“Wow, that was fast,” Ryan marveled. “But I am a little disappointed that you didn’t include her astrological sign too.”

  “She’s a Gemini,” Beth volunteered. “She turns twenty in June.”

  Ryan rolled his eyes at Jessie, the only person who could see it.

  “Serves you right for being snarky,” Jessie scolded him. “Let’s go see what Annie has to say.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Jessie decided not to call.

  They could always do that if Annie wasn’t in her dorm room, but her preference was for their first interaction to be in person.

  They walked to the student housing section of campus called The Hill, and arrived at Annie’s dorm, a visually uninspiring red and white brick five-story building. After following an oblivious student through the main door, they checked in with the on-site security guard, who gave them temporary swipe cards to access other areas. As they waited for the cards, they received a text from Jamil, helpfully pointing out that Annie had classes at 9 a.m. and 10 a.m., making her an unlikely suspect in the murder.

  Annie’s room was on the third floor. They took the stairs and wended their way through the hallway, dodging students, all of whom looked at them curiously. They reached the door to room 312, which had a whiteboard and black pen hanging from a plastic hook. The board was blank. Jessie looked over at Ryan.

  “I think you should knock,” he suggested. “If what you think happened did happen, I’d rather she see your face first.”

  Jessie agreed and rapped gently on the door. She could hear a rustling inside as someone came close.

  “Who is it?” asked someone with a young, female voice.

  Jessie realized that the door didn’t have a peephole so there was no way the person could see out. She didn’t love that.

  “My name is Jessie Hunt. I work with the Los Angeles Police Department. I’m looking for Annie Boyd.”

  She could almost hear the person processing what she’d said and expected more questions. Instead the door opened to reveal someone who looked even more timid in person than her pictures suggested. She was like the blonde twin of Phoebe. Small, with short, flaxen hair, porcelain skin, and black-framed glasses; she was wearing sweatpants and a heavy hoodie. She wore no cosmetics at all.

  Like, Phoebe, she was indistinctly cute, unlikely to draw the attention of the boys on campus who were constantly in search of model types. But all it would take was a few fashion tweaks and a bit of makeup for them to take notice. Jessie suspected that someone else already had.

  “I’m Annie,” she said softly. “Is this about Professor Tobias?”

  For one of the few times in recent memory, Jessie’s jaw dropped.

  “Yes,” she said once she’d recovered. “We were hoping you could answer some questions for us. I’m here with Detective Hernandez. May we come in? If you’d rather it just be me, he can wait outside.”

  Ryan stepped into sight and gave her his best “I won’t be offended” smile.

  “That would be good,” she said, before whispering, “If it’s okay?”

  “Of course,” he said warmly, using the same tone he employed when soothing traumatized victims of violence. “I’ll be out here if you need me.”

  They stepped inside and Jessie closed the door. She looked around the tiny space, which was smaller than some prison cells she’d encountered. There was a twin bed pushed up against the back wall, under the lone window. A Spartan desk was built into one wall, along with a wooden chair. There were two shelves attached to the wall above the desk, comprised mostly of books on the American Revolution and the Civil War. To the left of the door was a narrow closet, half of which was taken up by a rickety-looking chest of drawers, with a mirror affixed to the wall right behind it.

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” Jessie said, trying to break the tension.

  Thankfully, Annie giggled at the crack.

  “I once saw a documentary on those coffin apartments in Hong Kong,” she said. “When this place starts to close in on me, I try to remind myself that I have it better than those folks.”

  “Good attitude,” Jessie replied, looking at the posters that covered nearly every spare inch of the wall, and nodding at one corner. “I like the Dua Lipa poster.”

  “Are you a fan?” Annie asked, unable to mask her surprise.

  “That might be overstating it, but my little sister is a senior in high school, so I’m well-acquainted with her work.”

  Annie sat down on her bed and immediately curled her body into a protective ball.

  “So I guess we can’t stall forever,” she said. “What do you want to know?”

  “I gather you heard about what happened to Professor Tobias,” Jessie replied, pulling over the desk chair and sitting beside the bed.

  “I know that he died,” Annie confirmed. “The rumor around campus is that someone killed him in his office.”

  “That’s correct,” Jessie told her, seeing no reason to hedge. “Let me ask you, Annie, how did you know that I wanted to talk to you about him?”

  The girl shrugged.

  “I guess I just figured that once the folks investigating his death started digging into his life, you’d start coming across people like me.”

  Jessie nodded sympathetically and lowered her head, though not for the obvious reason. She was trying to hide the mix of shock and giddiness she felt at the answer. Annie had said “people,” as in plural. It was like a blinking red light staring her in the face and all she wanted to do was ask a follow-up question. But that might spook Annie, so when she replied, she did her best not to reveal the magnitude of those words.

  “What exactly was the nature of your relationship with him?” she asked gently.

  “You know what’s funny?” Annie wondered, though she wasn’t smiling. “Until he died, I never would have considered telling you this. His being gone is like having a gag suddenly yanked out my mouth. So here’s the truth. The nature of our ‘relationship’ was that he turned me into his sexual plaything and somehow made me think it was an honor.”

