“What happened?”
“They asked me for some secret code. Of course, I didn’t know it, so I just hung up.”
“Uh-huh. What’s the tire iron for?”
“I spend a lot of time here,” said Jo, motioning me to follow her once again, “which means that when a BRS member shows up here, I’m usually aware of it. It’s the same three or four people over and over again, and they always visit the same locker.”
“Which people?”
“That Davenport asshole, of course.”
“Of course.”
“And Catherine Flynn. You know her? She’s the dean of your college.”
I flashed back to the first time I’d met Catherine Flynn face to face. We’d had a standoff in her office, the topic of which was my incomplete thesis research. It seemed so long ago that all I had to worry about was finishing up my master’s degree. If only I could find my way back to that level of simplicity.
“I know her” was all I said.
Jo stopped outside another garage and pointed to the ground. “See that?”
I squinted. “No.”
She knelt down, poking aside a crushed Styrofoam cup to reveal something underneath. “It’s almost gone, now that they’ve trekked through here so many times, but look there. It’s a blood trail.”
Sure enough, a faint, brown splatter of what was unmistakably dried blood decorated the gravel pebbles outside the garage. Jo jimmied the tire iron under the roll-up door, stepped on the opposite end, and pried the door upward.
“They don’t keep it locked, but the sucker is rusted shut most of the time,” she explained, heaving the door open halfway before it got stuck. “I guess they didn’t really expect us to come out here.”
“I’ve noticed that the Raptors are oddly confident with their security,” I said, crouching to fit under the door. “It makes me wonder how their misdeeds weren’t discovered sooner.”
Inside the garage was Professor O’Connor’s rickety old sedan, and it looked like it had seen better days. It was completely covered in mud and debris, as though O’Connor had driven it straight into a lake. The front fender was missing, and the driver’s-side window had been smashed in. The trail of blood dribbled across the concrete floor to the backseat door.
“I ran the plates,” said Jo. “It’s George O’Connor’s car, that professor who went missing from Waverly? It’s not looking so good for him. By the look of that blood trail, they took him out of the car to transport him somewhere else.”
“He’s dead,” I said shortly, my eyes glued to a bloody handprint on the inside of the rearview windshield. “They killed him.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I was the one who found his body.”
Jo’s eyes widened. “Are you kidding? What the hell, Nicole? That alone is enough to sink these guys! Where is it?”
I shrugged. The sight of O’Connor’s ruined car exhausted me. I leaned against the side of the garage. “I don’t know. At first, the Raptors had hidden it in their headquarters underneath the library, but they moved it when I found out about it. Honestly, I was hoping that it would be here.”
“I doubt it,” said Jo. “I haven’t found it yet, and I’m very good at finding things.”
Remembering that I had a job to do, I dug the digital camera out of the backpack that Lauren had given me and switched it on. It took me a couple seconds to figure out how to get the lens to focus—I had never really been into photography—and then started taking pictures. I circled O’Connor’s car, trying to get every angle, then opened the driver’s-side door with a gloved hand to avoid leaving fingerprints or getting cut by the window’s broken glass. I leaned inside, taking a photo of the handprint on the windshield, and was about to pull back when the sight of O’Connor’s cell phone, sitting in a coffee mug in the center console, caught my eye. I plucked the mug out of the cupholder.
“What the hell are you doing?” asked Jo, eyeing the mug. “You know Davenport is probably going to come back here, right? He’s going to notice if that mug is gone.”
“Davenport’s head is too far up his own ass to even notice if the grass is green,” I retorted, flipping the mug upside down. It smelled awful. The coffee inside was frozen solid, trapping the cell phone. I banged the mug against the concrete wall of the storage unit, breaking up its contents, until O’Connor’s phone dropped to the ground encased in a slushy prison of coffee. I replaced the mug in the cupholder, picked up the phone, and shook it off.
“It’s fried,” said Jo, looking over my shoulder.
She was right about that. The screen was cracked and distorted, worn down by the coffee, but O’Connor had tried to get rid of it for a reason. I wiped the coffee off as best as I could and pocketed the phone. Maybe Lauren would know how to revive it or at least retrieve whatever information O’Connor might have stored on it.
“You ever listen in on the conversations between Davenport and Flynn?” I asked Jo. I clicked a few more pictures, this time of the unit itself and the blood trail leading away from the car.
“No, I like to keep my distance.”
“Damn.” I sighed. Satisfied with my photos, I turned off the camera and returned it to the backpack. We stepped carefully from the garage. “I want to know where that body is. I have it on good authority that both Davenport and Flynn are involved with its sudden disappearance.”
“Lauren Lockwood’s authority?”
I cocked an eyebrow. “How did you—?”
“You’re driving her car,” answered Jo. There was a sharp edge to her voice. “Did you think I wouldn’t recognize it? What did you do, jack it from her reserved parking space behind her dorm on campus?”
“No, er, she lent it to me.”
Jo let out a scoff of disbelief as she closed the garage door. “We are talking about the same girl who ruined my entire university career, right?”
“Look, she’s on our side
