What Lies Hidden

by C G Cooper

  “Mac,” said Mac.

  “Mac.” Snapping her fingers, she drew a keycard from her pocket. “This’ll open any electronic lock on campus. I can do it remotely, too, but this way you can let me sleep in.” She rose to show him the industrial keychain that hung opposite her badge. “If you meet any old-fashioned locks, give me a call.”

  Mac shook his head. “Kinda low opinion of my skills you’ve got there, officer.”

  Lynn held up her hands. “Fine by me if you want to do things the hard way.” She stood watching him a moment longer than necessary.

  “Was there something else?”

  “Nah. Just looking. A friend of mine from Langley told me you were something to see.”

  He spread his hands. “What do you think?”

  She shrugged. “I think I’d like to take you shopping. You could grab the soup cans I can’t reach on the top shelf.”

  “Everybody wants to put me to work.”

  She said, “I’ll give you a wake-up call when I come back on. Don’t want you to miss the meeting.”

  “Sleep tight.”

  “You too.”

  After she left, Mac checked his watch: 97:24:08.

  He sat down to decide how he was going to occupy himself for the next seven hours. Lynn’s intuitive leap that he might take a nap wasn’t crazy. He hadn’t slept more than four hours at a stretch since Tuesday. Maybe he’d do that after he checked out Schuyler’s fitness facilities, which he had reason to believe were pretty terrible. First, though, he wanted to review the dossiers of the people he’d met.

  In a few minutes, he had his laptop booted up and connected via Virtual Private Network (VPN) to the CIA mainframes. He reviewed the Jarralds’ dossiers, confirming that his memory of their contents was accurate. A brief diversion into Mikayla’s file revealed a juvenile conviction for vandalism that he’d forgotten. The account of the affair that had ended her time at Yale was juicier than he remembered, but that was probably due to the manly urge he tried and failed to suppress.

  The dossier he had hoped to find enlightening turned out to be the biggest disappointment.

  NAME: ANNE-JEANETTE KEYES

  DATE OF BIRTH: 10/03/1968

  CITIZENSHIP: USA

  OCCUPATION: PROFESSOR OF HUMANITIES, SCHUYLER UNIVERSITY, SENECA COUNTY, NY

  Born in Milan, Italy to runway model Leah Elizabeth Keyes and an unknown father, Anne-Jeanette spent her childhood in the fashion capitals of the world. Educated in private academies in Paris, London, and New York, her mother’s habit of never staying in one place for any length of time seems to have been passed down. After obtaining two Master’s and a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, UC Berkeley, and Princeton, respectively, her academic career has taken her around the world and back again.

  He skimmed over the recounting of the professor’s foreign ports-of-call until his eyes settled on the closing paragraph.

  In recent years, she has found employment at several small and mid-size universities throughout the United States. In 1998, she inherited at least $3 million in capital and assets from her mother and has since made significant contributions to Médecins Sans Frontières, Green Peace, and the ACLU.

  It was no surprise he had forgotten the dossier entirely. Though Anne’s beginnings were unorthodox, the glossing over of salient details gave the impression that she was totally unworthy of his time. Had he not seen Anne-Jeanette Keyes in person, he would have concluded that she was a jet-setting aristo whose educational attainments grew out of sheer privileged boredom. Otherwise, the writer of the bio would have taken care to lay out the breadcrumbs of her life.

  Where were the deviant trysts, the flirtations with anarchy, the blood and thunder he was sure pounded in her veins? Instead, no hints about her politics, aside from casual philanthropic donations.

  He paged through the files he’d already reviewed and a half-dozen more. Every single account included details of minor sins. Most of these were sexual, though drug use, cases of violent assault, embezzlement, and tax evasion also put in appearances. Even the sainted Chandra Velankar had a public indecency charge in her distant past.

  The only exception to the rule was Anne, which didn’t fit at all with the vibe he’d gotten from her. Perhaps the bio writer had just been lazy. More likely, thought Mac, he was looking at a sanitized report. His security clearance gave him broad access to top secret information, but its scope was limited to what Kreisburg and other authority figures felt he needed to know. He fired off an email to the old man asking to expand that scope in the case of Brian Jarrald’s sheet.

