Evelyn moved fast.
By the time Raphael had arrived at Martina's address and started his interview, she was already on the Keynes University campus.
Every thread they'd pulled so far led back to this place.
The victim pool, the relationships, the handkerchief, all of it narrowed toward the student population, and within that, toward the people who had been close to Laura.
She'd dressed for the cover: half-formal, half-casual, the kind of put-together-but-approachable look that small-outlet journalists wore when they were trying to get someone to talk to them.
The press badge was clipped to her lapel. The microphone was in her hand.
She didn't bother with the administrative offices.
Negative incidents and cooperative school officials didn't tend to appear in the same room, and she had no interest in spending the afternoon being redirected. She started at the gate and worked her way through the main social clusters.
Sports societies, study groups, the outdoor seating where people gathered between classes, asking questions quietly and listening to what came back.
Laura's social network turned out to be substantial.
Twenty-four people in total, spread across multiple year groups and extending to a few faculty connections.
The problem was the distribution: several had already withdrawn from the university, a few had graduated, some had transferred.
The number still on campus was small. Mapping the full network would mean chasing people across multiple locations, and the time that would cost was difficult to calculate.
Evelyn was working through that problem when the girl she'd just finished interviewing touched her sleeve.
"Excuse me, I have a piece of information you probably won't get from official channels. Would you be interested?"
The girl was young, curious, and making the very specific expression of someone who had learned that information was a commodity.
Evelyn's green eyes found hers. Clear, direct, the kind of gaze that made people feel like they'd been read more thoroughly than they'd intended.
The girl blinked. Shifted her weight.
She glanced around to confirm they were alone, then rubbed her fingers together in the universal gesture.
Evelyn produced the money without ceremony and held it where it was visible. The girl's expression opened like a window.
"Laura was gorgeous, and she was the star of the tennis club, she had a lot of people interested in her. One of them was a guy called Peter. Basketball club, very tall, good build."
A pause, a slight clearing of the throat. "Good-looking. But not a good person. He used the fact that his mother was a professor like it was a title, ran around acting like he owned the campus, him and his group from the basketball club.
Anyone who got close to Laura who happened to be male, he'd go after them. I saw it myself a few times. Taking people into the bathrooms."
Her voice dropped.
"Most people backed off when he threatened them. The ones who didn't back off got beaten. Heads held in toilet bowls, apparently, and worse things that nobody talks about on the record."
She stopped. Looked at the money in Evelyn's hand with a pointed smile.
"Is that everything?" Evelyn turned to leave.
"No, wait, wait..."
The girl caught her arm. One extortion attempt was apparently the limit of her ambition. She sighed and continued without prompting.
"There were two exceptions. Two people who didn't stay away from Laura despite Peter.
The first one was James. He and Peter were actually close friends, supposedly they made some kind of agreement to compete fairly, so Peter allowed him to keep approaching her. They were on the same side most of the time.
The second was Manson. Peter beat him up repeatedly, and he kept coming back. Didn't fight back, didn't run, just showed up the next day and tried again."
She shook her head, something between disbelief and a grudging kind of respect in it.
"James joined in on the bullying too, when the mood suited him. Manson was the school's designated punching bag. Anyone having a bad day could take it out on him and he'd just absorb it."
Evelyn thanked her, gave her the money, and spent another twenty minutes drifting through the campus, random students, casual questions, nothing that looked like a directed investigation. The picture she was assembling filled in at the edges.
She reached the main teaching building and stopped at the entrance.
"Non-staff, non-student access is currently restricted. Special circumstances. Faculty and enrolled students only."
The young security guard delivered it apologetically, his composure slipping for exactly one second when he registered her face before recovering.
"I'm sorry for the inconvenience."
Evelyn nodded and smiled and walked away.
But she'd already done a full circuit of the building while she was supposedly wandering, and she'd counted. Every entrance had a guard posted. Not one, not two, every single one.
This wasn't standard university security protocol.
Schools didn't staff entrances like this unless someone had told them to, and the most likely reason someone had told them to was that the school wanted control over who was getting in and what stories were getting out.
External pressure, journalists, investigators, anyone asking the wrong questions, was being managed at the perimeter.
Whatever the institution was protecting, it had enough reach to reorganize the entire security arrangement of a university.
She compiled what she had and arranged to meet Raphael at the hotel after dark.
On the way back, the feeling arrived without a specific cause, the particular awareness of being watched that didn't attach itself to any one direction.
She'd trained herself to trust this sense rather than explain it away.
She stopped walking and scanned her surroundings.
A tree. And beside it, sitting on the pavement with no obvious reason to be there, a mirror. Freestanding, angled slightly, reflecting the road behind her.
"Who's there? Come out."
Her voice cut off.
She vanished from the street.
In the mirror's surface, on the road that looked identical to the one she'd been standing on, her reflection appeared, but now she was inside it, the reversed geometry of the mirror world surrounding her.
Behind the tree, a young man stepped out. He wrapped the mirror in black cloth with practiced efficiency and walked away in the same unhurried manner as the pedestrians around him, indistinguishable from someone returning home after an errand.
A Doberman walked at his heel.
Its left flank, below the ribline, showed the same slight indentation, the same missing rib, the same hollow where something should have been.