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Back The Sorority Murder
Chapters (61)
  1. Cover
  2. Praise
  3. Dedication
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. From the Missing Journal of Candace Swain
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Eight
  13. Nine
  14. Ten
  15. Eleven
  16. Twelve
  17. From the Missing Journal of Candace Swain
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. From the Missing Journal of Candace Swain
  22. Sixteen
  23. Seventeen
  24. Eighteen
  25. Nineteen
  26. Twenty
  27. Twenty-One
  28. From the Missing Journal of Candace Swain
  29. Twenty-Two
  30. Twenty-Three
  31. Twenty-Four
  32. Twenty-Five
  33. Twenty-Six
  34. Twenty-Seven
  35. Twenty-Eight
  36. Twenty-Nine
  37. Thirty
  38. Thirty-One
  39. Thirty-Two
  40. Thirty-Three
  41. Thirty-Four
  42. From the Missing Journal of Candace Swain
  43. Thirty-Five
  44. Thirty-Six
  45. Thirty-Seven
  46. Thirty-Eight
  47. From the Journal of Candace Swain
  48. Thirty-Nine
  49. Forty
  50. Forty-One
  51. Forty-Two
  52. Forty-Three
  53. Forty-Four
  54. Forty-Five
  55. Forty-Six
  56. Forty-Seven
  57. Letter Found in the Journal of Candace Swain
  58. Forty-Eight
  59. Acknowledgments
  60. Booklist
  61. Excerpt

Jessie Nez had been her best friend since forever. She worked for the Arizona Game and Fish Department. If Regan’s naturalist granddad were still alive, he would have loved her, but he died the year before Jessie moved with her mom to Flagstaff from the Navajo reservation.

“I would love to go up there again, but I don’t think my knee would tolerate it,” her dad said. He’d had knee-replacement surgery shortly after he retired. He’d had problems for years, but her dad never did anything about it, much to her frustration.

“What do you remember about the Candace Swain murder investigation?” she asked.

“Swain—the college student, body found at the public golf course?”

“Yes.”

“Not much. Flagstaff PD handled the investigation, and I’d already retired.” He thought a moment. “Strangled, drowned in a lake, if I recall. I remember them looking for a transient, a homeless guy who had been hanging around the sorority. He disappeared around the same time they found her body.”

“One of Henry’s students has a podcast. He’s retracing Swain’s steps, trying to find out exactly where she was after she disappeared and before her body was found.”

Her dad frowned. “I forgot about that aspect of the case. I assumed that she died shortly after she disappeared.”

“According to Lucas—the kid who’s running this project—no one knows where Candace was or what she was doing for more than a week prior to her murder. He wants to interview me on his podcast, but I made no promises—other than to listen to the first two episodes and see what he has and if it’s interesting. Want to listen with me?”

“Sure, it’s not too late.” Her dad put his feet up on the ottoman and leaned back.

She glanced at the clock. It was eight thirty. Too late by her dad’s standard was ten o’clock. He was the poster child for the Early to bed, early to rise philosophy.

Regan took out her earbuds and turned up the volume on her phone. Living in the mountains didn’t make for speedy internet, even in the twenty-first century, so she’d downloaded the two recordings earlier.

Music, sort of a contemporary combination of The X-Files and America’s Most Wanted with a jazzy beat, filtered in.

Lucas’s voice was smooth, as if he had some experience with radio, even though he sounded nervous at the beginning. As he went on, he gained confidence, and his voice reflected that.

“My name is Lucas Vega, and I’m the host of The Sorority Murder, a podcast about the cold-case homicide of NAU nursing student Candace Swain.