Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Max and I headed to the front desk of House Torlaine in the afternoon, which ended up being staff ed by a bored-looking student twirling a pen in her fingers.
“Dr. Robetresse said we might have a look at the logs for the days preceding the incident with Maya Hagood,” I said.
“Sure,” she droned, barely looking up. She pulled a clipboard from a locked drawer and handed it to me.
“I’m also curious if anyone visited Dani’s room as well.”
“Those are the logs we have for all the rooms.”
Dr. Robetresse was right. There was nothing unusual in the logs the day of or before the murder. No one had visited either girl’s room that week. However, at least twice in the month leading up to the incident, an “A. Strauss” was logged as visiting Dani’s room after hours.
“How are these logs taken?” I asked.
She looked at me like I was an idiot. “I write down who comes in. And when.”
“And the times, are those always accurate?”
The girl smacked her gum. “I mean, yeah. Who comes in, where they’re going … and what time.”
I peered at one of the entries. “And Antony Strauss, do you remember him coming in on the night of the February 15th?”
“Uhhh, I don’t remember off the top of my head …”
“Dr. Strauss, the physics professor, you don’t remember him coming in at nine p.m.?” I asked, growing irritated. “You’d think a professor coming to visit a student after hours would be noticed.”
Max shot me a look and took off his hat. He flashed her a smile, all dimples and pearly teeth. “We sure hate to be a bother, but anything that jogs your memory would really help.”
The girl stared at Max, and for a second, I thought she’d drowned in those baby blues. “Yeah, I remember,” she said at last. “Well, it’s not, like, that unusual. He had stuff he was bringing her. A stack of papers, I think?”
I squinted. The 9 had been written over with a 3. “And the logs here, it looks like the time was changed. Do you remember changing it?”
“I didn’t change it, but he probably got one of the other girls to. They love him. I’m sure if he asked, they wouldn’t even question it. No one’s gonna risk getting on his bad side.”
“His bad side? What do you mean?”
She looked at me knowingly. “You went here, right? Then you know how he is. Oh, people can try to speak out against him, but until a whole lot of girls come forward, it doesn’t matter.
The last girl who tried to start shit against him doesn’t even go here anymore.
Then there’s the fact that, because he’s hot, some girls don’t mind the attention.
I don’t know if this girl Dani minded or not, but I guarantee if it did bother her, she probably didn’t think there was much she could do about it.
Someone like Strauss, who’s that popular around campus, he’s basically untouchable. ”
Or was, I thought. Strauss wasn’t on the council anymore. Maybe someone finally took a stand against him. Maybe he wasn’t as untouchable as we all thought.
The handsome, charismatic, twenty-nine-year-old professor on top of the world, taken down a few notches. Removed from his position of power and obviously pissed about it. Maybe he’d wanted revenge.
Maybe he’d gotten it.
Before heading in for the night, I looked up at the bull skull over House Torlaine, trying to spot the graffiti mark I’d seen from the balcony.
It was harder to see in the dark, illuminated only by the flickering floodlight above the door, but it was definitely there.
I had a better view from the building’s west corner if I carefully avoided a prickly pear cactus buried in the loose soil.
Now I saw it wasn’t just a graffiti tag, but some sort of odd symbol, a circle drawn in black ink on one side of the bull’s snout, with a triangle formed by ten dots inside it (one dot on the first line, two on the second, three on the third, four on the fourth).
Beneath the other eye socket, the number 191.
The way the roof sloped, the only way you could see them was if you were standing at this exact spot or on the balcony on the back of Ludlow House.
191?
A room number? The dormitory rooms only went up to 36. I thought of the nearby buildings, wondering if any of the classroom blocks went to 191. It was a small campus. Did we even have 191 classrooms? I wasn’t sure.
I wanted to study it more, but then the RA was shuffling me inside. I went in and closed the door.