motive—to “mess with her head,” as Sergeant Martinez had said. Or, as Courtney had put it more bluntly, “pull a mind-fuck on her.”
There was that guy outside their apartment last month. He was at the bus stop when she ducked inside Jamba Juice. She initially noticed him because he was cute, but by the time she had her Mango Mantra, the 3 bus had come and gone without him. Instead, he stood at the entrance of her building, and as she approached, she could have sworn that he’d been reading the list of names posted at the entrance, his finger resting close to her buzzer. She’d blown it off once the lobby door shut securely behind her, but now she wondered if there was some possibility she’d seen him before on campus.
As hard as she tried to remember that man’s face, her mind kept pulling up another image. Keith.
They were still together when she picked her fall classes, so Keith knew her schedule. Keith would know how much something like this would distract her from school. Keith was addicted to the Internet. He would know about a site like Campus Juice, and he would know that the site provided anonymity. And Keith could be vindictive when he set his mind to it.
But they had broken up back in June, and the online posts didn’t start until the beginning of September. Would he really stew for almost three months before carrying out a full-on assault of terror against her that continued to this day? It was hard to imagine.
But as she wrapped her necklace—the thin silver chain dangling the heart pendant that Keith had given her —around the tip of her right index finger, she couldn’t help but wonder.
Over the quiet distraction of the background music flowing through her headphones, she heard the clang of a pan against the electric stovetop in the kitchen. Heather had emerged from her cave for a feeding.
Megan had hoped that the one upside to getting a roommate would be a new friendship, a girlfriend to talk to late at night. And when Heather first moved in, she wasn’t particularly cold. In those initial weeks, she joined Megan in the living room for a couple of episodes of
Then one night in June, after Heather caught Megan crying in her room after officially calling it quits with Keith, Heather had actually opened up to her. She said she’d gone through some rough times—a boyfriend, someone older, someone who really fucked with her head. She said she was pretty screwed up until she went through counseling for it, and now she was getting a fresh start. But then Megan had made the mistake of asking her what had happened between her and the guy to make it so bad, and all of a sudden, Heather was gone. She had a paper to write or something, excused herself from Megan’s room, and never mentioned the conversation—or any other one, for that matter—again. She was just a tenant renting a room.
Then, yesterday, when she got home from the police station, for just a second, Megan had felt something like a bond again when Heather noticed how upset she was and asked what was wrong. But when Megan told her about the Web site, all Heather had said was, “Wow, I’m sorry to hear that. That must be really stressful.”
Megan supposed it was a polite enough response. But it wasn’t the kind of thing a real friend would say. Courtney had spent nearly an hour with her on the phone yesterday, helping her pull herself together and put the entire situation into context. “The big picture,” Courtney kept saying.
Then later, when Megan was hanging her coat in the closet outside Heather’s room, she heard Heather on the phone saying something about “threats” on a Web site. She hadn’t asked Heather to keep it a secret. And she probably should have expected Heather to gossip to whomever it was she spent most of her time with when she wasn’t home. But she didn’t want anyone else talking about it. About her.
And she didn’t need to hear that word.
Megan looked at her watch. Eight forty. She should be at her morning spin class, pushing through a sprint to spike her heart rate. But Courtney had advised her to deviate from her usual schedule, just in case.
She turned her attention back to a paragraph about steroid biosynthesis in rat cells, and realized she was actually starting to feel better. She had gone a full hour without crying. Maybe in the afternoon, after classes, she’d go to the gym and use the elliptical trainer for a little while.
As she turned the page, she heard a knock on the apartment door. She pulled one bud from her ear to make sure Heather was going to respond. Maybe she would finally meet one of Heather’s friends.
“I’ll get it,” Heather yelled from the kitchen.
Megan readjusted her headphones and turned back to her book just as she realized she hadn’t heard the security door buzzer.
“No, wait,” she yelled, pulling off her headset.
Jumping from her bed and lunging toward her bedroom door, she heard voices in the living room, then a loud groan, followed by the sound of something heavy hitting the floor.
Megan should have stayed in her room. She should have jumped out the window to the street below if that’s what it was going to take.
But she didn’t think. She acted on instinct. And her instinct was to help Heather. Heather. Poor innocent Heather. In the wrong place at the wrong time.
She opened her bedroom door to see her roommate sprawled on the floor next to the breakfast table. A man in a black-wool ski mask was plunging a six-inch blade into her torso. As he pulled the knife from Heather’s body, he looked up, saw Megan, and charged toward her.
Following instinct again, she slammed her door shut. She found herself grasping at the doorknob, but there was no lock on the bedroom door. She pressed her back against the door, trying to hold it closed with the weight of her body, but it was no use.
As she felt the door spring open and push her forward to the ground, Megan knew she would die. She knew she would never see her mother, father, or Courtney again. She would never graduate from college. She would never become a doctor.
She wished she could have saved Heather. She wished she knew why this was happening. And she wished she could have said good-bye.
PART II
“GO AHEAD. LIE TO ME.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
10:15 A.M.
Despite two large coffees and a cherry Danish, Ellie still felt like she’d been hit over the head with a sledgehammer and then strapped to an all-night merry-go-round.
She had gotten the tears under control by the time she and Jess made their way back to her apartment last night, but the emotions that had led to the outburst were still raw enough that she’d made the mistake of adding two Rolling Rocks at home to the two rounds of whisky she’d already consumed at Plug Uglies.
And then of course there had been the telephone call to her mother.
Her nightly calls to Wichita were never what she’d call the highlight of her days. At best the calls were short, just long enough for a telephonic kiss good night. At worst, they were hour-long reminiscences, with Ellie’s mother lamenting her status as a widowed bookkeeper whose happiest days were long behind her. Last night’s call fell on the crummy end of the spectrum.
And whether it was because of the whisky, the bad jail memories, the conversation with her mother, or a combination of the three, Ellie had slept in fits and spurts for a second consecutive night.
The case certainly wasn’t doing anything to help her stay awake. She was poring over Robert Mancini’s