  Soon after, the words on the screen started to blur together, so he slept until five-thirty. He woke with a gnawing hunger, so he scarfed down two of the sandwiches Chandra had stowed for him, plus a pasta salad.

  The fridge was loaded with bottled water. Once he was hydrated, he drove out to the gym but found that it was lousy: all plastic, no iron. He ran three miles on a treadmill and did a smoke session of push-ups and air squats, then left, disgusted. The place didn’t even have a pull-up bar.

  When he’d showered and changed, he drove back to the townhouse and ate another sandwich. He checked for a reply from Kreisburg, but found only a demand for the day’s report. After he had typed that out, he dozed on the couch, imagining tomorrow’s date with Mikayla.

  Chapter Nine

  Lynn called at nine o’clock, as promised. Mac dug out a sweater from his duffel to wear under his jacket. The overcoat was a bit bulky for his taste, and might get in the way should he run into trouble. He considered it a necessary evil given the cold. Mac completed the outfit wrapped in gloves and a hat.

  It had stopped snowing, but the dusting had kept up long enough to fill Chandra’s footprints to half their depth. Lynn had left no footprints at all.

  It took just over eight minutes for Mac to hike from his back door to the east stairway of the women’s dorm. More than half of Schuyler’s student body were commuters, so the school crammed all the live-ins into two L-shaped blocks of rooms at opposite corners of the campus. The east stairway was lightly trafficked, opening as it did on a snowy quarter-acre bordered by woodland.

  Lynn said that she’d cut the light and heat to the stairs, just in case.

  Clouds covered the waxing moon as Mac shielded the light from his watch. At precisely 9:30 p.m., he approached the stairway’s emergency exit, removed his gloves, and knocked. One, two, three knocks, then a pause before two more. The door opened and Mac slipped inside. He could hear another man breathing but could see only shadows on the floor.

  “Jeez, it’s freezing,” said the man.

  “I’m looking for the library,” said Mac. “Do you know how to get there?”

  “Huh? We doing that? I thought, you know, the knock.”

  Mac slid a hand behind his back.

  “Gimme a sec,” said the man. “Okay, got it. ‘Sorry. I’m more Netflix and chill.’ Can we go in now?”

  Mac relaxed his grip on the P229 and left it in his waistband. “Fine by me. I’m Mahoe. Call me Mac.”

  “Chance,” said the man. He held out a hand in front of the window, where Mac could see it. “Detective Chance Gardner, BCI.”

  Mac shook the detective’s hand.

  “We’re on two,” said Chance.

  The hallway was illuminated but abandoned. Police tape blocked the second door on the right. Mac watched Chance stroll down the hallway. A brunette in a Beauty and the Beast nightshirt stumbled out of the first door he passed. She paused. Chance flashed his badge.

  Her roommate leaned out, grabbing her elbow. “He’s a cop,” she said.

  “A cute cop,” said the brunette. The roommate pulled her back inside the room.

  Chance gestured for Mac to come out. He lifted away the black and yellow tape and waved a keycard from his pocket at the pad. The door clicked and Chance opened it, motioning for Mac to go ahead.

  “You’re not going to find anything,” he said, flipping on the light.
>
  Mac paused to look him over: middle height, scruffy, but not as rough around the edges as he wanted people to believe. He seemed young for a detective. Not young enough to pass as a student but young enough to flirt with one.

  “I saw you reach when you came in,” Chance said. “Were you gonna shoot me or what?”

  “What do you think?” asked Mac.

  Chance considered. “I think that’s a pretty thin jacket. You cold?”

  Mac unzipped the jacket, showed his sweater. “Layers,” he said.

  “Sure,” said Chance. “We all got ‘em. Look, man. What am I doing here?”

  Instead of answering, Mac walked to the back of the room. It only took three steps. He’d been in bigger closets. Shelves with cutouts for a mini fridge and microwave lined the cramped entryway. Past this joke of a kitchenette, a single desk stood against the wall on the left. Books were stacked on built-in shelves.

