The still simmering coffeepot, gurgling on the counter in the corner of the room, caught my eye, and an idea struck me. Casually, I strolled over to it, keeping my back to the camera poised over the doorway. I poured myself a cup of coffee then set aside the empty pot. Before anyone else could walk in, I grabbed a stack of coffee filters, shoved them onto the hot burner, and replaced the pot so that they were less visible. Then I grabbed my black cup of coffee and left the room.
I slipped into the nearby bathroom to wait. Just as I closed and locked the stall door, the burner phone notified me of a text message from Lauren.
Any luck?
I typed back: Possibly. Keep you posted.
I tucked the phone away and settled in to wait, rifling through the possible outcomes of my actions in the break room. My thoughts spun wildly. Worst-case scenario: this wouldn’t work at all, and the security guard would come busting into the bathroom and have me arrested for arson. Best-case scenario?
I didn’t have time to ponder it. Without warning, the fire alarm in the bathroom went off. An earsplitting buzzer sounded, accompanied by a bright, strobing light. Outside the bathroom door, I could already hear the thunder of footsteps fading down the hallway. The office was evacuating. Triumphant, I waited a few minutes longer and then ventured out of the bathroom.
Thick, acrid smoke filtered into the hallway from the break room like a dangerous storm cloud. I pulled my blouse up over my nose, trying not to inhale too much. I peeked into the break room, but the fumes were so thick that I could hardly make out the coffeemaker. I hadn’t expected a handful of coffee filters to create such an effective diversion. Backing out of the room, I moved to the security office. Sure enough, the guard had vacated, and from the looks of the monitors, Paulson’s employees had taken their leave as well. For good measure, I snuck in, clicked around the main monitor, and disabled the cameras that might catch me during my next round of felonies. The less footage Paulson had of my presence in the media office, the better.
I made my way back to the waiting room, and without preamble, I yanked the BRS painting off the wall. There was no immediate satisfaction in its removal. The wall behind it was unmarked, but I knew how BRS operated. They were sly bastards, and concealing things in plain sight, including their clubhouse, was their MO.
I rapped the wall with my knuckles. Sure enough, the sound that echoed back was hollow, not at all like the tight drum of finding a wall stud. I pressed my fingertips to the corners of the space where the painting had been, searching for a flaw in the pattern of the striped wallpaper. Along one of the vertical lines, I found the tiniest hint of a seam and followed it all the way up and across the perimeter of the painting space. With a slight push, the section of the wall gave way, flipping upward as if on a hinge.
“Idiots,” I murmured as the hidden door revealed a tiny, dark alcove. A small, opaque container about the size of a shoe box occupied the space, and I reached forward to extract it. I opened it easily, but as soon as the lid drifted upward, a cloud of ashes wafted out. I snapped the lid shut, my heart thumping wildly in my chest.
BRS had cremated O’Connor.
“You set the office on fire?”
“Barely,” I said to Lauren. I’d made it back to the basement of Ben’s indie bookstore without any trouble. Paulson Media had still been smoking when I left it, and it wasn’t hard to sneak past the gaggle of employees waiting on the first floor for the fire department to check out the situation. “You said it yourself. I needed a diversion.”
“I didn’t mean burn the place to the ground!”
I rolled my eyes at Lauren’s overreaction. “I didn’t exactly have a lot of options. It was just a couple of coffee filters, not a bomb. Besides, it was hardly a full-fledged fire. The smoke shield was really all I needed. I’m sure the fire department put it out by now anyway.”
Lauren simply gazed at me openmouthed.
“Seriously, Lauren. Stop looking at me like that. Paulson Media will go on.”
“You are way crazier than I originally assumed.”
“I thought you had that figured out when I broke in to the Raptors’ headquarters,” I reminded her, spreading out on the leather couch and propping my feet up on the opposite armrest.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t counting on pyromania.”
