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What the fuck was going on? He and Xavier didn’t seem like the type to be friends. Xavier Cross wasn’t even close to being a jock. What in the hell did he have in common with someone like Bear Hamilton? Better still, what could Xavier have said to him that had made him hightail it out of there like a startled rabbit? My brain whirred like one of the oversized washers at the laundromat.
I grabbed my coffee and darted out of the cafe too, yelling my thanks and goodbyes as I left. Back at my office I opened my files and looked long and hard at the org chart I’d created, then added Bryce Hamilton to it. How interesting.
Chapter 7
Bear
I sped back to Trinity Hall, grateful for the fact that football kept me fit—running all the way barely had me out of breath.
When I arrived, I burst into Xavier’s room, not bothering to knock. Kane and Fox were already there, but Drew was nowhere to be seen.
“Where’s Drew?”
“Probably still inside his girl. He’ll be here once he finishes.” Fox was only half joking.
“We waiting for him?”
“Fuck no.” Xavier looked at me as though I was out of my mind. “If he can’t get here when called, that’s on him. This shit is way too important to wait.” Even if it wasn’t, Xavier would probably have started without Drew anyway, just to remind him who was boss. Which was madness because Drew—and everyone else on the entire fucking planet—was well aware that if Xavier was alive and breathing, he was top dog in everything he did.
In the three years I’d known them, I’d often wondered about the dynamic between those two. They’d known each other since the dawn of time, and had, from what I gathered, been friends from the start, even though the push and pull was hectic as fuck.
“Okay, so what is it?” Xavier shot me one of his “Shut up and die” looks, before continuing as though I hadn’t spoken.
“I sent the Polaroid to Dillon—” Dillon was some kind of data and tech guru, and a friend of Xavier’s extended family. He was basically our go-to guy when we needed dirt dug, or tech miracles worked.
“But he’s a digital dude, and Polaroids are pretty much as analog as it gets.”
The comment earned me another of Xavier’s death stares. “Don’t you think I fucking know that? Obviously I wasn’t expecting him to pull up the meta data from a goddamned hard copy photo. I did, however, figure that one of his tech connections might be able to help a little, and I wasn’t wrong.” As far as Xavier was concerned, he never was.
“He sent it to a friend who digitized it, and cleaned it up a little to see if he could read any more information from it. The thing about Polaroids is that they are so fucking murky, it’s difficult to see anything. But lo and behold, when we enlarged it and sharpened the details, a clue revealed itself.”
“Yes!” This was Fox.
Xavier gave him a dirty look, then turned his laptop toward us all. “This is an extreme closeup of the wall panel in the photograph.”
I squinted at it. “So what are we seeing here?”
“That’s what we need to find out. It looks like some kind of lattice pattern, but what exactly it is, and why it’s there, I have no fucking idea.”
“Can I have a closer look?” Xavier nodded almost imperceptibly, handing the machine over to me.
I squinted at the image, cocking my head from one side to the other. What the fuck was that? A small spark of recognition gnawed at the back of my mind, but try as I might, I couldn’t focus enough to recall the information properly. Fuck that was annoying.
It felt like it was going to be something super simple and obvious like something we walked past every day, but didn’t consciously observe. I scrolled through my mind’s eye, trying to think of something that fit that description. Patterns and symbols around Trinity Hall, and the rest of the campus, shit I’d seen on TV, brand logos, anything, but I came up blank. It was frustrating as fuck.
“Anyone got any ideas?” All three guys shrugged.
“Nope. Not even a vague clue. I’ve been image searching while waiting for you guys to get here, and drawn a total blank there, too. The internet has no more idea about this than I do.”
“You know what’s fucked?”
Xavier cocked his head, looking at me with interest. “It does actually look familiar to me, but I can’t think where or how I’ve seen it. It’s fucking killing me.”
“Really? Think harder. We need to work out who the hell was watching that night, then shut them the fuck up before this information spreads. I don’t need to remind anyone in this room how much we all have to lose if details about that night were to find their way into the public domain, do I?”
He definitely didn’t need to remind me. We all had a lot riding on the outcome of this search, and for so many reasons, we needed to solve the mystery, then make it go the fuck away. Stat.
“Shit.” I grabbed at the back of my neck, wincing as I rotated my head, trying to relieve the pressure. For once I was sure the tension wasn’t just due to practice, and it definitely didn’t improve as I tried to iron out the kinks. I needed a proper remedial massage, and a magic fucking wand that I could wave at the Polaroid, and make it disappear.
