Most people wouldn’t show up until 10 a.m. The
Sentinel
was on a weekly publication schedule. Every Monday at 10 was the editorial meeting, where they would go over the previous week’s paper and then discuss story assignments for the upcoming issue, the deadline for which was Friday morning at 9 a.m. That was when the stories would be edited, sized and included (or not) in the next edition.
CJ figured that this morning’s meeting would probably be shorter than usual since they didn’t, technically, have a previous week’s edition to review, but with the change at the top, it was hard to tell. Colin was ruthlessly efficient when it came to dealing with news content and usually had a pretty good idea of how the final paper was going to look even before the assigned stories were handed in. If the submissions came up short of his estimation, he wasn’t afraid of handing them back to demand more investigation, sometimes even doing the work himself without credit. He didn’t make a lot of friends in the newsroom that way, but Colin didn’t see it as part of a reporter’s job to make friends. In Colin’s mind, a reporter with a lot of friends was someone who might have second thoughts about writing a story that might embarrass one of them or who might write the story in such a way as to minimize or mask blame, and that person was no longer a real journalist.
Most of the rest of the editorial staff did not share these principles. They took free drinks, music, merch and whatever they could get their hands on from the student association reps, who were always keen to get positive spin on their plans to expand the campus bar or build a new exercise centre using student money. As for the student body at large, most of them couldn’t care less. Their only priority was to graduate from Westhill as quickly as possible, preferably with a passing grade. The only reason most of them even picked the paper up in the first place was to get their hands on the discount coupons for the local bars that surrounded the campus, each one competing to see who could provide the cheapest pitchers, and seemingly (more or less concurrently) the highest proportion of collateral DUIs and date rapes.
Not being able to get a hold of Seth, CJ decided to replace Colin’s original front page story with one of Matt’s about a proposed change to city bus routes that meant students who lived downtown would no longer have to transfer at the mall to get to campus.
Ha
, he thought.
Take that, CNN.
He had just finished doing this when he looked up and saw Colin walk into the room. Colin looked like hell. He probably knew this was going to happen and had tied one on the night before to make it bearable. CJ felt guilty, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do about it. As the old joke went, a free press only belonged to whoever owned the press.
C
olin wandered over to the editor’s desk and looked at the inbox. The paper had an internal mailbox in the continuing education office on the first floor. Hardly anyone sent physical letters to the editor anymore, but they still came in occasionally. They were usually a predictable mixed bag of CDs from local musicians looking for some free promotion, sales announcements from nearby businesses, and the weekly letter from a lifeless wonder named Gareth Wigan who made a point of documenting every single typographical error in the latest issue and mailing in his findings with the admonishment that the staff “learn proper English usage and try to do better next time.” Colin had replied to the first of these letters to point out that strict observance of most grammar rules was pointless as most of the commonly accepted rules were originally designed for Latin and, since English was a primarily Germanic language, had no business being applied there.
That hadn’t stopped Gareth, however. He continued to send in his weekly copy editing manifesto nonetheless. Colin had looked him up and found out that he was a former humanities teacher who had left on stress leave and never come back. Colin had taken to deliberately inserting the occasional dangling participle or sentence-ending preposition in the hopes of driving the old bastard off the edge, so far without success. Colin picked up his latest rant and dropped it in the garbage without looking at it.
Underneath was a box roughly the same size as one that might hold facial tissues. There was no address on it. It was wrapped in plain brown paper and had some sort of symbol drawn on the top in what looked like red ink: a cross inside some sort of circle. Colin blinked his eyes and looked more closely. The circle was made up of two intertwining lines that looked like barbed wire.
What the hell is this?
he wondered, picking it up to examine it. People sometimes did some strange things to get attention. One guy out to promote a business called
Northern Hempire
had included a free joint with his grand opening announcement. The cops had swooped in pretty fast on that. The line between trafficking and distribution was a fine one.
