Free Far From True by Linwood Barclay Page B

college’s main dining hall, an arena-sized room with a vaulted ceiling. There were only half a dozen students there when Carlson arrived. Lorraine was sitting near one corner, working on a small laptop, a paper cup of coffee next to it.
    “Ms. Plummer?” he said.
    “You’re the policeman?” said the student, who Carlson guessed wasn’t more than five feet tall, maybe 110 pounds wet. She wore her black hair to her shoulders and was dressed in a gray sweatshirt and jeans.
    He offered a hand, which she took. “Carlson,” he said, taking a seat across from her. “Pretty empty in here today.”
    “Most everyone’s gone, but they’re still keeping the cafeteria open with a skeleton staff,” she said. “Thank God, or I’d starve to death.”
    “So you’re hanging in for the summer?”
    She shrugged, made a face. “Yeah. I’m trying to fast-track my degree. Don’t want to be here for four solid years. Want to get on with my life, do something, you know? Try to get started on a career before having kids and stuff.”
    “You have a boyfriend?”
    She blushed. “No. I just think way ahead.”
    “Nothing wrong with that.”
    “So, you have questions? About the guy who grabbed me?”
    He nodded. “I’m sure you’ve had to go over all this before, but it would help us if you could do it again.”
    “But they got the guy, right? I mean, isn’t it over?”
    “What we’re wondering is what Mason Helt—and we’ve no reason to think it wasn’t Helt who attacked you—might have said.”
    “Okay, well, I was walking by the pond. You know, Thackeray Pond?”
    “Yeah.” It was a small body of water at the college. Most pictures of Thackeray featured the pond with the stately buildings in the background reflected within in it. Students hung out by it, strolled and jogged around it.
    “It’s real pretty there, although I’m totally freaked about even putting my toe into it. Some kid here put a baby alligator in there as a joke. I mean, it might be dead, but you never know. So I was walking around it at about ten. At night. No one else was out, which was kind of dumb of me—I realize that now. When I got close to some trees, all of a sudden this guy runs out and grabs me. I’m not very heavy, you know, and he puts his arms around me and lifts me right off my feet and takes me into the bushes. And I’m totally scared and ready to scream, and he puts his hand over my mouth and puts me down on the ground, and then he’s all, hey, don’t worry, it’s okay.”
    “What’d he say, exactly?”
    She paused, took a sip of her coffee. “I was kind of scared, you know? So it’s hard to remember exactly. But it was like, ‘I’m notgoing to hurt you. I’m not going to do anything to you. But tell them what happened. Tell them to be afraid.’ Yeah, like that.”
    “‘Tell them to be afraid’?”
    Lorraine nodded.
    “Tell who to be afraid?”
    “Well, he didn’t exactly say. I guess he meant, tell everyone?”
    “There were two other students,” Carlson said. “Erin Stotter and Denise Lambton.”
    “Yeah,” she said. “I know them, but not really well. But they told me he said kind of the same thing to them, too. But you probably know all of this, right? Mr. Duncomb—he’s the head campus-cop guy—would have told you right after it happened?”
    Carlson knew, from what Duckworth had passed along, that all this information had come late to the Promise Falls police.
    “What makes you think he would have done that?” he asked.
    “Well, I told him I was going to call the police myself, but he said that wouldn’t be necessary, that he’d be calling them. And that he’d be passing along my statement, and if you needed more from me, you’d interview me.”
    Carlson smiled. “He did, did he?”
    Lorraine nodded.
    “I figured he’d do it. Because I sort of already know him, and figured he’d be straight with me.”
    “How do you know the security chief?”
    “He knows this writer guy. And he