27

At nine o’clock that evening, Caleb triumphantly presented a folded piece of paper.

“You did it?”

“The regular one was easy to crack, and that helped me to open the animal ones. Sorry it took so long,” Caleb said.

Katie couldn’t wait to see what was on the memory sticks.

She found her laptop under some unfolded but clean laundry on the table in her room. The computer woke up slowly as she put the gray memory stick in the slot and waited.

Staring at the screen, she sat back and watched as one file popped up. It was a sketchy outline of her project and a couple of pages of notes. Just as Russell had said, it wasn’t very helpful. Katie’s shoulders slumped.

She pulled out the metal thumb drive and replaced it with the monkey. This time, file upon file scrolled in the USB window. It was as if Taylor had been running a full private investigation. She had police reports, some interview excerpts, and notes. Lots of notes. Taylor had really taken this project seriously. Katie wondered why she hadn’t shared all of this with her professor. It made Katie sad, looking at all her hard work and wondering if her diligence had put her in danger. Could she have found some missed piece of evidence that had made one of her interview subjects nervous?

If these notes pointed to a different killer, then someone did have a dangerous secret. And that caused a cold shiver of dread.

She flipped open her notebook and got to work.

She clicked on the NOTES file, hoping that it would give her a summary of what Taylor had been thinking. Instead, it led to more questions.

Katie opened the file marked TIMELINE and saw that it focused on the night of the party. It was a scanned copy of notebook paper with multiple erasures and cross-outs. Taylor had written in the arrivals and departures of Heather and her close friends. From what Katie could tell while squinting and trying to read Taylor’s handwriting, things had gotten messy around ten o’clock. It was unclear who had still been at the party, who had seen Heather last, and when people had left. Katie wasn’t surprised. She would not want the job of tracking movements during a large college party where alcohol was the main entertainment.

Katie closed out that window and scanned the list of files. Why wasn’t there one labeled SUSPECTS or MURDERER? That would have been helpful.

Knowing that Hope Frost and Brad Humphreys were on the sticky note she had found at Taylor’s apartment, she clicked on Hope’s name. There were scanned newspaper clippings of her wedding announcement and pictures that looked like they had been pulled off of social media of her graduation and her kids.

Brad Humphreys had the same type of information in his file. Katie wondered what Taylor had been thinking. Why the pictures and the announcements from their lives years after Heather’s death? Did she suspect the roommates? And if so, what was their motive?

Katie had just started writing out a list of questions when her phone rang.

She was on call and looked at the screen with trepidation. Ugh. The Baxter ER. That was never good news. She answered the call as she shut down her computer and flipped her notebook shut.