  The opposite wall hosted a coffin-sized storage compartment. The only other furnishings in the room were a desk chair and a chest of exactly four drawers positioned between the two beds, one of which was neatly made, the other ruffled. On top of the chest was an empty plastic vase and an expensive set of wireless headphones.

  “What do you think of the roommate?” said Mac.

  “Dana? Dana’s okay. Out of town with the rest of the kids when it happened. Local PD paid a house call to her dad’s place a week ago Wednesday. She was definitely there.”

  Mac nodded. Nothing in Dana Barringer’s file suggested her as a person of interest. She was just a regular college girl whose roommate happened to show up dead.

  “Your boys find any narcotics?” said Mac.

  “You read my report.”

  “I did,” said Mac. “I did read your report. How do you explain the toxicology?”

  Nothing strange had been discovered in Tiffany’s blood work, but an unknown substance had been scraped from her face and hair. It was residue, according to the toxicologist, from an airborne chemical.

  “All of a sudden I’m an expert?”

  “How do you explain it to yourself, when you’re lying in bed at night?”

  The shadow of a smile flashed across Chance’s face. “I can’t. Dana had a can of hairspray — on the shelf, there — but nothing like the stuff they found on Tiffany.”

  “You call her Tiffany?”

  “Don’t you?”

  Mac examined the photo board hanging above the ruffled bed. Photos of Tiffany, her friends, mom and sister from back home. “What do you think happened to her?”

  Chance stuck his thumbs in his belt loops. “What’s the CIA’s interest in a teenage suicide?”

  “The CIA’s not interested. I am,” Mac replied. “And you don’t think it was a suicide.”

  “I don’t? Here you are asking questions but you were a mind reader all along.”

  Mac shook his head. “I don’t read minds, brother, just faces. Like the face you’re giving me now. You’re not mad at me for wasting your time. You’re worried about wasting mine.”

  Chance’s jaw slackened. He tightened it back up.

  “Fine,” he said. “Let’s go through it. Tiffany Garrett, bright, pretty girl from way out in flyover country, lands a scholarship with an out-of-state school. She breezes through freshman year. Good grades, no extracurriculars we know about.” He shrugged at Mac. “I mean that literally and euphemistically. She worked at the Sip ‘n Scrub over the summer. In the middle of her sophomore year, she takes a fall five stories into packed snow.” He pounded a fist into his hand, a gesture that would have seemed in bad taste if not for his scowl.

  “Dead. Gone. Nobody knows why.” Chance shook his head in clear frustration. “The lab boys didn’t find drugs in her system. Brute squad didn’t turn up anything here. The boot print evidence, you read that part?” Mac nodded, and Chance continued. “It shows there were four people on the roof the night Tiffany died. One of the other three must have dosed her with something. That stuff on her face, we don’t know what it is, but we know nobody was close enough to push her over the edge. She did that herself. Something made her do it. I can live with not knowing what that was. What keeps me up at night is why she had to die.” He gestured around him. “I was hoping we’d catch a lead when we searched this place. She didn’t keep a diary. Her social media’s clean as a Charmin bear’s backside. This was a girl who kept her thoughts to herself. If she knew somebody was out to get her, she took that knowledge to the grave.”

  Chance’s shoulders slumped with the weight of a veteran cop’s burden. “I’ve got a whole campus of kids out there wondering if they could be the next target. Half of them knew Tiffany and liked her. There wasn’t anyone who knew her that didn’t like her, unless they’re better liars than kids usually are. Faculty too. Staff, visitors, parents. There’s a university full of people who oughta be able to tell me who wanted Tiffany dead. Nice girl, they say. Quiet. Not an enemy in the world.”

  He kicked the wall in frustration. Just a toe to the baseboard, not enough to do damage.

  Mac gave him a second to catch his breath. Then he said, “It wasn’t a random killing, crime of opportunity?”

  “Who’re you kidding?” said the detective. “The furniture inside Morris Hall was rearranged. Whoever did it planned it to a tee.”

  Mac nodded. It was good that he’d brought the detective in. The man knew his stuff.

  Fishing a flashlight out of his jacket pocket, Mac knelt to search under Tiffany’s bed.

  Chance said, “There’s the other thing, too.”

