The Gilded Sanctum Read online

  “Did they seem suspicious to you?”

  “Suspicious? They always seem suspicious to me.”

  Walker laughed.

  Meredith leaned even closer. “Did they really not see anything on all those cameras they have? With all that equipment, shouldn’t they know what happened to her?”

  “Yeah, all the cameras,” Walker said sarcastically. “And only one person has the key. And my access is limited. I only get to see what he wants me to see.”

  Meredith shook her head and sighed. “It’s so sad.”

  ”I know,” Walker said. “So tell me about Amanda.”

  Meredith relaxed and leaned back. “Oh, she was wonderful. A great student. A great person. She was well-liked. Did very well in class. Was always there, stayed after to ask clarifying questions or discuss a grade. She was one of my best. Truly.”

  “Did she ever give you any kind of sign that she was unhappy or worried or anything out of the ordinary?”

  “Not at all. She was very consistent. Always seemed happy.” Meredith paused. “Except with her boyfriend.”

  “Josh Easterly?”

  “Yes, it seemed like the two of them didn’t get along very well, based on conversations I would overhear with her girlfriends about him. I didn’t know him personally, never had him in class, but he didn’t sound like a very good match for her. The small classes here allow us to build meaningful relationships with the students, so you can really get to know them and recognize when something is wrong. Her boyfriend was the only thing that seemed to bother her. All else was good.”

  “And your class was the last she attended that day?”

  “Yes, it was an afternoon class. Again, nothing out of the ordinary. She didn’t stay after that day, but I do remember her saying goodbye on her way out. She said something like ‘I’ll see you tomorrow’ so in my opinion, everything in her mind was fine when she left my class.”

  Walker nodded. “Okay.”

  “Do you have any leads?”

  “No. Lots of suspicion, but no leads.”

  “Suspicion with whom?”

  Walker leaned back again. “Everyone.”

  ***

  As they exited the restaurant, Meredith gripped Walker’s arm and held it in hers. She was slightly tipsy from the alcohol and bumped into him as they stumbled to the curb where the Ubers waited. They had called two cars — the same as when they had left the campus — to not draw any undue attention to themselves. Castillo had probably already viewed the footage of them leaving slightly apart from each other and possibly even tailed Walker to the restaurant. When Walker first suggested the separate cars at the residence, Meredith had quickly agreed, and now he knew why. Something was definitely mysterious about this private school, and she was right to be cautious.

  Moving slightly in front of her, Walker stepped up to the first car and opened the door for Meredith. She paused, waved to the driver — who returned the gesture — and pulled Walker back from the curb.

  “I’ll just be one minute,” she promised the driver.

  She pulled Walker close to her and held out her hand. “I don’t know if I can trust you, but I hope I can. You and I both know something suspicious is happening at this school, and I think Amanda may have gotten caught up in it. I want you to find her. I want you to find out what happened to her. And if this school is responsible, I want you to get them.”

  Meredith opened her hand, revealing a small, white keycard. She lowered her head and stared at the card. “I’m not proud of it, and please don’t judge me, but I actually dated Joaquin Castillo for a few months after my divorce. Definitely a rebound relationship.”

  Walker frowned at first and then simply shrugged his shoulders, trying to avoid passing judgment. We all make mistakes.

  Meredith gazed at Walker. “But he was too paranoid for me. Too secretive. Too obsessed with campus security and his damn cameras. I have this feeling like I’m always being watched, you know? I haven’t found any cameras, I’ve certainly looked, but I still have that feeling. His OCD and paranoia were simply too much for me.” Meredith looked again at the card. “He left this one day at my apartment, and when he came back looking for it, I told him I hadn’t seen it. Was that wrong of me?” Meredith asked.

  Walker shrugged, again trying to avoid passing judgement. He was the last one who had the right to do that.

  “I don’t know why I kept it,” she continued. “Perhaps I thought that one day I would need it...to unlock some secrets that might lay hidden…” her voice trailed off. Meredith quickly placed the security card in Walker’s hand and closed it. “It’s yours now. For whatever you need. Just find Amanda.”

  With that, Meredith turned and climbed into the Uber. The car pulled away. The second Uber pulled up as Walker was transfixed by the keycard in his hand. It was Castillo’s key. A key with the power to unlock secrets.

  Chapter 16

  It didn’t take long for Walker to make his decision during the drive back to campus. It was a little past 10 PM as Walker thanked his driver, checked in with the security guard at the front gate, and walked onto the quiet campus, except for the faint sound of crickets in the background. Walker noticed the decorative pole lamps, placed every few yards along the tree-lined walkways, casting a soft light on the nineteenth-century revival architecture. Dotting the campus were also emergency phones that gave off a bluish glow in the dark, any potential calls being funneled into one location: the nerve center of the entire campus. His destination.

  The administration building was an imposing structure on campus, both for its aesthetic architectural appeal and central geographic location on the school grounds. It also housed the offices of the Dean of Students as well as the Board of Trustees, but it was not the seat of power for that reason. It’s real power was buried deep underground in a basement-level complex. Walker remembered his long walk down the antique hallway leading to the next-generation security center. A hall of secrets. If he was going to make any headway in this investigation, he had to uncover what this school’s security center was hiding.

