VLOG
RECORDED 1.19.15
Dylan’s gone, but in a way, his ghost is still, like, haunting the campus. Everywhere I go, there’s a little bit of his horrible spirit.
Whitney’s not talking to me, except to say I “ruined Dylan’s life.” I don’t see her that often now—she pretty much just hangs out at Beta Psi—but when I do, it’s totally painful.
Obviously, Dylan’s friends are still here—and they hate me. Like, really, really, really hate me. And, wow, those Beta Psis know a thousand different ways to call you a slut. They could write their own entry on Urban Dictionary. It’s like—I’m trying to be strong. I keep my eyes straight ahead. I pretend not to notice when they spit at my feet. But it’s scary, and it’s humiliating. I try to act like I don’t even notice them, but my heart races every time. I see other kids watching. Their faces are sympathetic, but they don’t want to sit with me.
Online is worse. There’s a limit to what people will say to your face. On Twitter, it’s a free-for-all. “You’re a lying whore,” one kid tweeted at me. Another wrote about the encrusted state of my genitals. One kid tweeted, “Someone should shut that bitch up.”
Preya says not to worry. She says it’ll pass. They don’t have a long enough attention span for it to go through February.
God, I hope she’s right. I hope they break before I do.
21
Anna boosted herself onto the marble pedestal and climbed into the coffin. Sam was already several steps ahead, descending the stone stairs into darkness. With each step Anna took, the air got colder—first on her ankles, then her arms, then finally a waft up the back of her neck. She shuddered and took one last look at the Crypt as her head was at coffin height. Then she was fully underneath it, with only blackness ahead. It would be ironic, she thought, if the last thing she ever saw was the inside of a coffin.
She chided herself for thinking that way. She had an armed FBI agent in front of her, and one following behind. This was perfectly safe.
Still, it was hard not to be chilled as the darkness swallowed her whole. The air was dank and musty. The only sound was the shuffle of their feet echoing off stone walls. Anna couldn’t hear the search team in the house above; she doubted they could hear anything down here. The only light was Sam’s flashlight in front and Steve’s behind her. The stairs kept going, down and down, until the light from the door in the coffin was just a memory.
She reached out to steady herself. The stone wall was moist and cool, mossy in places, and she was just thinking it wasn’t so creepy when something skittered across her wrist. She yanked her hand away. It was a roach, Anna told herself. Maybe a millipede. Not a big deal. There were roaches in Superior Court. She rubbed her wrist to try to erase the tickle of the creature’s many legs. The stairs kept going down. She did not reach for the wall again.
Finally, they reached the bottom. Sam shone the flashlight around. It was a long hallway with a cement floor. On the walls were iron sconces holding charred torches. Anna could see as far as Sam’s flashlight beam. Then it was black. They kept walking.
Fissures in the stone walls and leaching mineral stains indicated this passage had existed for a long time. A torch hung every twenty feet or so. Anna wished the torches were lit, both for light and warmth. The walls radiated a cold so powerful it chilled her to the core. She crossed her arms over her chest and hugged herself tight.
A fluttering sound made Sam shine her light upward. A bunch of bats flew near the ceiling, dozens of wings beating a cloud of black. They sang a chorus of high-pitched shrieks. One dove toward Anna’s head. She covered her hair and ducked. The tip of a wing, soft and fetid, brushed her knuckles. Her hair danced in the draft it created.
They flew up through a hole in the ceiling, and their shrieking subsided, then was gone. Steve offered her a hand, and she stood up, shuddering.
“You want to go back?” Steve asked.
Anna shook her head. They walked on.
The hallway ended in an open door, supported on both sides by marble pillars. A marble slab across the top was inscribed with Greek letters. The two FBI agents walked, guns first, through the door. Anna heard them gasp—then silence. She followed them in.
It was an underground chamber, about the size of a college seminar room. Every inch of wall and ceiling was covered in bones.
Toe and finger bones, the size of macaroni, decorated the walls in elaborate swirling patterns. Femurs made crosses and starbursts. The ceiling was covered in a mosaic of stars, suns, moons, and diamonds, all consisting of thousands of individual vertebrae and ribs.