“Do you even want to know if I found anything?” I prompted, eager to move on from my incendiarism. I’d already added the incident to my mental list of the immoral deeds I’d racked up ever since the Black Raptor Society had derailed any hope of an uncomplicated life.
Lauren quieted. “Of course I do.”
I pulled the container of ashes from my black backpack.
“What the hell is that?”
“O’Connor’s ashes,” I said, getting up to set the makeshift urn on Lauren’s desk. “At least, I think that’s what it is. Then again, I wouldn’t put it past the Raptors to have multiple boxes of bodily remains hidden in random offices.”
Lauren pulled a face as she tentatively opened the box. “Ew.”
“Can you figure out if it’s really O’Connor?”
“Forensics was never really my thing, Nicole.”
My shoulders slumped. “So what? This is just another dead end? We can’t just turn it in to the cops and ask them to run DNA testing on it.”
“Living material doesn’t survive the heat of cremation anyway,” Lauren informed me matter-of-factly. “But if his teeth are in there, we still might have a shot.”
“I thought you said forensics wasn’t your thing.”
“It’s not,” confirmed Lauren, “but one of my best friends is majoring in biochemistry and molecular biology. She has access to Waverly’s labs. If anyone could figure out whose remains these are, it’s her.”
“Aren’t the majority of your friends BRS members?”
“You forget that I have quite a few interests outside of the Raptors’ insane plans to take over the campus,” Lauren said. She set aside O’Connor’s ashes. “This is another girl from my crew team.”
“And you trust her?”
“Unconditionally.”
I nodded. “Let’s do it then.”
“I’ll get the container to her as soon as possible,” said Lauren. “In the meantime, I decrypted some of the files off of O’Connor’s computer.”
“Why didn’t you lead with that?” I demanded. I dragged an armchair over to Lauren’s desk and sat down next to her. “What did you find?”
“See for yourself.”
She double-clicked a file in the corner of her desktop, and it expanded to display a scanned image of an old newspaper article from the Waverly Daily, the university’s current student-run paper. It was dated 1985, and the jarring headline was enough to make anyone do a double take:
Waverly Deaths Go Unsolved
It’s been a full three months since the last Waverly death, but as the spring semester comes to a close, an air of mourning once again looms over campus. Earlier this week, we reported that yet another freshman student, Anna Abernathy, was discovered unresponsive in her dorm room and was pronounced dead on the scene. Like the other victims, contusions on Abernathy’s body seemed to mark her death as a consequence of hazing. However, the police have yet to identify those responsible for these catastrophic grievances. Waverly University has a strict no-tolerance policy regarding hazing, and the board of governors has declared a suspension on all Greek life until they see fit.
Abernathy’s death marks the seventh and hopefully the final tragedy to befall our university this year. The Student Government Association will hold a tribute to the seven victims of the spring semester this Friday at 7 p.m. in the quad. Should you have any questions, please contact Poppy St. Claire or Stephen Wickes of the SGA.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the two points of contact for the SGA in 1985 were both members of BRS, right?” I asked Lauren, staring at the article.
“Probably not.”
“Coincidence?”
“Probably not.”
I sighed, leaned back in the armchair, and rubbed my heavy eyelids with the palms of my hands. “You said you decoded more than one file. What else did you find?”
“More of the same,” said Lauren, opening O’Connor’s other documents. “All Waverly Daily articles from 1985 reporting the freshman deaths.”
“O’Connor wouldn’t have honed in on that year if he didn’t think those students’ deaths had something to do with BRS,” I said. “If the Raptors were responsible, that would explain why shutting down Greek life didn’t stop the problem. The Raptors aren’t Greek, and they would’ve continued doing whatever they wanted. Did BRS haze you when you were a freshman?”
Lauren shook her head. “They wouldn’t dare. The extent of the freshman hazing experience depends on how deeply your family is rooted in the society. The Lockwoods founded BRS. If my father found out that any of the older Raptors had hazed me, he would’ve committed murder a lot sooner than this semester.”
“How comforting. But BRS does have a history of hazing?”
