Final Girls(48)

Lisa had trusted whoever killed her.

The medical examiner noticed something strange about the cuts on Lisa’s wrists. They were deeper than most self-inflicted knife wounds. Especially if the person doing the cutting was drugged out of her mind. Even more telling was the direction of each cut—from right to left on Lisa’s left wrist and left to right on her right one. In most cases, the opposite is the norm. And even though Lisa might have been able to slash herself in such an unusual manner, the angle of the wounds proved otherwise. There was no way she could have caused those cuts. Someone had done it to her. The same person who put pills in her wine and later took the glass with them.

The big question mark—other than who did it and why, of course—is when Lisa made the 911 call on her cell phone. Authorities in Muncie suspect it was after the drugging but before the cutting. Their theory is that Lisa realized she had been drugged and managed to call 911. Her assailant took the phone from her before she got the chance to speak and hung up. Knowing the police would be coming anyway, that person grabbed a knife, dragged a groggy Lisa to the bathtub and sliced. It also explains why her wrists were slit when, in all likelihood, the anitrophylin would have killed her on its own.

What the police don’t know, until they find it on Lisa’s computer hard drive, is that she sent me an email roughly an hour before all of this happened. It jumps into my thoughts as we sit around Coop’s cell phone, set to speaker so all of us can hear the details.

Quincy, I need to talk to you. It’s extremely important. Please, please don’t ignore this.

We’re in the dining room, me standing at the head of the table, too restless with anger and heartbreak to sit down. Lisa is still dead. This new revelation doesn’t change that. But it does leave me grieving in a new, slightly more raw way.

Murder is a stranger beast than suicide, although the end result of both is the same. Even the words themselves differ. Suicide hisses like a snake—a sickness of the mind and soul. Murder, though, makes me think of sludge, dark and thick and filled with pain. Lisa’s death was easier to deal with when I thought it was suicide. It meant that ending her life was her decision. That, right or not, it had been her choice.

There is no choice in murder.

Coop and Sam appear equally as stunned. They sit on opposite sides of the table, silent and still. Because he’s never been in the apartment before, Coop’s presence adds an extra layer of weirdness to what’s already a surreal situation. It’s jarring to see him in civilian clothes, uncomfortable in a dainty dining room chair. Like he’s not the real Coop but an imposter, lurking in a place he doesn’t belong. The fake, cheery Sam, meanwhile, has been left behind at the cafe. Now it’s the real one who gnaws her fingernails to the quick while staring at Coop’s phone, as if she can see the person talking through it and not the featureless silhouette currently filling the screen.

The voice we hear belongs to Coop’s acquaintance in the Indiana State Police. Her name is Nancy. She was a first responder to the sorority house after Stephen Leibman finished his bloody spree. She was also Lisa’s version of Coop.

“I’m not going to lie to you all,” she says in a voice made low by exhaustion and grief. “They’ve got very little to work with here.”

I can only half hear her because the email plays on a loop in my mind, read aloud in Lisa’s voice.

Quincy, I need to talk to you.

“Things might be different if those numbnuts had searched her place the minute they found her body, like I told ‘em to do. But they didn’t and God knows how many people tramped through there before they did. The whole scene is compromised, Frank. Fingerprints all over the place.”

It’s extremely important.

“So they might never know who did it?” Coop asks.

“I never say never,” Nancy says. “But, right now, it’s not looking too good.”

A brief silence follows in which all four of us think about the very real possibility of never getting more answers than what we already know. No killer brought to justice. No motive. No definitive reason why Lisa sent me an email not long before taking that first, unknowing sip of doom.

Please, please don’t ignore this.

Another thought slithers into my head, sinuous and alarming.

“Should Sam and I be worried?” I ask.

Coop scrunches his brow, pretending the thought hadn’t occurred to him, when, of course, it had.

“Well?” I say.

“I don’t think there’s cause for worry,” he says. “Do you, Nancy?”

Nancy’s wan voice emerges from the phone. “There’s nothing to suggest this has anything to do with what happened to all of you.”

“But what if it might?” I say.

“Quincy?” Coop gives me a look I’ve never seen before. There’s a sternness to it, mingling with disappointment that I might be hiding something from him. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Something I should have told him days earlier. I didn’t because it seemed like Lisa’s email was a desperate attempt to be talked out of killing herself. Now I know differently. Now I suspect that Lisa was really trying to warn me. About what, I have no idea.

“I got an email from Lisa,” I announce.

Sam at last looks up from the phone, hand still at her mouth, the nail of her ring finger grasped between her teeth. “What?”