“I think I found Nysa Somers’ backpack. Could you and Chan come process it?”
She gave them directions and a few minutes later, the two officers traipsed down the path from campus carrying their equipment. “I’m going to shoot my way in,” Hummel said as he pulled a large camera out of his equipment bag. “Chan can cordon off the area while I’m doing that. Once I’ve established the perimeter and checked the bag to see if there’s any indication that it’s Nysa’s, you can come over.”
Josie called Mettner and Noah as she waited on the path while Hummel and Chan got to work. Several more students passed by, each stopping to ask questions that Josie couldn’t answer honestly. A cool breeze drifted down from the direction of campus, drying the last few wet seams in her clothing.
“Son of a bitch,” Hummel said.
“What is it?” Josie asked.
“What the hell is this stuff?” He stood up straight and pointed down toward the thistles all around him. “It’s got thorns.”
“Bull thistle,” Josie said. “Looks like a dandelion while it’s growing, except it’s thorny. It grows tall and flowers pink and purple.”
Hummel held up a gloved hand and wiggled his index finger. A green thorn stuck out of it, and a drop of blood trickled from under it. “Hold on,” he said. “I’ve got to change gloves. I don’t want to contaminate anything here.”
Chan handed him a new pair of gloves and then both their heads disappeared into the thistle. A few moments later, Hummel hollered, “Jackpot.”
Chan’s arm appeared over the top of the greenery, her gloved hand waving Josie toward them. Once Josie reached them, she found Hummel squatting beside the backpack, holding it open. Inside, Josie saw a lanyard with a student ID attached to it. Nysa Somers’ face smiled at Josie from the photo. All innocence and enthusiasm for life. Josie sighed.
“What else have you got in there?”
As he riffled through the bag and listed off each item, Chan jotted it down on a notepad. “Two textbooks, a spiral-bound notebook, small cosmetic bag.” There was the sound of a zipper. “Lipstick, foundation, mascara, make-up blender, rouge.” He zipped the bag back up. “Pens, pencils, twenty-two dollars in cash.”
“Cell phone?” Josie asked hopefully.
“Just a second,” Hummel told her. He moved to the pockets on the outside of the bag. “Here. Cell phone.” He pressed some buttons, but nothing happened. “Looks like it needs to be charged. We can take care of that when we get this back to the station.”
“Great,” Josie said. A small thrill of excitement took hold in her stomach. For modern-day investigators, there was nothing more valuable in solving a crime than a person’s cell phone. People’s entire lives were on them.
“What about that?” Chan said, pointing her pen toward the yawning pocket from which Hummel had just removed the cell phone.
Josie leaned over and peered into it. What looked like a piece of plastic was poking out. Hummel reached in and teased its squished form from the pocket, smoothing it out. “A Ziploc baggie,” he said. “She must have had some kind of snack.” He held it up, looking at the crumbs in the bottom of it. “Looks like brownies to me.” He opened it and held it up to his nose, taking a whiff. “Yeah, smells like chocolate.”
Josie noted a small white sticker at the lower left corner of the baggie. “What’s that sticker?” she asked.
Hummel stood up and took a step closer to her so that she could see it. It was circular, black and white, about the size of a quarter with a crude hand drawing of a face. Its eyes were small ‘X’s, its mouth a toothy smile. Above the eyes, the forehead cracked open and squiggly lines jumped out in every direction.
“That’s weird,” Hummel said.
Josie nodded. “Move it around in the light. Can you see the impressions from a pen, or does it look like it’s a copy?”
Hummel moved the sticker this way and that as the three of them studied it. Finally, he concluded, “Looks smooth. Must be a copy. Looks like one of those weird skater stickers or something. Like the kind kids put on their skateboards?”
Chan said, “Something like that on a baggie? That’s not a skater sticker. Someone marked those brownies as edibles.”
“What do you mean?” Josie asked. “The sticker is to indicate marijuana in the brownies?”
“The last city I worked in, we had a couple of cases of these. Locals would brand their drugs before they sold them. Sometimes stickers, sometimes stamps. Usually hand-drawn, so it couldn’t be confused with anything else out there. Something cheap and easy so you remembered who to come back to for more. It’s not always the smartest practice because it makes it pretty easy for the cops to track you down and also figure out who you sold to, but some people do it.”
Josie took out her phone and took a photo of the sticker. “Have you ever seen this before?”
“No,” said Chan. “I could be wrong. I’m just tossing out ideas. Maybe she made brownies at home and someone in one of her classes gave her a weird random sticker and it ended up on the baggie.”
“I doubt that,” Josie said. She wondered if marijuana would have put Nysa Somers into such a state that she would have gotten into the pool and drowned—either by falling asleep or by simply being in an altered state. Or maybe it had been laced with something stronger. Perhaps whatever was in the brownie had had more of an effect on her than she’d anticipated since, by all accounts, she didn’t normally do drugs. But if she’d done drugs the night before, why? Why start taking them now? Josie knew that the university had drug testing requirements for all of its athletes. There was no way that Nysa would have been able to carry on a regular drug habit. Even a one-time thing would have been problematic for her since drug testing for university athletes was random unless drug use was suspected. Why would she risk it? Or maybe she hadn’t known the brownies were laced with drugs. Had they come from the mystery friend she’d met up with? Perhaps she had trusted that person not to give her something with drugs? Or the friend had convinced her to let loose a little and try them? There was no way to know without finding the friend.
Josie said, “You can mass-produce your own stickers?”
Chan shrugged. “You can get blank stickers from any office supply place and run them through your printer, or you could upload your design to a website and have them print and send you a bunch.”
To Hummel, Josie said, “Bag that up and get it to the state police lab, would you? I’d like to know what’s in those crumbs. Also, print the bag.”
She worked her way back to the path and then climbed up the rest of the way to the campus. Once in the parking lot, she called Christine Trostle. “You told me that Nysa never used drugs,” she said to the girl. “Were you telling the truth?”
“Well, yeah, why?”
“She never tried anything?”
Christine made a noise in her throat. “Well, I never saw her try anything or heard her talk about trying anything, but I wasn’t with her twenty-four seven. Maybe when she was at home she did, but it would have been really out of character for her. She drank sometimes, but drugs scared her.”