Anna recalled pictures she’d seen of the Capuchin monks’ underground crypts in Sicily, where mosaics were made with thousands of old bones. This looked like that. Except the monks had a tradition of using the remains of fellow monks to create monuments to mortality. Where would frat boys get bones?
“Human?” Anna whispered. There was no reason to whisper, but she couldn’t imagine talking any louder.
“Looks like it,” Sam whispered back.
“This one definitely is,” Steve said. Anna followed his beam of light. A fully intact human skeleton stood strapped to the farthest wall, its feet hovering an inch above the stone floor. It grimaced at them with perfect teeth. A red Beta Psi baseball cap sat jauntily atop its skull.
22
Anna felt dizzy. The musty smell she’d been inhaling took on a more ominous flavor. She fought back a gag.
“Could that be Emily?”
“We’ll test,” Sam said. “But I doubt it. Even pros can’t take a full human body down to clean bones in three days.”
“Who then?”
Steve shook his head.
In front of the skeleton was a marble table surrounded by four candlesticks taller than Anna. Massive half-melted black candles topped them.
On the table was a book as big as an unabridged Oxford dictionary. Embossed in gold on the black leather cover was the title, The Book of Earthly Pleasures. With gloved hands, Sam opened it. The pages were brittle and yellowed with age. Anna sneezed on the dust.
The first page had large black calligraphy script that said BETA PSI. The fraternity’s seal was printed in gold. Sam flipped to the next page. A man’s name was written at the top, followed by a series of letters and numbers.
Robert James Vary
1915–1919
Y.J. 9/25/15
S.D’U. 3/12/16
H.V. 10/5/16
G.A. 4/4/17
A.McH. 9/2/17
T.L. 5/3/18
J.W. 10/3/18
M.W. 2/6/19
T.Y. 5/1/19
The skeleton seemed to be watching with its hollow eyes. The next page had four pictures pasted onto it. They were all black-and-white shots of pretty young women with hair in elaborate buns, wearing corseted dresses. Pressed into the book’s crease was also a lock of yellow hair bound in faded pink ribbon, and a small piece of lace, cut from a larger garment.
Sam turned to the next page. BRUNO FREITAS, it said across the top, 1916–1920. Below the name was another list of initials and dates. On the next page was a picture, cut from a newspaper, of a beautiful teenage girl in a long, frilly white dress. A caption below the picture said, “Gayle Joseph Makes Her Debut at the Detroit Debutante Ball.”
Anna said, “Go back a page.” Sam flipped to the list of initials the page before. Anna pointed to the list.
“G.J.,” Anna said. “Gayle Joseph.”
Sam nodded slowly. “It’s a brag book. The initials are the girls. With mementos attached on the next page.”
“But what kind of bragging?” Anna said. “Sexual conquests? Or something more violent?”
“You mean, did they kill all these girls?”
Anna nodded.
“I doubt it. Debutantes are so much harder to kill than prostitutes. They’re not usually the top choice for serial killers. We’ll see.”
Sam kept turning the pages, which followed the same pattern. A male name
at the top, a list of initials and dates below. The next page was always covered with small mementos: pictures mostly, but also lockets, playbills, snips of fabric. In the 1950s a man named Scott Westerman listed M.M. among the initials. The next page included a glossy picture of Marilyn Monroe and a snippet of platinum hair.
“No way,” Steve said.
They kept going, through the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s. The women’s hairstyles changed, the pictures got color, and the mementos became more current: a bar tab from Lucky’s, the printout of a text message. But the format was the same. The Beta Psi boy’s name, then the initials, then the mementos.
Finally, they came to the pages where the date ranges were current. “Whoa,” said Steve when they came to Dylan’s page.
