“You know what you need?” Vero asked me.
“A paycheck?”
“That, too. Come on,” she said, tossing me my sock and dragging on her coat.
“Where are we going?”
“To the faculty lounge for cookies and booze.”
* * *
Vero and I cracked open the door to the dining hall. The cafeteria looked like a graveyard in the dark, its empty tables forming neat rows like tombstones and stacks of chairs casting eerie shadows against the walls. We tiptoed toward the faculty lounge, pressing our ears to the door before peeking inside.
I reached for the light switch, but Vero slapped my hand from the wall. “Are you crazy? Someone might see.” She pulled her flashlight from her coat and switched it on. “Where did Charlie say they kept the liquor?”
“The cabinet below the fire extinguisher.”
Vero circled the buffet table in the middle of the room, dropping to her knees in front of the cabinet in question. “It’s locked. Look for a key.”
I searched the cabinet above my head, recalling the fireproof key box I’d noticed when I’d been looking for a mug the other night. I pried it open, digging through a stack of card keys. “Try this one,” I said, passing her a tiny metal one.
Her grin was wicked as the lock popped open. She rifled through the contraband and withdrew a bottle of whisky. I pulled two mismatched mugs from the shelf, and we sat on the floor with our backs to the cabinet, the drape on the buffet table shielding us from view of the door.
Vero poured a few fingers in each of our mugs and set the bottle between us. My eyes watered as I took a deep swig. When I opened them, Vero was stealing a handful of cookies from the buffet. She set two in my hand. “Don’t give me any bullshit about New Year’s resolutions. It’s been a day, and I don’t want to hear it.” She rested her head against the cabinet as she nibbled, grinning at my quiet moan when I gave in to temptation and tore into my cookie.
“I can’t believe Joey’s betting against us,” she said, shining her flashlight at the dry-erase board. “You want to know what I think? I think he’s just been giving you a hard time and talking shit about you to Nick because he’s trying to make you look bad, so that when you finally prove he’s a dirty cop, no one will believe you.”
“We’re doing a fine job of making ourselves look bad.” We held the top score for moving a body and unearthing a corpse, and my high-speed maneuvers had raised more than a few eyebrows during my driving class yesterday.
Vero grinned behind her mug. “We might actually win this thing if Mrs. Haggerty doesn’t steal it.”
For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what it was Vero was so eager to win. It’s not like we were competing for a cash prize or an all-expenses-paid trip to Bermuda. And I highly doubted Nick’s admiration—or Tyrese’s for that matter—were high on her list of motivators. And yet, she’d been so determined to master every test they’d thrown at us.
I thought back to that day Vero had interrogated Aimee in Macy’s, when she’d pretended to be a cop. Then the night Nick was shot and Vero had called for an ambulance, claiming to be a police officer, reciting some ridiculous lines she’d probably heard while watching an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who wished I was on the right side of the law.
“There is such a thing as forensic accounting,” I suggested.
Vero choked on her liquor. I patted her back as she recovered. I didn’t think it was such a far-fetched idea. She was young and fit, stubborn, and intelligent, teetering between fearless and confident to a fault. She’d be a great investigator.
“I’m pretty sure they’re looking for candidates that haven’t committed felonies.”
“It’s not like there’s a warrant out for any of them.” At least, not yet.
She took the bottle and refilled our mugs. “Speaking of hot pursuits,” she said, deftly changing the subject, “are you going to spill the beans about where you and Nick disappeared to after class?”
“Are you going to tell me why the letter J is tattooed on your ass? And don’t tell me it has nothing to do with Javi.” She gasped as if I’d revealed a state secret. But she wore crop tops and low-riding pajama bottoms to bed, and she had a habit of throwing her covers off when she got hot in the middle of the night. I’d seen the top half of the letter peeking out of her waistband, high on her left butt cheek, just before she’d rolled out of bed for the crime scene exercise tonight.
She hiccupped and leveled a finger at me. “For your information, a lot of people’s names start with the letter J, like … Jimmy Fallon. And Jesus. And Jack Daniel’s,” she said, holding up her mug. “Don’t look at me like that. I was eighteen and stupid when I got that tattoo, and my stingy boss doesn’t pay me enough to have it lasered off.”
It was my turn to gasp. “Or maybe you just don’t want to.”
“Puh-lease.”
Voices carried through the door from the cafeteria. Vero snapped off her flashlight and scrambled under the tablecloth with our cookies and mugs, remembering the bottle of whisky as the lounge door opened and the room flooded with light. I reached under the drape, dragging it under the table with us a second before a pair of shoes and a cane rounded it toward the coffeepot.
“Then who sent it?” Nick’s voice was tense. A cabinet door slammed.
“No idea,” Joey answered. “When Georgia, Roddy, and I staged the crime scene after dinner, the dummy was in one piece, no markings on it. I talked to every instructor after the exercise. No one copped to it. They all said they had no idea how it got that way.”
“But someone dug it up, dismembered it, and emailed a photo of it to Feliks Zhirov. And you know this how?”
“One of my CIs was screwing around trying to find a back door into Zhirov’s network. He claims he saw an email with an attachment.”
“Jesus, not Cam.” I could practically hear Nick shaking his head. “And you believe him?”
“He described the crime scene to a T, Nick. He even knew the name written on the dummy. He gave me the time, subject line, and the email address of the sender. It came from a Google account registered under a bullshit ID. Tell Nick what you told me, Sam.”
Vero and I glanced at each other. Samara had been so quiet, neither of us had realized there’d been another person in the room.
“I called in a favor from a friend at Google. The CI’s story checks out. An email was sent to Feliks’s address from the same Gmail account the CI gave us. I asked her to verify the contents of the attachment, but my contact refused to open it without a warrant.”
“And we have no idea who sent it?” Nick asked.
“No,” Samara answered. “All we know for sure is that it was sent from an IP address in our network.”
“Here? You’re telling me this was an inside job?”
“Or someone who had access to the campus’s Wi-Fi. It’s not bulletproof,” she admitted, “but it’s locked down pretty tight. Whoever it was, they were definitely here on campus when they sent that email. I have no reason to believe our network was hacked.”