The Last Good Girl (22 page)

“You'd normally wait for the ME to give her findings on bones. What else do you know?”

“The fraternity's national lawyer called me today, after he saw this on the news. He said the underground room used to be an icehouse or root cellar, which was used to store food back in the 1800s. Eventually they moved to refrigeration and the icehouse was abandoned—till the 1920s, when the young men living there then decided to make it into a ritual room. The bones were placed there by Beta Psi members in the '20s through the '80s. Whenever a medical student worked on a cadaver, he was supposed to steal a few bones to add them to the collection. It was sort of an ongoing dare.”

“What about the whole skeleton, the one with the cap?”

“A model, stolen from the medical school in the '50s. The lawyer claimed to have several old men, retired doctors, who will admit to stealing these bones decades ago, when they were students.”

“Do you believe it?”

“It wouldn't be the first frat to have a stash of illicit bones. The descendants of Geronimo, the Native American chief, sued Yale's Skull and Bones fraternity in 2011. They claimed that Prescott Bush—George W.'s grandfather—dug up Geronimo's remains and hid them in that frat house back in 1918. We'll confirm today's find with DNA and the ME's findings. But if what the Beta Psi lawyer says is true—and I think it probably is—we're still just looking for one missing girl.”

“What about
The
Book of Earthly Pleasures
?” Anna said.

“According to the lawyer, that is a book of sexual conquests. Consensual ones. Not rapes.”

“No, of course not,” she said. “They're such upstanding citizens.”

If this story was true, the basement was more like a macabre version of boys playing Dungeons and Dragons than evidence of mass murder. Anna had to keep her focus on the one girl they knew was in real, current danger—and the person most likely to have hurt her.

• • •

Anna borrowed a conference room at the medical examiner's office and pulled out the university's file on Dylan Highsmith that she'd won at the hearing yesterday. She went through the cases again. Three female students had brought disciplinary charges against Dylan before Emily had. None of those cases had ended in Dylan being disciplined.

She checked their initials against Dylan's entries in the
Earthly Pleasure
book. They matched up.

The first case had been brought two years earlier, by a freshman named Ursula Maris. In her statement to the Disciplinary Committee, she said that she went to a party at Beta Psi, met Dylan, and drank a margarita he offered. She blacked out. Her next memory was a flash: waking up in Dylan's bed, with him having sex with her. She blacked out again. When she awoke, she found herself naked in Dylan's bed. She dressed and fled from the house. She didn't report the incident until the following week, when all the physical evidence was gone. Ursula had filed a disciplinary case, then dropped it before a hearing was held.

Anna looked up Ursula's current address and found that she had transferred to Northwestern University in Chicago. Had the incident with Dylan prompted the move? It seemed monumentally unfair that Dylan would get to stay and Ursula would have to transplant her life. Ursula had a cell number listed, and Anna hoped it was still the same. She called it, and was happily surprised when a woman answered on the first ring.

“May I speak to Ursula Maris, please?”

“This is. Who is this?”

“My name is Anna Curtis. I'm a prosecutor investigating a case involving Dylan Highsmith. Do you have a few minutes to talk?”

“Um.” The woman paused. “I'm sorry, I . . . don't want to talk to you.”

“I know it's a hard subject matter, and I'm really sorry to bother you. But there is a missing girl, and any information that you might be willing to share might help us find her.”

“Look, I'm sorry, but I, like, literally cannot talk about this.”

“Tell you what,” Anna said, “I know it's probably a shock to get this call. How about I give you my number. Think about it. If you change your mind, call me. Any time, night or day.”

“I'm not going to change my mind. Good-bye.”

Anna set the phone down. There were plenty of reasons a rape survivor might not want to talk to her. It was a hard conversation. Few people wanted to revisit a traumatic experience, especially if it was long ago, and they had gotten over it. But that wasn't the sense Anna got from Ursula. When she said,
I literally cannot talk about it,
Anna hadn't pictured so much a mental block as a legal impediment. She wondered if Ursula had been paid off. Her disciplinary suit had been dropped entirely—what could be more convenient for Dylan? And if his family had paid Ursula off to keep her quiet, they likely would have included a nondisclosure agreement as part of the settlement.

