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
