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Scott Blair’s former roommate, Dwaine Richards, was a squat nineteen-year-old with a thick neck, wide shoulders, and a buzz cut. He was a college wrestler and he looked the part. He wore a square-cut light gray suit two sizes too big that Rachel suspected belonged to his father, who was watching sourly from the front row of the public gallery.
“We came back to our apartment with some girls after a party,” Dwaine Richards was saying, sitting on the edge of his seat as if looking for an escape route as Alkins fired questions at him. “When they left in the morning, me and Scott joked about how many times we’d each scored that night. One thing led to another and Scott bet a thousand dollars that he could sleep with more girls than me in a month. I thought it was a joke, but then Scott put up a chart on our fridge to keep track. He was mad as hell when he came back from a weekend swim-team training camp and saw that I was ahead of him.”
Alkins moved on to the night of Lexi’s party: “The defendant called you from a party. Can you tell the jury what he said?”
“Scott said that he was crashing a high school party in his hometown and he expected ‘to bag at least one girl,’” said Dwaine. “He warned me that he’d catch up to me, and that he planned to win.”
“Did you hear from the defendant again that night?” Alkins asked.
“Yup, I did,” he said. “Scott woke me up in the middle of the night. Said he’d banged a high school girl just like he’d said. He told me to ‘add her to the list.’”
“What did Scott mean by ‘add her to the list’?”
“He meant that I should add her name to the list of girls we’d slept with that month on the whiteboard on our refrigerator. We had two columns. One for me and one for him. I was ahead by three girls. Once I added her to Scott’s list, I was winning by two.”
Alkins asked Dwaine if he recalled seeing a photograph of Scott Blair with a half-naked girl, which Scott had briefly posted to his social media account that night before quickly deleting it. Dwaine said he’d seen the photo. “Scott made a smartass comment in the caption. Can’t remember exactly what he said. And then he rated the girl as—I think it was a C or C plus.”
“Can you tell the court about the system you and the defendant used to rate girls you’d slept with?” Alkins asked, delving into their sleazy rating system. He questioned Dwaine Richards along these lines until all the jurors had the same disgusted expression on their faces.
When they did, he told the judge that he had no more questions and abruptly sat down. Scott Blair had sat through his former roommate’s testimony stone-faced, occasionally whispering to his lawyer as if to imply that Dwaine Richards had said something untrue. Rachel noticed that the tips of Scott Blair’s ears were bright red by the time that Alkins was done.
Rachel took Hannah’s latest letter from her purse as Judge Shaw conferred with his clerical staff about an administrative matter. To the sound of squeaking chairs and hushed voices talking, Rachel smoothed out the pages of Hannah’s letter and reread it. She finished reading as Dale Quinn began his cross-examination.
Quinn started slowly with a few softball questions. Within minutes, Dwaine was visibly sweating when Quinn asked him whether he’d wanted to get revenge after Scott had unceremoniously kicked him out of the apartment due to his “unpaid rent and disgusting lifestyle” a few weeks after the incident with Kelly Moore.
“Isn’t it true that after you were evicted, you threatened my client, Scott? You said you were going to take him down.”
“I was angry when he kicked me out even though I was only a few days late on the rent. I didn’t mean anything by it,” said Dwaine, looking down at his shoes as he spoke.
“I have here copies of your text messages to Scott. You used very, shall we say, colorful language, and some quite specific threats,” said Quinn. “How about you read out your texts and we let the jury decide whether you meant them or not,” he added, handing Dwaine a wad of stapled sheets.
Rachel left court to the sound of Dwaine Richards reading out his angry texts. She had something more important to do. Rachel had found a possible lead in Hannah’s letter, and she was anxious to follow it up. She didn’t mind missing the rest of Dwaine Richards’s testimony to do so. If truth be told, she couldn’t stomach hearing another word from him.
Rachel ran all the way uphill to the City Hall building at the top of the boulevard, her arm aching from the weight of her laptop bag digging into her shoulder.
The social services office was on the third floor. It had a sitting area of chairs next to a table piled with old magazines. The reception desk was unsupervised. From behind a stretch of plaster wall that separated the reception area from the offices came the hum of people talking on phones and typing on keyboards.
Rachel pressed a button on the desk to summon the receptionist. A young woman dressed in a long patterned skirt and button-down shirt came out of the back offices, holding a mug of coffee and finishing off a last bite of food. Rachel had clearly interrupted her lunch.
“I’d like to speak with Mrs. Mason. She was a social worker who handled welfare cases in the early nineties,” Rachel explained.
“I haven’t heard that name before,” said the woman. “I’ll ask my colleagues. Maybe someone knows. I’m still quite new here.”
She left Rachel to pace around the waiting area as she disappeared back into the offices. Rachel checked her phone. Pete had sent her a text message to let her know that his friend, a white-hat hacker, hadn’t been able to restore the original emails that Hannah had sent months earlier, which had been deleted by the intern. Rachel was disappointed. She’d really hoped they’d be able to retrieve the original emails despite the passage of time. It was another dead end.
“I understand you’re looking for Barb Mason?”
Rachel whirled around to see a woman with a narrow chin and fine features. Her short dark hair was flecked with gray.
“Yes, I am.”
“Barb retired years ago. Last I heard, she lives in Canada with her daughter’s family. Is there something I can help with? I worked with Barb for a long time.”
“I sure hope so,” sighed Rachel. “I’m looking for a girl who was put into care here in the early nineties. Her name is Hannah Stills.I believe she was fostered out when she was around nine or ten. After her mother and sister died.”
“The records would be sealed,” said the woman, careful not to divulge any information. A flicker of recognition in her eyes suggested that she remembered the case.
“I understand,” said Rachel, disappointed but not entirely surprised the woman was strictly sticking to the rules. She wrote down her first name and her cell phone number on a blank piece of paper along with all the details she knew about Hannah. “Please ask Hannah’s foster mom, Kitty, to contact me. It’s urgent,” she said, as she held out the note.
