I shrug. Now I know why Ben wasn’t super urgent in his message. A child, everyone drops what they’re doing. The first hours are the most critical—gathering evidence, interviewing parents, alerting the public. If it’s a stranger kidnapping, children might be murdered within a few hours, and if not, then within the first two days. It’s a sick feeling, knowing that one false lead could mean the difference between life and death. If it’s a young woman, she has a little longer, but not much. A nineteen-year-old male, though? He’ll turn up in a couple of days.

I thumb through the file. The parents reported him missing a week ago. He was supposed to return home to—I flip back to the front sheet—Marietta for the Thanksgiving holiday and didn’t show. But he has a history of blowing off visits. There’s a report from earlier this year—June—when his parents expected him back for the summer, heard nothing, and called the police. According to the notes, an officer found Colin safe and sound—just living at a different location than the one his parents provided, some derelict apartment on the north side. There’s a short observation scrawled in the margins: says he has a summer internship, doesn’t want his parents to know where he lives, skittish, no drugs or other paraphernalia.

Financial problems, I think, leaning over the kitchen table to snag an apple. Probably embarrassed for his parents to see where he lives. Or maybe they’re controlling. Or emotionally abusive. One note says that when the parents couldn’t get in touch with him, the mother drove around Athens for two days and stalked the university admissions office demanding his class attendance records, which of course, they wouldn’t give. I suspect Colin’s an only child. Another note that the mother was “hysterical.”

I snort and take a bite out of the apple.

I flip the page. More notes. She’s insistent this behavior was unlike her son, despite all the recent incidents. Wants her call put on record.

I dial Ben’s number.

His voice is soft and calm, but not in a way that makes you impatient. He’s simply a man who wants all the details, who won’t miss something in the middle of an emergency.

Talking to him, I have the strange feeling that he’ll take care of everything with Truman and at the fraternity, before I remember that he called me, not the other way around.