Chapter 37

“Where—” Julian hisses, and Rachel points. A skinny doorframe, wooden door shut tight.

“There’s a hall through there,” she whispers, “and then a bigger room beyond. That room has another entrance, too.”

A low murmur from down behind the door, a different voice from before, traveling up to meet them garbled and quiet.

“Lu,” Julian says, and a shiver cuts up suddenly through Charles, violent and startling.

“And somebody else,” he replies as quietly as he can.

He looks at Rachel. She’s gone quite pale, eyes wide, fixed on the door. Julian turns to her, quickly, and clasps a hand on her shoulder.

“It’s okay. I know who’s in there with her, and you don’t have to go in,” he says, very softly. “But can you go get help?”

Relief washes through her face, momentarily overpowering the terror. She nods.

“Quickly,” Julian says. “Quietly, and as quickly as you can.”

She nods again.

“Go.”

Rachel turns and, pen light bobbing, disappears back the way they came.

“Ready?” Julian asks Charles.

“Ready,” he says.

And Julian opens the door.

It’s a dark, dead-end hallway. For a second Charles thinks they’ve gotten it wrong, that the sounds are coming from somewhere else, echoing through the disorienting maze of passages. But Julian points: there, nearly at the end of the hall, hangs a heavy, floor-length curtain.

Charles nods. Then, creeping as quietly as he can, he follows Julian towards it.

There are sounds from the other side. More scuffling of feet, subdued now, and heavy breathing.

And then a clear, high voice: “Do you think it counts as self-plagiarism,” the voice says, “if you slit my throat the exact same way you slit Jack’s?”

Julian pulls back the curtain. A flash of surprise; a flash of a long thin blade as Julian’s pen light slides across Lu Fairchild, eyes frightened but defiant, and Christopher Maynard behind her, with a knife at her throat.

His head whips up as he hears them enter. Lu makes a move, but he’s back on his guard immediately, knife pressed against her windpipe.

“Well, this is an unpleasant surprise,” Maynard says, lips thinning in frustration. “I didn’t think you’d find your way here. Let alone so quickly.”

“Put the knife down, Christopher,” Julian says levelly.

“That’s Dr. Maynard to you,” he snaps back. Lu, who is frozen with her fists clenched in fear, nonetheless manages to roll her eyes.

“Hi,” says Julian. “You’re Lu Fairchild.”

She swallows. “Yeah,” she says. Maynard’s knife remains at her throat, but he doesn’t press it any harder down when she speaks. “You’re the private detective, I assume?”

“Julian Ellsworth,” he says. “A pleasure to finally meet you.”

Charles stares at her, drinking her in. Adrenaline throbs through him, part of his brain screaming knife knife knife knife, his muscles tensed to run away or lunge forward, but despite all that he can’t move. He can only look at her. She’s shorter than he’d expected. Her hair has grown out a little from the most recent picture he’s seen, an inch or so past her chin, dark blonde and falling messily around her ears. He doesn’t suppose she’s gotten to wash it recently. But her hazel eyes are as bright as he remembers, though now they’re hooded with fear.

“Dr. Maynard,” Julian says. His voice is dead calm, shockingly steady. “If you put the knife down, we can talk about this.”

“She attacked me,” the older man says viciously. “It’s self-defense.”

“I’m quite certain she didn’t,” Julian answers. He tilts his head. “What’s your plan, Dr. Maynard?”

The professor grits his teeth. His dark eyes dart around the room. “Why couldn’t you have just run, like I told you to?” he hisses to Lu. “I told you to go. I told you both to go.”

“Jack never got the message,” says Julian. “I’m surprised you didn’t know he didn’t use his locker very often. You knew just about everything else, thanks to the listening devices you planted in all the offices.”

Maynard’s hand jerks slightly. Lu winces. “That’s a serious accusation,” he says to Julian. Charles can imagine him using the same voice with a student who isn’t up to snuff. “Do you have evidence to back that up, sir?”