“It’s discouraged,” explained Lauren, crossing one leg over the other. “Hazing is distasteful, and I know my father won’t stand for it. The only problem? There have always been other members of the society that disagree with my father’s stance. They think freshmen should have to earn their place among us, especially those who don’t have family ties as historical as my own.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Donovan loves to haze the freshmen.”
“Nailed it. I caught him in the clubhouse last year doing some truly horrific things to our acolytes—that’s what we call the pledges—and I reported it my father. Donovan was reprimanded, but nothing really came of it. He still does it. He just takes it off campus.”
“Off campus?” I repeated, perking up. “Where?”
“No idea. I heard Donovan and Wickes talking about it once. Why?”
“Because I’d bet anything that they’re keeping Wes in the same place.”
15
At the warehouse, Wes wrestled with the duct tape around his wrists. Donovan had left him alone and been gone for well over an hour. In theory, that was plenty of time for a trained police officer to execute an escape attempt from a hostage situation, but the ibuprofen had only done so much, and the dull ache that persistently throbbed at the base of Wes’s neck was one hell of a distraction. Every tug at the duct tape was accompanied by a new stab of pain, and though he’d managed to loosen his bindings, it wasn’t enough to free his hands. Wes slumped in the chair, exhausted and cold, and wondered if Nicole was faring any better than he.
The door to the warehouse slid open again, and a gust of glacial wind rustled Wes’s hair. Donovan entered, this time leading a woman along behind him. She was tall, thin, and sylphlike, made entirely of graceful angles. She floated rather than walked toward Wes, and her dark eyes narrowed, honing in on Wes like a hawk singling out its prey.
“Good afternoon, Mr. McAllen,” she crooned, stopping short of Wes’s chair. She plucked her gloves from perfectly manicured fingers then shook a few snowflakes from her long, black hair.
“Who the hell are you?”
“My, my,” said the woman with a calculated smile. “I was under the impression that police officers were taught to treat their citizens with respect.”
“Not when those citizens are criminals,” growled Wes through clenched teeth.
“I disdain the word criminal,” replied the woman. “I quite prefer maverick or pioneer. You know, something with a little bit more pizazz. Donovan, fetch me a chair, would you? I’ve been on my feet all day.”
Donovan walked off, his footsteps echoing through the warehouse. The woman simply observed Wes, a hint of a smile playing at the corner of her lips.
“Allow me to introduce myself, Weston,” she said. “My name is Catherine Flynn.”
“Ah, I should’ve guessed.”
“You’ve heard of me?”
“Nicole’s mentioned you.”
Flynn arched an eyebrow. “Has she now?”
“I wouldn’t get so excited,” said Wes, fidgeting in the chair. “She didn’t have many positive things to report.”
“Yes, I’m afraid Miss Costello and I disagreed on several things including the topic of her thesis paper,” reported Flynn with an air of indifference.
“What else did you disagree on?” asked Wes in an even voice. “The level of psychosis required to murder a colleague?”
Flynn smirked, her silky black eyes reflecting the light from the fluorescents above. “I can see why Nicole adores you,” she said. “Handsome, intelligent, levelheaded even under stress. Any young woman would be lucky to have you. It’s a shame, really.”
“What is?”
“My dear, I don’t expect either one of you to survive the next day or so.”
Wes’s stomach lurched, but before Flynn could elaborate, Donovan reappeared with two additional folding chairs beneath his arm. He plunked them down in front of Wes, unfolding the first for Flynn.
“Thank you,” said Flynn. She removed her lush winter coat, draping it over the back of the chair, and sat down, crossing one long leg over the other. “Weston, I understand you haven’t been a model of cooperation these past few hours.”
Wes remained silent. By these people’s standards, that was true. Donovan had bombarded Wes with questions about Nicole’s family, the majority of which didn’t seem to have anything to do with the situation at hand. Wes had refused to answer, and Donovan had grown more and more agitated. Donovan had finally stormed out of the warehouse in a fit of rage, but Wes wasn’t naive enough to think he’d dodged a bullet.
