Free Book of Shadows by Alexandra Sokoloff Page B

property and we only need permission from the dean’s office to search, not from the individual students. It’s part of the student housing contract.”
    “Sweet,” Landauer murmured.
    “It’s common for university campuses,” Jeffs explained. “The school is in loco parentis. We didn’t find anything illegal, so no action taken . . .” A shadow passed over the sergeant’s face. “But this kid is no boy next door. He’s got a weird way about him.”
    “Got that right,” Land said fervently. Garrett nodded without speaking, and there was an uneasy silence in the small room. Garrett finally broke it.
    “You didn’t find any weapons in the search?” He was thinking of a dagger, the murder weapon.
    Jeffs tensed. “No. That would be automatic grounds for expulsion.”
    Garrett closed the file and sat back. “He’s a sophomore—no problems last year?”
    “Nothing that ever got reported. He was totally off our radar. And I checked the hospital, too, to see if there was anything medical or psychiatric we should know about.” Jeffs shrugged briefly, and there was frustration in the gesture. “Nothing. But after we talked to him we flagged his file. I have to say I’ve just been waiting for something ever since. You know, after Virginia Tech . . .” The sergeant’s face was troubled. “But I never in a million years thought it would be something like this.”
    Garrett met the young sergeant’s eyes with what he hoped was reassurance. “How could you?”
    Responding to Malloy’s request, Jeffs and the campus cops had sealed Erin’s room for processing as a crime scene, and Jason’s as well. Garrett asked Jeffs to take whatever men he had on duty and clear all students from the floors of the dorm where Erin’s and Jason’s rooms were located so the CSU could start on the rooms as soon as they arrived. The students would be held in the lounge and questioned individually.
    “And try not to let them bring any laptops or cell phones with them,” Garrett instructed as they got back in their car to follow Jeffs over to Morris Pratt Hall.
    In the car, Landauer glanced at the list on his legal pad and turned to Garrett. “Who’s it gonna be, Kemosabe?”
    They had a choice now: question Erin’s boyfriend, who lived in campus-owned housing a few blocks from the school; question Erin’s roommate, Shelley Forbes; or search Jason’s and Erin’s rooms. Garrett was itching to get into Jason’s room, but it wasn’t going anywhere and their witnesses might, and the crime-scene van was still en route.
    “The roommate,” he decided. “I want to see if she has anything to say about Erin and Moncrief before we talk to the boyfriend.”
    While Jeffs and his officers rousted students out of their rooms and secured them in the downstairs lounge of the dorm, Garrett and Landauer met Erin’s roommate, Shelley, in a downstairs suite of Morris Pratt, where she’d been moved when the campus police sealed off the girls’ room. The wide window had a view of the oddlychurchless steeple. Shelley Forbes was preppily pretty, but nowhere near Erin’s league, despite some obvious surgical enhancements: a nose job and breast job, at least, Garrett thought, on top of expensive corrective orthodontia. That kind of early plastic surgery was always unnerving to him.
Braces, sure, but what kind of parent buys their teenage kid a boob job?
    Shelley was presently red-eyed, shaken, and crying copiously in the way that only teenage girls seem to be able to cry. Garrett’s micro-recorder was rolling on the coffee table in front of her. They were going to have to do a lot of fast-forwarding later.
    “It’s s-so h-horrible,” she sobbed. It was, in fact, horrible, but Garrett could see Landauer straining to keep a semi-compassionate look on his face.
    “Shelley, when Detective Landauer talked to you on the phone, you told him Erin had gone to the Cauldron club on Friday night. How did you know that? Did she tell you