“Really late. I didn’t get back until after one in the morning. I went home most weekends, to Mesa, south of Phoenix. My grandmother was sick, and I wanted to spend all the time I could with her before she forgot me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was three years ago and she’s still with us, but her Alzheimer’s has progressed. I wouldn’t have traded those weekends with her for anything. So I left Friday morning and didn’t go to the party—which really wasn’t my thing, anyway.”

“Did you see Candace that morning?”

“Briefly. She was just waking up, maybe around eight? I was leaving and trying to be quiet. I told her to have fun for me at the party. She said she didn’t even want to go but had to because she was on the sorority council.”

“Was that like her? Not wanting to go to parties?”

“No. The police asked me a lot of these kind of questions—what was her demeanor, was she unusually stressed or depressed? This was when she was missing. I told them she had been preoccupied for a few weeks and hadn’t talked to me about it. They asked me to speculate. I didn’t know why then, and I still don’t know. I don’t even remember what I was thinking, and I’ll admit I was caught up in my senior project and my grandmother and trying to juggle a bunch of stuff. I just had the sense that Candace had something heavy weighing on her, over and above graduation.”

“Was that unusual? That she didn’t talk to you?”

“No. Like I said, Candace was private. I think she knew that I had my own things and she didn’t want to burden me. But she also never liked talking about her problems. Candace didn’t want other people to know she even had problems.”

“Who was Candace closest to in the sorority?”

“When she died? Just me, really. She had her boyfriends. She seemed to be spending less and less time at the sorority. She started to push people away. Probably I’d say when she came back from Christmas break, that’s when I really noticed it.”

That was good to know. What happened either before she left for the holiday or while she was gone that might have changed her? Regan made a brief note, then said, “Who had she been close to before her senior year?”

“Taylor James. Even after they had their falling-out, they were still somewhat friendly, were on the council together. She was pretty good friends with a girl named Alexa Castillo, and Alexa would sometimes volunteer with her at Sunrise Center.”

“Do you know how to reach Alexa?”