The Last Good Girl (5 page)

“Take your underwear off,” Dylan said.

The pledges looked nervously at one another. Was he serious?

“Take 'em off!”

Wyatt took his boxers off and threw them in a corner. So did the other three. The four pledges were naked, kneeling. The kid next to him, Alex, was shaking and trying not to.

“Get on your hands and knees.”

They did. Dylan took a paddle off the wall.

Wyatt was relieved. They'd done this before, though never naked. Dylan brought the paddle down on Wyatt's exposed ass, harder than anyone had ever hit him. Wyatt flew forward and crashed into the coffin's marble stand. Its corner scraped his hands.

“Get back on your knees, boy!”

Wyatt did. Dylan hit him again. Again. Again. Dylan was furious; Wyatt could feel his fury coming through the paddle. Was Dylan hitting him because the feds had humiliated him tonight? Was this his way of getting his power back? Or was this because of what Wyatt had seen? He'd never told anyone. Maybe this beating was a warning not to. The paddle came down again. The impacts echoed off the stone wall. Pain shot through his spine.

“Okay,” Wyatt said. “Okay. Please, stop.”

Dylan paused, the paddle midair. “Who said you could talk to me, whaleshit?”

Beta Psi had three rules: (1) trust the brotherhood, (2) what happens in the house stays in the house, and (3) trust the brotherhood. Dylan
was
the brotherhood. This, Wyatt reminded himself, or something like it, had happened to every brother who'd passed through the house. It happened to boys who became presidents and CEOs. If everyone else could take it, so could he. It brought them together. It bonded them. And in a way, the hazing made the brotherhood seem more precious. For every indignity Wyatt endured, one more cost was sunk into his commitment to the frat house. By now, the tally was precious.

“Seems we've got to find something to shut his big mouth.” Dylan's voice was full of laughter. Maybe he wasn't hitting him for any reason. Maybe he just enjoyed it.

Dylan made the pledges turn ninety degrees, so that they were lined up face to ass, like elephants in the circus. Dylan's face was a few inches from Tom's butt.

Dylan pulled out a bottle of vodka and poured it down Tom's back. The liquid spilled off the sides of Tom's torso and onto the concrete floor, snaking its way down to the drain.

“What the fuck?” Dylan roared. “You're wasting vodka, whaleshit.” He made Tom straighten back up to kneeling, so the vodka would run down through his butt crack. Then he grabbed Wyatt by the scruff of his neck and forced him closer, until Wyatt's nose was literally in Tom's ass. He poured again. “Drink it!”

Wyatt opened his lips and let the vodka running through Alex's butt crack flow into his mouth. He swallowed a mouthful, and more came down. Tears stung his eyes. He told himself it was from the 80-proof alcohol, nothing more. But he knew, somewhere deep down, that this humiliation would linger long after the bruises from the paddling faded. He swallowed more vodka. His head spun with the insanity of the situation and the alcohol swelling his stomach. Still, Wyatt drank. Dylan poured, Tom let it trickle down his ass crack, and Wyatt sucked it down. The whole time, Wyatt stared at the presidential signature on the wall, keeping himself focused on his goal, knowing it would all be worth it in the end. Until his balance teetered, his vision blurred to black, and he passed out, naked, in a puddle of vodka on the floor of the Crypt.

A
nna looked back at the frat house, where the line of hopeful young revelers had only grown. She walked to the side, so she could see into the backyard. It was a parking lot. Unlike the front of the house, the back was dark and empty.

“Sam,” Anna said, pointing to a lot. Sam retrieved a duffel bag from her truck. They walked to the edge of the lot and read the signs. It was a public parking lot; they didn't need a warrant. The cars inside were an impressive collection: among Jeeps and Grand Prix, there were three BMWs, two Audis, and a shiny red Dodge Viper. Sam began running the plates on each car. Anna walked from car to car, glancing in the windows. She saw the usual college detritus: empty pop bottles, backpacks, lacrosse gear, packets of condoms.

“Bingo.” Sam pointed to the red Viper. “Registered to one Robert Highsmith.”

