Chapter 4
FOUR
Durham, New Hampshire
Wednesday, October 9
10:04 a.m.
She was going to suffocate.
Mauve paint darkened the already small dorm room. Builder-grade laminate floors attempted to add some lightness and color, but this place was still as depressing as Leigh remembered.
What was it about college dorms aiming to suck the life out of the residents inside them? Alice Dietz’s room was identical to the hundred others in the building except Adams Tower West was slightly newer and catered solely to second-year students. Two loft-style bunkbeds took up each side of the room, dressers tucked underneath to save space. A single closet took up position across the room with a motel-style private bathroom off to the right. Two windows met in the middle of the far wall, each angled toward each other to create a false bump-out and the illusion of more space. Three mattresses. Three roommates.
But university police had only managed to find one. Well, other than Alice Dietz.
“I can’t believe Alice is dead.” Jeana Gray’s perfectly shaped eyebrows met over a pair of dark brown eyes as she sniffled into a soaked tissue from the edge of her mattress. Once-tamed hair escaped the ponytail at the back of the young woman’s head in frizzy wisps, accentuating the warm orange undertones of her black skin. A thick sweater hid a willowy frame. Dressed to repress. Schedules, calendars, and a printed syllabus on her desk said Jeana was the kind of student who colored inside the lines, followed the rules, and wouldn’t dare make the first move with a guy she might find attractive. An overachiever of the highest order. “I knew something was wrong. Alice wouldn’t just stop showing up, no matter how upset she was.”
“You’re the one who filed the missing persons report on Monday morning?” Leigh asked.
Jeana nodded, taking another swipe at her nose.
“How long have you and Ms. Dietz known each other?” The length of the roommates’ relationship would help Leigh understand how well Jeana could interpret their victim’s behaviors and moods leading up to her death. Leigh studied the personal effects of three distinct areas of the dorm.
Jeana had taken up position on her own bed, decorated with cutouts of books, a sticker showcasing a pink bubble font spelling “Word Nerd,” and a book thrown haphazardly at the end of the thin mattress. The other two spaces weren’t as organized. Clothes bunched on one bed. Highlighters and textbooks thrown across the other. There were few personal touches, but it could have something to do with the way the university assigned campus housing. Students never kept their dorm more than a year, relegated to moving from one building to the next at the start of each academic year.
“We don’t. I mean, not really.” Jeana sat straighter as if she had to remind herself about posture. “We were both assigned this room at the start of the semester. So, about six weeks, but we were becoming friends. Me, Alice, and Tamra. We hung out, got dinner together, and watched movies. Talked about guys and classes whenever we happened to be in the dorm at the same time, stuff like that.”
Leigh directed her gaze to Marshal Ford, who’d hung back by the door, all too willing to let her take the lead. For a federal agent, he was remarkably aware of his presence when faced with a female witness. None of the overbearing, competitive alpha-male bullshit she’d faced from previous male colleagues too many times to count.
“Tamra Hopkins, the third roommate,” Ford said.
“Let’s check in with campus police on Tamra’s whereabouts. Pull her out of class if necessary.” She didn’t wait for Ford’s acknowledgment, trusting that he would follow through as he left quietly. Leigh crossed deeper into the room, memorizing everything she could about the space. It was the little things that shaped a victim’s life. The brands they preferred told her a lot about financial mindset and likely debts. The type of devices they used determined whether their data was backed up to the cloud automatically. Personal photos and contacts established close relationships and potential leads. “Jeana, in the time you’ve known Alice, have you noticed anything unusual in her routines? Were you aware of any problems she was having in her personal or academic life?”
“Nothing she told me about, but as I said, we were just recently starting to get to know each other. As for her routines, I can’t say if she really had any. At least, not outside of showing up for her classes. She didn’t have a job. I don’t know how she was paying for school. Honestly, Alice was the kind of person who played everything by ear. Kind of impulsive. It was one of the things we argued about the most. Especially when we had plans to meet up, and she’d just not show up. And now she’s gone.” A fresh wave of tears pooled in Jeana’s eyes. “She was… moody at first. Like being here was some kind of punishment. It took a while before she made an effort to talk to me and Tamra, and even then, she liked her privacy. Looking at her, you get this cheerleader vibe and think she’s gonna be bubbly and insist on making best friend bracelets, but I got the feeling she wasn’t the kind of person interested in keeping in touch after graduation, you know?”