Anna sent Ursula her phone number and e-mail address.
Just in case you change your mind,
Anna texted. She wouldn't hold her breath. She turned to the next case in the university file.

The second woman who brought charges against Dylan had transferred to Columbia. Anna called her and had almost the exact same conversation she'd had with Ursula.

She pulled out the final case. The third student was a young woman named Kara Briscoe. Her file had a similar story: a freshman at a frat party, mixed drinks, waking up in Dylan's bed. The difference, for Kara, was that she had pursued her claim all the way through a Disciplinary Committee hearing—where Dylan had been found “not responsible.” Anna thought she might have a better chance of getting Kara's story. She was listed as a sophomore at Tower. Anna called her dorm phone number.

“I'm sorry,” said the person who answered. “I'm her roommate. Kara isn't here, and she won't be back for a while.”

“Oh,” said Anna. “Do you know where I can reach her?”

“Um. Not really.”

Anna went through the song and dance about being a federal investigator, looking into the disappearance of Emily Shapiro, and how any information would be helpful.

After an uncomfortable silence, the roommate said, “Kara's at New Horizons.”

“Do you have the phone number for her there?”

“I'm sorry. I'm not really supposed to give that out. I've already probably said too much.” The girl hung up.

N
ew Horizons was a private rehabilitation center located on a posh ten-acre campus in the exurbs of Tower County. Sam and Anna drove down a long tree-lined driveway. A white clapboard fence surrounded sweeping snow-covered fields, where weeping willows bordered a stream. The setting sun threw pink light on the undulating white hills. If you had to go somewhere to recover from something, this seemed like the place for it.

Modern white buildings dotted the campus. They pulled up to the Mental Health Center and Residences, a complex of curved white stone and swooping waves of glass. The interior was decorated in soothing neutral tones. A nurse greeted them; they'd called ahead of time and were expected.

“Welcome to New Horizons,” said the nurse. “I'm Tamara Welch, Kara's nurse. Before you meet her, I need to brief you. She's doing well today and has been getting better over time. But she's still very sensitive and suffers from serious depression and anxiety, in addition to overcoming an alcohol addiction. Mentally, she's fragile. Please try to steer away from topics that could be alarming or upsetting to her.”

“I'm not sure that's possible,” Anna said, “given what we have to talk to her about.”

The nurse looked at them worriedly. “She really wants to speak to you. But, please, be gentle.”

“Of course,” Sam said.

The nurse led them to a three-story glass atrium filled with trees, flowers, and a man-made brook. Stone paths were dotted with benches, where people sat reading or talking. Anna could see the snow outside, but inside the atrium was almost tropical. It was beautiful, but the artificiality of it all, the sense of madness barely contained by expensive trappings, felt like a silken straitjacket.

Kara Briscoe sat on a bench, biting her thumbnail and gazing out the windows at the field of snow. She had long, beautiful red hair and fingernails that were ragged and bitten to the nubs. But she smiled brightly at Anna and Sam and stood to shake their hands. The nurse made sure they were all settled, then left them alone with Kara.

“I'm sorry you had to come out here,” Kara said, gesturing around her.

“It's pretty,” Anna said. “Though I'm sorry you're having troubles.”

Kara noticed she was biting her nails. She took her thumb from her mouth and set her hands carefully down on her lap. She wore jeans and a white T-shirt, civilian clothes; the place was designed to feel like a resort rather than a hospital.

“I hear that you're investigating Dylan Highsmith,” Kara said. “How can I help?”

Anna took a deep grateful breath. “I don't want to upset you. So please let me know if you need a break or just want to stop.”

“Okay.”

“It would be helpful if you could tell us what happened between you and Dylan.”

“He raped me.” Kara smiled bitterly. “There you go. I'll say it again. ‘He raped me.' It took me a year of therapy to be able to say that.”