  Jessie sighed deeply, allowing herself a moment to process what she’d just heard. Finally, after butting her head against metaphorical walls for hours, her suspicion had been borne out. But her satisfaction was severely tempered by the horrific nature of Annie’s revelation. Tobias wasn’t just sleeping with her, it sounded like he was toying with her.

  Jessie also noticed that, for the first time, there was something in the girl’s voice other than self-doubt. She sounded angry. Jessie nodded again, using it as a stalling tactic so that she could best form her next question.

  “How did he do that?” she inquired delicately.

  Annie closed her eyes and shook her head, as if trying to force the memory out of her brain.

  “Well, first he groomed me, complimenting my analysis in the papers he assigned, asking me to stay after class for an extra few minutes to discuss the lecture topic in greater detail. After a while, he invited me to walk him to his office while we talked. He might make a mention of how remarkably gifted I was, and casually throw in a flattering remark about how my jacket brought out the color in my eyes.”

  She stopped for a second and it looked like she was about to cry. But she swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and continued.

  “I don’t mean to offend you, Ms. Hunt,” she continued, her voice full of pain, “But looking the way you do, it might be hard to understand what I’m about to say. Can you imagine how powerful it would be to have your intellectual hero, the man you’ve been reading about and watching on TV for years, and maybe nursing a schoolgirl crush on, tell you that you are smart, that you are special, and that you are pretty? Other than my dad, no man ever called me pretty in my life, and he left us when I was twelve, so that ended up being a tad emotionally complicated for me.”

  She laughed bitterly at the thought, but then quickly regained her focus.

  “Professor Tobias knew exactly how to work me,” she said. “He understood my weak spots. He knew what made me vulnerable and how to build me up and break me down when it suited him. The next thing I knew, I was showing up at his office at all hours to do…whatever he instructed me to do. I let him do things to me that would make my mother cry. He preyed on me, Ms. Hunt, and had me thanking him for it.”

  Jessie was quiet for a while, wanting to be respectful of what she’d been told but cognizant that she needed more.

  “How long did this go on?” she wanted to know.

  “About six weeks,” she said. “When I finally started to realize what was happening and tried to find a way out, he threatened me. He said that if I breathed a word of this to anyone, it would be reflected in my grades. He told me he could put obstacles in the way of my graduation. And then, when he had me petrified that I’d be kicked out of school and branded a whore, he kicked me to the curb.”

  Her voice quavered as she finished. Jessie took her hand and squeezed.

  “Listen, what happened to you was wrong,” she said, looking Annie in the eyes. “It’s over now, so allow yourself to breathe, okay?”

  Annie nodded silently as she took Jessie’s advice and sucked air in through her nose. As she slowly exhaled, Jessie continued.

  “As someone who has been through my fair share of trauma, I can tell you, this is going to come back at you, probably when you least expect it. You should take advantage of the school’s resources, talk to someone. This happened on their watch and your care will be on their dime. They won’t balk but if anybody gives you a hard time, you call me. Got it?”

  Annie nodded again. She seemed to be breathing more normally now so Jessie proceeded tentatively.

  “Can I ask you a few more questions?”

  “Of course,” Annie said.

  “You said that at some point, Tobias ‘kicked you to the curb.’ How long ago was that?”

  “About two weeks ago,” she answered, “which was right around the time I started to pick up on the signs that I wasn’t the only one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I started thinking about this other girl in the class with me. I remembered that earlier in the year, before he noticed me, he would invite her to stick around for an extra minute. It occurred to me that she was a lot like me: quiet, shy, almost invisible in class, except to him. She even looked like me.”

  “How so?” Jessie pressed.

  “She’s tiny with short hair and glasses,” Annie explained. “I remembered that at some point he stopped inviting her to stay after class. Later on, she was always the last one to enter the classroom and the first to rush out when it ended, like she didn’t want to be stuck alone with him for any reason.”

  “Do you think she was the only one?”

  “I can’t say for sure,” she admitted, “but I doubt it. He was too polished with his act, like he’d been at it for years. In fact, now that I think about it, there’s this one girl in my class who he just started chatting with this week after the lecture was over. Her name is Phoebe something. She’s a quiet one too. I hope he died before he started in on her. Hey, maybe one of his playthings decided to turn the tables on him. Wouldn’t that be something?”

  Jessie didn’t comment on that, not wanting to violate Phoebe’s privacy or fixate on the understandable vitriol in Annie’s words.

  “Thanks, I’ll look into that,” she said. “In the meantime, can you give me the name of the girl that you mentioned, the one you thought might have been your predecessor?”

  Annie hesitated.

  “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble,” she said carefully.

  “Neither do I,” Jessie replied, not entirely truthfully. “But with you, this Phoebe girl, and the one before you, that looks like a pattern. We need to pursue that, not just in case it’s relevant to the investigation, but to get these girls help. There may be a lot of you out there.”