Anna pulled two flashlights from the duffel bag. The women shone the lights on the car. The black leather seats were shiny and clean. The floor was spotless. The interior was as empty as a car in a showroom. “That's the cleanest car I've ever seen a college kid drive,” Anna said. Sam took out a camera and snapped a couple photos. They walked around the shiny red sports car, looking for scratches or dings. There were none.

But as Anna shone the light on the trunk, she saw a long red-brown smudge by the keyhole. She pointed it out to Sam, who took several pictures, then pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and took out a small white box. Inside were two long Q-tips and a small vial of purified water. She dipped a Q-tip in the water, then rubbed it on the smudge. It came off, reddish brown on the wet swab. She placed the swab into the box.

“Possible blood on the trunk. That's enough to get a search warrant for the car,” Anna said. “Can we get officers to guard it while we apply?”

“Yep.” Sam said. She made the call, and five minutes later, two officers stood near the car. They would stand guard until the FBI came to tow it.

“Does Michigan have a traffic camera system like D.C.?” Anna asked. Around D.C., speeding cameras also took photos of nonviolating cars. They didn't send tickets to those cars. But police officers could use the pictures to see what cars had passed near a crime scene. “We can see if Dylan took any drives last night.”

“I'll look into it,” Sam said.

The two women got back in the SUV. “Let's see the purse and the Pit,” Anna said. “Then we can put those in the warrant too.”

They drove on North Campus Street, the line between campus and off campus. They passed Lucky's bar, then the Urban Outfitters and Bank of America on their left—the route Emily had walked with Dylan following her. The cute college setting ended at the construction sight. Floodlights ringed the block-long stretch surrounded by chain-link fence. Inside was a massive square-shaped dirt hole going down two stories below street level. The walls of dirt looked like a canyon. The bottom of the site was covered with construction equipment and piles of metal and lumber. Down there, six police officers and two K-9 dogs searched for signs of Emily.

Sam and Anna got out of the car and walked into the night. Anna pulled her coat tighter around her. The chill in the air instantly turned her cheeks and nose cold. A girl who was hurt and lying outside in this weather did not have a good chance of lasting long.

They walked up to a cluster of officers and agents on the sidewalk. “Hey, Joe,” Sam said. “Let me see the purse.”

A stocky officer wearing blue latex gloves nodded gravely and pulled the purse out of a box.

“Already processed for prints and DNA?” Sam asked.

“Yup. No usable prints. We'll process the swabs for DNA.”

Fingerprints often didn't stay on soft items like leather.

Anna and Sam each put on gloves, and Joe handed the purse to Sam. She pulled out a wallet; inside was $57 in cash, a student ID card, a driver's license, an ATM card, a gym membership card, and a MasterCard. Tucked in a pocket were three tampons, a tube of lipgloss, a keychain with a fuzzy giraffe and four keys, a travel-sized bottle of Jim Beam, breath mints, and an iPhone. Anna felt dizzy looking at this—the hopeful possessions of a college girl going for a night out. She felt the same sense of wonder she did when she was at a museum and saw an ancient artifact, thinking
Real people really touched this, a thousand years ago.
It was always hard to try to convince herself, to make her mind feel that as real.
Just twenty-four hours ago,
she thought,
this purse was Emily Shapiro's most important possession.
And yet here it was, covered in grime from being fingerprinted, being held by police officers wearing blue rubber gloves, while its owner was out in the world, somewhere, with no way to call home. It was terrifying how quickly the universe could take a simple thing like a purse and turn it into a piece of evidence in a criminal case.

Sam tried to unlock the iPhone, but it was password protected. “Send it to the FBI field office, and get a tech on it,” Sam told Joe. “Meanwhile, we'll see if a parent will sign off on letting us in.”

Sam walked down the long dirt ramp into the Pit. Anna went back into the SUV and took out her laptop. In the forty minutes that Sam was checking out the Pit, Anna drafted an application for a warrant to seize and search Dylan's car, and another one asking to search the Beta Psi fraternity house. She located the local duty magistrate for the Eastern District of Michigan—he lived just down the street in Tower Hills. She called him, waking him up. She apologized for the midnight call, introduced herself, and told him she needed an emergency search warrant. He said she could email him the warrants and then go to his house. Anna went to the top of the ramp and called for Sam. “We've got a judge!”