She did know. Had been that person herself. It’d been necessary. To protect her brother. But now, Leigh found herself inventorying the relationships in her life. Her father had spent the past twenty years behind bars, her brother couldn’t admit his real identity without putting Leigh in the law’s crosshairs, and her best friend was currently serving life without parole in Alabama. And Ava… Leigh didn’t know how to be a mom. Least of all to a teen who wanted nothing to do with her, fought to run away any chance she got, and rarely said more than two words in a conversation. Nothing close to the relationship she’d had with her own mother.
Expectations: the real happiness killer.
“And which bunk is Alice’s?” Leigh pointed to the one closest.
Jeana nodded. “That one with the clothes piled on it.”
“When was the last time you saw Alice?” She visually searched the closet without touching anything.
“Saturday night.” Three full days.
Leigh picked through a couple of T-shirts and a pair of jeans. Sliding her hand into the pants pockets, she pulled a tube of Chapstick free and dropped it on the bed. No phone. No laptop. No backpack. The only personal effects on Alice’s body had been her wallet and keys. Without them, it would’ve taken DNA, fingerprints, and dentals to identify her remains and wasted precious hours. A few high-end cosmetics were scattered across the nearest dresser. Good quality and well-used. The clothing, too, spoke of quality over quantity. Alice Dietz invested in key pieces. “Did you talk? Get a sense of her mood or where she planned on spending her time yesterday?”
“I know she had class at nine,” Jeana said. “But we weren’t exactly on speaking terms.”
She’d come back to that.
“All right. What about anyone new in her life?” Leigh gave up on sifting through the items on the bed and moved on to the dresser stacked underneath the bunk. “Boyfriend, girlfriend?”
Jeana shook her head. “Not that she told us, but I got the impression she was seeing someone she didn’t want me and Tamra to know about.”
She searched the top dresser drawer, then moved on to the second. Nothing but underwear, bras, pajamas, and everyday essentials. Then again, people tended to get creative when it came to secrets they never wanted uncovered. Leigh noted the air returns and vents throughout the room. As of now, they had nothing to tell them what kind of woman ended up at the wrong end of a syringe of arsenic and cyanide. Nothing obvious to mark Alice Dietz as a victim. “What gave you that idea?”
Hesitation etched deep into Jeana’s features. Burdened with betrayal for telling investigators this much. “She’d get messages in the middle of the night. Slip out after Tamra and I were already in bed. I’m not sure she realized I knew. She never said anything about it.”
Ford slipped back through the door. Quiet. Reserved. Waiting.
“Do you know where she was going so late?” Instinct had Leigh ending her search prematurely. In her experience, everyone had secrets, but there was nothing here. At least nothing she would’ve left lying around with two roommates to find. No journal detailing the victim’s life or raving over a secret affair. RAs patrolled the floors late into the night. Most universities, but more so the University of New Hampshire, enacted curfews for their students. Of course, there were always ways around them. She’d found a few herself during her years here. Had Alice done the same? Where had she been going in the middle of the night?
“No.” Jeana seemed to curl in on herself, wrapping her arms around her middle with the tissue still clutched tight. “I asked. It didn’t end well. That’s why we weren’t talking.”
“Tell me more about that.” Leigh flicked a glance to Ford.
“She got all defensive. Told me to mind my business,” Jeana said. “That was about a week ago.”
“What about close friends who she might confide in or people in her program? Could she have been sneaking out or seeing one of them?”
Jeana pulled the tissue in her hand apart, close to tearing it in half. “If she was, she didn’t want me or Tamra to know. Now I wish I would’ve pushed. Maybe then she wouldn’t have died.”
Guilt settled heavy on the girl’s shoulders. Something that would stick with her for the rest of her life in Leigh’s experience.
“We recovered her keys and wallet with her remains, but there isn’t any sign of her phone.” Ford took a single step deeper into the dorm room, sucking all the air out of it with his size alone. “Did she usually keep in on her?”
“Alice never went anywhere without it.” Jeana sunk back in on herself. The shock was setting in. They wouldn’t get much more out of her.
