Chapter 3 — The Third Drawer

Keller University's criminology department occupied the fourth floor of Heller Hall, a building that smelled of institutional carpet and departmental politics. Marcus Hale's office was at the end of the east corridor — corner office, which he'd been quietly proud of, with a window that looked toward the city rather than the parking lot.The door was unlocked.This was wrong. Marcus locked his office every night with the precision of a man who had spent thirty years in law enforcement and understood the value of secured spaces. Nora stood at the open door for a moment, processing.She put on gloves before touching anything. Old habit, now the right choice.The office was not visibly ransacked, which was more alarming than if it had been. A ransacked office means someone was looking for something and probably didn't find it or didn't know exactly what they were looking for. An undisturbed office means someone either found what they came for and left it neat, or knew precisely where to look.She went to the desk. Third drawer. It was closed.She entered 1-7-4-9.The drawer opened.Inside: hanging files, neatly labeled. Research Notes. Student Grades. Admin. And at the back, slightly recessed, a brown folder with the label CT Research in Marcus's precise handwriting.She took it.She looked around the office once more. The bookshelf was intact. The whiteboard had lecture notes. The desk surface had a coffee cup, a stapler, papers in an ordered stack.And a small framed photograph, face-down, that should have been upright.She turned it over with a gloved finger.Marcus and Elena at their anniversary dinner. Smiling. A perfectly ordinary photograph.But it had been face-down. And the dust pattern on the shelf behind the photograph was disturbed — there was a clear rectangular outline, lighter than the surrounding surface, in a slightly different position from where the frame now was. The photograph had been moved. Probably picked up, examined, replaced — slightly wrong.Someone had been in this office.They had been neat. They had not found what they were looking for — or they had found it and she was holding it. She couldn't know which.She left quickly, taking the stairs, not the elevator. In the stairwell she passed a young woman with a Keller lanyard who looked at her with mild curiosity and said nothing.In the car, she opened the folder.— ◆ —