Dylan Highsmith
2011–2015
K.G. 11.14.11
V.H. 1.5.12
G.F. 5.17.12
E.C. 9.1.12
R.O’T. 9.3.12
V.B. 9.5.12
M.V. 9.5.12
K.L. 9.8.12
A.T. 9.12.12
T.U. 9.24.12
V.W. 9.30.12
H.R. 10.4.12
O.C. 10.7.12
U.M. 10.11.12
L.K. 10.18.12
S.S. 11.3.12
P.R. 12.1.12
M.F. 12.8.12
N.Q. 1.3.13
T.G. 1.14.13
K.M. 1.23.13
C.W. 1.31.13
R.E. 2.2.13
V.T. 2.7.13
E.D. 2.15.13
T.Z. 2.28.13
I.R. 3.4.13
V.O. 3.15.13
U.B. 3.22.13
U.R. 4.1.13
Y.H. 4.15.13
T.E. 4.22.13
I.R. 5.1.13
M.N. 5.3.13
U.O. 5.15.13
I.P. 5.21.13
R.O’D. 5.25.13
L.L. 6.1.13
R.W. 9.2.13
I.G. 9.3.13
M.B. 9.11.13
K.LR. 9.17.13
J.G. 9.30.13
K.B. 10.31.13
R.T. 12.31.13
D.H. 1.6.14
B.F. 2.5.14
M.H. 2.14.14
J.L. 3.3.14
T.R. 3.15.14
J.G. 4.2.14
P.T. 4.12.14
M.R. 5.1.14
S.McV. 5.2.14
I.S. 5.4.14
Z.M. 6.1.14
E.S. 9.1.14
G.V. 9.2.14
R.M. 9.3.14
K.H. 9.4.14
W.F. 9.5.14
C.R. 9.15.14
T.W. 9.22.14
C.T. 10.15.14
M.V. 11.12.14
I.K. 12.3.14
S.S. 1.12.15
K.J. 2.5.15
J.J. 3.3.15
Anna recognized the handwriting from the notebooks in Dylan’s room. These entries had been written by Dylan himself. She skimmed the list, then focused on the fall of 2014. And there it was: “E.S. 9.1.14.” Emily Shapiro, September first. Anna pulled out her phone and took a picture of the page.
“Looks like he really started to get lucky in 2012,” Sam said.
“Maybe that’s when he perfected his recipe,” Anna said. “And he slowed down in the fall of 2014, after Emily’s case got some traction. Could’ve been worried.”
“Look at this one, September of 2013,” Sam said. “K.LR. Kristen LaRose?”
“Barney’s mistress. She gets around.”
“Do you think he raped all of them?” Steve said.
“There weren’t this many cases filed against him,” Sam said. “Not even a fraction.”
“Rape is the most underreported crime in America,” Anna said. “Over eighty percent of victims never report it.”
“Who knows. Some of these might’ve been consensual.”
Sam turned the page. There were several pictures of young women. One picture was of Emily Shapiro, lying in bed next to Dylan, squinting blearily at the camera.
Sam’s radio crackled to life. A disembodied voice came through the speaker. “Randazzo, you’d better come up here.”
Sam pressed the button on her shoulder and spoke into it. “I’m in the middle of something. Is it important?”
The radio crackled again. “Uh, yeah. There’s a guy here, saying we have to stop the search and leave the house.”
“Tell him to fuck off. Politely.”
“I would,” said the radio voice. “Except he’s the district attorney. He’s got a bunch of state troopers here trying to confiscate our evidence.”
Sam cursed a rainbow of obscenities. Then she pressed the button and spoke into the mic. “We’re on our way.”
23
They jogged back through the dark hallway and up the stone stairs, then climbed out of the coffin into the Crypt. They kept going, out the dynamited door, up the basement steps, and through the handsome foyer. Sam called for all the FBI agents who were searching the house to follow them out the front door and onto the fraternity’s wide front porch. Anna took a big breath of the cold outdoor air, incredibly fresh after the bone-lined basement. A big man in a tan suit stood on the porch, facing a stoic FBI tech who was refusing to hand over a box of evidence. A bunch of state troopers in tan uniforms stood on the porch behind the man.
Anna stood next to the FBI tech. She was in charge of legal challenges. She looked at the big man in the tan suit.
“Hello, I’m Anna Curtis, an Assistant U.S. Attorney. May I help you?”
