CHAPTER NINE
Veronica found Chad as he left his three o’clock international relations class. She recognized him from his Facebook pictures—a tall, wiry boy with light hair, a sharply defined jaw, and wide, sensual lips. He walked for a ways in a small cluster of other students, all talking animatedly. Veronica wasn’t close enough to make out what they were saying; she hung back, walking slowly but keeping Cohan in sight.
He broke off from his group as they passed the library. Veronica followed him through Canfield Court, where groundskeepers were blowing leaves off the walk, and then up another narrow street. In front of the New Guinea Sculpture Garden he paused to talk to a slender girl in a knit beanie before turning up the walk to his dormitory and disappearing through its wide double doors. Veronica found a spot on a bench outside and sat down, pulling out her phone and pretending to text. She wanted to give him a few minutes to get to his room and start to feel safe. Cohan liked to be in control. If she caught him off guard, he might reveal something he hadn’t intended.
After about ten minutes, she stood up. She followed two girls holding hands up to the double doors; they swiped their passcard, and then, assuming she was a student too, held the door open for her.
“Thanks!” she chirped.
Mac had gotten Cohan’s dorm number out of the Stanford databases—he was on the first floor, at the end of a dimly lit hallway. Veronica walked slowly down the corridor. A few doors were propped open with concrete blocks. Inside kids sprawled across their beds highlighting passages in enormous books or hunched at their computers, playing games. Music floated through the dorm from a dozen different places, Kanye West, Vampire Weekend, and the Indigo Girls weaving together a clumsy mashup. No one seemed to notice Veronica, or if they did they gave her brief, distracted nods.
Chad Cohan’s door was decorated with clippings of his lacrosse wins. A few articles had pictures of him in his red and white uniform, hurling the ball toward the net, face obscured by his helmet. The whiteboard on his door was covered in doodles, well-wishes, and enigmatic bro-speak.
Good luck Chad-Chad!
SPANK THE DUCKS
THIS WEEKEND!!
Where are you?
Veronica took a deep breath and knocked softly.
A few seconds passed, and the door opened. Chad Cohan stood in the doorway, looking politely startled. His pale blue eyes flitted over her face, his brow furrowed.
“Hi, Chad.” She offered up a disarmingly bright smile. “Sorry to bother you. My name’s Veronica Mars. I’m assisting in the search for Hayley Dewalt, and I was hoping you could answer a few questions for me.”
He blinked rapidly three, four times. Then he seemed to shake himself into action. “Of course.” He opened his door a little wider to let her in.
The room was fastidiously neat. The bedspread was smooth and tight against the mattress, and the shelves were devoid of clutter—no toys or tchotchkes, no mementoes. A few framed nature prints in black and white hung on the walls, perfectly centered.
“Are you a police officer?” he asked, turning to face her. “I talked to the sheriff on the phone the other day. I already told him everything I know, which unfortunately isn’t much.”
“No, I’m actually a private investigator. I’ve been hired to assist with the case.”
His face remained almost still, a mask of civil curiosity, but she thought she caught a flicker of skepticism as he looked her over.
Fine. Let him underestimate me. I can work with that.
“Do you have any new information about what may have happened to Hayley? I still can’t get over that she’s missing,” he said, closing the door.
“Not yet.” She moved slowly around the room, looking at the books on his shelves, the few framed photos perched on top of the dresser and desk. They showed Chad, smiling with friends and family in fancy restaurants, on the steps of Mayan ruins, outside the Paris Opera House. There was one of Hayley, sitting on a boulder and looking out over the ocean, her hair whipping in the breeze. Veronica picked it up. Chad stiffened almost imperceptibly, as if having a stranger handle his belongings physically pained him.
“Did you take this?” She held it up, baiting him. “It’s great work. I’m something of an amateur photographer myself.”
“Um, yeah.” He moved closer to her, gently taking the picture from her hands and setting it back on the shelf exactly where it’d been, just as she suspected he might. “I did. Hayley was a great subject.”
“She’s a pretty girl.” Veronica smiled as he gave the photo one more minute adjustment. Textbook control freak with a side of OCD.
He sat down on the edge of his desk. His long, slender fingers tapped a quick syncopated rhythm against the top. “Look, I want to help find Hayley, but I’m not sure what I can tell you. We actually kind of broke up before she went to Neptune.”
Veronica gave him a wistful, sympathetic smile. Between the smiley faces and loopy handwriting on his whiteboard and the way Hayley’s friends had described him, she guessed that Chad was used to solicitous female attention. “That’s what I heard. And I’m sorry if this is painful for you. I didn’t come to open up any wounds—I’m just trying to get a better sense of who Hayley was, what she was like. I was hoping you could help me fill in a few of those blanks.”
He hesitated, then nodded. “Sure. Sure, if it’ll help you find her. I’ll tell you anything I can.”
“Thanks.” She held his gaze for a moment, then took her notebook from her purse, flipping to a blank page. “How long were you and Hayley together?”
“Five months, on and off.” He glanced at the photo on the dresser, as if checking with Hayley’s image to affirm this was right. “We met at a Hey Marseilles concert. I saw her across the room during ‘Heart Beats.’ I knew I had to be with her the second I laid eyes on her.”
Veronica gave an awwww, so sweet smile, jotting down romantic lead in his own imaginary movie in her notebook. “How often did you see each other? Berkeley’s almost an hour away—I’d imagine it’s not an easy trip to make when you’re busy with school.”
“She came down on the weekends. Sometimes during the week, if we weren’t too busy, but weekdays we mostly talked on the phone.”
“And when you got together, what kind of stuff did you do?”
He leaned back a little. His collar gaped, and for the first time she noticed a long scratch along his neck. It looked like the skin had been broken, but it was mostly healed now. Interesting. Lacrosse injury … or something else?
“We went to movies, to parties. She came to my games. We studied together sometimes. I was trying to help her decide what she wanted to major in—she kept talking about nutritional science but I thought she should take a wider focus, do biology or chemistry. I mean, why settle for nutritionist when you could aim for doctor?” He shrugged. “She had a tendency to sell herself short.”
“Hayley’s friends told me you guys fought a lot.”
“Hayley’s friends need to mind their own business.” Color rose in his cheeks, his body tensing. “Look, we had ups and downs, obviously. But Hayley’s friends were always trying to convince her to dump me. They caused a lot of problems between us—they’d put things in her head, give her crazy ideas about me. They told her I was trying to control her. Like they weren’t?” He rolled his eyes. “Hayley can be really … innocent. She trusts people too easily. I worried about her a lot. She’d call me to tell me she was on her way to some frat party or some club, and I’d spend the whole night imagining … awful things.”
“Is that why you broke up?”