Page 31 of Shadow of Justice
Gus pulled out his phone and scrolled to a picture I’d seen at least a hundred times now. It was the one Hayden showed us from the amateur sleuth forum she’d frequented. One of the online users had connected with another student in Bree and Ellie’s cohort. A group of twenty-somethings smiling for the camera as they sat on a cement wall outside the main entrance to the university. Ellie Luke sat at the center. Jamie Simmons was on the edge, his arm around another of her classmates.
“That’s me,” Bree said, pointing to the pretty brunette in the back. The first time I saw the photo, I hadn’t even recognized her. She wore her hair long then. Her face was turned away from the camera.
“I know I talked to you before,” Gus said.
“A million years ago, yeah,” Bree said. “You talked to all of us. I remember wishing I could do something to help you. I felt useless back then. I just didn’t know anything. Now …”
“It’s okay,” Gus said. “You did help, as I recall. You did the best you could.”
“So did you,” Bree said, sensing something in Gus’s tone, maybe. I was still worried about him. Though Gus was always gruff, something haunted his eyes more than usual today.
“I have a copy of the statement you gave me,” Gus said. He pulled a folded piece of paper out of his jacket pocket. It was several pages long. I’d read it over myself before coming. His interview with Bree had been thorough.
“I can have you read it,” he said. “But first I’d like to see what you remember on your own.”
“I remember everything,” she said. “That week has always stayed kind of frozen in my mind. Losing Ellie was such a shock. I mean, I was in nursing school. I’d already done a couple of clinical rotations. I was used to being around sick and dying people by then. But Ellie was the first person I knew who died. I know that’s crazy. I was twenty-one years old. But she was.”
“Okay,” Gus said. “So walk me through what you remember again. How did Ellie seem to you that week?”
“She seemed normal,” Bree said. “We had an anatomy class that was torturing all of us. We were meeting once a week to study for it. Ellie was the brain of the group. No question. She aced everything. She was one of those people who just remembered everything she read. And she was calm. Never freaked out. That’s kind of why a bunch of us gravitated toward her in the beginning. She was like the class hype girl. Everyone’s cheerleader.”
“You told me back then she wasn’t dating anyone that you knew of,” Gus said.
“Nope. Ellie was very serious. We would joke that she was twenty-one going on fifty. At the time, I would question whether this was really what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Everyone did. Not Ellie. She was driven. Focused. Had a plan for her life and she just methodically followed the steps to get there.”
“Okay,” Gus said. “What about Jamie Simmons? What do you remember about him?”
Bree’s face fell. Kat came back into the room and put her hands on Bree’s shoulders.
“I just didn’t think anything of it,” she said. “I never would have thought Jamie had anything to do with this.”
“Forget that,” Gus said. “Try to forget what you’ve seen on the news. I know it’s a shock. But try not to reframe your memories with what you think you know about Simmons now.”
“Okay,” she said. “But that’s hard. It’s almost impossible not to think I should have seen it.”
“Why?” I asked.
Bree took a deep breath. “Jamie was a creep. That’s as plain as I can say it. In the beginning, our first year, he was just this goofy guy in our group. A cut-up. Harmless. Just affable. He made us laugh. But after a while, he got annoying.”
“In what way?” Gus asked.
“Just kind of in your face a lot. So there were eight of us in our group. Jamie and Paul Mansfield were the only men. But Paul was married to Sarah Mansfield. They were going to school together. So Paul was just paired off. Jamie was the single guy and he started going through the group.”
“What do you mean?” Gus asked.
“Just … that he’d start paying particular attention to the other five girls in the group. Like he’d pick a favorite and just pester her to death. I mean, he started with me but found out pretty quick he wasn’t my type. But everyone else, he burned through. Just calling all the time. Texting. Giving gifts that weren’t appropriate.”
“What kind of gifts?” I asked.
“Well, with me, when it started, it was just dumb stuff. Candles. A day planner I didn’t want. When he realized it was a waste of time, he’d move on to the next girl in our group. We started trying to freeze him out. Only Ellie was just nice. She felt sorry for him. Jamie just didn’t seem to know how to talk to girls. He was awkward. The class clown routine got old. And he was just one of those guys who didn’t know how to read the room or take no for an answer. At one point, our friend Shante confronted him. He’d been pretty merciless asking her out.”
“Shante Jones,” Gus said, checking his notes.
“Yeah. She’s Shante Rawlins now, I think. She’s not local anymore. I don’t know what happened to her. We lost touch. She dropped out of school the next year. She married this guy who went into the Army and last I heard she was living overseas somewhere. But that had to be almost twenty years ago now. I couldn’t even tell you if she was still married to him.”
Gus wrote down what he could.
“Tell me what you know about that?” Gus said. “This confrontation?”