  Annie appeared convinced by that.

  “Okay. Her name is Rachel Jones. She actually lives on the fifth floor here.”

  That name rang a bell. It took a second for Jessie to remember that she was one of the girls eliminated from the database.

  “Wait. I’ve seen photos of Rachel Jones,” she said. “She doesn’t wear glasses.”

  “She only wears them in class,” Annie said.

  Jessie heart rolled over sickeningly in her chest. They had eliminated a possible victim simply because she didn’t wear glasses in her directory photo. How many other girls did they remove from the list for the same reason? Or because they had long hair when their photo was taken and subsequently cut it? If Tobias had targeted three girls in a matter of just a few months, how many had he victimized in his half a decade here? Or before that?

  Her mind was swimming and she felt slightly ill.

  “Thanks for your help,” she said quickly to Annie before darting out of the room. “Remember to take advantage of those resources. I’ll be in touch with updates.”

  She closed the door quickly behind her and moved toward Ryan, who was staring at her, confused.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I know who we need to talk to next,” she said as she wrapped her arms around him and burrowed her head in his chest, “but first I could really use a hug.”

  *

  Rachel Jones took longer to open up than Annie.

  But once Jessie made it clear that she wasn’t in trouble, she came clean too. Her story was remarkably similar. A self-conscious bookworm, unpopular in high school, never confident about anything other than academics, suddenly overwhelmed by the flattering attention of a personal hero.

  “He had me strip naked as part of this sick twist on that cruel sorority thing. He would circle parts of my body, but instead of pointing out flaws, he would tell me why they were beautiful. In the moment I thought it was romantic. But looking back, it was just a different kind of sick—a grown man in a position of power over a girl less than half his age, picking apart her body as a way to assert his dominance. I’m glad he’s dead.”

  “I get that,” Jessie had told her, “but that’s also why I need to know where you were this morning between 9:45 and 10:30.”

  The question had made Rachel laugh.

  “I was in the library, working on a paper for his class,” she explained. “That place is littered with cameras. You should be able to find me without any problem.”

  Before Jessie left, Rachel also gave her the name of two other female students she suspected Tobias had been with. Like Annie, she’d never seen anything overt, but she recognized the grooming behavior he used on her being employed with them too.

  Jessie and Ryan visited both girls, who each shared their experiences before offering other potential victims to follow up with. It was after getting the same story from the seventh girl, who, like all the others before her, had a solid alibi, that Jessie reached her limit.

  “I need a few minutes here,” she said after they got a text from Jamil for the address of the eighth potential victim. “It’s starting to get late and I’m losing my dispassionate professionalism.”

  “When have you ever been dispassionate?” Ryan asked, obviously hoping to lighten her mood a little but failing.

  “I’ve felt nauseated for the last two hours, Ryan,” she said earnestly, looking at her watch and seeing that was after 6 p.m. now. “This is a man who hunted the most susceptible victims—the introverted girls who stayed home every night in high school, who had body image issues, who always felt like ugly ducklings. And he used their hero worship of him to prey on them. I’ve pursued serial killers less creepy than this guy. And it’s been going on under everyone’s noses, with what seems like something bordering on tacit approval.”

  “I know,” he said quietly, aware that there wasn’t much more he could add.

  “And to make it worse, when Decker calls us for an update, we’re going to have to tell him that we’re no closer to finding out who killed this bastard. Every one of these girls has an alibi, thank God. I don’t know what I would do if one of them did it. Part of me is praying that it was some equally awful professor who bashed his head in during some dispute over which president had the worst State of the Union speech.”

  “We can dream,” Ryan said, giving her hand a squeeze, before looking up at the address on a nearby building. “I think we found the apartment of the next girl. What’s her name again?”

  “Natasha Myers,” Jessie said, looking at her phone.

  They entered the vestibule, looked through the unit directory, and buzzed Natasha’s apartment.

  “Hello,” said a frantic-sounding female voice. “Is that you, Natasha?”

  Jessie and Ryan exchanged perplexed looks.

  “No,” he said. “This is the LAPD. We were hoping to speak with Natasha.”

  “You can’t,” the young woman told them loudly through the intercom, her voice cracking slightly.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because I think she’s missing.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Calm down,” Jessie pleaded with Natasha’s roommate after she let them in.

  “I can’t,” Simone said. “I thought I was doing okay but when I heard ‘LAPD,’ my brain broke. I think I’m starting to hyperventilate.”

  “What’s your name?” Jessie asked, trying to get her to focus on something simple.

  “Simone Howard,” she gasped.

  “Come lie down on the couch, Simone,” Ryan said, guiding her at first, and then, when she seemed incapable of walking, juts picking her up and carrying her over.

  As he got her settled, Jessie looked around the apartment. Compared to the tiny dorm rooms she’d seen, this place was a palace. It had a nice kitchen, a roomy living room with a giant television, and a balcony that looked out over the hills to the north. Considering the location and amenities, she suspected that one or both of these girls’ parents were rich.

 

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