Chapter 16 Callum Finds Out About the Locker

Chapter 16 Callum Finds Out About the Locker
POV: Wren

I photographed everything before I touched anything.
The locker interior, the printout lying on top of my notebook, the three circled names, the red ink handwriting at the bottom. Eight photos from different angles, all of them saved to the offsite cloud account before I picked the paper up with two fingers at the corner and slid it into the spare evidence sleeve I kept in my bag because two weeks into this investigation carrying evidence sleeves had stopped feeling excessive.
Then I called Callum.
"Someone got into my library locker," I said when he picked up. "They left something. I need you to look at a name."
"Twenty minutes," he said. He didn't ask which library or which locker or any of the questions that would have wasted the twenty minutes. Just: twenty minutes. Then he hung up.
I sat at my desk in the paper office with the evidence sleeve flat on the surface in front of me and looked at the three circled names through the plastic.
Name one: the Crestfield principal. I had known that name for three years.
Name two: Chen. My department, two offices down, cc'd on the decision to bury my article before I finished writing it. Known for eleven days.
Name three: completely new. No recognition, no half-memory, nothing in any document or database or thread I had worked through in two weeks of mapping this connection. A clean unknown sitting in the darkest circle, the one pressed so hard the pen had nearly gone through the paper.
He's the one who started all of it. And he's on campus right now.
Someone had been in my locker. Had known my combination or bypassed it. Had placed this deliberately and left. The same operation that photographed me through my window, that put a device in my mailbox, that had a man in a grey jacket reading a newspaper in the library. But this felt different from those. Those were surveillance. This was communication.
Someone on the inside was trying to tell me something.
Callum came through the door at twenty-three minutes, not twenty, and I noted the three extra minutes without saying anything about them. He crossed to the desk and looked at the evidence sleeve and picked it up and read it through the plastic, taking his time on each name.
He stopped at the third one.
He read it again. I watched his eyes go back to the beginning of it and move across the letters a second time, slowly, the way you read something when you were checking it against something else in your memory, something stored, making sure what you were seeing matched what you already knew before you said it out loud.
He put the sleeve down.
"Gerald Thrace," he said.
The name landed in the room and I picked up my pen. "You know him."
"He's on my father's legal team." Callum pulled out the chair across from my desk and sat down heavily. "Has been for at least four years. Corporate attorney. He handles the foundation's compliance documentation, the donation structures, anything that needs to look clean on paper."
I was writing. "Describe his role specifically."
"He makes sure money moves in ways that are legally defensible. Donation to a school athletics program, grant to a facilities fund, that's the kind of thing he structures." Callum's voice was even but something underneath it had changed since he'd read the name, a tightness that hadn't been there when he walked in. "If my father donated the money that brought the coach to Harlow, Thrace wrote the paperwork."
"So he knew about the coach transfer."
"He would have had to."
"And the Crestfield donation. The one made two weeks before my article was pulled."
"Same answer." Callum put both elbows on the desk and pressed his hands over his face and stayed like that for a moment, palms flat against his forehead, not moving.
I let him stay there.
The paper office was quiet. Ten forty-eight at night, nobody else in the building, the corridor outside dark except the emergency lighting that stayed on permanently. Somewhere below us a door opened and closed and then silence again.
He dropped his hands.
His face had the look of someone who had been adding numbers and kept arriving at a total they didn't want to confirm.
"The handwriting on the note," he said. "The one that says he started all of it. Someone put that in your locker on purpose."
"Yes."
"Someone who knows this building, knows your locker, knows your combination or how to get past it."
"Yes."
"That's not Marcus's people." He said it like he was thinking out loud, like the sentence needed to exist in the air before he could evaluate it. "Marcus's people watch. They photograph. They put devices in mailboxes. They don't leave handwritten notes with names on them. That's the opposite of what they do."
"I know."
"So whoever left this is something separate." He looked at the evidence sleeve again. "Someone who wants you to find Thrace."
"Someone who can't go to him directly," I said. "Or can't surface without exposing themselves."
Callum nodded slowly. His jaw had a tension in it that had been building since he read the name and hadn't released.
"How long has Thrace been handling your father's legal work," I said.
"At least four years. Maybe longer. He was already established when I started paying attention to who was around my father's operation." He paused. "He's been at Harlow twice this semester. I saw him in the administration building. My father said it was foundation compliance business."
Foundation compliance business.
On a campus where the coach Thrace had helped relocate was currently running a gambling arrangement. On a campus where I had enrolled two years ago and immediately made myself invisible. On a campus where Chen had been flagging my story pipeline to someone before I had done anything worth flagging.
I wrote Thrace's name at the center of the connection map and drew lines outward.
Callum watched me draw them.
When I looked up he was already looking at me, not at the map, at me, with something that had moved past the controlled steadiness he usually kept in place and into something unguarded and tired and very direct.
"I think my father has known about your high school story," he said slowly, "since before you enrolled at Harlow."
The pen was in my hand and I had stopped writing.
I looked at him across the desk.
"Say that again," I said quietly.
"Thrace would have flagged you. The moment your name came up anywhere near anything connected to Crestfield, Thrace would have flagged you to my father." His voice was flat and certain. "You applied to Harlow two years ago. Thrace has been here twice this semester alone. My father knew who you were before you walked through the gate on your first day."
The connection map on the desk between us.
All those lines.
My phone lit up. A text from Carol's prepaid number, Jamie's number, sent at eleven pm when Jamie had said he wouldn't contact me until Thursday morning.
Friday is off. They found the prepaid. Run.