The Accomplice(49)

“Any chance she jumped?” Officer Craig asked.

Oslo shook his head and directed the officer’s attention to the mud gutter. “Looks like a heel, trying to get purchase.”

“So maybe she slipped?” Craig said.

Craig and all the campus police desperately wanted the death not to be a homicide. If an accident was a headache, a suicide was a migraine. And a murder would be more like a brain tumor. Specialists would have to be called in.

“Maybe. Or she was pushed,” Oslo said, as he aimed his flashlight down at the craggy rocks below the bluff.

Oslo and Craig made their way down the path as Scarlet’s body was bagged. A young man in a coroner’s windbreaker jogged up the last few yards to meet them.

The windbreaker guy delivered a baggie that appeared to be filled with mud. “Found a phone about ten yards from the deceased. Battery died. But it could be hers.”



* * *



—

Owen was asleep when the police came. It was Sunday, after all. The knocking on the door intruded into his dream and twisted it into a gestapo-style home invasion in which he’d been accused of unspecified crimes. Later, Owen would remember only a fragment from the dream, a feeling of bottomless guilt, a sense that his conscience was truly unclean. He’d gone to sleep wearing earplugs—there had been an impromptu hallway party the night before. The knocking sound was muted just enough that Owen didn’t wake up until the police were inside his room. His RA had given the key to the cops.

“Owen Mann?” said a large man in uniform.

As he came to, Owen noticed that the man in his room had a gun. There was another, older guy in a uniform standing behind him. It was like his gestapo dream had taken a pedestrian tangent.

“What’s up?” Owen said.

He was trying to keep himself calm. To an outsider, he looked remarkably, ridiculously calm.

“I need you to come with me,” said the guy with the gun.

“Where?”

“Deerkill station.”

“Train station?”

“Nope. Police.”

“Why?”

“Your girlfriend was found dead last night,” said the older cop. Students began to spill into the hallway. What happened? Scarlet’s dead. Scarlet Hayes? Yes. Oh my god.

The cops let Owen put on a pair of pants and a sweatshirt. Owen wasn’t being arrested, so there were no handcuffs and no perp walk, but the way people looked at him as he followed the two men with guns out of the dorm, there might as well have been.

“Is Scarlet really dead?” Owen asked on the drive to the station.

“Yes,” said the cop behind the wheel.

The news of Scarlet’s death evoked some feeling in Owen, but there were too many other emotions, all vying for attention, canceling one another out. What remained was an oppressive depression mixed with caffeine withdrawal.

“What happened?” Owen asked. “How?”

“We thought you might know,” said one of the cops.

That’s when Owen’s nerves took over.



* * *



—

The news began to spread across campus as soon as the police knocked on Owen’s door. An hour later, Scarlet’s death of a likely subdural hematoma had become a slit throat; the suspicious death was now a sex crime and murder.

Luna remembered feeling it first, the way the news came to her. It wasn’t spoken; it was a collage of sounds that evoked a feeling. Like the chatter of an audience right before a movie begins, but instead of quieting when the screen went dark, the volume slowly increased. Shrill voices saying, Oh my god. Random swear words. Then there was a loud knock at the door, not a secret knock.

Luna crawled out of bed and opened the door. It was Casey. She had an expression that Luna had never seen before. It was like fear combined with a mild flu.

“Have you heard?” Casey said.

Luna could only imagine that her secret was out. She felt like a hand was squeezing her heart. She thought she might vomit again and swallowed sour saliva. “Heard what?”

“Scarlet is dead.”

“?‘Dead,’?” Luna repeated.

The word didn’t make sense at first. Luna had prepared for other unfortunate news. Not this. Not death. Not Scarlet.



* * *



—

Detective Oslo had instructed the officers to bring Owen Mann around to the back door of the Deerkill precinct, but they instead marched him right through the front door, past the waiting area, where Scarlet’s mother and father had been sitting all night. A woman Owen had never met charged at him, screaming, “What did you do? What did you do?”

Owen felt her hands grasp at him. Then more pulling and pushing. Men were shouting. The woman, screaming. A door opened and Owen was shoved into a long corridor. Another man in uniform led him into a smaller room with walls made of tiles and holes. None of it felt real except the sick twist in his gut.

“Detective Oslo will be with you in a minute,” the officer said, shutting the door.

Owen’s throat burned, his head throbbed, and his tongue felt like gravel. He knew there were things he should be thinking about, but he was too tired and hungover to form coherent thoughts. All he could do was look around and take in details of the room. As he was observing the patina of handmade grooves that lined the desk, which was bolted to the floor, Detective Miles Oslo entered, knocking on the way in. He was tall and wiry—the opposite of the pudgy slob in a rumpled suit Owen had expected. He had the hollowed-out cheeks of a long-distance runner, his face splattered with freckles. His hair was almost red but sun-bleached closer to blond. Oslo explained that Owen wasn’t being arrested, that they were just having a conversation, which he would be recording. He placed a digital recorder on the table and pressed a button.