Colin picked up the box. It weighed about as much as a medium coffee. There was definitely something solid inside—he could feel it bumping around.
“Hey man.”
Colin turned to see CJ standing behind him. “Hey.”
“I’ve got about four hundred copies of the paper in the trunk of my car. Wanna wallpaper Devries’s office windows with ‘em after he leaves?”
Colin smiled. “Nah, let’s just burn them. We’ll stack them under his car first, though.”
“I heard the tow truck did quite the number on his Merc.”
“That was his own damn fault. He kept yelling at the guy and distracted him.” Colin pulled open the top drawer of the editor’s desk and removed his cell phone charger and camera. He checked the other drawers, but there was nothing else of his in them.
CJ watched all of this with bemusement. “Is that really it? You’ve been sitting at that desk now for how long?”
Colin shrugged. “I like to stay portable.” He looked at the mess of food containers, photos, cups, gadgets and clips on CJ’s desk. “You, on the other hand, could die under all this and nobody would notice until the smell drifted into the darkroom. Isn’t it a little early in the morning for a cheeseburger?”
“I’ll have you know I started eating that last night.”
“That would explain the presence of microorganisms, but not the continued presence of the item itself. Do you have anything I can barf into?”
“Why don’t you barf in your top drawer? It was empty.”
“It’s not
my
top drawer anymore.”
“Right,” CJ said, mentally smacking himself in the forehead. “Sorry. Was Hal pissed?”
“Hal doesn’t get pissed,” Colin said. “He just gets more or less worried about losing a job he doesn’t really do.”
“Where’d he stick you?”
Colin smiled. “Varsity sports.”
“Well, you’re in luck. I think the women’s volleyball team is playing a game tonight in Cornwall. You can probably just make it if you leave now.”
“Don’t worry. I have no intention of writing a single word on the subject.”
“Great,” CJ said. “I hate laying out all those damn stats boxes. What does a paper need a sports section for, anyway?”
The two of them were interrupted by Matt, who, along with Shona, had moved to the window and was looking out at something that was happening outside.
“Hey,” Matt said. “Check this out!”
Colin and CJ moved to the window, which looked down on the front of the arts building. Not one but three police cars had pulled to a stop across from the main entrance, completely blocking the road. One of the cruisers had its lights flashing and one of the cops was using yellow tape to mark off a large area around the access to the path through the forest.
“Holy shit!” CJ said. “What d’you figure?”
“Dunno,” Colin said. “Looks like they just pulled up.”
“Maybe it’s like the time that engineering student called in a bomb threat so he wouldn’t have to write one of his exams,” Matt suggested.
“I remember that,” Colin said. “Dipshit did it from his own dorm room. Even our security knows how to use call display. They arrested him almost as soon as he hung up the phone.”
“It was a nice break in the day, though,” CJ said.
“That can’t be it,” Colin said. “Who’d plant a bomb in the woods? Or claim to have planted a bomb in the woods? The squirrels aren’t
that
annoying.”
“Lookit that,” Shona said, pointing to a spot about 20 yards behind the cruiser where a van had pulled up. Colin watched as the officers who got out started pulling on large red hazmat suits.
“Holy shit!” he gasped. He did a quick check to make sure that his camera and phone were fully charged and then ran out the door without waiting for anyone else.
B
eing a large man, Jerome Ludnick did not have any problem pushing past the secretary.
True, he wasn’t in quite the same shape he had been in when he was a cop—he had thickened a little around the midsection and his back was prone to spasms if he stood up for more than ten minutes at a time—but, in his experience, none of that mattered much anyway. Force equalled mass times acceleration. So he didn’t run the hundred as fast as he used to. He still had the mass. That’s why Devries’s prissy new secretary was of little concern.
“Mister Ludnick, it doesn’t matter if you are the head of security, you can’t just expect to walk in without—”
Ludnick grabbed the secretary by the shoulder and rolled her sideways so she was no longer blocking the door. “Fuck off and make me a coffee or something. Stupid twat.” He said the last part under his breath, but not so far under that she didn’t hear it.
