“How long were you Candace’s roommate?”
“Three years. The way our sorority handles recruitment and housing is that we rush our first semester freshman year. Second semester we can move into the sorority dorms at Mountain View, or stay in our own dorm until our second year. Most of us move into the sorority because it’s fun and exciting. I met Candace during rush, but she and Taylor were best friends and roommates in the dorms, so they stayed roommates at Sigma Rho. But something happened, I don’t know what, and they had a falling-out. Second year Candace and I roomed together. She reached out to me, and it worked. We weren’t best friends, but we were best roommates, if that makes sense. She was very considerate, respected my space, things like that. We were both very neat people. She was private. We were close, but we didn’t do much together outside of the sorority.”
“According to the police and media reports, you were away for the weekend and came back late Sunday, correct?”
“Really late. I didn’t get back until after one in the morning. I went home most weekends, to Mesa, south of Phoenix. My grandmother was sick, and I wanted to spend all the time I could with her before she forgot me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was three years ago and she’s still with us, but her Alzheimer’s has progressed. I wouldn’t have traded those weekends with her for anything. So I left Friday morning and didn’t go to the party—which really wasn’t my thing, anyway.”
“Did you see Candace that morning?”
“Briefly. She was just waking up, maybe around eight? I was leaving and trying to be quiet. I told her to have fun for me at the party. She said she didn’t even want to go but had to because she was on the sorority council.”
“Was that like her? Not wanting to go to parties?”
“No. The police asked me a lot of these kind of questions—what was her demeanor, was she unusually stressed or depressed? This was when she was missing. I told them she had been preoccupied for a few weeks and hadn’t talked to me about it. They asked me to speculate. I didn’t know why then, and I still don’t know. I don’t even remember what I was thinking, and I’ll admit I was caught up in my senior project and my grandmother and trying to juggle a bunch of stuff. I just had the sense that Candace had something heavy weighing on her, over and above graduation.”
“Was that unusual? That she didn’t talk to you?”
“No. Like I said, Candace was private. I think she knew that I had my own things and she didn’t want to burden me. But she also never liked talking about her problems. Candace didn’t want other people to know she even had problems.”
“Who was Candace closest to in the sorority?”
“When she died? Just me, really. She had her boyfriends. She seemed to be spending less and less time at the sorority. She started to push people away. Probably I’d say when she came back from Christmas break, that’s when I really noticed it.”
That was good to know. What happened either before she left for the holiday or while she was gone that might have changed her? Regan made a brief note, then said, “Who had she been close to before her senior year?”
“Taylor James. Even after they had their falling-out, they were still somewhat friendly, were on the council together. She was pretty good friends with a girl named Alexa Castillo, and Alexa would sometimes volunteer with her at Sunrise Center.”
“Do you know how to reach Alexa?”
“No, I’m sorry. She was one of the few non-science majors, and we didn’t have any classes together or anything like that. She had her own group of friends, plus she graduated before I did.” She paused. “Candace was mentoring Vicky Ryan, a first year who, I saw from the sorority newsletter, is now the president. I’m not surprised. Vicky had that personality, that she wanted to be in leadership, and she was very organized and together. Everyone liked Candace, but no one was her confidante.”
Taylor James. Her name kept popping up. Regan wrote down the other two, Vicky and Alexa. But Taylor was definitely someone they needed to track down.
“When you returned on Sunday night, you noticed Candace wasn’t there.”
“I came in really late, she wasn’t in bed, but at the time I didn’t think anything of it, and I told that to the police. She was seeing two different guys at the time—I told her she should choose. She said that Tyler was a sweetheart and they had fun together, but Richie was someone who listened to her and had more life experience. I don’t think she was serious about either of them, to be honest.”
“Did the two guys know about each other?”
“Richie knew about Tyler; I don’t think that Tyler knew about Richie. Richie dated other girls, but the funny thing is I think he really liked Candace. If she had split with Tyler and wanted to be exclusive, Richie would have jumped at it.”
“You knew both of them?”
“I knew Tyler better because Candace had been seeing him on and off for two years. Very nice guy, the typical too nice, if you understand?”
Regan smiled. “I do know what you mean, Annie.”
“No backbone,” Annie said. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to date a guy who just did everything I wanted and never had an original thought on his own. It’s nice for a while, but it gets old fast.”
“According to the police report, you didn’t notice that Candace’s phone was in the room until you woke up the next morning.”
“I was exhausted when I got in. I unpacked and crashed. In the morning I saw her phone in the charger and thought she was around, but I didn’t see her. Her bed was made, it didn’t look like she’d slept there, but I didn’t really think much about it until I came back that afternoon and everything was the same. I called around to see if anyone had seen her—then I started to worry. I looked at her phone—I didn’t have her passcode—but I could see that she had a lot of missed calls and texts. That’s when I contacted campus police.”