Page 36 of Kings & Corruption

I continued up to the door on the second-floor landing and stepped into another hall. This one was less luxurious than the one downstairs. It could have been any hall in any corporate building in America, with utilitarian linoleum and tacky oil paintings of the campus.

I looked for cameras, didn’t see any, and guessed they’d opted out of them on the second floor to protect the privacy of administrators like Dean Giordana.

Seemed lazy, but who was I to judge?

I started down another hall with a row of closed doors adorned with brass plaques. I didn’t recognize any of the names — until the last one.

Stephen Giordana

DEAN

Bingo.

I turned the knob, hoping to get lucky, and found it locked.

Opening my clutch, I dug for the hairpin and looked around to make sure the hall was still empty. It was so quiet up here the music had faded to nothing but a vibration under my feet.

I bent the hairpin a bit wider and leaned down to stick it in the lock, silently thanking Helga, a girl I’d met at a hostel in London. She’d taught me to pick a lock with a hairpin, a consequence of an argument she’d had with a hostelmate, who’d proceeded to lock the door of our shared room.

The trick wouldn’t work with a complex lock, but this wasn’t complex. I closed my eyes and felt for the locking mechanism, waiting for it to catch on the hairpin. When it did, I turned the knob, and voilá.

I was in.

I closed the door quickly and looked around. The room was nicer than the glass-fronted offices I’d seen on my way down the hall. Those had been simply furnished with outdated wood furniture, a few potted plants, and lame art.

This one had gleaming wood floors that were covered by an intricate (and obviously expensive) area rug. Bookshelves dominated one entire wall in front of a sitting area with a sofa and two chairs.

Nice, but uninteresting for my purposes.

I looked at the carved wood desk that sat in front of a generous window offering a view of the grounds in front of the admin building.

That’s where I needed to look.

A faint glow emanated from a lamp on the desk, and I hurried to the window, careful to stay to the side as I drew the drapes. The last thing I needed was for someone down on the quad to look up and see me rifling through Dean Giordana’s shit.

I was eager to check out the contents of the computer, but that probably involved passwords and a whole lot of digging — digging I didn’t have time for, not with the entire Aventine student body partying downstairs and the Kings circling the ball like guard dogs.

I started with the top drawer of the desk instead.

I didn’t know what I was looking for. That was the problem with Emma’s disappearance. The trail had been cold from the beginning. There was just her roommate and friends at Bellepoint saying she went to a party at Aventine, then that last image of Emma on Aventine’s security cam.

Then… nothing.

No one at Aventine would cop to seeing her at the two parties on campus that night, which meant she hadn’t made it to either one or everyone on campus was keeping a secret.

But I had to look. I had to try. The detectives assigned to Emma’s case had interviewed anyone at Aventine who’d known Emma even a little, and that had to be almost everyone if she had been regularly partying there. Maybe there was something about the investigation in one of Dean Giordana’s files or something.

The top drawer of the desk wasn’t helpful: a few pens, some Post-it notes, a tube of lip balm, and some paper clips. I reached to the back of the drawer, just to be sure I wasn’t missing anything, and closed my hands around a couple of foil packets. When I pulled them out, I saw that they were condoms.

Gross. Was Dean Giordana married and having an affair at work? Or did he and Mrs. Giordana get nasty on his desk when she met him for lunch?

I didn’t want to know, and I opted not to sit in the chair as I opened the drawers on the left. There were some old-school hanging files in the larger drawer, but they were all empty. Wherever Dean Giordana kept his records, it wasn’t here.

I turned my attention to the drawers on the right. The top two were almost entirely empty, but the third?

The third was locked.

I chewed my lip. It wasn’t incriminating in and of itself. Everyone was entitled to privacy.

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