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“You got better ideas about where we should be looking?”
He didn’t, and that was a huge chunk of his foul mood. “Have you had any communication at all with Nash? Do we even know what happened?”
“Nope. All I have is an update on his condition, because I was a good boy and presented the proper paperwork. And Trees showed up.”
“At least there’s that.”
“Yeah,” Joaquin seconded. “Tell me where to look, and we’ll do it.”
Matt tried to mentally map the city and think of places Madison could have escaped. Lafayette wasn’t bursting with taxis. They happened…but not often. She knew better than to use credit cards—not that she had one with her—so that left out ride-share options. She wouldn’t have called anyone who couldn’t handle the danger for a pickup or a place to crash—if she could even have gotten her hands on a phone. According to Hunter, her burner device was sitting uselessly on Nash’s kitchen counter.Ifshe remembered anyone’s phone number—big if—pay phones were extinct. She probably could have hoofed it to campus police. But if she had, someone would have reached out to them by now.
So, she was on foot with limited resources. Fuck. Where would she have gone? How far could she have traveled?
“Has anyone tried that big park south of campus?” Matt knew he was grasping at straws.
“I’ll get Hunter on it.”
“Tell him to try the twenty-four-hour pharmacy about six blocks west, too.” Maybe she was hiding there.
Waiting for what?
“Isn’t that a national chain now…with cameras and facial recognition?”
True, but she wasn’t trained to think of that shit. “Just try it.”
Joaquin sighed. “Okay. I texted him. He’s en route. Logan came up blank. Anyplace you want me to send him?”
Matt was flat fucking out of ideas—for her sake, he couldn’t afford to be. He’d lost her for three years. He’d be damned if, so soon after finding her again, he let harm come to her. “Isn’t there a twenty-four-hour gym east of campus? I think I remember—”
A beeping interrupted his call. Matt paused on the steps of the pancake house and stared at his phone. Incoming call from Ethan Garrison. What the fuck did he want? “Does Ethan know anything?”
“Nope. Only the six of us in the gazebo. And Nash.”
Who was in no position to spill anything—not that he would blab secrets.
Matt declined the call.
“I don’t know why he’s calling me, then. It’ll wait. Let me think of somewhere else Logan can search…” But before he could pull a new location out of his ass, his phone beeped once more. He gave it another glance. “It’s fucking Ethan again. Why does he keep calling me in the middle of the night?”
“No idea. Gotta go. A nurse is finally taking me back to see Nash. Talk to Ethan and figure out what the fuck he’s up to. If it’s anything helpful, holler back.”
“Roger that.” He dropped the call from his boss with an exasperated sigh to answer the aggravating punk.
Yeah, they were all supposed to gel together and trust each other and be a band of brothers, blah, blah, blah. The bosses had gotten big on that in the past couple of years, but Ethan hadn’t really tried to mesh.
Have you made any effort to include him?
“What?” he barked at Ethan as he barged into the pancake place, taking advantage of the fact there was no host at the stand to stop him from scanning the nooks and crannies of the old restaurant.
“Hey, buddy. How’s it going?”
The new guy sounded smug. His voice immediately put Matt on edge. “I’m in the middle of something, so unless whatever you have to say is really fucking important—”
“What are you in the middle of?”
Did Ethan think he had time for a game ofTwenty Questions? “Tell me why you called. It better be good or I’m hanging up.”
But Matt had no idea what to do next. He’d already seen the handful of people sobering up at this hour on coffee and syrup-laden carbs. None of them were Madison. He’d even peeked into the women’s room like a creeper, but it was an empty one-holer. Trying to rein his panic in, he shoved his way out the door and into the hot night again.
