“I know, right!” His smile was almost giddy. He reached for the hard drive, and she smacked him over the head with it.
“Ow! What the hell was that for? I got you what you needed. There’s no reason to get violent.” He rubbed his head as we stripped off our coveralls and tossed our shovels into the minivan.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “The sooner we get that hard drive home, the sooner we can find the security logs and bring it back.”
CHAPTER 22
Later that afternoon, Cam sat at Norma’s kitchen table with Arnold curled in his lap. He plugged an adapter into the hard drive he’d taken from Celeste’s computer, connected it to his laptop, and set both devices on the table in front of him. The lawn mower hummed loudly outside, where Javi was busy cutting the grass. Vero had given him a list of projects to tackle around the house, enough to keep him busy for a few hours. Her attention was torn between watching him push the mower in slow passes in front of the window without his shirt on and watching Cam’s laptop screen as he accessed Celeste’s hard drive.
I peeked over Cam’s shoulder as he worked. “Don’t you need some kind of password for that?”
“Nope. It’s an old computer, and Celeste is about two steps up from your typical millennial-grade Luddite. Her operating system had pretty basic password protection, but she never bothered to encrypt her hard drive. It’s an open book. See?” he said, angling his laptop screen toward me and Vero. Celeste’s files were all there, neatly organized and labeled: Chapter Members, House Residents, Meeting Minutes, Greek Council Correspondence, New MemberOrientation, House Staff and Personnel, Chapter Expenses, Accounts and Finances, Incident Reports…
Cam clicked on the Accounts and Finances file. A dialogue box opened with a security prompt. “Go figure. She was smart enough to password-protect that one.”
“Probably because it contains all the chapter’s bank account information,” Vero said. “Celeste follows security policies like they were handed down to her by Moses on a stone tablet. Chapter checking accounts contain a ton of money, and every house director is supposed to keep their financial records locked. Room-and-board payments from all the residents, the house’s operating expenses for cooking, cleaning, and maintenance, funds earmarked for special events, interior decorating, and renovations… If any ofthatmoney had gone missing, Celeste would be in as much trouble as I am. That’s why those files are locked. Try Incident Reports,” Vero suggested.
Cam clicked the file open. It contained several dozen subfolders, each one labeled with a name and date.
Vero reached over Cam’s shoulder and pointed to a folder with her last name on it. The file contained dozens of documents, all related to the investigation into the poker nights and the missing money. Inside was Celeste’s official report. It included her interviews with the house residents after the money had gone missing and a copy of Mr. Willingham’s complaint letter.
“Wait,” I said as Cam scrolled through the list of documents. “Open that one.”
“Why?” Vero asked. “There’s nothing in that man’s whiny complaint letter that’s going to help us. All he did was blame us for corrupting his son and demand to get his money back.”
That was all true, but there was something else in his letter that might come in handy. “Cam, can you use the contact information in that letter to do some investigating?”
“You bet. What do you want to know?”
“Is there anything that might tell us where James Willingham was last night at ten o’clock?”
Cam frowned at the screen. An idea seemed to come to him. He opened a new window and began copying and pasting Mr. Willingham’s phone number into a search field. After a few minutes, he turned the screen toward me. “His wife tagged him in a Facebook photo at some fancy dinner party in Chevy Chase last night. They were all dressed up. Some kind of fundraiser or something. Looks like it ran pretty late.”
Which meant he probably wasn’t running through the woods in a tux, carrying a bag of dog poop.
I counted back in my head to the night the rock had been thrown through the window. “How about last Thursday night, around eight o’clock?”
Cam took a few extra minutes for that. “Looks like he and the family were checking in to an Airbnb in Annapolis for the weekend. Mrs. Willingham posted a check-in on her Facebook page. And Mr. Willingham’s profile says it was his birthday.” If that were true, we could probably rule them out as suspects.
Cam opened the rest of the documents one by one, and we all silently skimmed them. Vero bristled, quietly seething, when she got to the board members’ official statements, in which Mia and Ava had told Celeste that the unsanctioned poker nights had been Vero’s idea.
“That’s bullshit,” Vero said, smacking the table. “Yes, the poker nights were my idea, butIwanted to play with plastic chips and promote it as a university-approved fundraiser. Theo was the one who insisted that gambling with tokens was boring, and Jackson complained that if we didn’t serve alcohol, no one would come. And it was Bennett’s idea to hold the games off campus. But I don’t see a single one of them mentioned in these reports.”
I read the rest of their statements over Cam’s shoulder. “They also told Celeste that you were the one who insisted on holding all the money.”
“That is a bold-faced lie,” she said through her teeth. “Iwas the one who told them it was a terrible idea to keep all that cash in my closet, but none of them wanted the responsibility. They were all too afraid of getting caught with it.Iwas the one who wanted to put the money in the bank. I even tried to convince Mia to let me open a new account, separate from the sorority’s, so Celeste wouldn’t find out. I told her we could use a cashier’s check to make an anonymous donation to the sorority so no one would know where the money had come from or how we got it. At least that way the cash would be safe until we could figure out what to do with it.
“But Mia freaked out when I suggested it. She got it in her head that someone at the bank would want to know where a bunch of college girls got all that cash and would report us to the cops. She was terrified of moving the money. Mia wanted to keep it hidden until graduation, then take the money with us. But Ava still had a year left, and we’d promised the guys a cut. I told Mia we should put it to a vote, and that’s what we were arguing about when Theo picked me up for the party.”
“And you didn’t think that was a little suspicious?” Cam asked.
Vero shrugged. “In hindsight, sure. But Mia couldn’t have taken the money from my room. She was with the rest of us at the party, and she spent the night with Ben at the frat house.”
Cam let out a low whistle as he scrolled through each of the girls’ statements. “Some friends. They really hung you out to dry. Every one of them pointed the finger at you.”
Vero didn’t look surprised. “I was an easy scapegoat. I was the sorority treasurer, the money went missing from my room, and my family isn’t white and flush with cash, so everyone assumed Itook the money because I needed it. As fast as rumors spread in that place, it only would have taken a few closed minds to make the whole house jump to asinine conclusions. Running away only reinforced every ugly thing they were saying about me, and I wasn’t there to defend myself after that.”
“That’s some bullshit,” Cam said. “Once we figure out who really did it, you can tell every one of them to fuck all the way off. Also, we should ask for a reward. What if I just save us all some time, figure out where this asshole Theo lives, and then the three of us can go to his place, rough him up, and make him tell us what he did with the money? If anyone can get him to talk, it’s you, Mrs. D.”
