“Irritated more than worried, but by Monday night I was worried. Candace wasn’t irresponsible. She didn’t skip classes. It was the last six weeks of school. If she needed to get away, she would have told someone.”

“Lucas has a statement from a sorority sister who said that she saw Candace speed into the sorority dorm lot around ten on Sunday night.”

“I heard that on the podcast. Which surprised me, actually, because Candace was usually a good driver.”

“Annie, based on what the police reports stated, and what we’ve learned from the callers, Candace left after the party and no one knows where she went that weekend. She returned Sunday night but didn’t stay in her dorm, and the police cleared both Richie and Tyler. Do you know what she might have been doing or who she would have stayed with?”

Annie said, “I—I really don’t know. If her car was gone, I could see her going to see family. She didn’t get along with her parents, but I could see her hopping on a plane and flying to South Carolina to see her sister if something was wrong. She was pragmatic, like I said, but she was also bold. When she made a decision, she jumped on it. No looking back. When her parents came down to clean out her dorm room after her body was found, they were devastated. They told me the police were looking for Joseph Abernathy, the weird guy who’d been lurking around. I don’t have any reason to think the police are wrong, but...I’ll admit, the podcast has made me think.”

Regan caught Lucas’s eye: that was exactly what they wanted to do, have people start to think.

“Candace originally met Abernathy at Sunrise Center, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Did she ever complain about him or anyone else from the shelter?”

“No. She wasn’t a complainer. One time I remember, and I told this to the police because they’d asked about Abernathy, she was frustrated. I asked about it, and she said that Joseph—she always called him by his first name to show that she saw him as an individual—wouldn’t stay in rehab. He didn’t want it. He didn’t want to be in recovery or do anything different, for whatever reason. He accepted shelter in bad weather, and he went there to eat a few times a week. She wanted to fix everything, and the fact that he wouldn’t take the help bothered her. I think he was somewhat fixated on Candace, which is why he kept showing up at the sorority.”

If Annie had told the police that Joseph Abernathy was fixated on Candace, that would definitely put him high up on the suspect list. A troubled, homeless alcoholic who Candace was trying to help, turning on her. It would check all their boxes, especially since she’d confronted him the night she disappeared.