It was just after eight when Lucas left, passing Denise as she was coming up the stairs. She smiled and said hi, cute in her down jacket and jeans. She was the nicest of Troy’s long string of girlfriends and seemed to have some staying power. It had been three months already, and Troy was still enamorado, as Abuela would say.
Lucas zipped up his jacket. Being early March, there was no more snow on the ground, though higher in the mountains they still had plenty and some people still skied. Tonight, it was freezing cold, already forty degrees. He missed Phoenix. It got cold there, too, sure, but a person did not have to endure months of twenty-, thirty-degree nights. The first week they were on campus after Christmas break, it had actually been ten degrees below zero. Who in the world wanted to live in a town where the temperatures dropped to below zero?
Lucas called Lizzy to see if she wanted to meet him. He should have driven. He had a truck but usually kept it at the apartment because he didn’t want to spend money on gas if he didn’t have to. But Lizzy didn’t answer. Probably had a date or something. She was cute and smart. She’d had a boyfriend for two years, but they’d split when he graduated. Lucas was pretty certain she had plenty of friends to hang with, and he was not really fun to be around these days.
He walked down to McCarthy’s, where he and Lizzy had dinner the previous night. He liked the place, and not just because Candace’s bartender boyfriend worked there. It was comfortable, and though Lucas wasn’t into sports, he liked the noise, and when he was alone he could pretend to watch. Baseball wasn’t too bad: at least he understood it better than football. It was a popular hangout for older college students as well as locals and was always busy.
Lucas had reached out to Richie Traverton, Candace’s boyfriend, via email two months ago when he was putting together his podcast project, asked if he would be willing to make a statement or be interviewed for the show, but Richie never got back to him. There was no reason the bartender would know him, and Lucas hoped to keep it that way.
He ordered a pint and sat at a table for two. He opened his laptop and brought up the outline that Professor Clarkson had approved for his capstone project. The podcast was only part of it. He also had to write a paper on the topic: methodology, interviews, procedures, outcomes, more. Updating the existing outline with details along the way would make it easier to finish his paper later, when the podcast was over, so he fleshed out several of the points and wrote a timeline about responses and problems he’d encountered.
He really, really hoped he could solve Candace Swain’s murder. Otherwise, all his efforts would be for nothing.
Lucas didn’t know if Richie killed Candace, though it didn’t make sense for a lot of reasons. Mostly, though, Lucas believed in Richie’s innocence because Lucas knew more about the police investigation than he let on. He was hesitant to share all the info on his podcast because he wasn’t sure about the legality of what he’d done. When working in the medical examiner’s office over the summer, Lucas had been able to access all police reports—not just the public ones. Technically, anything written down by a cop could potentially be made public, but anyone interested would have to go through the Freedom of Information Act to legally obtain the information. What Lucas had found still wouldn’t have been released that way because Candace Swain’s murder case remained an open investigation. But the police had cleared both Traverton and Tyler Diaz, the student Candace sometimes dated. They had solid alibis for the night she was killed and the night she disappeared.
But just because Traverton hadn’t killed Candace didn’t mean he didn’t know more about what had happened to her, at least for the time she’d been missing. But if he did know something, wouldn’t he have told the police? Wouldn’t he want to help solve her murder?
Lucas worried he was in over his head. He had thought for certain that after his first episode, he’d have a dozen people calling in, telling him they’d seen Candace, that he’d be able to piece together her last days alive. It didn’t happen.
Discoverability was key to a podcast’s success. He had stats of how many people had subscribed—just under three hundred people after the first episode, which was good for something he’d only advertised on his social-media pages and through the school’s pages. Double after the second episode. He’d posted flyers on every board—attractive flyers, because his roommate was nice enough to let him use his color printer so he didn’t have to pay for them. Candace Swain had been popular. Even though she was killed three years ago, wouldn’t others be interested in a nursing student’s murder that had taken place only a couple miles from campus?
You know why they wouldn’t. People don’t care about anyone but themselves.
He pushed the thought aside. He had to focus on the here and now, not the past.
He nursed his one beer and nibbled on a side order of nachos while working on his paper, then switched over to research Regan Merritt. He knew some things about her from her talk on campus, and Professor Clarkson had privately shared more when Lucas had approached him about inviting her on the podcast. Lucas knew that her son had recently been killed and she quit the Marshals Service. But it wasn’t like he could ask her about it, and he could find very little online.
At quarter to eleven, Lucas closed down his laptop, slung his case over his shoulder, and left the bar. It was even colder than when he’d arrived nearly three hours ago. He wished he’d brought a hat, but even after nearly four years of living here, he hadn’t quite adapted to a cold lifestyle and always forgot a hat and gloves.
Now he really wished he’d driven.
His phone vibrated as he turned the corner and started up the short hill that led to his apartment complex. He pulled it out and saw that Lizzy was calling.
“Hello,” he answered.
“You called and didn’t leave a message.”
“I was going to McCarthy’s and thought you might want to meet me.”
“I totally would have. Next time text me, or leave a message.”
“I figured you had plans.”
“Hardly. You still there?”
“Walking home.”