Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter Read Free Book Online

discussed football with the father because the boy was not a fan.
    The park ranger’s contribution to the case did not stop there. He offered the sheriff a possible explanation, an explanation the sheriff later presented as fact.
    That same week, the ranger had come across a band of stragglers camping in the woods. They had been moving around the state for a while. They dressed in dark clothing. They cooked their meals on an open fire. They walked down country roads with their hands clasped behind their backs and their heads down. Drugs were involved, because with these sorts of characters, drugs are always involved.
    Some called them a cult. Others said they were homeless. Many said they were runaways. Most called them a nuisance. You, my sweet girl, were heard by many of your friends sympathetically referring to them as free spirits, which is why the sheriff assumed that, lacking any other leads, you had simply run off to join them.
    You volunteered at the homeless shelter and you drank alcohol even though you were underage and you were caught smoking pot, so it only made sense.
    By the time the runaway theory became cemented in the sheriff’s mind, the group of stragglers, the cult, the free spirits— whatever they were called—had moved on. They were eventually located in North Carolina, too stoned and too disbanded to say who had been among them.
    “She looks very familiar,” one of the few remaining original members had written in his statement. “But we all have eyes and noses and teeth, so doesn’t that mean that everybody looks familiar?”
    This is why we know you were abducted:
    You were mad at your mother, but you still came home the day before and talked to her in the kitchen while you did your laundry.
    You were furious with your sister, but you still let her borrow your yellow scarf.
    You despised your grandmother, but you still left a card to be mailed the following week for her birthday.
    While it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility that you would run into the woods and join a group of aimless, wandering vagabonds, it is completely impossible that you would ever do so without telling us first.
    This is what we know you did on the day you were taken:
    At 7:30 on the morning of Monday, March 4, you joined some friends from the homeless shelter and went to Hot Corner to pass out food and blankets. At 9:48 a.m., Carleen Loper, the desk monitor at Lipscomb Hall, was on duty and recorded your return to the dorm. Your roommate, Nancy Griggs, left for the pottery lab at 10:15 a.m. She said you were tired and had gone back to bed. Your English professor remembers you from his noon workshop. He offered you some editorial suggestions on your Spenser paper. He recalls a lively discussion. (He was later ruled out as a suspect because that evening, he was teaching a class on the other side of campus.)
    Around 1:00 p.m., you went to the Tate Student Center where you ate a grilled cheese sandwich and a salad that you shared with Veronica Voorhees.
    The next part is less specific, but based on interviews, the sheriff managed to put together a likely list of your activities. At some point, you dropped by the Red & Black offices to deliver your story on UGA’s attempt to privatize meal services. You returned to the student center and played a game of pool with a boy named Ezekiel Mann. You sat on the tweed couches in the lounge with another boy named David Conford. He told you that he’d heard Michael Stipe, the lead singer of REM, would be at the Manhattan Cafe that night. Friends in the vicinity claim that Conford asked you to go with him, but he insists that he did not ask you out on a date.
    “We were just friends,” he said in his statement. The deputy who interviewed him made a note that the boy had obviously wanted to be more. (Witnesses place both Mann and Conford in the student center later that evening.)
    On or around 4:30 p.m. that afternoon, you left the Tate. You walked home, leaving your