“I'm sorry,” Anna said.

“You read the university's file?” Kara asked.

Anna nodded.

“Then you know what happened. He spiked my drink, knocked me out. Took me upstairs and had sex with me. Laughed when I confronted him. I brought the case against him through the university disciplinary process—and no one believed me. They found him ‘not responsible.' ”

“For what it's worth,” Anna said, “that verdict was not about you. It was about the university. They want to report zero rapes on campus. It's harder to do that if they find the guy guilty.”

Kara ran a hand through her long red hair. “Yeah, I kinda figured that. I wasn't done fighting. I thought if the college didn't believe me, maybe the regular courts would.”

“What did you do?” Anna knew there hadn't been a criminal case; it would have shown up on the background check.

“I filed a civil case against him. Sued him and his fraternity for five million dollars.”

“Good for you.”

“Not so good for me. It was a shitstorm. Excuse my language. The fraternity, apparently, gets all the brothers to sign a code of conduct, which is so stringent no boy could possibly live by it. So then if the frat is sued, the boys are considered in breach of fraternity policy, and the frat throws them overboard. Beta Psi got itself out of the lawsuit. They had a good policy—it was the individual boys who violated it. I could only sue the boys.

“Dylan had the best lawyers in Michigan. He got himself severed from the lawsuit too. The only person left, by the end, was some poor freshman pledge who'd served me the alcohol, which I guess violated Beta Psi policy. His name was Eddie. He was a nice kid, and I didn't have anything against him. His family had to hire a lawyer and defend against my lawsuit. I got a thirty-thousand-dollar settlement from that family. I hear Eddie's family had to remortgage their house to pay for their lawyer and ended up losing it in foreclosure.”

She looked around the atrium. “Thirty thousand paid for my first week here.”

“I'm so sorry,” Anna said. “That sounds like a terrible process. On all counts.”

“I feel bad about Eddie. I feel worse about Dylan.”

“Did you know Dylan before the assault?”

“I was in a sorority, so I knew of him—he was head of some big Greek event; he seemed really cool. I only met him in person the night he raped me. But I got to know him after that.”

“How so?”

“He got me blackballed from Greek life. He knew everyone. Guys taunted me. Girls whispered about me. I've never felt so hated. I tried to stick it out, you know, to make a point. But I felt so alone.”

“Being a freshman itself is hard,” Anna said. “Away from home for the first time, far from everyone you know and love. And you were put in a terrible situation, right at the beginning.”

Kara nodded. “That's when I started drinking. It started as pregaming on weekends, a socially acceptable way to get wasted. It ended with me drinking a fifth of vodka every day, alone in my room.”

The sky grew dark, turning the atrium's windows into a wall of mirrors. Anna looked at Kara's sad profile, then her pale face reflected in the glass. “They found me on the bathroom floor, passed out, puke in my hair. They had to pump my stomach. My blood alcohol level was so high, they tell me it's a miracle I didn't die.”

Anna put a hand on Kara's arm. Kara turned to her. “What's going on with Dylan now?”

“You've heard of Emily Shapiro?”

“The girl who disappeared.”

“He was the last person to see her.”

“You think he hurt her?”

“It's possible. He hasn't been charged with anything yet.”

Kara brought her thumb back to her mouth and gnawed around her thumbnail. The ragged skin broke open and started bleeding. A few drops of crimson spattered Kara's white T-shirt. Anna offered her a tissue. Kara crumbled it into a ball inside her fist, then continued chewing on the thumbnail.

“Why don't we take a break,” Anna said.

“I don't want a break. Why are you here?”

“I'm seeing if we can build a case against Dylan.”

“How does what happened to me help you with Emily's case?”

“If he's committed a series of crimes against women, a pattern of assaults on people of one gender, that could be evidence that his actions were committed because of the gender of his victims. Which is a hate crime.”

“Of course they were committed because of my gender!” Kara started laughing. “He wasn't drugging the boys.”