Page 68 of Follows with Intent

Jadon

Jadon was parking on the edge of campus when the call came. Nico’s name appeared on the car’s display. For a moment, all he could do was stare. Then he reached to accept the call. Before he could, though, it ended. He thought it couldn’t have rung more than once.

He sat there, counting the seconds. After a full minute, he placed a call to Nico. It rang until it went to voicemail. Jadon counted two full minutes next time. The counting was helpful; it let him focus on breathing, keeping everything even and regular. He tried to center his thoughts. I’m sorry. That would be a good way to start. I’m sorry for how I acted and what I said. I was out of line. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Nico. I’m so sorry.

When he placed the call again, it went to voicemail.

“Hi. I saw you called, and I’d like to talk to you.” Jadon had to stop. He felt it again, that part of him rushing forward, the sudden stop as he balked. “I’m sorry, Nico. I acted inappropriately, and I was out of line. I’d like to apologize in person and see if we can find a way to—” Again, that surge of emotion, and then the hard stop. He felt like he had something stuck in his throat. “—to figure this out.”

He disconnected. And he thought, That, ladies and gentlemen, is how a coward does it.

The phone stayed dark. A minute. Then three. Then five.

I can go home, Jadon thought. I can go home, and I can pretend that was it—he called, and I called, and that was our chance. And that would be easy and safe and it would hurt like hell, but in a few days, Jadon knew he’d be back in his routine, and the pain would get a little easier every day.

He got out of the car and headed for Harlow Hall.

The dorm lights were on tonight, making it a limestone island that dissolved into the low, hard sky of clouds. Inside, it had an emptiness that Jadon didn’t remember—the white noise of silence, the rebounding echoes in the stairwell, the way you could tell, sometimes, that you were the only one in a building. Nico’s door was locked, and the strip underneath was dark. When Jadon knocked, no one answered.

“Nico?”

Nothing.

It was a dorm room in an old building. The lock might as well have been make-believe. Jadon loided it with a credit card, and when the door popped open, he braced himself for—

Shouts. Outrage. Worse: Nico lying there, still and unresponsive.

But the beds were empty, and Nico’s luggage still lay in the middle of the room, surrounded by clothes. He hadn’t finished packing. He hadn’t gone to a hotel.

Jadon did a quick walkthrough, checking for anything that looked out of place. Nothing. He let himself out of the room, pulling the door shut behind him. His heart was beating a little faster as he made his way out of the dorm. Nico had called him only a few minutes ago. That meant, at the minimum, he was still thinking about Jadon. Wanted to talk to him. He might have felt conflicted about a conversation—that could explain why he hadn’t answered when Jadon called back—but a part of him wanted to talk. His bags were still here. He couldn’t have gone far. He was probably somewhere on campus still—

Dr. Meza’s face floated in Jadon’s vision. The way he had smiled. The way his pale fingers had rolled the corduroy of Nico’s lapel back and forth.

The dinner, Jadon thought. The closing dinner for the seminar. That made the most sense—Nico had decided to go after all, maybe to patch things up with Meza, maybe simply to round out his time at the seminar. Jadon started across the quad at a jog. He knew, from previous visits to campus, that the college had a private club for the professors. Then he realized he didn’t know if any of the professors from the seminar were actually faculty at Chouteau; they might have gone somewhere else. The Central West End had lots of great restaurants, the kind of upscale places that a group of academics might go for wine and overly priced tapas, for example. He placed another call to Nico as he passed through a clump of trees, the shadows deeper under the shroud of bare branches.

If it hadn’t been so dark, he wouldn’t have seen the light. Jadon noticed it, lying off to the side among the trees, and he almost kept going. Then his brain recognized the familiar shape—a phone screen, lighting up as a call came in. His own phone, still pressed against his ear, continued to ring. He stopped jogging.

He ended the call to Nico. A moment later, the phone on the ground went dark.

Jadon turned on the flashlight on his phone. He directed it at the grassy stretch next to the path, took one step, and then another, sweeping the light left and right. He stopped again. To his left, a few yards back in the direction he’d come, muddy depressions and torn grass showed where something heavy had fallen and then slid. Not something, his brain corrected. Someone. Where someone had fallen.

It was luck, a part of him recognized numbly. If the ground hadn’t been so soft from the steady drizzle, there wouldn’t have been any sign at all. Luck and carelessness. Because he’d left the phone.

He took Nico.

It was a jump in logic—the rational part of Jadon knew that. But he also knew it was true. He used the phone’s weak flashlight to check the ground as best he could, and then he took a looping route toward where he’d seen the fallen phone. Finally, balancing on an old tree root to keep from disturbing the marks and prints left on the ground, Jadon snagged the phone. He knew this was reckless, knew he should have waited for an evidence team, knew, at the least, he should have been wearing gloves. But it didn’t matter. It was Nico’s phone; he recognized the case, the corner of the molded plastic where Nico, lost in thought, had chewed on it. And something else, too—a dark, wet clump of fabric. His hoodie, the one he had loaned Nico on that morning run.

For a moment, Jadon couldn’t do anything. Then, holding the phone and hoodie, he retraced his steps to the brick path. He needed to call Cerise. No, she wasn’t on duty, and this wouldn’t be her case. He needed to call this in, get a patrol unit out here. Only it was Halloween, one of the busiest nights of the year for the Metropolitan PD. They’d be spread thin, and Jadon wasn’t sure that pulling rank would help him. If the captain caught wind of it and shut him down—he could hear her now: He dropped his phone while walking across campus. Believe it or not, it’s happened before, especially after someone’s had something to drink. Do you think that might be a possibility on Halloween on a college campus?

He placed a call to the campus security office instead. The voice that answered was male, older, gruff. After identifying himself, Jadon said, “I’ve got an active crime scene that I’m trying to secure, and a possible assault currently in progress. I need as many people as you can spare to search the campus—anywhere you wouldn’t be able to see on a camera.”

“That’s a lot of campus, Detective. And we’ve kind of got our hands full with a fraternity party—”

“Really? Does that seem like your priority? What do you think your supervisor, or the dean, or the chancellor, or whoever the hell I have to get on the phone, is going to think when I tell him that a sworn officer of the law requested help to prevent a sexual assault in progress, and you decided that a bunch of toga-wearing assholes breaking the campus alcohol policy was a bigger deal?”

Silence. Then, in a stiff voice, “I’ll send some people over.” There was a pause, and the next words were even starchier: “Do you still want me to call that detective?”

“That’s me,” Jadon said and disconnected.

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