Chapter 15 The Source Surfaces
POV: Wren
Carol picked up on the second ring.
"You called back fast," she said.
"You said his sister was being followed." I was already at my desk pulling up a new document. "Talk to me about Jamie."
She took a breath. Not a nervous breath, a settling one, like she had been waiting for this call long enough that actually having it required a second to adjust to. "He has been trying to reach you for two years. Every time he gets close to talking to someone, something happens. His landlord gets a complaint. His job gets an anonymous review. Once his car was towed from a legal space and the fine was doubled by the time he got the paperwork."
"Someone is monitoring his communications."
"His phone, his email, his social accounts. He stopped using all of them eight months ago except a prepaid he bought with cash." A pause. "That's the number I called you from."
I wrote that down. Prepaid. Cash. Smart. "The documents he has. What are they."
"He'll tell you that in person. He won't say it on any phone."
"Carol." I kept my voice level. "I need to know what I'm walking into before I agree to a meeting."
"You're walking into the truth about what happened to your article." Her voice was steady, not dramatic, just tired in the way of someone who had been carrying something heavy for a long time and had stopped prettying it up. "He has emails. Original ones, not copies. Between people who made the decision to pull your story before you even finished writing it."
My pen stopped on the page.
"How long has he had them," I said.
"Since the week after your article was pulled. Someone sent them to him anonymously. He didn't know what to do with them. He was seventeen and scared and the people in those emails had already shown what they were willing to do." Another pause. "He kept them because throwing them away felt wrong. He's been trying to find the right person to give them to ever since."
I looked at the document open on my screen. The connection map I had rebuilt from memory after leaving the coffee shop. All those lines running back to the center.
"He wants to meet in person," I said.
"Somewhere he hasn't been before. Somewhere nobody would expect." Carol's voice dropped slightly. "After his sister was followed Thursday, he stopped sleeping at his apartment. He's been moving around."
"Thursday." I checked the date on my laptop. "Three days ago."
"Yes."
Three days ago was the same day the photograph of Marcus and the Crestfield principal had appeared in my midnight email. Same day the forum post went up with both names tagged. Someone had seen that post and immediately moved on Jamie. The connection was not subtle and was not meant to be. It was a message. A demonstration of reach.
"Friday," I said. "I can meet Friday. Tell him to pick the location and send it through this number only. No email, no forum, nothing digital."
"He'll want to know you're coming alone."
"I'll be alone."
"He'll also want to know." She stopped. Started again. "He wants to know if you still protect your sources. After everything that happened. After what it cost you."
I sat with that for a second.
"Tell him nothing has changed," I said.
She exhaled. "Friday then. I'll have him text the location Thursday morning."
We hung up.
I sat at the desk and looked at the connection map and added Jamie's name to it, not at the edges but close to the center, close to where the original story lived, because if he had the original emails then he was not peripheral to this. He had been at the heart of it from the beginning and had been surviving the weight of that alone for two years while I had been surviving the weight of it alone two hundred miles away on a campus where the thing we were both carrying had followed us both.
I called Callum.
He picked up immediately. "The forum post," he said. "I've been trying to reach you."
"I know. I have something bigger." I told him about Carol, about Jamie, about the emails and the prepaid phone and the sister being followed on Thursday. He listened the same way he always listened, completely, no interruptions, nothing wasted. When I finished he was quiet for three seconds exactly.
"You're meeting him Friday," he said.
"Yes."
"Alone."
"That's the condition."
"Wren."
"Callum. He's been trying to talk for two years and every time he gets close someone finds out and applies pressure. The only reason this call worked is because Carol used a prepaid that nobody has connected to either of them yet." I turned my pen over in my hand. "If I show up with anyone he doesn't know, he runs. And the emails go with him."
A pause. Long enough that I heard him make a decision in the silence.
"Okay," he said. "But you tell me the location before you go. Not after."
"That's fair."
We hung up and I worked until eleven, adding to the connection map, cross-referencing the school board minutes with the timeline Carol had given me, building the structure of what Friday might confirm into something I could test against what I already had.
Thursday morning Jamie's location text came through at seven forty-two. A town forty minutes from Harlow, a coffee shop on the main street, noon on Friday.
I saved it. Forwarded it to Callum as agreed.
Thursday night I stayed late in the paper office finishing the corrections piece that had been sitting half done for two weeks because normal work still existed and still needed doing and keeping my name on ordinary output was part of staying credible.
I packed up at ten forty-three, locked my desk, and went to collect my jacket from my locker in the library annex next door.
The locker was closed. The combination lock was in place.
But the lock was on the wrong latch.
I stood there for a second. I always put the lock on the left latch. Every time, without exception, left latch. The lock was on the right.
I opened it.
My jacket. My spare notebook. Everything exactly where I left it.
Except on top of the notebook, placed deliberately, face up, was a printout.
My Crestfield article. My full byline at the top.
Three names circled in red ink.
Two of the names I knew. The third name, circled darkest, pressed hard enough that the pen had nearly gone through the paper, was a name I had never seen before in any document, any email, any database, any thread of this investigation.
Completely new.
And written underneath it in the same red ink, in small careful letters:
He's the one who started all of it. And he's on campus right now.