Total pages in book: 136
Estimated words: 131789 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 659(@200wpm)___ 527(@250wpm)___ 439(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131789 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 659(@200wpm)___ 527(@250wpm)___ 439(@300wpm)
RJ is among the last to enter the classroom, and I quickly get up and toss myself into the seat beside him just as his last option to escape is taken. Last few classes he’d been faster and managed to avoid sitting with me. Today I’m a ninja.
“What?” he says, already in one of his typically amiable moods.
“Well, I’m honored to warrant a verbal response.”
“And I already regret it.”
I chuckle. “Just out of curiosity, how much longer do you expect to employ the silent treatment on Fenn like some petulant child?”
“Piss off.”
“Mr. Shaw. Page ninety-two.” Jack then casts his gaze toward me. “I’m sure Mr. Kent can find our page as well.”
We both dutifully open our books to appease him while he engages in a lecture about some bullshit that could be swimming around somewhere in my head between the brandy and Vicodin.
“Regardless of your little family falling-out,” I whisper to RJ, “Duke will still be waiting for you this weekend. You intend to follow through with the fight?”
“Yep.” He slouches in his seat, pretending to read. “And I’m planning on losing. Leave this place and never see any of you assholes again.”
If my eyes could roll out of my head they’d be spinning down the aisle between our feet. It seems RJ’s not yet entered his cooling-off period since the blowup with Fenn. I’d admire his stamina if it weren’t so exhausting to watch this tantrum persist for another week.
“Brilliant,” I tell him. “Truly masterful strategy.”
“Eat shit, Lawson.”
“Honestly, grow up. You can’t take everything personally. So his dick slipped and landed in your girlfriend once upon a time. Oh well.”
We’ve never been especially close, me and RJ. But as teammates and a foursome, I do believe we’re something akin to friends. And since Silas has been uncharacteristically moody lately, I suppose it falls to me to make RJ see reason.
“How many people will the average person know in their lifetime? A few thousand? Even less we’ll consider friends. Some of those orifices are bound to have interacted.”
RJ’s attention remains defiantly aimed at Jack pacing the front of the room on one of his emphatic literary tangents.
“You’re in your feelings now,” I tell him, leaning across the aisle between us. “But come on. You don’t actually intend to leave Sandover. You know you love it here. And having a brother. You’d miss us. I mean, shit, do you really want to say goodbye to all this?”
He shrugs in response, a thoroughly dispassionate gesture. “I’ve been alone before. And I’m used to saying goodbye.”
I shake my head at him and settle back in my seat. Well, I tried. Anything he does now is on him.
Chapter 50
RJ
A little research proves my hunch correct. The security company responsible for Ballard Academy’s surveillance system maintains an automatic backup redundancy for every feed of every client worldwide. The feeds go to a third-party cloud service and are then encrypted and randomized for an additional layer of protection. Which means the first thing I had to do was figure out which sub-folder contained the Ballard feeds. After that, I discovered twelve months of footage from more than two dozen cameras. That meant writing a decryption to let me see the dates and positions, then running another script on the data to eliminate everything but the boathouse on the night of the accident.
Again my instinct was correct. Though the video system on campus was undergoing upgrade maintenance and not downloading to the home server on campus, the cameras that were operational did back up to the cloud. Call it laziness or ignorance, but it seems the local police department didn’t bother to ask.
Luckily, I’m more thorough.
I’ve got a couple other side projects running as well. One of them, a piece of spyware I wrote to track down Duke’s hidden bank account, pings while I’m watching my script populate the video feeds. But it seems like a moot point now. It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m hours away from walking into the greenhouse to let Duke get enough good licks in that I can call it a loss and get the hell out of there.
I guess that means there isn’t much purpose in tracking down this boathouse footage, either. Except regardless of Sloane, Fenn, or anyone else, Casey deserves an answer. If I can give that to her, maybe this whole experience will have served a better purpose.
I grab a Red Bull from the mini fridge just as footage begins downloading. It’s a huge file and there’s nothing to do now but wait. And waiting is a bad thing, because it gives me time to let my mind wander. And when my mind wanders, it always returns to Sloane and the look on her face when I left her standing in the woods. She tried calling a dozen times that night. And when I didn’t answer, she started texting. One apology after the other. Some long, some short, all expressing her regret and begging me to talk to her, to forgive her, to meet her at our spot.