“I think we talked to about thirty-seven potential witnesses, and then you had how many more?” Rodney asked Kate.
She said, “I talked to another twelve, I think.”
“There will be people who saw things but didn’t realize that they saw something.” Colby tilted his head at her.
In that moment, she realized what he was talking about. “You want me to go back and talk to them?”
“Leave it for a couple days. And then go.”
She nodded.
“Did anybody catch your suspicion?” he asked, turning to look at her, then Rodney and back to her.
“Yeah, six of them left the scene, after supposedly calling it in, and went to have pizza.”
“Pizza?” He stared at her, then shook his head. “So seeing death made them hungry?”
Her face cracked into a smirk. “That’s what I said.… But they were all about not wanting to hang around and not wanting to wait for the whole investigation to happen. They figured that, if anybody wanted to talk to them, it would take hours anyway.”
“And it might have. But presumably you did talk to them?”
She nodded. “I did, and all of them very helpfully provided their parents’ addresses instead of where they’re living right now.”
At that, his eyebrows went up again. Then he thought about it, shrugged. “I’m not sure that was deliberate as much as instinctive.Where do you live? Well, I live in Burnaby.”
“In this case they lived all around the province, which is how I knew that they were all living in the residence housing.”
“Did you get those addresses too?”
She nodded. “Of course. And the cell phones.”
“Good, then I guess we better check to see if any of the cell phone numbers given belong to them.”
“Those six, you mean?”
He smiled. “If you were talking to all university students, I wouldn’t put it past them to offer somebody else’s cell phone number.”
“Thinking this is a joke or with ill intent? What are you thinking?”
“I had one case, and it taught me a lesson I never forgot. Somebody on campus was strangled to death at a party, and everybody at the party gave somebody else’s number. So, we had all these wrong numbers, and, in fact, we even had a couple duplicates, but we didn’t know that until we sat down and compared our notes.”
“Right, and was it done to confuse the issue?”
“Nope, they thought it was a lark. They didn’t really seem to get the seriousness of the fact that somebody had died.”
“Jesus,” she said.
“It’s not that they were being foolish or stupid or intentionally difficult. It was just their mind-set at the time. They were all half high on drugs, alcohol, and sex. Half high on college life, living the dream, and pushing aside their responsibilities.” He sighed. “They weren’t even thinking about anything real going on in their world, beyond enjoying that moment. And, once somebody lied, and they all figured out what was going on, they all did it.”
“Did you haul them all back in again?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, with a big fat grin. “Hauled them all in, contacted all the parents. Yep, that was fun. Now it’s your turn.”
“I don’t think that’s the case here, although one or two of them were completely belligerent.”
“But you get that all the time, don’t you?”
“Yes, and I’ve never quite understood it. We often get the shock, the denial, those who are curious, and then others who are very worried and afraid that something they might have done will surface, even though they probably haven’t done anything at all. But belligerence? Not so much. And, in this case, there was an arrogance, an attitude of entitlement, like, ‘Hey, you know who I am? I’m somebody special, and you shouldn’t be talking to me,’ or the like,” she muttered.