The Last Good Girl by Allison Leotta Read Free Book Online

going down two stories below street level. The walls of dirt looked like a canyon. The bottom of the site was covered with construction equipment and piles of metal and lumber. Down there, six police officers and two K-9 dogs searched for signs of Emily.
    Sam and Anna got out of the car and walked into the night. Anna pulled her coat tighter around her. The chill in the air instantly turned her cheeks and nose cold. A girl who was hurt and lying outside in this weather did not have a good chance of lasting long.
    They walked up to a cluster of officers and agents on the sidewalk. “Hey, Joe,” Sam said. “Let me see the purse.”
    A stocky officer wearing blue latex gloves nodded gravely and pulled the purse out of a box.
    â€œAlready processed for prints and DNA?” Sam asked.
    â€œYup. No usable prints. We’ll process the swabs for DNA.”
    Fingerprints often didn’t stay on soft items like leather.
    Anna and Sam each put on gloves, and Joe handed the purse to Sam. She pulled out a wallet; inside was $57 in cash, a student ID card, a driver’s license, an ATM card, a gym membership card, and a MasterCard. Tucked in a pocket were three tampons, a tube of lipgloss, a keychain with a fuzzy giraffe and four keys, a travel-sized bottle of Jim Beam, breath mints, and an iPhone. Anna felt dizzy looking at this—the hopeful possessions of a college girl going for a night out. She felt the same sense of wonder she did when she was at a museum and saw an ancient artifact, thinking Real people really touched this, a thousand years ago. It was always hard to try to convince herself, to make her mind feel that as real. Just twenty-four hours ago, she thought, this purse was Emily Shapiro’s most important possession. And yet here it was, covered in grime from being fingerprinted, being held by police officers wearing blue rubber gloves, while its owner was out in the world, somewhere, with no way to call home. It was terrifying how quickly the universe could take a simple thing like a purse and turn it into a piece of evidence in a criminal case.
    Sam tried to unlock the iPhone, but it was password protected. “Send it to the FBI field office, and get a tech on it,” Sam told Joe. “Meanwhile, we’ll see if a parent will sign off on letting us in.”
    Sam walked down the long dirt ramp into the Pit. Anna went back into the SUV and took out her laptop. In the forty minutes that Sam was checking out the Pit, Anna drafted an application for a warrant to seize and search Dylan’s car, and another one asking to search the Beta Psi fraternity house. She located the local duty magistrate for the Eastern District of Michigan—he lived just down the street in Tower Hills. She called him, waking him up. She apologized for the midnight call, introduced herself, and told him she needed an emergency search warrant. He said she could email him the warrants and then go to his house. Anna went to the top of the ramp and called for Sam. “We’ve got a judge!”
    A moment later, Sam emerged from the Pit, carrying a single brown suede boot in her gloved hand. “This was Emily’s shoe,” she said. “We’ll confirm with DNA. But it’s the one that appeared on the video.”
    Anna’s stomach clenched as she looked at the shoe. Emily was like a reverse Cinderella—fleeing at midnight, losing a shoe, but ending up somewhere much more sinister than a castle. Sam bagged the shoe and gave it to the officer in charge of chain of custody. Anna and Sam got back into her Durango in grim silence.
    Ten minutes later, they pulled up to a house in an upscale neighborhood. Magistrate Judge James Schwalbe met them at the door in a bathrobe over pajamas. His thick brown hair was mussed from sleep, but he greeted them with a fatherly smile. His wife, in her own matching bathrobe, had them sit at the kitchen table and offered them coffee, which they gratefully