Линвуд Баркли - Find You First

If he entered the Winnebago, he might shoot before he realized it was her.

“It’s me!” she cried. “It’s Nicky!”

“Nicky?”

She got to her feet and opened the door. There were already tears coming down her cheeks. “I wanted to surprise you. Make things right.”

Jeremy stared, dumbfounded. At least, Nicky thought, the gun was pointed at the floor.

“Christ, you’re lucky I didn’t load this. I could have shot you.” For a moment, he had looked relieved. But now his face was awash with worry.

“You were listening.”

Nicky shook her head. “No. No, I wasn’t. I didn’t hear anything.”

“How could you not?”

She tried to think of something to say, some lie that would be convincing, but she couldn’t come up with anything.

“Oh, Nicky,” Jeremy said sadly. “Oh dear, dear Nicky.”

Lewiston, ME

Before there was Todd Cox, there was Jason Hamlin.

They had decided to do him first.

Kendra Collins, again posing as a police detective, and Rhys Mills, who was also carrying a very authentic-looking police badge, knew that Jason went for a jog very early in the morning. Most young men his age, particularly those attending college, liked to sleep in, but Jason was different. He was a sports-oriented individual. Not so much football. That had never been his game. Jason was more a winter sports kind of guy. Skiing, snowboarding. And attending school up in Maine afforded plenty of opportunities through the winter months for him to engage in his favorite activities.

But before the snow fell, Jason liked to stay in shape with jogging. He set his iPhone to wake him at six, although he usually woke up on his own minutes before that and turned the alarm off so as not to bother any of his housemates. He would slip on some shorts, a T-shirt, and a pair of Nikes, and then leave the old house a few blocks from the campus and do a four-mile route that took him through the town.

This was usually a time when he could clear his head. Breathe in that cool, crisp morning air through his nose, feel it filling his lungs. Slip the buds into his ears and listen to Garth Brooks. (Jason wasn’t a big country-western fan, but there was something about this Brooks guy that spoke to him.) On this morning, however, Jason was unable to appreciate the freshness of the dawn or Garth singing “The Night I Called the Old Man Out,” which always had a place in Jason’s heart, reminding him of the shouting matches he’d had with his own old man, or, more accurately, the old man who’d raised him. And that was because he could not stop thinking about what had happened the night before, when he was with Jenny, this girl he’d been seeing pretty seriously for the better part of two weeks.

She was from Kingston, Ontario, on the other side of the border. She’d picked Bates College because her mother had gone there, and her grandfather had gone there, so it was kind of a family tradition. She’d actually have been glad to go to Queen’s, in her hometown, and saved her family a fortune, but hey, you couldn’t fight tradition.

Jason hailed from Baltimore, and he’d been wrestling with whether to find a job here in Lewiston for the summer, and hang on to his off-campus accommodation, or head home. Jenny planned to go back to Canada once school ended. So Jason had been thinking, if he wanted to visit her through the summer, was it better to be in Lewiston or Baltimore? He’d checked Google Maps and saw that either way it was an eight- to nine-hour drive. How could you visit someone for the weekend when it took two whole days just to get there and back?

But that was not what he was thinking about as he went for his run this morning.

What was on his mind was something Jenny’s friend Denise had said the night before when a bunch of them had gone across the bridge into Auburn to have a few drinks at Gritty’s. Clearly, Denise wasn’t aware that Jason and Jenny had been a thing in the last month, that Jenny had even slept over at Jason’s three times, because if she’d been aware of that, she probably wouldn’t have asked Jenny if she’d slept with Carson yet.

It wasn’t like she’d shouted the question. She’d asked it when she was sitting to Jenny’s left, and Jason was sitting on Jenny’s right, but Denise had asked it loudly enough that Jason heard it loud and clear.

Carson? Who the fuck was Carson?

So the second they were outside Gritty’s, heading home, he’d asked her. She’d shrugged it off. Denise was kidding around, she said. Or confused. She’d known a guy named Carson once, but that was a long time ago.

But Jenny hadn’t been able to look him in the eye.

Jason got this very sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. When he got back to his place — a century-old house about four blocks from the campus that he shared with three other guys — he went online to see if he could track down this Carson dude.

He’d had no luck, but as he ran down Main Street, heading for the footpaths that ran along the banks of the Androscoggin River, he promised himself he’d do more research when he got back.

Maybe if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with his love life, and if Garth hadn’t been crooning in his ears, he would have noticed the black four-door sedan that had been riding along about fifty feet behind him.

The car suddenly sped up, then pulled over to the curb ahead of Jason, brakes squealing. The car hadn’t finished rebounding from the sudden stop when the passenger door opened and Rhys leapt out, flashing a badge in the palm of his hand just long enough for it to register with Jason.

“Jason Hamlin?” Rhys said.

Jason stopped, yanked the buds out of his ears, and said, panting, “What?”

“Are you Jason Hamlin?” he asked again.

He chose to nod instead of speak, still catching his breath. He saw a woman getting out now from behind the wheel. She flashed her badge, too, as she came around the back of the car.

“Is this Mr. Hamlin?” Kendra asked her partner.

“Yeah,” he said.

Now less winded, Jason said, “What’s this about?”

Kendra said, “This is Detective Mills and I’m Detective Collins. I’m afraid we have some bad news for you, Mr. Hamlin.”

“What?”

“Am I correct that Margaret and Charles Hamlin, of Baltimore, are your parents?”

That sick feeling he’d had in his stomach the night before was nothing compared to what he felt now.

In the distance, they could hear sirens.

“Yes?” he said weakly, glancing for a half a second over his shoulder, where the sirens were coming from.

“We were asked to track you down. If you come with us we can give you a ride back to your residence.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

Rhys said, “We’re guessing you’re going to want to go back there.”

“Just tell me,” he said.

“There was a car accident,” Rhys said. “We don’t have all the details.”

Kendra walked over to the car and opened the back door. An invitation. Jason, his legs rubbery, got into the back of the car. Kendra closed it, went around, and got back in behind the wheel. Rhys went around to the driver’s side but opened the back door, taking a seat next to a visibly distraught Jason. He closed the door.

They sat there for several seconds, the car not moving. Jason was not so overwhelmed by the distressing news that he failed to notice they weren’t going anywhere.

“Um, what are we waiting for?”

As Kendra shifted around in her seat, Rhys pressed himself up against his door and quickly put his arm over his own face. Kendra raised her hand above the seatback. In it was a small tube, not much bigger than a lipstick, with a button on top. She aimed it at Jason’s face and pressed the button with her index finger.