The Last Good Girl (28 page)

Sirens wailed in the distance, then grew closer. An ambulance pulled up first, which was silly if you thought about it. There was nothing a doctor could do for the girl at the bottom of the elevator shaft. Sam's unmarked sedan came next. Anna saw Sam get out of the car, approach the two young men, and talk to them. Lamar and De'Andre gestured excitedly toward the train station. A police cruiser came wailing up the road. It screeched to a stop in front of the station's entrance. Two cops emerged and slammed their doors shut simultaneously, making a sound like gunshots. Cooper jumped.

A phone buzzed under Anna's hand, from within Cooper's pocket. She expected him to let it go to voice mail, but he took it out and looked at the incoming number. “Wyatt,” he said. He never turned down a call from his baby brother.

Cooper stood, took a deep breath, and went through a brief but intense moment of pulling himself together. Shaking a moment before, he pressed send and said calmly, “Hey, Wyatt.”

She stepped a few feet away to give him some privacy as he spoke to his brother. Through the chain-link fence, she saw people in front of the train station donning yellow plastic jumpsuits. This was a special FBI team that would descend into the elevator shaft and excavate the body. It was delicate work; they wanted to extricate the corpse while preserving it, so that a medical examiner could be able to make determinations about time and manner of death.

Sam motioned for Anna to come over. Anna and Cooper walked back to the station entrance, while Cooper continued talking to his brother. Anna only heard his end of the conversation. “Can you take a picture and send it to me? Yeah, I think she can keep it confidential. You might want to make yourself scarce, though. No, fuck those guys. You don't need them. Okay, okay. I get it. Just be careful. Okay. Love you.”

When they hung up, Anna put a hand on his arm.

“What did Wyatt want?”

Cooper held up his phone and forwarded something Wyatt had texted him.

“He wanted to help.”

Before Anna could ask any more questions, Sam asked Cooper to tell her how he and his interns had found the body. She took notes. Then she turned to Anna to discuss logistics. As they were talking, the team in the yellow plastic suits emerged from the station.

They carried a stretcher with a heavy load covered in a black plastic tarp. Anna pictured the vibrant, hopeful college student Emily had been on the last night of her life, her hair curled into ringlets, lips covered in gloss, ready for a happy night out. Anna couldn't quite grasp the difference between the night Emily expected and what had actually happened to her.

“Do we have confirmation on the ID?” Anna asked Sam.

“Too soon to tell by a visual exam. The body is damaged and bloated from the water and whatever happened before it went down the shaft. We'll do DNA.”

Anna watched the search team load the body into a white van.

She had a vivid fantasy of going to Dylan's house and shooting him between the eyes. She shook it off. Prosecuting pedophiles, rapists, and abusers, she often had these fantasies. The key was channeling that anger into a meticulous and legally acceptable method of kicking ass.

Anna turned back to Cooper. But he was gone. “Cooper,” she called. A few of the officers looked up, but Cooper wasn't among them. “Coop?”

Sam said, “I saw his motorcycle heading away a second ago.”

“Oh,” Anna said. That was odd, for him to leave without saying good-bye. She hoped he was okay.

She looked at her phone to see what he'd texted her. Her heart started thudding. It was a photo that Wyatt had texted to Cooper, which Cooper had forwarded to her. It was the picture of an airline ticket for Dylan to fly to Venezuela. Tomorrow.

D
ylan was fleeing the country. Anna had to stop him before he became this generation's Roman Polanski, evading the American justice system forever. Venezuela had no extradition treaty with the United States. Once he got there, Dylan wasn't coming back.

She didn't have as much evidence as she would want, ideally, to make a homicide arrest. The victim's body hadn't yet been identified. But she had enough evidence to squeak by on an assault charge: the video of Dylan running after Emily, her blood on his car, her scarf in his room, her initials in his brag book, the history of their Disciplinary Committee proceedings. Homicide cases could be prosecuted without a body; certainly an arrest for assault could be made. Anna and Sam went back to the FBI command center, huddled over her laptop, and cranked out an arrest warrant and affidavit. The warrant was for the hate crime of assault, not homicide. That gave them less to prove but would allow them to arrest Dylan. When they identified the body, they'd change the charge to homicide.

