Well, there was no way to handle that but to go for it.

The elevator opened onto the floor and Ruby gestured down the hall.

“She’s in interview room three,” she said.

Gabe nodded, hiding his discomfort as he walked down the hall and let himself in, sitting across from the young woman waiting there. She was as pretty and fresh-faced as her roommate, her clothing muted and sensible. At first glance, Emily was innocent and unprepared to face hard things in the world. Vanessa must have had a complementary personality if they got along while sharing an apartment.

Her face had the puffy quality of someone who had recently been crying.

“Hi, Emily. My name’s Gabe. I just need to ask you a few questions about Vanessa,” he started.

Emily put on a brave smile despite her red eyes. “Of course. Anything to help.”

“How’d you two meet?” Gabe asked. “Did you answer a roommate ad online or anything like that?”

If Vanessa posted things online, that could be a direction to look into.

But Emily shook her head.

“Vanessa and I had pre-calc together at the university,” she said, “Vanessa was kind of cautious. Her Insta was private and everything. She only used Facebook to talk to her family.”

Okay, so there went the Craigslist idea, but just because Vanessa didn’t telegraph her location online didn’t mean that no one had something against her.

“Was she out meeting anybody that night? Were there any guys she was seeing?” Gabe tried again. The trouble with interviewing anyone was that it Gabe never knew if he was asking the right questions to trigger the right memory. As thorough as he might try to be, it was hard to be certain he was gathering all the information there was to gather.

There had to be some unsavory character in her life. Maybe even an unsavory character that connected her to the second victim.

Emily spread her hands helplessly in front of her.

“She had a boyfriend. Tyler Mancini. He was out of town. His grandmother is in the hospital,” Emily said. She wiped away another tear threatening to spill out of her eyes. Gabe didn’t know how to make this interview feel less like an interrogation, but he needed something. Emily had to give him something.

“Did you ever feel like Vanessa was hiding something from you? Did she maybe have an ex she didn’t want to talk about? An inappropriate coworker?”

“Nothing like that,” Emily replied, sniffing again, “Vanessa liked to have fun, but she was too focused to waste time on drama like that. She was nice to everyone. People liked her.”

Of course everyone liked her. It would be too easy if she had enemies, if she broke up with a guy chock full of red flags. Logically, Gabe knew that his theory was slipping away from him, but the alternative was worse.