Chapter 253 Seven Bags

Chapter 253 Seven Bags
ASHER'S POV
The staff corridor runs behind the locker room. I've walked it something like four hundred times in three years and never once looked at the doors on the left.
At ten to eight there were five cars in a lot built for six hundred. Last night's banners were still strung over the main doors. Somebody had left the trophy case light burning all night, and nobody had thought to notice that either.
April got out of her mother's car with the camera around her neck and didn't lift it once.
The investigator's name was Ruiz. She'd brought two county officers and a man from the university who made her ask his name twice before he gave it.
"You don't have to be here," Ruiz said to April.
"I'm aware."
"I mean you're welcome to wait upstairs."
"I know what you mean."
Locker forty-one sits in the second bank, low, at the end nearest the ice. I've leaned against that stretch of wall in skates more times than I could count. Marsh keeps a spare stick behind the fire extinguisher eight feet from it.
There's a boot print at shoulder height that's been there since my freshman year and nobody has ever painted over it. Just a gray door, five feet high, a number on a plastic tag.
They photographed it shut before anyone touched it. The bolt cutters took eleven seconds. The door swung open on its own weight and then stopped — something inside was holding it. The whole corridor stopped talking at once.
It was a plastic storage bin with a lid, the kind my mother keeps the Christmas things in. Ruiz lifted it onto a folding table they'd carried down from the media room, gloves already on. The man from the university stood six feet back with his hands behind him and never once closed the distance.
Small bags inside, the kind with a seal at the top.
Seven of them.
Each one had a white sticker with a date written on it in the same hand. One man, seven times, had sat somewhere with a pen. That's the part I still haven't found a way to put down.
Ruiz laid them in a line and read the dates aloud for the officer taking notes. One small thing in each bag, and nothing worth a dime among them. An earring missing its partner. A hair clip. A student ID with the corner snapped off. A key on a ring with a hardware store tag.
April moved up to the table on the fourth one.
"That's a locker key," she said. "Ours. The media office."
Ruiz looked up.
"Second floor," April said. "They give you one when you start. You hand it back when you leave, and nobody ever does."
The sixth bag held a phone, screen cracked, dead, four years out of date. The seventh held a lanyard — the same kind that had been around my neck last night, and around April's. There are two hundred of them sitting in a box in an office upstairs.
I made it as far as the wall and stayed there. Your body understands a thing about ten seconds before your head agrees to it, and I stood in a corridor I've walked four hundred times holding the whole shape of it while some part of me kept trying it another way.
April hadn't moved from the table.
"Read them again," she said.
"April—"
"The dates. In order."
Ruiz looked at her a moment, then did it.
The earliest was four years back. Four years back is Evan Clarke's complaint. The captaincy. The internal review. A settlement with a confidentiality clause stapled to it and eleven documents signed by the same hand. The last date on the table was October.
I heard April take one breath in through her nose. She didn't lift the camera. Her hand lay flat on the edge of the table, thumb moving over the metal lip again and again — I don't think she knew she was doing it.
"October's mine," she said.
"We're not confirming anything yet," Ruiz said.
"You don't have to confirm it. I'm telling you."
The man from the university stepped forward at that, then thought better of it, found somewhere else to stand. Out came his phone. He walked twenty feet up the corridor, put his back to us, and made a call I couldn't hear a word of. I have never in my life wanted to hit a man for using a telephone before this morning.
Ruiz watched him go and said nothing about it. That told me what I needed.
"There are six other people," April said.
"There are six other bags."
"Ruiz."
"I know." She was sealing the last one. "I know. Say it again and I'll have to write it down."
"Say it again and you'll have to write it down," April said. "There are six other people."
They broke the table down around us after that. One of the officers went to find whoever holds the key register for that corridor and came back eleven minutes later — there's a register, and nobody knows where it lives. Marsh's stick was still behind the extinguisher.
Down at the far end someone started the resurface for the morning skate, and the sound of it filled the whole corridor, because the building had a schedule and the building meant to keep it.
In the middle of all that stood April, with a camera she never used.
"Asher."
"I'm here."
"Get me out before somebody I know comes down that tunnel."
We took the fire door at the end instead of cutting back through the room.
⸻
Outside it was bright and cold, the lot filling up around us. She got four steps from the car and stopped, both hands flat on the roof, head down for a while. I kept myself where she could see my feet and didn't touch her.
Then she straightened, and she wasn't crying, and that was worse.
"I need you to hear the actual thing," April said.
"Okay."
"For four years, seven times, a man walked into a building with two hundred cameras in it, left with something in his pocket, and filed it behind a metal door forty feet from the team room."
She pulled the door open and stood there with it against her hip, not finished.
"Somebody issued him a key," she said. "Somebody put his name on a registration. That's a piece of paper with a signature on it, and it exists, and I want it."
"April, it's eight in the morning and you're—"
"I'm what."
I let that one die. There's no way to finish it that a man should say out loud.
She got in, pulled the door to, and lowered the window.
"Ring Ruiz this afternoon," April said. "Not tomorrow. Ask her one thing for me, because she'll answer you, and she's stopped answering me."
"Ask her what."
"Who signed for the key."