“Hi, baby,” said Wes. He was still dressed in his uniform. It looked like he had just gotten home from work. “Have you been here all day?”
“Mostly,” I admitted. At some point during my knockout nap, Franklin had abandoned me. Now he sat patiently by his dog bowl as if to remind us that it was time for his dinner.
“You have ink on your face,” Wes said, licking his thumb and rubbing at my cheek.
I sat up suddenly, remembering Jo’s message. The red ink on the back of my hand was smudged but still legible. Before I could forget, I leaned across Wes, reaching for a blank sticky note from the coffee table, and jotted down nec plus ultra. For good measure, I did my best to imitate the bird outline. I was no artist, but I got the general shape of it down.
“What’s that?” Wes asked, looking over my shoulder at the note.
“Something else to confuse me.”
“Well, explain it to me while we figure out what to make for dinner.”
As Wes and I unearthed a pair of chicken breasts from the refrigerator and decided to make chicken parmesan, I filled him in on the events of the day.
“She sounds like a bitch,” he commented when I told him about my meeting with Flynn. He popped the lid off a jar of tomato sauce and started spooning it over the chicken. “This Jo girl, though. How sure are you that she isn’t actually suffering from paranoia?”
I shook my head as I sliced fresh mozzarella. “It makes sense. Davenport never would’ve been valedictorian with his grades. Don’t you think it’s weird? Jo’s at the top of her class, everything’s perfect, and then all of a sudden, she’s flunking out and labeled as a nut job. It doesn’t add up.”
“If that’s the case, it makes me wonder what else the university is covering up,” said Wes. We finished preparing the chicken, and Wes slid the pan into the oven.
A possibility crossed my mind. “How curious are you about that?” I asked him.
Wes leaned against the kitchen counter, crossing his arms. “You’ve got that look, Nic.”
“What look?”
“The one you get every time you try to coerce me into doing something I don’t want to do. Just tell me.”
I circled around the counter to where Wes’s laptop was charging and tapped my fingers on its keyboard. “You have access to the police database, right? Could you do a search for cases involving Waverly students?”
“I could.”
I rolled my eyes. “Okay, but would you?”
“Nicole, come on.”
“What? It’s all right there!” I unplugged the laptop from its charger and carried it over to Wes. He remained firmly planted against the counter, so I gave him my best doe eyes. “Please?”
“Put my laptop back before you accidentally drop it in the sink or something,” Wes ordered. I stayed put, pouting, but Wes was adamant. “I have to draw the line somewhere, Nicole,” he said. “I can’t risk my job like that.”
My shoulders dropped. Most days, the presence of a morally sound boyfriend worked to my advantage, but when I needed him to bend the rules a tiny bit, he was as stiff as a slab of concrete. I recognized a lost battle. “I understand,” I said, abandoning the laptop. “I’m going to go change.”
“Thank you. I’ll make some veggies.”
I ambled into the bedroom, stripping off my sweater and undershirt, and opened the closet door to find something more comfortable to wear. As I rifled through my wardrobe, searching for a particular pair of ratty sweatpants with the Waverly University crest emblazoned on the thigh, the sight of Wes’s desktop computer, the one he used to work from home, caught my eye in the mirror. Half-dressed, I wandered over to Wes’s desk and typed his password in. The screensaver vanished to reveal the main page of the police database already pulled up on the desktop. All I had to do was log in with Wes’s information. I glanced over my shoulder toward the kitchen, where the steady sizzle of oil in a pan and the clink of silverware told me that Wes was still blissfully unaware of my actions in the bedroom. My fingers lingered over the keyboard. I knew Wes’s username and password for his work account, but betraying Wes’s trust was a high price to pay for the slim chance of obtaining potential information. I was tiptoeing over the line he had spoken about earlier. Before integrity could get the best of me, I tapped in Wes’s information and hit Enter.
The database itself was easy enough to search through, and I found a list of cases involving Waverly students in a few brief seconds. As I scrolled through, keeping my eyes peeled for familiar names or peculiarities, Wes called down the hall from the kitchen.
“Babe, dinner’s ready!”
“One minute, I can’t find my sweatpants!” I called back, scrolling faster now. Several Waverly students had had encounters with the local force for petty crimes, but vandalism, disorderly conduct, and shoplifting were all run-of-the-mill experiences for the average college student. Nothing out of the ordinary revealed itself right away until one name, Spencer Schwartz, caused me to pause in my swift search. Schwartz was yet another one of the families that O’Connor had been following. I clicked on Spencer’s name, expanding the case file. It was a citation for aggravated DWI from the previous year, but for some inexplicable reason, Spencer hadn’t faced any kind of consequences for her actions. No fine, no jail time, no revocation of her license. She’d gotten off scot-free.
I took a picture of the screen with my phone then noticed that Spencer’s case had been copied and stored in another folder as well. I clicked the folder, revealing its contents, and a groan of incredulity found its way out of my mouth. The folder was full of cases similar to Schwartz’s, students from Waverly’s blue-blooded families that had committed crimes of varying severity, but every single one
