Influenced by Eva Robinson (best free ebook reader TXT) 📗

laptop in my apartment building after it was stolen. But it wasn’t me! The only criminal thing I’ve done is the bullshit test reports I’ve been writing.”

“That’s not criminal. It’s normal.”

“Well, Peter was right. I never should have been a part of it.”

“Don’t worry about that right now.” Rowan looked over her shoulder. “Hannah, I’m getting death threats, and I have no idea who they’re coming from. They’re saying if I expose the truth, they’ll kill me. I’ll be next, like Peter. But I need to let it out, because they’ll find out anyway. There are so many people watching me. And I’m rotting. I’m decaying. Do you understand?”

Hannah stared. “You’re what?”

“I’m decaying. It’s like I’m already dead. There are these vines in my head, and they’re festering. They’re rotten and they’ve eaten me alive. And the only way I can get rid of them is to tell everyone the truth about everything. And then… then I can be alive again.”

Rowan seemed to be having a full-blown psychotic episode, and a jolt of panic shot through Hannah. “Rowan, when was the last time you slept?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

The glass door slid open behind Hannah, and she turned.

A pit opened in her stomach as she took in Luke and Stella standing there, so close to each other, arm in arm.

She felt as if the earth were tilting. That was where she’d heard “Moonlight Sonata” recently.

In the background of her call with Luke.

Thirty-Eight

Michael pulled up Luke Kerr’s website, searching for his publication history. Luke was directly tied to Arabella, and maybe to whichever woman had stolen her laptop. But for some reason, their publications weren’t listed on his site. When he googled their names together, he found only a cached website listed.

He stole a glance at Ciara, who was frowning at the screen and muttering, “Stella Campbell,” to herself. In the warm office lights, her hair was a deep, fiery bronze.

She nodded at the screen. “I have Stella’s class schedule up here. And she’s not teaching at the times Red Sox Lady went into the building. That leaves her schedule open for theft and poisoning. What are you finding about Luke?”

“He deleted their paper from his website.” Michael rubbed his eyes. “It doesn’t look like it ever went through the full publication process. It was called A Foucauldian Discourse Analytic Approach to Constructions of Morality and Discipline in the American Education System. Preprint only.”

“What’s it about?” asked Ciara.

“I honestly have no idea. But the interesting thing is that it was deleted. Hang on.” He started searching other cached versions of Luke’s site, finding that each one had different lists of publications. “Okay. I see he has something like twelve first-author papers per year. He’s churning them out, then changing the papers listed on his site.”

“Is that number unusual?”

“He’s writing a lot. Most professors might publish maybe once a year? His are all going into the same journal that publishes preprints. It means they haven’t gone through the peer review process. But why is he deleting them? And why not finish the process? I mean, it’s bizarre. One out of ten get published in peer-reviewed journals.”

He searched for another of the preprints: A Discourse Analytic Comparison of the Moral Rationale of the Iraq War in the U.S. and U.K.

But when he navigated to the journal itself, he found it had been pulled down also. “This journal he uses—PsychJ—allows these early drafts to get published. Luke seems to be cranking out papers, putting them up for preprint, then deleting them again. I have no idea why.”

“Arabella thought she’d uncovered a conspiracy. Adam thought she was paranoid. But what if she had?”

“Yes, but what kind of conspiracy is this? What would he get out of it? It’s not helping his career.”

“Who else is on the papers?”

Michael scanned the names on the paper he’d written with Arabella and plucked one of them at random. Iona Schaeffer—an uncommon enough name that he’d be able to find the right result, fast. Immediately, The Musket came up, the Lexington High School newspaper. Iona Schaeffer was currently listed as the managing editor. “He published with someone who’s a junior in high school. Doesn’t that seem strange?”

“I have no idea.”

Michael swallowed hard, then started entering one name after another from the papers, growing increasingly baffled. “Hang on. Apart from Arabella, they’re all high school students. This is completely bizarre. What does a high school student have to offer? Why not grad students?”

Ciara’s eyes widened. “Oh!”

“What?”

She leaned over him, pointing at the screen. “That’s an easy way to make money, isn’t it? For a high school student, that’s their ticket into the Ivy League. When half your graduating year is in AP classes, when everyone’s paid for SAT prep to inflate their scores, what are you going to do to stand out? You spend your summer vacation writing papers with a professor at Harvard. You put that in your college application essay, and boom. Suddenly you stand out.”

“How much money do you think he could get for that?”

Ciara turned back to her own laptop, hammering away on the keyboard. “Five thousand? No, ten thousand, probably. Per student. And I’m sure he wrote them recommendations, as well. I bet it’s a really, really good racket.”

Michael leaned back in his chair. “You saw what Stella’s place looked like. It’s a bloody mansion, right on the pond.”

“I’m already searching for her publication history.” Ciara blew a ginger curl out of her eyes and leaned closer to her monitor. “Holy shit. Same. Old cached websites with tons of these preprints that have been deleted.”

“Enough that they might kill to cover it up?”

“Think about it. If this came out, their lives would be ruined. Their careers over. It’s fraud, isn’t it? These papers were never meant to be legitimate. People are buying their way into the prestigious universities. It could mean jail time. And I have a feeling it’s just the tip of the iceberg. So, yes, they might kill to cover