“She was a sophomore,” I said.
“And she should have been studying,” Senator Hale said. “Good afternoon, Mr. Walker.”
She looked down at her desk calendar, clicking her pen twice.
“We have a lot of work to do before the election,” she said to her secretary, who stood by the door.
“Your son Brandon was with Ethan Cole,” I said. “He was there.”
Senator Hale’s hand tightened on her pen.
“My son was at his dormitory, Mr. Walker,” she said. “And I suggest you stop making accusations you cannot prove.”
“We will see what the security logs say,” I said.
She smiled, but her fingers were white around the pen.
“The logs are public record,” she said. “Or rather, they would be, if they existed.”
“They exist,” I said.
“You are welcome to try to find them,” she said. “But I think you will find this town is very small when you do not have any friends.”
“I have enough friends,” I said.
“We will see about that,” she said, her voice dropping its warm tone completely.
I turned and walked out of the office.
The lobby was cool, but the air outside was thick with the smell of damp asphalt.
The sun was low behind the brick buildings when I walked out into the gravel lot.
My old blue sedan was parked near the brick alley wall.
Two men in black windbreakers stood near the driver’s side door. They had short haircuts and wore small earpieces.
One of them stepped forward, blocking my path to the handle.
“Mr. Walker,” he said.
“Step aside,” I said.
“We have a message from the county commissioner’s office,” the man said. “Your state security consultant certification is under review. Some paperwork went missing from your file.”
“What paperwork?” I asked.
“The kind that keeps you in business,” the man said. “You should take a long vacation. Out of the state.”
I did not answer.
“Your business license suspension notice,” the second man said, leaning against the fender. “It would be a shame if you couldn’t pay your bills.”
“My license is current,” I said.
“Not anymore,” the first man said.
I did not answer.
I reached past him, unlocked the door, and got into the driver’s seat.
The two men watched me through the glass as I started the engine.
I looked at my hands on the steering wheel, realizing the law was never designed to protect me here.
The rain had stopped by the time I pulled into the gravel lot of Reyes’s salvage yard, the dark shapes of stacked cars rising like broken teeth against the night sky. The light in the metal shed was blue and sharp, casting long shadows across the oily concrete floor.
Raymond Reyes sat on a steel stool, his deep frame hunched over a heavy computer monitor. He adjusted his plain black wristwatch with a quick, nervous flick of his thumb before looking up.
“Close the door behind you,” Reyes said, his voice a gravelly rasp.
I slid the heavy metal door shut, the latch dropping with a heavy clank. The room smelled of copper wire and cold oil, a familiar combination that always made my shoulders tighten. On the workbench lay a heavy silver hard drive with its casing partially exposed.
“Where did it come from?” I asked, keeping my words short.
“A contact in the campus IT department who still owes me a favor,” Reyes said, tapping the grey casing of the drive with a yellowed fingernail. “Someone tried to wipe it twice, but they used a standard university delete command instead of a military-grade overwrite.”
He hit a key, and the monitor flickered, displaying a dark, grainy view of the campus plaza. The timestamp in the corner glowed in bright green digits, showing the exact date of Lily’s attack.
“This drive has the original timestamp, Daniel. They cannot bury this,” Reyes whispered.
On the screen, three figures in heavy jackets walked across the stone tiles of the courtyard. The overhead safety lights were dark, but the camera itself was running on an independent battery back-up, its lens catching the pale reflection of the city lights in the distance. The boys were not hurried, their movements loose and confident as they waited near the edge of the shadows.
I rubbed my thumb over the silver skull coin in my pocket, the cold metal edges pressing into my skin. The figures on the screen were clear enough to identify if we had the right software to clean up the resolution.
“Who else has seen this?” I asked.
“Just us,” Reyes said, turning his head to look at the dark window. “But the local police department is already asking questions about why the server room log showed an external download at noon today.”
The screen went black as Reyes cut the feed, the silence in the shed suddenly feeling much heavier.
We walked out of the shed and into the main yard, our boots crunching on the wet gravel. The rows of rusted car frames stretched into the darkness, smelling of damp iron and rotting upholstery. A cold breeze came off the river, rattling a loose sheet of tin on the roof above us.
Reyes reached into his canvas jacket and pulled out a small plastic bag containing a black keycard with a gold-plated chip. He held it out to me under the pale light of a single exterior bulb.
“I found this in a desk drawer when I visited the campus security office after hours,” Reyes said, his gravelly voice dropping even lower. “It belongs to Officer Vance.”
I took the bag, the plastic crinkling in my palm. The card had a small university logo printed on the front, but the magnetic strip on the back was marked with a red marker.
“What does it open?” I asked.
“It is a master key for the athletic department facilities,” Reyes said, adjusting his watch again. “But it has a customized digital signature that bypasses the standard logging system.”
The implications of the card in my hand were clear, yet the risk of carrying it was a weight I had not planned on taking. If Vance noticed it was gone, he would know exactly who had been digging into his desk.
“We need to know what he was keeping in those facilities,” I said.
“Then we need the old gear,” Reyes said, looking at me with a steady, unblinking gaze. “The stuff you swore you would never touch again.”
We drove back to my house in separate cars, parking two streets away to avoid leaving a pattern for anyone watching the driveway. The brick house was dark, the front porch light casting a yellow circle on the empty concrete.
We went straight to the basement, where the air was cool and smelled of dry earth. I walked past the shelves of old paint cans and garden tools to the heavy steel locker in the far corner behind the water heater. My fingers felt stiff as I turned the combination dial, the clicks sounding unusually loud in the quiet house.
