BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) – It was a chance meeting of two strangers. One had a cell phone that wouldn’t work. So she borrowed one from a man she didn’t know.

When she called friend Tommy Lang with it, University of Vermont senior Michelle Gardner-Quinn gave no indication of trouble.

“She sounded completely fine and normal and exactly the way she did when she left us,” Lang, 21, said Friday. “There wasn’t anything that made me worry or made me suspicious that anything was going on.”

Lang never heard from her again. No one did, police said.

Gardner-Quinn, a pretty 21-year-old Latin American studies major with brown hair and a nose stud, vanished without a trace after her chance 2:30 a.m. encounter on Main Street last Saturday.

On Friday, her body turned up along a rural road near a swimming hole in nearby Richmond, and police named “the cell phone man” – Brian Rooney, 36, a contractor who had been interviewed previously – as the chief suspect.

Rooney, who was captured on surveillance videos walking alongside Gardner-Quinn, was arrested on unrelated charges.

The twin developments solved one mystery but deepened another, prompting police to step up the investigation into what happened to Gardner-Quinn.

Police Chief Thomas Tremblay said she appeared to have been killed, but didn’t know the cause of death and couldn’t say whether she was sexually assaulted.

Rooney, who had been interviewed by police earlier in the week but not arrested, was taken into custody without incident Friday, charged with unrelated sex crimes as a result of the investigation into the disappearance.

He was charged with sexual assault in Caledonia County and lewd and lascivious conduct with a child in neighboring Essex County, rural areas in northeastern Vermont more than 80 miles from Burlington.

But he wasn’t charged in Gardner-Quinn’s disappearance or death.

“The investigation takes a significant turn now,” said Tremblay. “It’s almost like a new investigation starts. Now, we specifically know this is a suspicious disappearance and we are conducting a kidnapping investigation.”

More crime scene processing is necessary to attempt to link Rooney to Gardner-Quinn’s disappearance, Tremblay said.

As night fell Friday, about two dozen Vermont State Police and Burlington police investigators and crime-scene technicians worked in and around the ravine at Huntington Gorge, a popular but sometimes deadly swimming hole.

Some were seen rappelling down into the ravine in a search for clues.

Gardner-Quinn, a senior majoring in environmental science as well as Latin American studies, was reported missing Saturday after she failed to show up for a planned meeting with her parents, who had been in town for parents’ weekend.

Lang, whose cell phone memory had captured the man’s number, called Rooney later Saturday when concern began to mount about her whereabouts.

“He really didn’t tell me a whole lot. He basically said he saw her walking up the hill toward the dorms and that’s about it,” Lang said.