It took about a nanosecond for Derek Rogers to appear at the conference room door. Derek was Susan’s age, which she, in her more contemplative moments, admitted brought out her competitive instincts. He had gone to college in South Dakota on a football scholarship and settled for sports journalism after an injury forced him off the team. Now he split his time between the crime desk and city desk at the Herald. He still looked like a jock, square-jawed and clean-cut, with that way of walking a little bowlegged, like a cowboy. Susan suspected that he blow-dried his hair. But he wasn’t wearing his suit jacket today, and his eyes looked bleary. Susan considered that perhaps he led a more interesting life than she gave him credit for. He smiled at her, trying to catch her eye. He was always doing that. Susan remained evasive.
Derek was carrying a projector, a laptop, and a box of doughnuts. He slid the doughnuts on the table and opened the box. A sickly sweet aroma filled the room. “They’re Krispy Kreme,” he said. “I drove all the way to Beaverton.”
A girl was missing and Derek was buying doughnuts. Nice. Susan glanced at Clay. But he didn’t launch into a lecture about the grave nature of the situation. He took two doughnuts, and bit into one. “They’re better when they’re fresh,” he announced.
Ian took an apple fritter. “You don’t want one?” he asked Susan.
Susan did. But she didn’t want to make Derek look good. “I’m fine,” she said.
Derek fiddled with the equipment. “I’ll just get set up,” he said. He opened the laptop and turned on the projector, and a square of color appeared on the white wall. Susan watched as the blur focused into a PowerPoint title page. On a bloodred background, a Halloween font read THE SCHOOLGIRL KILLER.
“The Schoolgirl Killer?” Clay asked skeptically. White clumps of doughnut glaze clung to the corners of his mouth. His voice was fat with sugar.
Derek glanced down shyly. “I’ve been working on a name.”
“Too literal,” Clay said. “We need something snappy.”
“How about the Willamette Strangler?” Derek said.
Ian shrugged. “It’s a little derivative.”
“It’s too bad he doesn’t eat them,” Clay said dryly. “Then we could come up with something really clever.”
“So the third girl’s been missing how long?” asked Susan.
Derek cleared his throat. “Right. Sorry.” He faced the group authoritatively, his fists on the table. “Let’s start with Lee Robinson, Cleveland High. She disappeared in October. She had jazz-choir practice after school. When it was over, she left the gym, where practice was held, and told some friends that she was walking home. She lived ten blocks away.”
Susan flipped open her notebook. “Was it dark?” she asked.
“No,” Derek said. “But close. Lee never arrived home. When she was about an hour late for dinner, her mother started calling her friends. And then, at nine-thirty, she called the police. They’re not thinking the worst yet.”
Derek hit a button on the laptop and the title page dissolved into the image of a scanned Herald news story. “This is the first story we ran, on the front page of Metro, October 29, forty-eight hours after Lee’s disappearance.” Susan felt a jolt of sadness at the sight of the girl’s school picture: flat brown hair, braces, jazz-choir sweatshirt, pimples, blue eye shadow, and lip gloss. Derek continued: “The cops ask anyone with information to call a hot line. They got over a thousand calls. Nothing panned out.”
“You’re sure you don’t want an apple fritter?” Ian asked Susan.
“Yes,” Susan said.
Derek hit a key again. The story dissolved into another slide, an image of the front page. “The November first story was front-page news. ‘Girl Missing.’” The school picture was there again, along with a picture of Lee’s mother, father, and brother at a neighborhood vigil.
“There were two more stories after that, with very little new info,” Derek said. Another slide. This one was dated November 7, another front-page headline: MISSING GIRL FOUND DEAD. “A search and rescue volunteer found her in mud on the banks of Ross Island. She’d been raped and strangled to death. The ME estimated that she had been in the mud for a week.”
There was a story every day for the next week: rumors, leads, neighbors remembering how lovely Lee was, classmate vigils, church services, a growing reward fund for information leading to the killer.
“On February second, Dana Stamp finished up a Lincoln High dance-team practice,” Derek said. “She showered, said goodbye to friends, and headed to her car, which was parked in the student parking lot. She never made it home. Her mother, a real estate agent, was showing a house on the east side and didn’t get home until nine P.M. She called the police just before midnight.” Slide. ANOTHER GIRL MISSING screamed the front page of the February 3 issue of the Herald.