The Name of the Star - Maureen Johnson [39]
“We’d like you to show us exactly where you saw this man,” she said.
Two minutes later, we were on the sidewalk outside Hawthorne, staring up at the bathroom window. The screws were still on the ground. It was only now that I realized that we’d left our entire building vulnerable. A sloshy, queasy feeling came over me.
“So,” DI Young said, “show us exactly where you were.”
I positioned myself right under the window.
“And where was the man?” she asked.
“Right about where you are,” I said.
“So, quite close. Within ten feet.”
“Yes.”
“And your roommate?”
This was the first time DCI Cole had spoken to me. He was staring at me unblinkingly, judging me, his hands deep in the pockets of his coat.
“Was right here,” I said, pointing up at the window.
“So she saw him as well.”
“No,” I said. The queasy feeling got worse.
“She didn’t see him? But she was right in the window, wasn’t she?”
“I guess she was just looking at me.”
DCI Cole bit his upper lip with his lower teeth, looked from me to the window and back again, then waved DI Young to the side and spoke to her quietly. Then he walked away without another word.
“Let’s go back inside and go through this again,” she said.
So I returned to the library with Detective Young. I was given a cup of coffee once we sat down, and another officer came over and sat with us. I never got his name, but he typed a lot into a laptop as I spoke. The questions were more detailed this time. How did we get out of the building? Had we been drinking? Did anyone see us leave?
“We want to do an E-fit,” Detective Young finally said. “Do you know what that is?”
I shook my head wearily.
“It’s a way of producing digital images of suspects based on witness reports. Those pictures you see on the news? Those are E-fit pictures. We’re just going to go through your story one more time. You provide us with all the details you can remember. We enter them into a program that creates a digital image of a face, which we can then refine until it looks like the man you say you saw. All right?”
I didn’t like the way she said “you say you saw,” but I nodded. I was pretty sure at this point that if I went through this again, my head would explode. Nothing seemed real anymore. But they weren’t going to let me go until I did this. So we went through it a third time, this time concentrating solely on the man. We went into even deeper detail—the size of his eyes (medium), the depth of his eyes (deep, I guessed), wrinkles (none, really), the size of his lips (normal), the shape of his eyebrows (slightly arched), his weight (normal, maybe a little thin). It was only when we got to the color of his skin (white) that something stood out.
“He seemed very . . . gray,” I said. “Kind of pale. Or sick.”
“So he was a Caucasian man with a pallor?”
It was more than that, though. His skin and his eyes didn’t match. His eyes were so bright and clear to me, but the rest of him . . . the rest of him hardly seemed to matter. It was like I forgot the rest of his body.
The E-fit produced something that looked like a cartoon, specifically, like an older, more evil Charlie Brown. In reality, the man’s head wasn’t so smooth. Not that it was lumpy, either, but skulls have textures that are hard to explain.
Detective Young looked at the image with a resigned expression.
“All right,” she said. “For now, you should go back to your building. But make sure to stay around today. Don’t leave the campus area.”
By the time I stepped outside, it was fully daylight and there were television trucks all over the square, pulling up on the sidewalks, taking up every available space. Police officers in bright neon Windbreakers were moving around them, telling drivers to move, pointing camera people away from the