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CHAPTERFOUR
Madelyn
Evening was falling by the time we made it back to the parking lot next to my dorm building. I wasn’t sure Logan and his friends would be able to turn up much evidence with the sunlight fading, but they’d seemed determined to get started right away.
I marched straight to the still-empty spot where my car had once been and pointed. “That’s where I parked.”
The guys stalked over. Dexter walked right to the edge of the stall and pulled out his phone, while Logan and Slade came to a stop next to me. Logan looked at me rather than the parking spot.
“When did you see the car here last?” he asked, all briskly business, no emotion in his tone.
“Last night,” I said confidently. “I was coming back from the dining hall, and I remember glancing over and thinking about how I was going to take the drive I meant to tonight. I had a lab for my first class this morning, and I was distracted planning for that when I headed over, so I wasn’t paying attention then. And when I came back to the dorm in the afternoon, I went in a different door where I couldn’t have seen it anyway.”
Logan nodded and turned toward Slade, effectively shutting me out of the conversation. “We’re looking at about a twenty-four-hour timeframe then,” he said. “During most of those hours, there are students in and out of this parking lot regularly, so it’d be difficult to get away with breaking into a car and stealing it.”
“The security camera’s broken too,” Dexter pointed out without even looking up. He must have noticed while he’d been walking over. He snapped a couple of pictures of the empty spot with his phone and then crouched down closer to the asphalt.
“Another victory for campus security,” Slade said with obvious sarcasm. He shook his head, shifting his weight from his prosthetic leg to his other leg. “Well, it doesn’t take a genius to convince students that the thief locked his keys in his car or something. Anyone with decent social skills could convince bystanders that there’s not a crime being committed. I’ve done it plenty of times.”
My attention shot toward him, and Slade only gave me a wink as he pulled a small candy from his pocket and popped it into his mouth. Was he kidding me, or was that the truth? I suddenly found it easy to imagine him conning his way into a flashy sports car to zoom around town. But I hadn’t thought he was quite that casual about things like the law.
“That’s… good to know,” I said.
Logan glanced over his shoulder at me. “Did you lock the doors to your car, Madelyn?”
Both the question and the authoritative way he said my name irked me. I rolled my eyes. “Of course I did.”
“And you definitely didn’t leave the key someplace a thief could grab it?”
I grimaced and fished the key out of my pocket. “It’s right here. I’m not an idiot. Do you always blame people when their property is stolen, or is that a privilege you save for me?”
He shrugged, letting the question roll right off him. “We have to cover every possibility.” He focused on Slade again, giving me his back. Disregarding me so easily after his stupid questions. “With a new-ish car, chances are they managed to clone the key fob at some point, so it wouldn’t have been an obvious break-in. But they couldn’t have known whether someone walking by would know the car is Madelyn’s. I don’t think it’s likely that the thief would have wanted to risk that. It’d be a lot easier to conduct a major theft under the cover of darkness.”
“The three other cars that’ve been taken in the last couple of months went missing overnight too,” Dexter put in, calmly analytical. He bent forward, still studying the ground. “There’s some bits of red clay-like dirt here. I don’t think that would have come from anywhere on campus.”
“That’s from me,” I said quickly, impressed that he’d realized it was significant. Clearly his observational abilities were sharper than his social skills. “It’s how I’m sure that’s where I parked the car. I drove down a lane that was pretty muddy with that stuff last week, and it got plastered all over the undercarriage. It’s been flaking off bit by bit.”
“No way to identify the perp based on leftover mud then,” Slade said with a playful tsk of his tongue. “Too bad. That would have made a good story.”
“It could tell us where else the car’s been once we start following the trail,” Logan said, and rubbed his hands together. “Every clue matters.”
Dexter was snapping more pictures, even though I wasn’t sure how much he’d be able to make out in the increasingly dim light when he checked them later.
“I’d recognize the mud if I saw it again,” I told him. “No pictures necessary.”
He glanced back without actually meeting my eyes. “I like to keep a visual record. That way there’s never any doubt. Memory is unreliable.”
I guessed that was a fair point.
Slade tapped his lips. “We could still try to jog some memories. Find out who came through the lot last night and whether they noticed any suspicious characters.”
“If anyone saw anything concerning, we’d already know about it,” Logan said.
I raised an eyebrow at him. “How? Since when does the entire student body report to you?”
He shrugged. “We have our ways.” He motioned to the other guys, and Dexter straightened up, apparently done with his visual record-taking.
I was starting to get a sense of the dynamic between this group that called themselves “the Vigil”: Logan taking the lead and making major judgment calls, Slade suggesting more out-of-the-box possibilities and stopping the tone from getting too dour, Dexter keeping track of the details.
