Once the interviews were done, I returned to my office and glanced at all the reports that mentioned the man in red. I spread them across my desk to try and find a connection. When I ran out of desk room, I used the floor. It was as I was spacing them out that I finally found the link between them: every single sighting of the man in red had occurred in or around the same four buildings. These weren’t just any random buildings on campus, either. They formed the perimeter around one of the university’s main parking lots. Even still, the buildings had very little in common, except for their proximity:
Vanier, the oldest of the four facilities, was built in 1954. It closed down for a while, but was renovated recently to make room for the school of psychology.
Monpetit, found diagonally across the parking lot from Vanier, was built in 1973, and has since been host to the gym, a swimming pool, and the largest library on campus.
Lamoureux, Montpetit’s next door neighbor, was built in 1978. It was later connected to Montpetit and Vanier through a series of overpasses.
FSS, the university’s shiny new state-of-the-art social sciences facility, was finished in 2012. With all floors connected to Vanier, some consider it to be a new wing of the old building.
Like I mentioned earlier, at the center of these four buildings was a parking lot. This summer, the lot was fenced off for construction work. The university wanted to turn the area into a green space and courtyard. It was supposed to be done by the start of the Fall semester, but construction crews came across several setbacks. The most notable of which was the car they unearthed about a month ago. The license plate on the car dated it back to the late 1960s. Apparently, before the parking lot was a parking lot, there had been some sort of student housing facility, which had been bulldozed in the early 1970s. It was assumed the car had been abandoned inside the old residence and buried along with it.
I decided to cast a wider net. Going back through decades of accident reports in and around those four particular buildings, I found the burgundy-clad man every so often. He was first seen in 1975 when the scaffolding came apart and caused a construction worker to fall to his death, he was present in 2003 when a student slipped on the ice and was paralyzed from the waist-down, he watched from a window when a young woman fell down the main stairs and broke her arm, and he was even spotted sitting in a reading room in the library when a man suffered a seizure. He was all over the place, with reports dating back 20, sometimes even 30 years.
Today, construction work on the parking lot came to a complete stop. The area was corded off by police. I walked by just in time to see them pull out the skeletal remains of a man in an old, tattered, red pullover. 