“We’ll see if we can locate it with GPS. Until then, it would help if you let us know if it and any other of her belongings turn up.” Leigh’s phone vibrated from her slacks pocket. She pulled it free, her lungs seizing as she read the caller ID. Ava. “Excuse me a moment. I have to take this.”
Marshal Ford’s eyebrows rose as he followed her out of the dorm into the narrow corridor. This entire place had been coated in an odor. Something wet, musty, and stale in the air.
She answered. “Ava? Everything okay?”
“When are you coming back? I’m sick of being in this room.” Thunder resonated through Ava’s side of the line. Deep and booming. “I mean, how many more episodes of The Office am I supposed to watch before you come back? Isn’t there a law or something that says this is neglect?”
Funny. Ava usually went out of her way to avoid contact with other humans. Well, humans with Leigh’s face anyway.
Leigh checked her watch. Three hours since she’d left the hotel. The trees jerked side-to-side through the window at the end of the hallway. The storm had picked up. Rain pitted against the glass, the sound pecking at her nerves even this far down the corridor. Damn. The crime scene was at serious risk. Mother Nature was fighting to wash away vital evidence every second the techs left it exposed. Tarps would help, but only for so long. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting to have to go so long without checking in, but I’m almost finished here at the university. Did you get breakfast?”
“The menu here sucks. They don’t have anything I want.” Leigh swallowed back a laugh at the stroppy, hormonal answer. But, at the same time, Leigh couldn’t blame Ava’s hormones for their relationship. She’d been in Ava’s position. Mad at the world. At her new reality. At the unfairness of it all. Rage was what got her to where she needed to be in life, and it wasn’t until Leigh had faced the past that she’d been able to let go. To feel something more. Ava wasn’t alone. But she hadn’t realized it yet. “Can I at least go down to the lobby? I saw vending machines on the way in.”
Yay for junk food. Just what growing bodies needed. “Sure. Give the front desk the room number, and they’ll charge?—”
The line went dead.
“Ava?” Leigh pulled the screen back. She’d been disconnected. Tapping her adopted daughter’s name from her contacts list, she tried to get back through, but the call refused to connect.
The lights overhead cut out.
“That can’t be good.” Ford stared up at the ceiling, almost willing the power to surge back to life with a single look.
Light from the window at the end of the corridor barely reached her. Dorm room doors swung inward as second-year students poked their heads out. Groans and complaints competed with the tick tick tick of the rain pummeling the windows. No power, no Wi-Fi. Leigh headed for the single source of light and caught sight of a traffic light down the block. It was dead. Campus power was out, but the university generator should be kicking on to pick up the slack. Except it wasn’t.
Ford closed in behind her, and her skin warmed at the proximity. What was it about him her body wanted to automatically accept? She’d never allowed people to hover in her personal space. But in just a couple hours, he’d managed to slide through her boundaries. “How are we going to review the surveillance footage from campus security without any power?”
“The school’s generator should be kicking in.” Why wasn’t it? Leigh’s heart rate pulsed at the bottom of her throat. She checked her phone again. The cell towers would each have their own backup generators in case of emergency, but she still wasn’t getting any service. What the hell was happening out there? Another gust of wind ripped through the trees outside the dorms. An oversized branch twisted and broke before their eyes. It slammed into the ground with an impact that could’ve broken the sound wall.
Low murmurs from nearby students swarmed her. Some laced with disbelief. Some with fear.
Leigh backed up a step, reaching for Marshal Ford with the side of her hand against his chest. “Contact the university first-responder staff. We need to get everyone on lockdown and begin to shelter in place.”
This wasn’t just a storm.
This was something far worse.
And it was headed right for them.
Universities had emergency preparedness drills and protocols. But she never thought she’d be stuck in the middle of one during a murder investigation. Seemed Mother Nature herself was trying to aid their killer at this point.
Her thoughts went to Ava. How to get to her, how to assure herself she was safe. Leigh turned toward Ford, who looked as if he’d accidentally swallowed an insect, and shoved through the throng of students staring out the window. Jeana was one of them, her gaze wide and pupils dilated in a combination of fear and grief. “No one is leaving this campus.”
Not even their killer.