Anna listed all the evidence that proved Dylan's actions against Emily stemmed from a hatred of women. That included the girls listed in his brag book, the “bitch” he called Emily, and the insults scribbled on the sorority's composite hanging in his room. They attached the paperwork from Tower University listing the other three sex-assault charges brought against Dylan. They raced to the courthouse where Sam swore out the affidavit and Anna filed the papers. Magistrate Judge Schwalbe signed the warrant and his secretary stamped it.

From the courthouse, Sam and Anna drove to Dylan's father's house in Grosse Pointe. In his text, Wyatt said Dylan was there for a Beta Psi alumni luncheon. Anna hoped he still was. As they drove, Anna tried to call Cooper. She got no answer. Where was he? Her discomfort about him driving away from the train station blossomed into full-fledged worry. She called Jody, who hadn't seen him either.

Meanwhile, Sam made phone calls to Steve and other FBI agents. By the time they pulled up to the Highsmiths' sprawling Tudor, the driveway was covered not only in Jags, Cadillacs, and Teslas, but also several unmarked Tauruses, Capris, and vans with federal government plates.

They met Steve on the driveway. He had twenty SWAT agents, who'd already been briefed, and a full operations plan, ready to go. Sam gave him a nod. “You don't mess around, Quisenberry. That's what I like about you.”

Steve blushed below his dark stubble.

Anna stood by the Durango while the FBI agents lined up and Sam knocked on the front door. Anna counted under her breath along with Sam. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand . . .

The door swung open. Behind it stood none other than Lieutenant Governor Robert Highsmith. He wore a blue blazer and held a cigar in one hand and a crystal glass of amber liquor in the other.

“Good afternoon,” he said, looking with amusement on the group of twenty FBI agents on his driveway. “What can I do for you?”

“Sir, I'm Agent Samantha Randazzo, FBI. We're here to execute an arrest warrant for your son, Dylan Highsmith. Is he in the home?”

“No, he's not. But I do have several other people here. They are guests, here for a luncheon party. I'd ask that you not disturb them.”

“I'm sorry, sir, but we have to ask everyone in your house to step out. And then we have to search your home to make sure Dylan isn't here. Do you know where he is?”

“I do not. And you do not have the legal authority to search my home.”

Anna stepped up to the porch as Sam handed Robert the paperwork. “That's a federal arrest warrant, sir, which gives us full authority to search your home incident to arrest.”

He shifted the cigar to the same hand as the scotch so he could take the warrant. He skimmed it, then looked up.

“You'll do no such thing.” He turned to yell into his home. “Felicia! Bring me those papers from the printer.”

A maid hurried over carrying documents. He took the papers and handed them to Anna. They were still warm from the printer. It was an order from a district judge on the Eastern District of Michigan—one level above Magistrate James Schwalbe—overruling the magistrate's order and finding their arrest warrant lacked probable cause.

“Your warrant has been quashed.” Robert puffed on his cigar and blew the smoke at Sam and Anna. “You can't come into my home. You can't touch my son.”

I
f she weren't so angry, Anna might have been impressed. Arrest warrants were not publicly filed; someone had tipped the Highsmiths off. Then Dylan's lawyer had managed to draft a motion, get it to the courthouse, and have a federal judge sign it—all in the time it took the FBI to put an arrest team together and drive to the Highsmith house.

Anna called Judge Schwalbe's clerk personally to be sure Robert was telling the truth. He was. U.S. District Judge Joseph DeLuca had overruled the magistrate's decision, finding there wasn't enough evidence that Dylan assaulted Emily because of her gender. If there wasn't gender-based animus, there wasn't a federal hate crime. Judge DeLuca quashed the warrant.

Reasonable minds could disagree on how much evidence was sufficient to support a warrant, but Anna was familiar with this particular district judge. She guessed Judge DeLuca had been primarily motivated by the fact that Robert Highsmith was the politician responsible for getting him on the bench.

