The Last Good Girl (23 page)

“Right. It's complicated, under federal law.”

“It's always complicated when women are victims. Because the people making the laws are men. It's like the women's bathrooms at football games.”

“Sorry, I don't follow.”

“There's always a hundred people waiting for the ladies' room at halftime. The men's room you can always walk right into. Because men build the stadiums.”

“Ah, got it. I see what you're saying.”

“It's ‘complicated' because men build the bathrooms,” Kara said. She laughed again, a giggly hiccup that she covered with her hand. “The Highsmiths build the bathrooms.” The giggles grew to full-fledged laughter. “Dylan builds the bathrooms!” She rocked backward with the hilarity of it. Residents on other benches looked over. Anna put a hand on Kara's arm and turned to signal for a nurse.

“Kara, we definitely need a break,” Anna said.

Kara's laughter grew louder. Between gulps of laughter, she choked out, “Dylan controls the world. You'll see. You'll see!” Her laughs were almost shrieks.

Tamara and two male nurses hurried toward them. The nurses shot Anna an angry look, then helped Kara to her feet and started walking her back toward the lobby. Kara pulled away from them. “No. No! No!” she shouted. “Get your hands off me! No one touch me! Do not touch me!” She tried to run from them. The nurses grabbed her; between the three of them, they managed to keep her from bolting. Tamara pulled a syringe out of her pocket. Kara saw it and panicked. She screamed and thrashed in the nurses' arms. Her red hair whipped their faces as her screams echoed off the glass walls. Tamara plunged a shot into her arm.

As the needle slid into her skin, Kara's scream was so piercing it hurt Anna's eardrums. The young woman stopped thrashing. Her screams stopped abruptly, and her eyes went dull. Her body melted between the nurses. The three nurses got hands under Kara's armpits and half escorted, half carried her away.

Tamara glared back at Anna and Sam. “Please leave.”

T
here were dozens of protesters, maybe hundreds, looking like refugees from a war fleeing their homeland. Each carried a mattress. They walked slowly down North Campus Street, their zombielike speed perhaps a way to make a point or perhaps it was just difficult to carry their load. They didn't make a sound. Each mattress carrier had a piece of duct tape over his or her mouth. Heide Herrmann marched in the front, carrying a posterboard sign that said,
WE WILL CARRY THIS WEIGHT UNTIL TOWER U PROTECTS RAPE VICTIMS.

The news cameras rolled, their lenses capturing the made-for-TV images.

The mattress carriers walked past the podium where Emily's parents were assembled to give their speech. A crowd stood around the parents, holding candles for the vigil. The mattress carriers silently nodded as they paraded past.

Mr. Shapiro stared at the protesters, then looked down at his feet. The mattress carriers were both supporting his daughter and protesting his university's policies. After his head injury two nights ago, he was probably having trouble standing, much less balancing his complicated work and personal lives. He wore a white bandage on his forehead, a remnant of where Mrs. Shapiro had sliced him with the crystal vase of flowers.

The effects of his concussion would last for several days. The legal effects would too. Mrs. Shapiro, elegant in a gray dress, was the subject of a restraining order mandating that she stay away from her husband—although the judge had made an exception for tonight, so the parents of the missing girl could stand together and issue a joint statement. Beatrice kept her back turned to Kristen, who hovered just off the elevated stage on which the podium stood.

The stage was set up on a concrete circle that surrounded the clock tower. As the Shapiros faced the microphone, they looked at North Campus Street, where Emily had run on the night she disappeared. The street itself had been blocked off for traffic, which allowed the procession of students carrying mattresses. Mrs. Shapiro looked grimly satisfied as she gazed on the procession.

Anna wasn't sure how the mattress carriers knew to come tonight. So far, the news had only reported that a girl was missing—not a girl who'd accused a boy of raping her before going missing. But, Anna supposed, word traveled around campus. The students in Emily and Preya's room had all known about the rape charges. While Anna was prohibited from giving information to the press about an ongoing investigation, it couldn't be long before the mainstream media got hold of that angle. Given the mattress protests, Anna guessed, someone would be telling the assembled reporters about the rape charges before the night was through.

