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“Have you heard from Claire?”
“Russel came and went this afternoon,” Steve said. “My mother watched him like a hawk from the street.”
“Atta girl.”
Steve laughed gently. “Just be safe out there, okay? I want you back on Martha’s Vineyard as soon as possible.”
It was rare that somebody was so frank about needing her. Rina had to steel herself from crying.
After they hung up, Rina paid for her gas and drove toward the outer banks of campus, where Nathan Rodgers had once lived with three roommates. After she knocked, a roommate with thick glasses and a band T-shirt opened the door, and a thick wall of body odor and pizza smashed into Rina’s face.
“Wait here,” the kid said. “I’ll get Craig.”
Rina waited in the foyer and assessed the living room: the television, the gaming devices, thePulp Fictionmovie poster, and the empty cans of beer. It looked like any typical college house. It wasn’t hard to imagine Gail on the couch, eating chips and watching Nathan play video games. Rina had done similar things as a young woman, pining for the affection of older guys. She’d wasted so many hours on couches.
“You Rina?” A twentysomething guy came down the steps in his pajamas. It was only eight at night, and Rina guessed that he just hadn’t gotten dressed today at all. He had very long arms and legs and a paunch, probably a result of all that pizza and beer.
“Hi, Craig.” Rina shook his hand. “Thanks for meeting with me.”
Craig indicated they could sit on the couch for the meeting. He ruffled his hair and looked at her coolly as though he was really high. It was possible he was.
“Have you heard anything from Nathan since he moved out?” Rina asked.
“Nope,” Craig said. “But that isn’t so weird for Nathan. He was never much of a texter. And we were friends, sure, but we weren’t that close.”
“Who was he closest to?”
“I don’t know. He hung around that freshman girl a lot. You mentioned her name on the phone.”
“Gail.”
“Right.” Craig snapped his fingers.
“And you haven’t seen Gail around at all since last semester?”
“Nope,” Craig said, popping the p.
Rina felt as though she’d hit a brick wall. But she couldn’t show weakness here, not to Craig. “Do you have any photographs of Nathan?”
“Oh. Yeah. I guess.” Craig pulled his phone out of his pocket and began to flick through his saved photographs. It took forever. Based on what Rina could see from where she sat, Craig had taken a lot of photographs of graffiti. Maybe he drew it in his off-hours. But it seemed unlikely he had anything but off-hours.
“Here. These are from when we first moved in.” Craig passed his phone over to show a photo of himself and three other guys. They stood on the front porch with their arms slung around each other’s shoulders. Craig tapped his finger on the guy second to the left. “That’s Nate.”
Nathan Rodgers was slender, with black hair and a hint of black eyeliner, similar to the eyeliner Gail had been wearing on the night of New Year’s Eve. He wore skinny black jeans and a big black T-shirt and didn’t smile.
“Did he always dress like that?” Rina asked.
Craig shrugged. “He had his own style, sure.”
“Are there any others?” Rina asked.
Craig flipped through the photographs from that first weekend they’d moved in. There were numerous porch shots, plus a few in the yard, where they’d set up a beer pong table.
“We were asking everyone to play with us as they walked by,” Craig said proudly as though they were the life and soul of the Amherst party. “It got wild.”
Rina studied each photograph, analyzing the sharp cut of Nathan’s jawline for clues. In some of them, he was off to the side, leaning on a dark red Chevy. His beer was balanced on top of it as he lorded over the other beer pong players.
“Wait. Is that Nathan’s car?”