Whatever the decision was based on, a district judge's order overruled a magistrate's. Only a panel of three judges on the federal court of appeals could overrule Judge DeLuca. There was no way to get a panel assembled today. Tomorrow would be too late.

Sam stopped the Durango at a red light and looked at Anna. “Have they outmaneuvered us?”

Anna stared out the windshield. The Renaissance Center stood ahead of them, dark gray glass against a light gray sky. The skyscrapers were supposed to help Detroit come back in the 1970s but had had little effect. Nevertheless, the city was coming back now. Anna had just seen a
Forbes
article calling Detroit the new Brooklyn—
the
place for hipsters and artists. Detroit was coming back because dedicated, creative people were finding interesting new ways of doing things.

She said, “I have an idea.”

• • •

Anna's paralegal, Nikki Greene, had compiled a list of all the names she'd been able to match to the initials in Dylan's brag book. If Anna could find just one more girl who'd been sexually assaulted by Dylan, it could tip the balance for the warrant. She could show a
pattern
of sexual assaults, and reapply with the additional evidence. This time, she would go through a grand jury and ask them for an indictment. Indictments—the findings of a panel of citizen jurors—had a certain level of gravitas. A judge would be less likely to overturn a warrant based on a grand jury's indictment. But first she had to get someone to talk.

Nikki had listed phone numbers of the girls she'd found from Beta Psi's
The
Book of Earthly Pleasures
. Anna started making calls. The first woman didn't answer. The second, third, fourth, and fifth didn't want to talk. The seventh, a woman named Melinda Bates, reluctantly agreed to have Anna and Sam come talk to her.

Anna hung up and smiled at Sam.

“Let's go to Michigan State.”

• • •

An hour's drive from Tower, MSU was a beautiful land grant university, hundreds of acres sprawling across East Lansing. Long stretches of parklike campus were bounded by cute shops and restaurants. A seventy-thousand-person stadium held Big Ten football games. It was a larger university than Tower, both in number of students and in sheer geographic space.

Sam and Anna pulled up to Case Hall, a redbrick dormitory. Melinda Bates had transferred from Tower and was getting a B.A. in public policy at the James Madison liberal arts college within MSU. Anna wondered why Melinda had transferred. Was it for the excellent education—or to escape the shadow of Dylan Highsmith?

They took the elevator up to the sixth floor and knocked on Melinda's door. It opened a crack, and a light green eye peered out at them. The door closed, a mighty sigh ensued, and the chain slid off. Melinda Bates stood before them, in jeans and a green Spartan T-shirt, looking unhappy but resigned. “I guess you should come in,” Melinda said, like a woman inviting an executioner into her house.

“Thanks.” Anna introduced herself and Sam. Melinda's place was a neat studio apartment. A small dining table sat under a window that looked out over the basketball stadium. Melinda had light brown hair cut in a cute bob she kept tucking behind her ears. She was whip thin, like someone who was a serious runner or had an eating disorder. Melinda sat at the little table and gestured for them to do the same.

“I don't have a lot of time,” Melinda said. “I have class in half an hour.”

“We appreciate you seeing us,” Anna said. “I wouldn't bother you if it weren't so important. I'm investigating Dylan Highsmith. And I understand that you might know him.”

“That was years ago,” Melinda said. “Ancient history.”

“Do you mind telling us how you knew him?”

Melinda tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear. “I didn't know him well. Just for a night, really.”

“What happened?”

“What happens to a lot of girls. I went to his frat party. He plied me with this deadly fruit punch. I passed out; he had sex with me.”

“When you say deadly . . .”

“I think there was something in it. I'd hardly had anything to drink. And then I was out. Next thing I know, I'm waking up in his bed naked and sore.”

“Did you report that to anyone?”

“I told some friends; he told some friends. Some stuff got posted online.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Someone took a picture of me in Dylan's bed. They tagged me and it showed up in all my feeds. It was my first week as a freshman. I never really got over it, socially.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. “It's how I ended up here. I wanted to get away, have a fresh start. Plus MSU is a better school anyhow. They let me transfer my second semester. Now I'm a junior.”