A moment later, Sam emerged from the Pit, carrying a single brown suede boot in her gloved hand. “This was Emily's shoe,” she said. “We'll confirm with DNA. But it's the one that appeared on the video.”

Anna's stomach clenched as she looked at the shoe. Emily was like a reverse Cinderella—fleeing at midnight, losing a shoe, but ending up somewhere much more sinister than a castle. Sam bagged the shoe and gave it to the officer in charge of chain of custody. Anna and Sam got back into her Durango in grim silence.

Ten minutes later, they pulled up to a house in an upscale neighborhood. Magistrate Judge James Schwalbe met them at the door in a bathrobe over pajamas. His thick brown hair was mussed from sleep, but he greeted them with a fatherly smile. His wife, in her own matching bathrobe, had them sit at the kitchen table and offered them coffee, which they gratefully accepted. “I heard about that poor girl,” the wife said, handing Anna a mug. “I hope you find her.” Anna thanked her. “Me too.” Judge Schwalbe had already printed out the documents Anna had e-mailed. He sat next to Anna, put on his reading glasses and read carefully through them. When he looked up, he shook his head.

“You don't have enough evidence to search the fraternity house,” he said.

Anna agreed—there wasn't much, so far, indicating that evidence of a crime would be found inside the frat house—but she'd tried anyhow, hoping that sentiments like the judge's wife's would help.

“Can we call you again to reapply if we find more evidence tonight?” Anna asked, worried about waking him again at three
A.M.

“Of course. That's what the duty judge is for. Good luck.”

He signed the warrant allowing them to seize Dylan's Viper. They thanked the judge and left the house. As soon as they were outside, Sam called her agents and ordered them to tow the car and start processing its interior.

Meanwhile, she and Anna headed to the university president's house. Anna took a deep breath and tried to brace herself. She always hated this part. In a job full of difficult moments, there was nothing quite like talking to parents about losing a child.

S
am pulled up to the president's home, a beautiful Georgian standing on a circular drive in the middle of campus. Behind the house sprawled trees and then acres of campus, crisscrossed with tidy footpaths. The clock tower shone from its crown-jewel position just north of the house. The lights in the house were blazing although it was close to one
A.M.
Anna didn't worry about waking anyone.

Anna had looked at the Tower University website on the way over. It showcased the huge breadth of the campus, from scientists holding test tubes to the Division I football team. The university was home to ten thousand undergraduate students, with activities ranging from the skydiving club to atom splitting at the nuclear lab. Many of the students had been top students or athletes at their high schools, which the university highlighted in links to
U.S. News & World Report
rankings. There were pictures of the Jewish Students Group at Hillel, the LGBT Students Group, the Hiking Club, the College Republicans.

Pictures of the president were easy to find, though his wife was more elusive. Anna had finally found a picture of Emily's parents together: a handsome white couple in their fifties. He wore a tux; she was in a sequined ball gown. The caption read: “President Barney Shapiro and his wife, Beatrice, Attend the Black-and-White Ball, Which Raised $1.5 Million for the University's Cancer Research Center.”

Anna and Sam walked up to the house. The front yard was beautifully landscaped with native plants, Anna learned from a sign on the edge of the lawn. The doorbell chimed with the first stanza of the Tower University fight song. This was a house made for entertaining, for impressing visitors and welcoming donors. The woman who answered the door, however, didn't match either the decor or the picture of Emily's mother. This woman was in her midthirties, with spiky platinum blond hair and five piercings in her left eyebrow. She wore a crimson leather sheath dress, high-heeled black boots, and a massive statement necklace made out of what appeared to be old engine parts.

She looked them up and down. “You're the police?” she asked skeptically.

“Yes, I'm Anna Curtis, a federal prosecutor. This is Samantha Randazzo, FBI. May we come in?”

The woman nodded and opened the door wider. They stepped into a long marble foyer. Long-stemmed lilies blossomed in a crystal vase on a pedestal table in the center.

“I'm Professor Kristen LaRose,” the woman said, leading them through the foyer. They passed a high-ceilinged ballroom on the right, then a dining room with a banquet-length table on the left. “A friend of the family.”