Flynn leaned forward, scootching closer to Wes. “See that trunk over there?” she asked, pointing to the ever-present object. It was a ghost in the room, haunting Wes quietly from its spot on the warehouse floor. “Weston, that trunk contains something very valuable to me,” Flynn went on. “However, I do not happen to possess the key. You can imagine how this predicament might be… frustrating.”
“I already told this dipshit,” said Wes, jerking his head toward Donovan who sat a few paces away from Flynn. “I have no idea where your damn key is.”
“Oh, but I think you do,” countered Flynn. “I’ll make you a deal, Weston. The more information you can give me, the longer I’ll keep Miss Costello alive. Maybe I’ll even allow the two of you an emotional reunion before I kill you both. How does that sound?”
“Nicole’s gone,” hissed Wes, but the thought of Flynn harming her caused him to yank at the duct tape again. “Davenport’s already let slip that she escaped.”
A vein in Flynn’s neck twitched as she caught Donovan in her gaze. “Donovan, why is it that I continue to hold you in such high regard when you cannot seem to keep your damn mouth shut?”
Donovan didn’t dare respond. Instead, he fixed Wes with a menacing glare to which Wes responded with a humorless grin.
“Rest assured, Weston,” continued Flynn, putting an immediate end to the silent bickering match between the two younger men, “we have plenty of eyes on your precious girlfriend. She’ll be picked up again soon enough.”
“Why are you doing this?” asked Wes. “Because Nicole almost busted the Black Raptor Society? Have you even thought about what you’re doing? The crimes you’ve committed? You murdered a man! Took away his life. How does that thought not haunt you at night?”
Flynn let out a high, cold laugh. “Oh, my boy. My qualm does not lie solely with Nicole Costello. She is a mere pawn, and a regrettably inconvenient one at that. Sometimes, I even lament orchestrating her acceptance to Waverly. This might’ve been easier had we disposed of her earlier.”
“What are you even talking about?” demanded Wes, confused.
“Nicole Costello would have never been accepted to Waverly University on her own,” declared Flynn, flicking an invisible speck of dust from beneath one flawless nail. “God, she went to a state school for her undergraduate degree. It wa
s only by chance that she even applied to Waverly for her master’s. At first, I wondered if she’d discovered her connections to our beautiful institution, but I understand now that she is just as ignorant of her history as you are.”
“I have no idea what you’re—what history?” Wes squinted at Flynn. Was she toying with him, or were the effects of his concussion still messing with his perception of things?
Flynn chuckled. “This is such a treat. I so enjoy delivering heart-stopping revelations.”
“What revelations?”
She lounged in her chair, gazing languidly at Wes. “Both of Nicole’s parents, Anthony and Natasha, were once students at Waverly University. Her father was a member of the Black Raptor Society.”
16
“Anthony!”
Anthony picked up his pace, racing down an aisle of the Waverly library. For God’s sake, all he needed was to check out a damn book on Greek and Roman humanities, but his ex-girlfriend lurked like an ever-present shadow. These days, it seemed like he ran into her at every corner of the campus, and he was starting to think that it wasn’t an accident. He rounded the row of shelves at top speed and plowed right into a librarian. The load of books that she carried toppled over and fell noisily to the floor in a jumbled pile.
“Young man!” the librarian scolded.
Anthony knelt to help gather the books. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“Nice going, dipstick,” said a voice behind him. Anthony’s fists clenched at the familiar biting tone. “If you hadn’t so desperately been trying to escape from me like an immature five-year-old, you wouldn’t have run over Miss Smithson.”
Anthony handed the last rumpled book back to Miss Smithson before turning to face his ex-girlfriend. As usual, she looked flawless, but her dark beauty had long lost its disarming effect on Anthony. “Cat, I swear, if you don’t stop accosting me, I’m going to get a restraining order.”
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