“I want this search stopped,” the man said.
“Sir, I’m at a disadvantage, since I don’t know who you are or why your wishes should carry any weight.”
The man puffed out his chest and pulled out the credential clipped to his belt on a retractable cord. “I’m Bill Xanten, the Tower County district attorney. And this is a lawless travesty.”
“Nice to meet you.” Anna had read his name in the papers many times and wondered how it was pronounced. Zanten. Good to know. “We have a warrant.”
“Let me see it.”
She handed him a copy and looked him over as he read. He was a man whose thick waist spoke of meat and potatoes, and whose symmetrical auburn roots spoke of a hair transplant. He wore a gold wedding ring, a gold watch, and a Michigan-shaped American flag lapel pin. His bulbous nose flared with anger as he looked up from the warrant. “I don’t know how you got this, but no searches happen in my county unless I’m informed of them. I’m ordering you to stop.”
“The warrant is signed by a federal judge,” Anna said. “I’m a federal prosecutor, investigating a federal case. With all due respect, there’s no signature block for the county DA, and we don’t need one. We have jurisdiction, we have a warrant, and we respectfully ask that you step aside.”
“You said your name is Curtis, right? You’re the girl who assaulted Dylan Highsmith in this very house. Surely you don’t think you should be in charge of searching here.”
“Mr. Highsmith cannot choose his prosecutor, nor can he choose to get one removed from his case by assaulting her. I have decided to stay on the case despite Dylan Highsmith’s unexpected groping. That doesn’t change our legal basis for this search.”
“You’re going to be in charge of this case for approximately two more minutes—until I get you kicked off. I’ve been the top attorney of this state for the last ten years, and I will be for the next ten. You’ll want to be on my good side when I decide whether to prosecute you for assaulting Dylan Highsmith.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“Damn straight I am.” He turned to his troopers. “Stop this search. Take anything these agents have collected and return it to the house.”
“Do not do that.” Anna made her voice as loud and authoritative as his. “Mr. Xanten may make whatever legal challenges he’d like—in the future. Right now all he has is hot air. I have a federal search warrant. Any trooper who interferes with this lawful search will be arrested by the FBI and charged with federal obstruction of justice.”
The troopers eyed the FBI agents. Standing on opposite sides of the porch, they looked like two sports teams facing off: the locals in tan, the feds in dark blue. Blue outnumbered tan three to one. It didn’t change her legal standing, but it helped the practicalities.
Xanten stepped forward till his chest was close to Anna’s face. He was six inches taller and probably a hundred fifty pounds heavier. Looking up, she could see the hairs inside his nostrils. His breath smelled of stale coffee and salami. Her instinct was to step back—but she made sure she didn’t. She put her hands on her hips and kept herself planted in place.
“Young lady,” said Xanten, “you don’t know who you’re messing with.”
She smiled up at his nose hairs. “I think you don’t know who you’re messing with. I grew up in Michigan. I still read the Detroit Free Press. I know you were Robert Highsmith’s campaign manager the first time he ran for office. In fact, now that I think about it, aren’t you godfather to one of his kids? I’d say that’s a pretty serious conflict of interest, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know what you mean—”
“Then you’d better look it up,” Anna said. “You are exactly the reason we need federal prosecutors on this case. And right now, you’re impeding my search and obstructing justice. As a professional courtesy, we won’t arrest and prosecute you—if you leave. Now.”
Xanten looked at the twenty-five FBI agents behind her, then at the eight troopers behind him. She could see the calculations whirring through his hair-transplanted head. He would lose a shoot-out. He would also lose any inquiry into the legality of his actions. He’d hoped to bully her into stopping the search. It hadn’t worked.
“You’re going to regret this, young lady.” Xanten turned and herded his troopers down the porch steps. He shot one last furious look back at her. “You have no idea what you just started.”
“Thanks for stopping by,” Anna said. “Appreciate the assistance.”
Xanten slammed into his brown sedan. She waved good-bye, making sure no one could see that her hand was trembling.
VLOG
RECORDED 2.4.15
The Last Good Girl Page 15
