“At the U?”
“No, Brown.” He placed what was left of his sandwich on his plate, reverentially, like an offering. “We’re talking great story elements here. If it’s not a book, it could be a screenplay. You learn something, I’ve got to know. Deal?”
“If the case resolves, you’ll be the first writer to know.”
“That sounds kind of ambiguous.”
“It’s not,” I said, without taking my eyes off him. He tried for impassive, fell way short. Just a kid. I felt exploitative, told myself he was over twenty-one, had come here voluntarily, was trying his own wheel-and-deal.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “It’s no big thing anyway. The basic point is that Shawna might not have been such an innocent farm girl.”
He took another giant gulp of sandwich, washed it down with root beer. I waited.
“Shawna—and this isn’t fact, it’s just my assumption, that’s why I never published it, along with not wanting to hurt Mrs. Yeager. Also, I did tell Riley and the unicops and they ignored me. The fact that you’re here tells me they never even bothered to put it in their file. Because obviously if they did, you’d have read it.”
“What did you learn, Adam?”
“Okay,” he said. “Shawna might’ve posed nude. Done a photo shoot for Duke magazine—or what she thought was a shoot for Duke magazine, ’cause I think it might’ve been a scam.”
“When did she do this?”
“Might’ve,” he emphasized. “And I don’t know. Probably sometime during the first part of the quarter would be my guess.”
“Not long after she arrived.”
He nodded.
“How’d you learn this?” I said.
“I saw a picture—what I’m pretty sure was a picture of Shawna. And the way her roommate reacted when I brought it up told me I was probably right.”
“Mindy Jacobus.”
“Yeah, Mindy. I bugged her a lot, ’cause she was the last person to see Shawna alive. She never wanted to cooperate, said she and Shawna were close, she didn’t want to bad-mouth Shawna. Maybe she was being sincere, but I also think she was a little jealous.”
“Why’d you figure that?”
“You’ve seen pictures of Shawna?”
I nodded.
“Mindy was cute, but she was no Shawna. I’m not saying there was overt animosity between them. But something about the way she talked about her—I couldn’t put my finger on it, I just felt it. Whatever the reason, Mindy really didn’t want to talk about Shawna. I kept bugging her—showing up at her dorm room, catching her in between classes, playing Ace Newshound.” He smiled wistfully. “I must’ve been a real pain in the ass—today, she’d probably have me arrested as a stalker. But I was like . . . driven. Things bothered me. Like why didn’t Shawna have a boyfriend? Mindy had a boyfriend. Any good-looking girl can have a boyfriend at the snap of a finger, right? Mindy’s answer was that Shawna was a super-grind, end of story. Went to class, came back to the dorm and studied, went to the library and studied some more. But I checked out the grinds in all the libraries, and no one remembered seeing Shawna, and neither did the librarians. I also managed to get hold of Shawna’s library records—big no-no, don’t ask me how. Shawna hadn’t checked any books out the entire quarter.”
“Your article said she was headed for the library the night she disappeared,” I said.
“That was the official story. Mindy’s story. And the unicops believed it. But I’m not sure Mindy believed it. I think she was covering for Shawna. Because she got all shifty when I bugged her about it. And finally I got her to admit that the reason Shawna didn’t have a boyfriend was because she liked older guys. Mindy had tried to fix her up with a buddy of her boyfriend, and Shawna had turned her down flat. Said she preferred older guys—’grown-ups’ was the term she used.”
“You’re thinking she was having an affair with an older man,” I said.
“It crossed my mind,” he said. “But I was never able to take it any further. Mindy got all pissed off at me and got her boyfriend—he was this refrigerator-sized behemoth named Steve—to warn me off. I wasn’t about to risk life or limb, so I backed off. I did suggest to the unicops that they check out whether Shawna had ever been seen with an older guy— maybe even a faculty member—but they brushed me off.”