Marcus swallowed hard. He looked at the audio monitors, where Dean Sterling’s voice was already trickling through the house mix, welcoming the trustees and thanking the alumni committee for their annual patron pledges.
"The annex passage is locked from the balcony side after six o'clock," Marcus murmured, his hand resting on a heavy brass ring of utility keys hooked to his belt loop. "Security runs the exterior patrol every twenty minutes. If Miss Cross catches me unlocking the faculty corridor, she won't just pull me off the tech crew—she’ll void my financial aid work-study credits for the spring semester."
"Marcus," I said, stepping directly into his line of sight so he couldn't look back down at his mixing board. "Look at the memo line on that wire confirmation. The money that paid for your mass spectrometer and my reagent kits didn't come from Harold Morrison’s chemical plant. It came from forty pipefitters who spent seven years in federal court after breathing chlorinated solvents in the canal ditch. If Morrison takes that stage tonight, his board committee deletes the digital archive on Monday morning. Your senior thesis data on the northern aquifer goes straight into the shredder with mine."
Marcus looked from my eyes to my father’s hands. Dad stood motionless against the console rack, neither pleading nor leaning forward, his worn coat square against the steel paneling. Marcus reached down to his hip, slid a long, notched brass key off the ring, and pressed it into my palm.
"Room 204," Marcus whispered. "The file cabinet behind Abbott’s desk has a mechanical three-digit tumbler. The combination is his old union local number—four-one-two. But you have less than twelve minutes before Sterling finishes the trustee introductions and calls Julian to the podium."
We didn't run. Running through an academy annex makes noise on hollow parquet, and the sound of rubber soles striking risers carries straight down through the ceiling vents into the auditorium. We moved quickly along the back service ramp, slipping through the fire door into the dark, linoleum-floored corridor of the science wing.
The faculty offices smelled of cold coffee and paper dust. Outside Room 204, the frosted glass window was completely dark, but the brass cylinder of the lock bore fresh, bright scratches around the collar—the kind left by a hand in a hurry with an unfamiliar master key.
I slid Marcus’s key into the core, turned it until the bolt clicked back, and pushed the door inward.
The office was in disarray. Dr. Abbott’s oak desk had been swept clear of the blue-covered grant applications that usually sat stacked beside his lamp. The lower right-hand filing drawer was pulled open three inches, its lock cylinder hanging loose from its mounting plate where a heavy flathead screwdriver had forced the latch.
"They've already been through here," I whispered, the cold air from the window vent hitting my neck like a wet towel. "They took his physical project binders."
Dad didn't answer. He walked directly past the damaged desk, stepped behind the rolling chalkboard that Dr. Abbott used for organic chemistry structures, and looked down at the wall baseboard near the radiator.
Mounted flush against the radiator housing was an old cast-iron inspection port—an access panel for the gravity-return steam valves that heated the original nineteen-twenties wing of the building. The cover plate had been unbolted, its two square-head screws sitting neatly in the groove of the wooden floorboards.
Dad knelt on the floor, his stiff knees popping once in the quiet room. He reached his right arm into the wall cavity, his scarred knuckles scraping against the rough edge of the lath and plaster, and pulled out a heavy, red-rope expanding portfolio wrapped tightly with two heavy industrial rubber bands.
Taped to the front was a handwritten note on yellow legal paper, written in Dr. Abbott’s sharp, cramped cursive:
Clara—Sterling demanded the culvert sample logs at four-fifteen under threat of immediate tenure suspension. He stated the board would reject any presentation that identified the Morrison drainage ditch as the contamination source. I have placed the duplicate chain-of-custody forms, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality certified split-sample assays, and the original Vance Trust deed inside this packet. The front doors are watched. Do not let them present the Morrison plaque without reading the covenant into the symposium record. The state inspector is on call at the county extension office.
Beneath the note lay sixty-four pages of certified laboratory test sheets, signed by the state water laboratory in Grand Rapids, with Julian Morrison’s signature on the custody log acknowledging that thirty-four barrels of halogenated wash water had been dumped into the north canal between June and August.
I looked at the clock on the office wall. It was seven-twenty-two.
"Julian’s speech starts at seven-thirty," I said, my heart hammering against my ribs until my vision tunneled. "If we walk through the rear stage door, the security guard will tackle us before we clear the curtains."
Dad took the red-rope folder from my hands, slid it securely under the left arm of his charcoal jacket, and buttoned the bottom two buttons of his coat.