The Silent Wife (Will Trent #10) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,91

at the end of every other sentence, as if she was asking a question instead of answering one.

He said, “I know you already talked to one of my officers. Just take me through the events of yesterday morning. Anything you can remember would be helpful.”

She picked at a piece of loose skin on the sole of her foot. The girl was wearing blue silk pajamas. Chinese characters were tattooed on the inside of her wrist. Her short blonde hair had worked its way into a spiral while she’d slept.

“Like I said, I was asleep?”

Jeffrey looked down at his notebook. He silently debated whether or not to tell Kayleigh that her friend had been attacked. He went with his gut, which was telling him that the second she found out, her usefulness as a witness would take a nose-dive. The girl tended to turn everything back around on herself. Which wasn’t unexpected. She was still at that age where you could only see the world through your own lens.

He told Kayleigh, “Go on.”

“Becks was really mad at us? All of us? She just started screaming like a crazy person, knocking stuff over, throwing things?”

The kitchen was a mess, but Jeffrey could tell the garbage can had been kicked. The plastic was dented. The trash on the floor had created a slime trail. The only item that seemed to have been spared was a tan leather backpack beside the fridge.

He asked, “Why was Beckey mad?”

“Who knows?” Kayleigh shrugged, but Jeffrey could guess that she not only knew what her friend had been angry about, but with whom she was angry. “She kicked open my door? And she yells, ‘you bitches’ like she hates us? Then I follow her to her bedroom to see what her deal is? Only, she won’t tell me?”

“Beckey’s room is at the end of the hall?”

“Yes.” She finally managed to phrase a proper answer. “When we first got here, everybody saw the room was the smallest, and we were all bracing for a fight or something, but Becks goes, ‘I’ll take the small one,’ and like that, we were all best friends.”

“Was she seeing anyone?”

“She broke up with her girlfriend over the summer? But there’s been nobody since then. Not even a date. There’s a lot of assholes on campus?”

“Was anyone fixated on her?”

“No way. Becks didn’t even go to bars or have fun or anything?” She shook her head hard enough to make her hair fly. “If someone was, like, fixated, I would’ve gone straight to the cops. The for reals cops, not the mall cops on campus.”

Jeffrey was glad she knew there was a difference. “Did Beckey ever tell you she felt unsafe? Or like someone was watching her?”

“Oh my God, was someone watching her?” She looked at the kitchen, the door, the hallway. “Should I be worried? Am I, like, in danger?”

“These are routine questions. It’s the same thing I would ask in any other interview.” Jeffrey watched the anxiety tease in and out of her features. Within an hour, every woman on campus would probably be asking if she should be worried. “Kayleigh, let’s concentrate on yesterday morning. Did Beckey say anything to you when you followed her back to her bedroom?”

“She was, like, putting on her running clothes? Which, okay, she likes to run but it was super early? And then Vanessa goes, ‘Don’t go out at rape o’clock,’ which was funny at the time, only, now we’re all just so worried because she’s in the hospital? And her dad, Gerald, called this morning and he was crying, which is hard because I’ve never heard my own dad cry, so hearing him cry made me really sad?” Kayleigh rubbed her fingers into her eyes, but there were no tears. “I had to tell my teachers I need to skip classes for the rest of the week. It’s just so random? Becks going for a run, then she hits her head and her life is—her life is, I don’t know? But it’s so sad. I can barely get out of bed because what if it had been me? I like to run, too.”

Jeffrey paged back through his notebook. “Deneshia told me that Beckey spent the previous night at the library.”

“She did that a lot. She was, like, terrified of losing her scholarship?” Kayleigh took a handful of tissues from the box on the table. “I mean, she talked about money a lot. A lot? Like, not the way you talk about money, because you