“He’s an idiot,” Stella blurted out. “Peg dumped him.”
“He says it was mutual,” Lonergan said, “and you had a part in it.”
Stella smiled. “You have a problem with that?”
Lonergan lifted off the windowsill. “Look, kid . . .”
Foster interrupted him. “Rimmer seemed a bit raw over the breakup.”
“He was mad, sure,” Wendy said. “Called her like twenty times a day trying to get her to take him back, but she wouldn’t.”
Stella nodded in agreement. “All he wanted was a groupie. He thinks he’s going to be the next Dave Grohl.” She rolled her eyes. “Fat chance.”
“He been hangin’ around?” Lonergan asked.
“Too big of a wuss for that,” Stella said. “He’s all talk, believe me.”
Wendy pushed her glasses higher up the bridge of her nose, and her mouth clamped shut. She was definitely not saying something. She obviously found Stella intimidating. Foster could see how she would. Wendy was meek, a shy little mouse. Stella looked to be the kind of person who sucked up all the oxygen in a room, the kind you noticed and shied away from for fear of being swept into her vortex.
Foster stood, sliding the chair back under the table. “Wendy, would you mind showing me your room?” She looked over at Lonergan, whose mouth was hanging open in shock. “Maybe Stella can continue with Detective Lonergan.” She smiled. “We won’t be long.” She looked down at Stella. “We’ll talk again.”
Lonergan walked over and pulled Foster gently by the arm away from the girls, out of earshot, both turning their backs to them for privacy. “Ah, what gives?” he whispered.
“I think Wendy has more to add,” Foster whispered back. “But she’s not going to talk with Stella sitting next to her.”
“But I get the snippy bulldozer?”
Foster peeked behind him, noting that Stella had composed herself. “She’s a kid. You can’t handle a kid?” She could tell Lonergan wanted to say more, and loudly, but she didn’t give him the chance. “I’ll be back.”
Lonergan turned around to face his misery. “I’ll count the friggin’ minutes.”
CHAPTER 13
Wendy and Peggy’s room wasn’t much to write home about. It was small, crammed with personal things, and barely big enough to fit everything Peggy and Wendy had brought from home, let alone themselves. The space was stuffed with clothes, shoes, bags, makeup, hair dryers, and styling irons. The posters taped to the walls were for bands Foster had never heard of, and they held pride of place beside a collage of personal photos, presumably of the girls’ families and friends. She identified Peggy’s side by her wall of photos. Foster spotted several of Peggy and her parents taken at Christmas and birthdays and family vacations. Many of the photos were of Peggy with her friends—a lot of friends. It was true, then, that she’d been friendly, well liked. Looking, Foster could find no photos of Joe Rimmer. Either Peggy didn’t have any, or she’d taken them all down after the break. There were no photos of Keith Ainsley either.
“Did Peggy wear lipstick?” Foster asked, recalling the troubling discovery of lipstick around Birch’s wrists and ankles. If the lipstick wasn’t Peggy’s, that meant the sick SOB they were looking for had brought it with him. That meant he’d planned to kill, had prepared for it. Foster’s stomach turned.
Wendy eased down onto her bed. “No. Why?”
“How about you?”
Wendy shook her head. “Just tinted gloss, maybe, if I’m going somewhere nice.”
Foster lifted a sweatshirt off Peggy’s bed, folded it, and laid it on the side of her messy desk. She straightened the textbooks sitting there, noting the yellow pencil tucked between the pages of the abnormal psychology textbook on top. Peggy would never come back to her stopping point. Wendy’s desk was neater, her laptop sitting in the center. There was no laptop on Peggy’s desk. There hadn’t been one found in her backpack either. “Where’s Peggy’s laptop?” Foster asked.
“She took it with her. She was going to work on her paper on the bus. It’s due . . .” Wendy stopped, stricken anew. “I guess it doesn’t matter now.”
So in addition to her missing phone, there was a missing laptop. Were they looking at a robbery gone bad? Foster peeked out the window, but there wasn’t much to see beyond a small courtyard with stone benches. She turned back to Wendy. “Okay. Tell me about Peggy and Stella.”
Wendy’s eyes widened, and her guard went up. “What do you mean?”
There was a tennis ball on Peggy’s desk. Foster picked it up, squeezed it, and rolled it around in her hands, giving the young woman a moment. After a time, Wendy’s head fell to her chest, and she began rubbing her hands against her thighs. Nerves. Foster put the ball back where she’d gotten it.
“You asked if Peg had any trouble with anybody. Well, yesterday, she and Stella argued over the phone. It was nothing new. They were always fighting about something. I mean always. Stella feeds off drama.”
“You know what they argued about?”
“Stella was mad Peg was going to the march without her. She thought because she couldn’t go, Peg shouldn’t. But if it hadn’t been the march, it would have been something else. Honestly, Stella’s a . . .”
“Bully,” Foster offered when Wendy couldn’t come up with the right word.
Wendy looked up, giving her a slight smile. “And clingy, possessive . . . and so intense. You saw her. She has to be the center of attention. When we heard about Peg . . . right away she started in, like it only affected her.” She looked up and found Foster’s eyes. “I think Stella’s feeling guilty about something.”
“Like?”
Wendy shrugged. “Don’t know, but Stella lies. I don’t think she can help herself. Peg was just realizing that about her.”
“So you don’t believe she was studying Sunday afternoon and eating pizza alone.”
Wendy bit her lower lip and went back to picking at her cuticles, which were red and on the verge of bleeding. “Like I said, Stella lies.”
“Did Peggy tell Rimmer she was dumping him for Stella?”
Wendy shook her head. “She just stopped being there for him. When he finally noticed, she made it official.” Wendy reached over and grabbed a bedraggled bear off her pillow and held it tight. “This is what I know. Peg was a good person. She got along with everybody. She was excited about the march. She believed in what it was about. I don’t know who those guys in the photos are, but I’ve never seen any of them around here.” She nuzzled the bear. “She was my best friend. And the only problem she had, as far as I know, was Stella.”
Back downstairs, Lonergan looked desperate enough to leap into Foster’s arms when she walked back into the room alone. Stella’s tears were gone. Foster saw something else in her eyes this time—defiance, cunning.
Foster walked over to the table, tore a blank page from her notebook, and handed it to Stella along with her pen. “Write down the names of the people you spent time with yesterday, please. Full names. Phone numbers, email, dorm addresses. Whatever you have.”