He pulled the door open and walked into the office. Devries was on the phone behind his desk. Ludnick had always admired this office. It was large and round, jutting out from the main admin building under a domed roof. There was a meeting area on the left next to a large bank of windows with a view of the forest. If the place were his, Ludnick would have torn down the trees. They blocked out the sunlight and made the space too dark.
Devries looked up from the phone with a surprised and annoyed expression on his face. “Jerome? What the hell?”
The secretary stuck her head in through the door. “I’m sorry, mister president. He just barged in and—”
Ludnick closed the door in her face, almost flattening her nose. He then crossed the room as quickly as he could manage, grabbed the phone out of Devries’s hand and replaced it in the cradle. Between the round office and the fact that Devries made all the staff call him “Mister President”, it was all he could do not to use the phone to beat his badger-faced boss into reconstructive surgery, but he had more pressing concerns.
“Peter,” he growled. “We have a serious problem. The cops are here. They found something in the woods in front of the arts building.”
C
olin burst through the door and raced down the front steps. A crowd of gawkers was already starting to form as uniformed officers fanned out to close off any access point to the woods.
Colin raced up to the nearest cop. He kept his digital recorder in his pocket. He wasn’t looking for a quote, he just wanted to know what was going on. “I’m a reporter for the newspaper. What’s going on in there?”
The cop, who looked about 20, waved him away. “Stay behind the line.”
Colin stepped back and surveyed the scene. So far it was just uniforms and the crime scene unit. No sign of any plainclothes yet. In his mind, cops wading into the forest in biohazard suits could mean only one thing: they had found a dead body, or what they believed to be a dead body, somewhere in the woods.
He heard huffing and turned as CJ jogged down the steps and staggered to a stop behind him, doubling over with the exertion. CJ lived mostly on a diet of vending machine food and the only exercise he usually got was getting up to go to the vending machine, so Colin was actually surprised that he had made it down to the scene as quickly as he did.
“Hey,” CJ gasped, his face flushed. “You find anything out?”
Colin shook his head. The cops had completely blocked the road and had strung yellow tape across the entrance to the path. The cops in the red suits were making their way down the path to a point about 40 yards in, then stepping into the trees. Whatever they were doing, it was impossible to see much from here because of the thick undergrowth.
Christ
, he thought.
I walked right past there just this morning
.
Which gave him an idea.
“Wait here,” he said to CJ.
“For what?” CJ asked. “Where are you going?”
Colin stepped off the curb and walked around the police cars, heading west on the main access road. Already a line of cars had formed at the road block, most of them students on their way to their morning classes, heading for the admin parking lot. A uniformed cop was advising them to turn around and go back. Whatever this was, the cops didn’t expect the blockade to clear anytime soon. Farther down the line was a city bus. It was much too big to make the three-point turn on the narrow road. Most of the passengers had gotten off. Colin could see the driver sitting behind the wheel, tapping something out on her cell phone.
He continued along past the cars for about a hundred yards until he reached an even smaller access road that was blocked by a heavy length of chain stretched between two rusty metal poles. This was the secondary access road that led to the facilities maintenance building, a large brown bunker that sat in the middle of the woods, and which housed the enormous boilers that heated the college in the winter. Colin took a quick look around to make sure no one was paying attention before hopping over the chain and jogging down the path.
It took him about 30 seconds to reach the building: two large, elliptical brown brick towers that always reminded him of the recording and playback heads on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder because of the asymmetrical angle they presented. Architecturally, it was probably the most interesting building on the campus, and Colin had always thought that it was kind of a shame that it was buried deep in the woods where no one could really see it. Like most college or university campuses, Westhill had been constructed in bits and pieces over a number of years and had about as much visual continuity as a theme park: the neoclassical admin building next to the faux modernist tech wing next to the dull stone block of the arts building, which Colin had always thought looked like an East German stockade.