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“And you don’t want to just take them to campus police so they can figure this out?” Hannah asked.
“I was hoping that you could figure it out,” Lizzie conceded. “That way we could handle it, you know, informally.”
Hannah wasn’t sure what she could do—at least legally—without the authority of the school behind her. But for now, she decided to stick to Lizzie’s request.
“I’ll do the best I can,” she said, focusing on what they knew for sure. “One thing seems certain at least. All the details in these new messages definitely suggest that whoever is behind them either went to your school or knew someone who did,” Hannah noted.
“I thought the same thing,” Lizzie told her, “so I tried to go through all the freshmen here who went to my high school. The problem is that my school was here in Orange County so there are a lot of them. I might be forgetting some, but I counted fourteen.”
“I’ll double check that,” Hannah said, slipping into the private investigator mode that had defined much of her summer, when she worked with Kat Gentry. “How many of those fourteen did you know?”
“Maybe half, but it’s not like I was super close to any of them,” she said. “That’s why I chose a roommate I didn’t already know. I didn’t feel friendly enough with anyone from school to pair up with them. Plus, like I said, I wanted a fresh start. My roommate, Bellamy, is from the Bay Area, which is fine by me.”
Hannah sat quietly for a moment, sifting through possibilities for how best to proceed.
“Do you know if any of those fourteen students were close with your ex?” Hannah asked.
“None jumped out at me, but Daniel and I didn’t have overlapping friend groups so I could be missing someone.”
“Okay, I’m going to help you get to the bottom of this,” Hannah said before realizing her tone was somewhat presumptuous, “assuming that really is what you want.”
“Yes,” Lizzie said, “that’s why I brought it up. I can’t handle this hanging over my head, and I thought that maybe you could look into it in a way that didn’t draw as much attention as I would. And I really want to avoid involving the authorities if we can.”
“That will be a last resort,” Hannah assured her. “I’ll get started right away, confirming your count of students from high school. Then we’ll reconvene to go over them again and make sure you’re not forgetting a connection or something. Of course, we have to prepare for the possibility that it’s not even someone from your high school. Those people might be the source of the gossip, but anyone could have taken that info and run with it. If that’s the case, we’ll have to widen the scope of things. We don’t want to get tunnel vision.”
Lizzie looked at her with a relieved, grateful smile before her brow suddenly furrowed.
“Of course, I’ll pay you,” she said.
“Absolutely not,” Hannah told her. “We’re friends.”
“But it sounds like this could be a lot of work.”
“I’m a double major in Criminology and Psychology, remember,” Hannah pointed out. “This is what I want to do for a living, solve crimes and get justice for people like you. Consider this field study.”
That got a giggle from Lizzie, which was one of the few times Hannah saw her smile that freely from then on. Over the course of the next week, she got several more notes, even as they did their research. Hannah wanted to set up a camera in the dorm hallway but there was nowhere to put one where it wouldn’t be seen. The notes on the car had stopped, but only because Hannah instructed Lizzie to start parking in a covered lot with better video surveillance. The perpetrator must have realized it was too risky to try that again.
They had more luck with the students who had attended Lizzie’s high school. It turned out there were actually sixteen alums currently enrolled as freshmen at UC Irvine, seven of whom could be tied to Lizzie’s ex in more than just a casual way. Five had shared classes with him senior year, three had attended school with him all the way back to their elementary years, and two joined him on a summer school trip to Chile after sophomore year.
But as Hannah had discovered earlier this morning, only one person—Finn Anderton—met all three of those criteria, along with one more that Lizzie hadn’t been aware of. Finn was also on the lacrosse team, though a broken ankle kept him out of competition, and away from several social events, for part of the year. Lizzie only knew him in passing.
But he was here at UC Irvine. In fact, he lived in the same residence hall as them. He was on the first floor, while Lizzie and Hannah were on the third. And for Hannah’s purposes tonight, he was also a pledge at Omega Sigma fraternity, whose house she was in line to enter right now.
Omega Sigma didn’t have the best history on campus when it came to treatment of female students. In the last decade, there had been five allegations of inappropriate behavior made against members or pledges. Three were verified, including one involving harassment and “slut-shaming” of a member’s ex-girlfriend. In fact, the fraternity had only just gotten off a year of probation starting this semester. Hannah aimed to see just how much they’d reformed.
She was almost to the front of the line, which was a good thing, considering that she was freezing in her skimpy top. She looked at her phone. It was 10:30 p.m. and the party seemed to be just starting. An old school trip-hop song with heavy bass was rattling the windows and raucous voices could be heard inside.
Two girls in front of her were being given a hard time by the frat guy at the door letting people in.
“We have to wait for some people to leave to let new ones in,” he claimed.
But Hannah was dubious. She’d seen him scrunch up his face in distaste when the girls, who apparently didn’t fit the beauty profile he was after, weren’t looking his way.
Just then, Hannah caught sight of four girls walking out a side door and saw that the gatekeeper did too. But instead of letting the girls in front of her in, he went a different way.
“You know, it could be a while,” he told them. “Maybe you should try a different party for now and come back later when the wait isn’t so long.”
His pathetic attempt to send them elsewhere was clumsily transparent, but since the girls hadn’t seen the others leave, they didn’t pick up on the ploy. Hannah, however, wasn’t having any of it.
