Now I was fucking reeling. All this time Heather had been working for them.
Heather rubbed her hands together, but it wasn’t an act of greed. “I like you, Sian. You know I like you, and that is never going to change, and I’m sorry I lied to you. My job was to take care of you. I … I didn’t look into your dad until after I talked to Fred, and then I realized that I could help you. You want to live your own life and I get that. The Society offered me everything. The chance to be better than my parents. To fit into this world where I’m supposed to be. The career, the life, the power. All I had to do was this one thing.” Heather stopped.
“Your dad is a bad man. I’m going to make sure my contact is aware of what I’ve found. I don’t know how your dad was able to do it, but there are always crumbs. Your mother, Sian, she loves you so much. Every time she is lucid, she has done everything in her power to help you. I hope you know that. There is nothing else I can do at this point. The Society will know the answer to dealing with Alexander. You have to stay away from him. He is guided by greed and power. That is all. I will be mailing this laptop out to my grandma with strict instructions to give this to Sian only. If you’re watching this, it means that my gut is right. I hope I can get to my contact before this is over. Until then, tell Fred to get the evidence you need. The server for the campus is not within the grounds. They can’t control everything, just the camera they know about. Love you, Sian, and Fred, if you’re watching this, I liked you a lot. I was going to ask you to a Halloween party. I hope you’re feeling better.”
The screen went blank, and I now had more questions than answers.
“She liked me,” Fred said.
“What did she mean about the outside servers?” I asked.
Fred snapped his fingers and got to typing. “Fucking genius.”
“You want to tell me what is going on?” I asked.
“When you know an exact location of certain systems, it can be easier to find. To hack. The amount of dollars in All Saints, they have to have protection of all kinds. It’s why I couldn’t always access files. I knew they were storing them in a database off campus, but where? Outside servers for our security systems are not too hard to track down.” He began clicking away. “All it takes is finding the ones closest to them and seeing about a direct link to our systems.”
“I have no idea what you’re saying right now.”
Fred laughed. “That’s my lingo, dude. Got it.” He got into a network.
“Are those the cameras into the school?” I asked.
“You betcha. Let’s see what the fuck has been going on.” He clicked some more. Sure enough, I saw the campus, the gym, each building, the main hall, and the dorms. The school had plenty of cameras for their and our security.
“Please tell me you can access that night ten months ago?” I asked.
“That might be a little tricky. Depending on what information they want to keep and for how long, they could have deleted it.”
“We already know the camera within the library was destroyed.”
Fred got to clicking. “Well, fuck me,” he said. “They keep files backdated by a year. That’s a lot of footage.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Keep them for a year, see if anything comes of it, then wipe them clean. Why do people do this kind of shit?” he asked. “Go to the principal and ask.”
As if I’d do that.
“Here we go.” I watched the screen as Fred moved the camera angle, changing it to the school dorm. “There’s Heather with her package. She’s going to the mailroom.”
We watched her as she went to the mailroom.
On her way back, that was when the action happened. It was way too dark, and I squinted, trying to see.
“Get the angle different.”
“I’m getting it there.”
My patience wore thin as Fred began typing, bringing in the monitors of several angles.
“Okay, whoever this guy is, they know where most of the cameras are. There were several that had a sudden malfunction that night. I see the report.”
“I’m guessing the ones that are working are the ones that were installed after he left school,” I said.
“You think this person is a student?” Fred asked.
“I think he is an ex-student, and what’s more, I think it’s Alexander Roberts, let onto the grounds by Coach Bilson.”
“Then who is that?” Fred asked, pointing at a second figure.
I watched as Alexander, dressed all in black, released his rage on Heather. He beat her until she was unconscious, but there was a second person with him that night. She was too small to be Joan. I’d seen her.