The Professor Read online

  Jo shook her head. “It was all a setup, courtesy of BRS, just to get me expelled from Waverly. I thought you’d have figured that out by now.”

  “I only assumed. You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here.”

  The first time I’d met Jo Mitchell, she had shadowy eyes and limp hair, and looked like she needed a hot shower. Now she seemed invigorated. Her cheeks were pink and flushed, and there was a hard determination in the set of her mouth. It was almost as if this Jo was a completely different person than the one I’d first met, strengthened by her mission against BRS.

  “I’m hiding here,” she admitted. As she said it, she glanced toward the end of the row of units where the cameras were. “I split my time between here and a couple of nearby motels.”

  “You do know that Lockwood Inc. owns this property, right?”

  She nodded. “That’s actually why I picked it. I’ve been tracking as much of the Raptors’ movements as I can. Occasionally, a few members come by here, but it’s easy to avoid them.”

  “What about the cameras?”

  “Cameras have blind spots, Nicole.”

  I held up my hands in a defensive gesture. “Excuse me. Not all of us are born and bred spies. What do you mean you’ve been tracking the Raptors?”

  Jo tipped her head down the row, indicating for me to follow her. Together, we headed farther into the maze of units.

  “Ever since the Raptors had me expelled from Waverly, I’ve been keeping tabs on certain key members. That’s mostly just surveillance though. What I’m really trying to do is find out who else the Raptors have already screwed over. I know that list has to be extensive, and I figure the more victims we can rally, the better. Actually, I was hoping to get ahold of you sooner or later, so this worked out surprisingly well for me.”

  “Have you been in contact with other victims?” I asked.

  “I tracked down a few,” said Jo. She paused at one of the open units, stepped inside briefly, and returned with a tire iron. “Unfortunately, the Raptors have paid them off so well that they were scared shitless to even talk to me. At one point, I even pretended to be a member to see if I could score information better that way.”

  “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 now,” I said. “Altering your grades and making Donovan valedictorian was the last thing she ever did for the Raptors.”

  “Or so she says.”

  “When the Raptors captured me, she was the one to help me get away,” I said. “I trust her. I have to. Otherwise, I don’t have anyone else to help me. They took my boyfriend, Jo.”

  Jo paused, her eyes widening. “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish I was,” I said. “Donovan got to him while I was still locked up at the clubhouse. I have no idea where he was. That was my other reason for coming here.”

  “He’s definitely not being held at the storage unit,” said Jo. “I would’ve seen them bring him in. Nicole, I hate to put this thought in your mind, but what if he’s already dead? We know Donovan’s track record isn’t exactly squeaky clean, and he seems to get some sort of sick pleasure out of torturing non-BRS members.”

  My throat closed up at the thought of finding Wes the way I’d found O’Connor, unceremoniously dumped into a deep freezer until BRS found a way to get rid of the body. Jo had another point though. If Wes was still alive, Donovan certainly wasn’t treating him to tea and crumpets. “No. Wes is the only bargaining chip they have for me. They gave me twelve hours to get out of town before they kill him.”

  “Why aren’t you heading for the hills then?”

  “Because I won’t be threatened out of bringing BRS down.” Jo led us along the pathways that avoided the security cameras’ lenses as we walked to Lauren’s car. “When I started this whole thing, I knew that they needed to be exposed. That hasn’t changed. If anything, my experience with the Raptors has only encouraged me to get even. I’m getting Wes back, and I’m nailing Donovan Davenport, Catherine Flynn, and the rest of the Raptors to the wall in the process.”

  Wes awoke in dizzy confusion at the click of snapping fingers. His head swam, and his stomach still felt fragile. He tried to inhale, but a stabbing pain in his nose prevented him from taking a full breath. His vision was obscured. At some point, someone had covered his face with a burlap bag, and his hands were still bound behind his back. He knew he was in a car—the rumble of the engine beneath his smooth leather seat was enough of a clue to figure that out—but the images that rushed by outside the backseat window were too blurry to make out a location.

  “Stay awake, Officer,” a familiar voice, the owner of which seemed to sitting next to Wes, taunted. “I promised your girlfriend I’d keep you alive until midnight tonight, and I like to pretend that I’m a man of my word. Make a right at that stop sign, Wickes.”

  Wes felt the vehicle slow and turn. “Where are you taking me?” he forced out through the haze of his injuries. His broken nose was clogged with dried blood, and the back of his head throbbed. He swallowed another bout of nausea.

  Donovan chuckled. “It wouldn’t be any fun if I told you, would it? Wickes, pull in here.”

  The vehicle bounced over a bump in the road, and Wes felt the transition from the smooth pavement to a rough dirt road. The car jolted to a stop, doors opened and closed, and Wes heard someone approach his side of the vehicle.

  “Out you get, McAllen.”

  Donovan seized Wes by the upper arm and dragged him from the car, out into the cold. Still blinded and queasy, Wes struggled to find the ground with his boots. As his labored breaths warmed the inside of the burlap bag, Donovan led him roughly away from the vehicle. Through the gaps in the burlap, Wes saw a large building looming. When they reached it, Wickes pushed open a heavy sliding door, and Donovan forced Wes inside. The air indoors was hardly warmer than the temperature outside. Wes shivered as Donovan shoved him along, focusing all of his energy on keeping himself conscious.

  “Sit down,” ordered Wickes, but before Wes could obey, Wickes planted his hands on Wes’s shoulders and propelled him toward the ground. Wes plunked down into a waiting chair, grunting as the unexpected jolt caused another wave of pain to flood through his body.

