Page 49 of Follows with Intent

But whatever the rest of that thought would have been, shock cut it off. The door to Nico’s bedroom stood open, and the room was in shambles. Nico’s suitcases had been emptied onto the floor and thrown into the corner. More clothes had been taken from the closet and lay on the floor. The bedding was rumpled, even though Jadon had made the beds himself, the sheets and blankets neat and tight the way his moms had taught him. Because someone had lain there, he thought. And then, more clearly, He was here. He was in here, and he laid on the beds, and he touched Nico’s clothes, and he didn’t care that it was the middle of the fucking day.

Nico let out a laugh. The sound was hollow, disbelieving, and raw. He stepped into the room, shaking off Jadon’s touch when Jadon tried to stop him, and toed through the clothes on the floor. “My underwear is gone.” His breathing accelerated. His voice was higher than usual, tight, the sound of a man hanging on. “He was in here, wasn’t he? He was in here, and he took my fucking underwear.”

14

Nico

In the campus security office, Nico stared at Detective Cao—Cerise, he thought numbly; Jadon called her Cerise—and said, again, “I don’t know who did it.”

It was a small room, spartan, with filing cabinets and a desk and a computer and, lying next to the phone like it had been forgotten, a pencil eraser shaped like a cat’s paw. He only vaguely remembered the walk across campus, with Jadon’s hand wrapped around his arm, and then the murmur of voices, the banks of fluorescent lights, until they put him in here. The room smelled closed up, and the computer looked ancient, and Nico had the sense this place didn’t get used much. Only when police needed to interview a hysterical victim, maybe. Or maybe only if the victim had special status because he’d jerked off with a cop the night before.

“I understand that,” Cerise said. “And I also understand that you’re upset right now. But I want you to start thinking about anyone you might have noticed, anyone who seemed even slightly unusual, from the last few days. Just think about it. Keep thinking about it. Something might come to you.”

Even through the haze of shock, Nico could hear the request for what it was: last-gasp desperation. They had no leads. No idea who was doing this. They had nothing.

The discovery in his room had changed everything for Nico. Until then, the situation had evolved from a seeming overreaction on Jadon’s part into a mild concern—even the strange encounter in the darkened dorm, when he thought about it in the light of day, could have been bad luck. A burglary gone wrong. But finding that his room had been searched, his clothing pawed through, his underwear stolen—that meant something different. Someone was following Nico. Someone was—well, the word obsessed came to mind, but that sounded dramatic, like something off TV. It sounded impossible.

Cerise asked a few more questions, asked if Nico needed anything, and left. The door clicked softly when it shut in its frame, and then he was alone. Muffled voices from the next room suggested a conference. I’m going home tomorrow, Nico wanted to tell them. It’s not a big deal. And then, without any warning, he was fighting back tears as he dragged out his phone.

Emery answered on the first ring. “What’s wrong?”

“Don’t do that,” Nico said, although the words lost some of their force because he sounded so phlegmy. And then the story spilled out of him—the man who had followed him, the darkened dorm building and the running footsteps, his room.

“I can be there in five hours,” Emery said. “I’ll stay on the phone with you until you get to a police station. The closest one is either headquarters or central patrol; one sec, and I’ll have an Uber headed your way.”

“No, Em—”

“Then I want you to wait there for me.”

“I don’t want—”

“Five hours. Don’t hang up.”

“Emery Hazard!”

“What?”

“I don’t want you to do that! And I’m trying to tell you, and you’re steamrolling me!”

More of that silence.

“Oh my God,” Nico moaned.

Emery’s laughter was barely more than a breath.

“I’m sorry,” Nico said.

“No, I should have listened. Although, to be fair, if I see this fucking chiropractor fuck one more woman upside down, I’m going to lose my fucking mind, so I might have been a bit motivated to call it quits on this job.”

“What do you mean ‘upside down’?”

“Is there more than one meaning?”

“But, I mean, how—” Nico managed to stop. He wiped his eyes. “This one’s insurance fraud, right?”

“Yeah, he can’t work, he can’t walk his dog, he can’t take his trash cans down to the road. But he can plow at a hundred and eighty degrees without any complications.”

“I still have zero idea what that means. And why did he have to go to Chicago? Can’t he find somebody closer?”

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