Anna stood respectfully to the side of the podium. She'd organized the press conference and prepared the parents to speak. Anna herself would not make a public statement. The parents' message was a powerful one. Her job now was simply to stand out of the way.

Mrs. Shapiro stepped forward and leaned toward the microphone. Anna knew she was having trouble keeping from crying. She'd been sobbing all the way here, dabbing her eyes with tissues as they walked from the hotel, through campus, and up the three steps to this impromptu stage. Her eyes were pink and her mascara gone. But now she kept her face calm, eyes focused on some point on the other side of the street.

“My daughter, Emily, is one of the sweetest, most caring young women in the world. She loves music, cooking, and dogs,” Beatrice said. “She is kind to everyone she meets. She is a wonderful daughter. We love her more than anything. Please, I beg anyone who has any information about what happened to Emily three nights ago, come forward. Please, if you're with her, keep her safe and warm. Know that Emily is a wonderful person and a light in this world. Please help us find Emily. Help us bring her home, where she belongs.”

Mrs. Shapiro stepped back and her face collapsed. Her shoulders shook, and she buried her head in her hands. Mr. Shapiro looked at her uncomfortably, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. For a moment, she looked like she was going to refuse it, then she thanked him and used it to wipe her tears.

Mr. Shapiro stepped forward, touched his head wound, and looked around, confused. He blinked toward the microphone and said nothing. The last few days had changed him from a confident president who'd brushed off his daughter's disappearance as a “frolic” to a distraught man paralyzed by the possibility that she was really gone. He turned toward Anna, looking lost. Anna said softly to him, “Just talk to Emily.” He nodded and turned back to the microphone.

“Emily,” he said. “We love you so much. I pray that we'll see you soon. Anyone who knows anything about where she is, please call the hotline.”

The people holding the candles murmured. Someone said “Amen.” The mattress carriers kept coming, dozens of them toting their big white mattresses, gazing out above the duct tape over their mouths, silently passing the candlelight vigil.

The assembled press was torn between focusing their cameras on the sobbing parents and the mattress carriers shuffling past. Usually, the grieving parents would be the key shot. But the mattress carriers made such a vivid image.

Modern college students, Anna thought, knew how to work the media far more effectively than did older generations. They'd grown up in a world where going viral was the goal, and they understood like second nature the technology that democratized the chance to do it. They were savvy about how to make their issue become
the
issue. In Anna's day—which was only a decade ago—a student group might do a sit-in. They might have a march. But today's students—fluent in grassroots media like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and steeped in the twenty-four-hour news cycle—were savvier than ever about what would make an impact.

Last month, at MSU, there'd been a “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes” protest, where a bunch of boys bared their hairy legs in shorts and skirts and wore high heels while they walked through town demanding equality for their female peers. That was followed by a “Slut Walk” at U of M, where a bunch of girls—and a few boys—dressed in skimpy clothes and paraded down the street. The girls, in studded leather bras and short shorts, yelled that they had the right to wear whatever they wanted and not be sexually assaulted. A few even went topless, shaking their bare breasts for CNN—which would blur them out—and any nearby cell-phone owners—who would not.

It was a strange sort of feminism, Anna thought, where women used the very bodies they were pronouncing sovereign as a way to titillate the rest of America into listening to them.

She helped the Shapiros down from the stage. She told them they'd done a good job, and that the phones were manned for any tipsters who might call. As well-wishers came up to hug the parents, Anna asked Kristen if they could speak alone for a moment. They walked over to a quiet area with Sam.

“Thanks for your help tonight,” Anna said. “If you don't mind, I have just a few more follow-up questions.”

“Of course,” Kristen said.

“With apologies for asking a personal question. Did you have a relationship with Dylan Highsmith?”

“Mm.” Kristen looked to where Barney was standing. She lowered her voice. “Define ‘relationship.' ”

Sam said, “Did you have sex with him?”

