37. SEARCHING
ONLY THIRTY MILES TO THE SOUTH, the man Leesa was hoping would find her again exited a grimy bus at the edge of the Yale University campus. Neither Leesa nor he knew how close to each other they actually were, but until Dominic found her, the distance did not really matter.
With no clues to guide him about what college Leesa might be attending, Dominic had been systematically working his way up the Connecticut coast. Yale was the sixth school he had visited in the last five days. Searches of campuses in Stamford, Fairfield and Bridgeport had all come up empty. The New Haven area contained six different colleges he would have to check, so he expected to be here five or six days, at least. Then he would have to decide whether to head north toward Hartford and its collection of colleges, or to continue east along the coast. He thought he would probably go north, since there were more schools in that direction, but he didn’t have to make that decision until he was finished here in New Haven.
The afternoon was cold, and a chill wind blew off nearby Long Island Sound, making the day feel even colder. The first thing Dominic had done when he disembarked from his cross country Amtrak trip in New York City was to purchase a worn black jacket and a pair of black leather gloves at a used clothing store. He wouldn’t need them unless it got much colder than even this, but he wanted a jacket and gloves to help him blend in.
As soon as he stepped off the bus, he donned the jacket and gloves. He would search Yale the same way he had checked the other schools—by systematically walking up and down every street or walkway on campus, and climbing the stairways of any building taller than three stories. Despite his past failures in locating Leesa, he was pretty sure he would be able to sense her if he got close enough, and vertical distance counted just as much as ground distance.
Fortunately, all the campuses he had searched so far had been urban schools, with their necessarily more compact grounds. Still, his painstaking searches were time consuming, but he had no other choice—not unless he chose to unleash a magical search. Such a search would draw his enemies to him as surely as if he had lit a beacon fire atop a mountain. No, that had to remain a last resort, to be used only if his present tactics failed and he saw no other options.
There were holes in his methodology, he knew. If Leesa was off campus for any reason while he was seeking her, he would miss her. She could even be on campus, but moving in a direction that would keep her too far from him, despite the thoroughness of his search. Still, this was the best strategy he could come up with, without resorting to magic. He wished college administration offices were not so protective of the names of their students, but several attempts to find out if Leesa was at a college had been met with stiff resistance.
He turned his back to the wind and opened the map of the city he had obtained at a tourist kiosk in the New Haven train depot, protecting the paper from the wind with his body. He folded the map into a smaller square that showed only the Yale area and was able to handle it much more easily. The campus was about seven short blocks wide and slightly more than a dozen much longer blocks long. That was the good news. The bad news was that parts of the campus were built in quadrangles with lots of walkways and plazas, and there were many dorms and other buildings taller than three stories. The stair climbing would not really tire him, but it would take valuable time.
There was nothing he could do about it, though, so he tucked the map into his coat pocket and set off down the first block.