“It’s the reason you sent them both warnings to leave or else,” Julian replies. “Because you heard Lu tell Jack your secret.” Julian looks at Lu. “You told him in your office? His?”

“Mine,” she whispers.

“There’s something I don’t understand.” Julian frowns at Maynard. “Lu was seen leaving Isabel Ortiz’s office in tears the week before she left. I assumed that was because she’d just shared everything with Isabel, too. It would have been an emotional conversation. So if Isabel knew, why didn’t you see her as a threat as well?”

A vicious smile cuts across Maynard’s face. “Tell them, Miss Fairchild.” When she hesitates, he pushes down on the knife.

“I told Isabel first,” Lu says with difficulty. “Before Jack. She said…” She hesitates, pain flashing across her face. “She said to wait. To wait to tell anyone else until…” Her eyes flutter shut. “Until after open house.”

“She cared more about recruitment than her precious principles,” Maynard says smugly. “And I planned to discredit her—and all the others—so thoroughly that by the time she went to the administration, no one would believe she wasn’t making false accusations just to train the spotlight on someone else.”

“So then you went to Jack,” Julian says to Lu. “Why him? Did you think people would be more likely to believe it coming from two people on opposite sides of the departmental conflict?”

“Yes,” says Lu. “And he was a man.”

Charles swallows hard. A suspicion is rising sour in his throat.

“So you killed him,” Julian says, eyes shifting to Maynard. “You threatened him and Lu and when he didn’t leave, you killed him.”

“I didn’t kill Jack Hart.”

Julian shakes his head. “You thought you were in the clear, then. But we came poking around. And then—not till you heard us talking outside open house just now, if I’m not mistaken—you realized Lu hadn’t run away at all. Why didn’t you?” He directs this last question to Lu.

“I couldn’t leave her,” she says quietly, her voice, for the first time, straining against shakiness. “I thought—I thought I could snoop around at night, find some proof. And then Jack was killed, and I…I didn’t know what to do. I’ve been sneaking into the grad lounge, using the microwave when I needed food, but I didn’t dare do anything else.”

“Who told you?” Maynard asks suddenly. “Was it Rachel Glass?”

Lu lets out a long breath. “If you have to ask,” she says, almost wearily, “that means there’s more than one.”

“False accusations—” Maynard says, his voice rising, but Julian cuts him off.

“Lu,” he says quietly, “we’re talking about sexual harassment here, right?”

Lu shuts her eyes for a moment, then opens them again. “Yes.”

“How dare you—”

Charles stares at Maynard, who is opening and closing his mouth in fury. The blade of the knife digs deeper into Lu’s neck. She bites her lip, hard, holding back a terrified cry.

“I used to run this department,” Maynard hisses. “Before all this trendy so-called scholarship, before all these politically correct yes-men took over academia, when we did real work, real research, I ran this department. It’s been nothing but a steaming pile of bullshit since then, all of you too busy firing your little darts at each other to care that nobody was making any sense anymore. But you’re over. You’re a phase, all of you, and you’re finished—look at what happened, look at what happened with Ortiz when it came down to choosing between staying in power and following her precious politics. I’ve done nothing wrong, nothing that hasn’t been done a million times before—”

And then, from far off and coming rapidly closer, the sound of running footsteps. Maynard swings towards the noise and, all at once, Lu throws herself out of his grasp, the knife clattering across the floor, Maynard caught off balance, windmilling his arms—Julian and Charles both surge forward—and Lu lunges for the knife, seizing it and raising it up, stopping Maynard in his last desperate lunge.

“Police!” calls out a voice, and two men burst into the room.

“She’s got a knife!” Maynard cries. “Careful, she’s got a knife!”

But the police officers take him roughly by the arms and pull them behind his back. “Put the knife down, miss,” one of them says as the other gets out his handcuffs.

For a second, Lu remains frozen, the knife clenched in her fist, its sharp point aimed accusingly at Christopher Maynard. Then she bends down at sets it on the floor, and her whole body starts to shake.