“I don't see how that's relevant.”

“We're not here to gossip or start a scandal,” Anna said. “But we need to know the truth.”

Kristen twisted one of the piercings in her eyebrow. The gesture reminded Anna of an old-timey villain twirling his mustache. “We had a brief fling,” Kristen said softly. “Maybe a year and a half ago. He'd been in my Shakespeare class the semester before.”

“Was that ‘fling' consensual?”

“Yes. Although regrettable. I had been his teacher. I shouldn't have let it happen.”

“How long did your sexual relationship with Dylan last?”

“About fifteen minutes.”

“Why him?”

Kristen sighed. “I had a very difficult marriage. I turned to many things I probably shouldn't have.”

“Is that allowed under school rules? To be with a student?”

“You're very young. One day you'll understand. Rules sometimes fall away in the heat of the moment.”

“What I'm asking is: Could you lose your job?”

“It's a gray area. He was no longer my student. There are plenty of male professors who've done far worse and never gotten a reprimand.”

“Does Barney know?”

“No. We both lived full lives before we met. We don't need to hash out every detail. Everyone makes mistakes.”

“Are there any other mistakes you need to tell us about?” Sam asked.

“My biggest mistake was not taking a restraining order out on Landon. I'm afraid he's not right in the head. Please excuse me. I need to be there for Barney now.”

Kristen wended her way back through the crowd and brushed past Beatrice. As Beatrice glared, Kristen looped her arm around Barney's elbow.

A
nna sat with her laptop in its usual position, balanced on her knees. She had a hard time concentrating on the writing in front of her, though. Between each paragraph, she saw Emily's single shoe, at the bottom of the pit. The red-brown smudge on the back of Dylan's Viper. The silver needle sliding into Kara Briscoe's soft skin.

She took a long sip of pinot noir. It was her second glass. Cooper sat next to her on the couch and held out a bowl of sweet-potato chips. She shook her head. “No thanks.” She clicked through to the next case on PACER. She had a paralegal working to identify the girls whose initials were listed in Dylan's brag book. Meanwhile, Anna was looking up every civil case that had been brought against the Beta Psi fraternity in the last twenty years. There were fifty-six.

“Anna, you need a break,” Cooper said softly. “Your mind and your body will be better off if they have some time to recover.”

“I'm not interested in a break.”

“You can't fix everything single-handedly.”

“I can't seem to fix
anything
. And today I drove a poor young woman to a breakdown.”

Cooper took her computer gently from her hands and set it down on the coffee table.

“Tell me what happened.”

She didn't want to tell him what happened today. He might hate her. She wanted to lose herself in the computer and wine. He reached over and took her hands, enveloping hers completely. His palms were big, calloused, and warm. After hours of hearing terrible stories, Cooper's very tangibility was comforting. She gave him a quick summary of her day. He kept asking questions, drawing more and more details from her until she found herself telling him everything—every little detail, and how she felt about it. How it weighed on her. How she feared she wasn't going to find Emily. How Kara's reaction made her wonder if she was doing any good in the world at all. She did her job because she wanted to help people. So what did it mean when she was creating despair?

“You didn't create the despair,” Cooper said softly. “But you do have to wade through a lot of it. I'm not surprised some of it rubs off on you.”

“I'm not even sure how to do my job anymore. It seems like there are systems—huge powerful systems—that are stacked against getting the right result.”

“Like what?”

“The college's response to sex assaults on its campus. The good-old-boys network protecting its own.” She gestured toward her laptop. “And these frats. Did you know that men who join fraternities are three hundred percent more likely to rape women than other college boys?”

“Whoa.”

“And I'm not convinced their nationals are doing much to stop it. In fact, they seem to encourage kids to go crazy—everyone wants to join Animal House—but they throw the kids under the bus if something goes wrong. They say, ‘You served alcohol, that violated our honor code, you're on your own.' The kids' families get hit with huge civil judgments. I don't think parents understand the massive liability they expose themselves to when they send their son to join a fraternity.”