  “What other thing?” said Mac as his flashlight cut through the darkness under the bed.

  “There are security cameras aimed at the path Tiffany must have taken that night. I interviewed a guy who says he was watching those cams. Only, he didn’t see anything. No Tiffany, nobody else at the time she was on the move. There’s tape, of course, but when I ask for it, the chief tells me I can’t have it. Some federal agency’s gone over my head. I’m thinking FBI.“ Mac could hear the shrug in Chance’s voice. “I don’t love the idea, but I’ve dealt with FBI. I can handle FBI. But it ain’t FBI, it’s CIA. I say to the chief, ‘CIA?’ He says to me, ‘Yeah, CIA.’ And all of a sudden, I go from beating myself up for not having a solid lead to wondering what my government doesn’t want me to know.”

  Bored with looking at dust bunnies, Mac got to his feet. “There was nothing on the tape,” he said.

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing you wouldn’t have seen on another night. Several nights, actually,” Mac explained as he brushed off his pants. “The recording spliced in footage from at least four different dates. The watchmen are supposed to walk a fixed route. On the tape, they do. But my colleagues interviewed the watchmen. Their walkies went dead around 1:00 a.m. Following protocol, they switched channels.” Mac pocketed his flashlight as he spoke.

  “As soon as they did, new orders came in. Two guys were ordered to deviate from their route. There was a disturbance, supposedly, at a picnic spot in the northwest corner of the property. When they got there, they found a hot grill. Nothing else. Ten minutes later, the new walkie channel went dead and the old one came back to life. All that time, the dispatcher didn’t see a thing.”

  Chance said, “Somebody hacked the security feed.”

  Mac nodded. “Minutes before Tiffany Garrett died.”

  “My guys didn’t hear that story.”

  “They wouldn’t have.”

  “Because your guys told the watchmen to keep quiet.”

  “They did.”

  Chance’s eyebrows furrowed. “Why?”

  “Your guys wouldn’t have known what to make of their story without the tape.”

  “And you didn’t want to turn over the tape.”

  Mac shrugged. “Not my call. I do understand the reasons, though.”

  “Care to enlighten me?”

  “Think about it,” Mac said. “How does it sound to you? How does knowing that somebody hack
ed the cams, patched in a false feed, and used RF scramblers to fuzz the walkie signals change your theory of the crime?”

  “It- I don’t know. It’s crazy.”

  “Crazy?”

  “Yeah, crazy,” Chance replied. “Also complicated, and dangerous.”

  “Why dangerous?”

  “Too many balls in the air. Too much can go wrong. You wanna kill somebody, that’s about the craziest way I ever heard of.”

  “What if I told you that it sounded about right?”

  Chance raised an eyebrow. “About right for what, the circus?”

  Mac smiled. He wasn’t far from wrong. “About right for people in my line of work. You ever heard of The Farm?”

  “I did my research,” said Chance. “It’s where you spooks go to spook school, yeah? What about it?”

  “Everything that happened: the video feed being altered, the watchmen getting diverted, Tiffany’s death being something you could pass off as suicide if you didn’t want to look too hard – it all reminds me of my time at The Farm. I can’t tell you how. You’d have to have been there. But it’s familiar. Like a training exercise I half remember, the sort of operation we might have been asked to plan and execute.”

  “Throw a lot of people off buildings at The Farm, did ya?”

  “Not without a net,” said Mac. “And Tiffany wasn’t thrown.”

  “Right,” said Chance. “That’s right. But you still haven’t answered my question.”

  “What question’s that?”

  “What am I doing here?”

  Mac walked over to the desk. “There was a detail in your report that I wanted to ask you about. Tell me about the mirror.”

  “Huh?” said Chance. He looked at the glass in question. The eight-by-five-inch oval sat in an old-fashioned, lacework metal frame. It was propped up on a wire picture stand on the desk’s lowest shelf.

  Mac said, “You noted there were grains of sugar on the desk in front of the mirror, like they’d fallen off.”

  “Yeah,” said Chance. “I didn’t know it was sugar at the time. Might have been anthrax for all I knew. We don’t dip a finger in and taste stuff, like on TV. I sent it to the lab. It was sugar.”