  “Easy, Wickes,” cautioned Donovan. “Remember what happened to O’Connor. We can’t go overboard with this one. I have too much riding on it. In fact, go into the office and get him a cup of water and some painkillers. We need him alert.”

  Wes listened foggily as Wickes’s footsteps receded, echoing through whatever building they were in. Without warning, Donovan whisked the burlap bag off of Wes’s head. Wes blinked, trying to clear his bleary eyes.

  They had taken him to a giant empty warehouse. The brick walls and polished concrete floor sucked all of the warmth out of the building, and the windows were set so high that Wes had no hope of looking out of them to get a sense of what area of town the Raptors had taken him to.

  Donovan leaned down, propping his hands on his knees, and awarded Wes with a pompous smirk at eye level. “Let me tell you something, Officer McAllen,” he said. “This is even more satisfying than I thought it would be.”

  Wes gazed vacantly at the floor. He would not appease Donovan by biting back. Instead, he focused on taking steady, even breaths. It was a common tactic to ease anxiety, but it also helped Wes to avoid thinking about vomiting on Donovan’s shiny, leather chukka boots.

  “Oh, you’re doing the silent treatment thing,” observed Donovan. “That’s fine. I don’t actually expect you to speak yet. Hastings did a number on your head. A little too overzealous, in my opinion. Then again, who am I to judge? I killed George O’Connor.”

  He said it nonchalantly, as if the brutal act had no effect on his conscience whatsoever. Wes, on the other hand, couldn’t help but betray a tiny hint of disgust at Donovan’s indifference.

  “Didn’t know that yet, did you?” continued Donovan, his voice light. He could’ve been discussing the weather over a cup of warm coffee. “If it makes you feel better, it was an accident. We were only supposed to rough him up a bit, you know? Make sure that he wouldn’t spill his guts about the Raptors. But there is something so incredibly gratifying in making someone pay for their mistakes. O’Connor was an idiot to think he could take us on. In my opinion, he deserved a well-placed kick to the head. My superiors disagreed. Oh well. Shit happens, as they say.”

  Bile rose at the back of Wes’s throat, but this time it wasn’t in response to his concussion. Donovan’s speech was more sickening than any illness Wes had ever experienced.

  “Anyway,” Donovan went on, examining his fingernails, “you can have a little time to recuperate. I need you on full alert. Ah, speaking of which—”

  Wickes had returned from the warehouse office, carrying a paper cup full of water, a bottle of painkillers, and a roll of duct tape. He knocked a few pills into the palm of his hand and offered them to Wes, but Wes turned his head away.

  “Suit yourself, asshole,” said Wickes, tossing the pills to the ground. He knelt down with the duct tape, busying himself by taping each of Wes’s ankles to either leg of the chair. Wes watched him, his face impassive but his mind whirling. Wickes was beefier than Donovan, tall and muscled. He was clearly the brawn of Donovan’s operation. Even so, if Wes were fully functioning, he could have easily aimed a quick boot at Wickes’s face. As it was, Wes could barely see straight.

  Donovan took another set of painkillers from the bottle. “Shit, McAllen, it’s just ibuprofen. Look.”

  He showed the label of the bottle to Wes, then the pills, which were marked with the brand of the medication. It was a strangely reassuring gesture, one that made Wes wonder what the Raptors had in store for him if they required his unchallenged attention.

  “Trust me. You’re going to want them. The back of your head looks like a damn eggplant, and your nose—I’d be surprised if you ever regain the ability to breathe through it again. ”

  Donovan pinched Wes’s cheeks to open his mouth. Wes, his hands taped together behind the chair, had no way of fighting back. He allowed Donovan to tip the pills then a gulp of water into his mouth. He had to a
dmit it: he couldn’t wait for the ibuprofen to kick in.

  Wickes finished securing Wes to the chair and set the duct tape on top of the only other object in the vast, empty warehouse: a small, metal-plated storage trunk.

  “Thanks, Wickes,” said Donovan. “You can head out.”

  Wickes eyed Wes with displeasure. “All right, man. Call me if you need anything.”

  They bumped fists as if they were everyday, run-of-the-mill Waverly fraternity brothers. Nothing defined brotherhood like a good, old-fashioned hostage situation. As Wickes saw himself out of the warehouse, Donovan took a seat on the storage trunk across from Wes.

  “Where’s Nicole?” asked Wes in a hoarse voice.

  Donovan grinned. “Honestly? No idea. Last time I saw her, she was tied to a chair in BRS’s clubhouse. Funny how things end up, isn’t it? Maybe later, you two can bond about the experience.”

  Wes closed his eyes. He knew he should have gone after Nicole sooner. If he had, the two of them could’ve avoided this entire fiasco.

  “Relax, McAllen,” said Donovan, correctly reading the look on Wes’s face. “Last I heard, your girlfriend made one hell of an escape. She knocked out her guard and snuck past the entire damn society.”

  Relief flooded through Wes, but it was short-lived. For all he knew, everything that came out of Donovan’s mouth was an outright lie. For Nicole’s sake, he hoped Donovan’s story was true.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked. There was no chance of sounding assertive. The concussion, even if its effects had somewhat receded, weighed down Wes’s tongue. His speech was heavy and slurred.

  “That remains to be seen,” said Donovan. He stood up from the trunk to circle around Wes. “See, from what I know, Nicole loves to share everything with you. You know about the Raptors, the clubhouse, O’Connor, and what we’ve done, among other things. I assume you know a lot about Nicole too.”

  “Normal and sane people are like that,” intoned Wes. “People in relationships share things with each other, especially if they have knowledge that might keep the other person safe.”