Page 21 of Virgin Sacrifice

Unsurprisingly, Dr. Blackwell gave me the hardest time. Initially, he refused to excuse me from his lecture until I provided written documentation showing that I had a follow-up interview with the police that I was required to attend. I ignored the temptation to point out that according to his syllabus, it was only attendance of the tutorial sessions that counted toward our mark, nor had he taken roll the week before. With my luck, he would have revised the entire syllabus just to spite me.

Still, I would have rather been suffering under Blackwell’s hostile glare and at least learning something than sitting through another pointless meeting with the police.

The good news was that I wasn’t considered a suspect. The cameras on the floor had been recording that night, and they clearly showed me entering my room on Saturday night after helping Autumn into hers. About five minutes later, someone wearing a dark hoodie and jeans came out of the stairwell, stopping in front of my door and pressing their ear up against it to listen for some time before proceeding to pull a Tupperware out of the pouch. They kept their back to the camera the entire time, but a couple swings of a hammer were visible before they shoved everything back into their sweatshirt and rushed back to the stairwell.

I felt ill at the idea of how close they had been to me, separated only by a door. There was something incredibly violating about it. Hollow Oak hadn’t necessarily felt like a safe space in the short time I’d been here, but suddenly it felt a lot more sinister.

The bad news was that, while I wasn’t considered a suspect, the police believed I was deliberately targeted. Which meant answering endless questions about me and my past and anything else they could think of that might shed light on why someone had chosen my door, making me feel as though I was somehow to blame for the incident.

“Any ex-boyfriends, girlfriends, significant others who might be looking to scare you? Get back at you for something?” the female detective across from me asked for the third time.

She was youngish for a detective, with short strawberry blonde hair and blinding white teeth.

“No, no one like that, I’ve always been kind of a loner,” I replied, repeating the same answer I had given them twice already while twisting my hair around my finger.

“I’ll be direct,” the other detective interjected. He was a grizzled-looking older white man with a paunch and coffee stains on his button-up shirt. “Are you sexually active, Miss Torres?”

“Um, n-no,” I stuttered. “No, I’m not.”

“So, no one-night stands who maybe liked you a little too much? Maybe had a hard time letting go?” he pressed again, and I felt flush with discomfort.

“No, nothing like that,” I said more firmly, fighting the urge to grind my teeth. “As I already said, I’m not sexually active.”

“And what about your family?” probed the other cop as she took control of the questioning again. Kimberly Marques, she had said her name was. “I see here that your mother passed away last year, and you spent most of your senior year living with some cousins.”

Technically, Amelia and Marco weren’t related to me and Mami at all, but I nodded along deferentially.

“What about your father? Did your mother ever tell you who he was?” Marques said, shuffling through some papers in her file. “Do you think he could be involved in this?”

My father would have almost certainly been capable of doing something like this if he hadn’t been dead for over eight years. And in the new life Mami had built for us, I didn’t have a father.

“No, my mami refused to tell me anything about him, other than he was a pendejo who destroyed everything he touched and that we were better off without him,” I replied with a shrug.

Detective Marques nodded with knowing, sympathetic eyes while her partner, a Detective Ronald Denver, scoffed before muttering something like “typical” under his breath.

“Have you met anyone on campus since starting school who stood out to you? Anyone who stood out as odd or aggressive?” she continued.

“Like I said, there was that person I thought was watching me on my floor one day.”

I had briefly considered telling them about Locke’s obvious dislike of me, but a bloody heart to my door really didn’t seem like his style. The man wore a Kiton suit to lecture, it was hard to imagine him getting that messy. Even if I had believed he was capable of it, it was clear that his family was important around here, and I didn’t need to attract any more attention from the Blackwells. I was also hardly in the position to start trusting cops.

“But you have no idea who that person was, and you couldn’t make out any discerning features on them,” she said.

“No, as I told you, they were at the end of the hall wearing a hoodie, and they ran away before I could get a good look at them.”

She frowned. It had become painfully obvious throughout these interviews that the cops wanted me to have more information than I did. At first, part of me was worried that they had figured out who I really was. But, had that been the case, I would have been answering an entirely different set of questions.

The other detective scowled at me; his disgust was as palpable as his partner’s disappointment. There was something else going on here, something behind the scenes that I wasn’t aware of.

After a moment of awkward silence, I cleared my throat before asking if we were through. “I’d like to get back to focusing on my classes,” I explained. “I have to maintain a 3.8 grade point average or I’ll lose my scholarship. I can’t afford to miss many more.”

“Actually, there was one other thing,” the male detective sneered while the other cut him a warning look that he ignored. “The results came back from the coroners,” he paused.

I looked at the two of them in honest confusion, uncertain what kind of reaction he was looking for.

“It turns out it wasn’t a human heart after all, just a pig’s,” he said with smug satisfaction, as though he was dropping a bomb on me.

Oh, that’s all?

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