  The trained professional wondered if the key card would actually work, or if had it been updated or deleted from the system. Would campus police surround him once he tried to use it? How OCD really was Castillo?

  Walker entered the building using his own keycard, saving Castillo’s for as long as he could, surmising that each keycard entry was logged, and the alerts would immediately appear once he used Castillo’s card. His time would also be severely limited once he waved the card at an entry point, but it all depended on who was monitoring the alerts and how quickly they noticed it. It was a chance he had to take.

  Making his way quickly across the lobby, Walker stepped into the elevator. Only the ‘up’ button could be pushed. The ‘down’ button required a keycard. Walker let out a deep breath as he pressed Castillo’s card against the button. The button immediately lit up, followed by the reassuring bing, and the doors closed. Walker felt a flutter in his stomach as the elevator descended.

  He swallowed hard as the elevator came to a stop and the doors opened into the dimly lit hallway. It was empty. Walker had already strategized in his mind about what he would say to anyone in the hallway, as it would have been difficult to explain why an unauthorized person was down here. Interestingly enough, there were no cameras in this hallway. It was obviously too sensitive a location for cameras, and he was sure Castillo had already made the necessary precautions to prevent entry into this part of the campus. Walker moved swiftly.

  The glowing translucent glass at the end of the hall was a like a beacon calling out to him, but he was sure he would not be able to enter the main complex as it was likely manned 24-7. However, there were several rooms on either side of the hallway leading to the bright pane of glass, which he assumed his key would also open. Again, all of his entries would probably be recorded, so he figured he only had enough time to choose one room.

  Walker stalked down the hallway, staying to one si
de and focusing on the lights ahead, just waiting for someone to exit the surveillance center and put a halt to his little foray. He paused by each door, trying to decide which one to attempt, until finally he arrived at the last one on the right before the glass. He swung his arm down, swiping the keycard over the keypad, and the door opened slightly. Walker pushed it with his shoulder, quickly made entry, and closed the door gently behind him.

  Once inside the small room, he hoped he had selected the right door. Any one of the hallway rooms presented the possibility for a treasure trove of information, but Walker hoped that Castillo put the most important things closest to him. The room was dark and smelled of mahogany and furniture polish. It certainly wasn't like the next-generation complex next door, but rather an aging room from the 1800s. The one modern adornment was a large set of fluorescent lights hanging above the desk, but Walker avoided that wall switch and moved to a small lamp on the desk.

  He flipped the switch, emitting a dim glow onto the room, and surveyed its contents. It was sparse. Aside from the large desk in the center of the room with a computer, few decorations adorned the walls and only two filing cabinets and bookshelf buffeted the walls. The cabinet drawers were all locked, as were the desk drawers. Walker moved the mouse for the desktop computer, but was greeted with a small popup window — the Washington Academy logo as the background — asking for a username and password. He tapped his thumb rapidly on the desk in frustration, while looking up from the computer and studying the room again.

  Finally, he noticed a small door, like a closet, in the far corner. As he approached the door, he recognized a small keypad, which closely resembled the one in the hallway. Was it possible? He pulled Castillo’s keycard from his pocket and waved it in front of the keypad. Nothing happened. Dammit. He waved it again. The door clicked open.

  Chapter 17

  Walker entered into a small space, not much larger than a walk-in closet. In front of him was an assortment of screens and keyboards, similar to what he had seen in the surveillance room, but on a much smaller scale. He stepped closer to the monitors, carefully studying the images move across the brightly colored screens and then peered at the controls below the pictures. Thoughts raced through Walker’s head. Is this where Castillo edited his digital footage? Where he could determine what the outside world saw? Where only Castillo knew what had really happened?

  But he was confused. These images didn’t look right. Walker cocked his head slightly to try and make out what he was seeing. Something about these video feeds was different. It was not like the footage he had seen in the surveillance room. These images were not from the cameras that lined the campus. These were from different locations, more intimate locations. One monitor caught his attention. He recognized the location. He peered closer at the brick facade, the rusted railing, the brush which had been stomped down. Walker jerked back as he suddenly realized he was looking at hidden camera footage.

  He thought back to his conversation with Castillo in the small meadow behind the female residence hall. The same space at which this camera was pointed, the same feed now showing on this monitor. That’s why Castillo wasn’t worried about the blind spots. There were no blind spots. The visible cameras were only one side of the equation. The hidden cameras were the real power behind the surveillance system. Walker stepped back from the monitors and glanced anxiously across the litany of images. They literally covered the entire campus.

  Walker exhaled his surprise, regained his composure, and sat down in a soft chair in front of the array of equipment. He anxiously glanced over at the slightly ajar door, the soft light from the desk lamp filling the adjacent room. There wasn’t much time.

  Having worked with surveillance equipment during his time in the FBI, Walker played with the controls until he was able to adjust the video feed of the hidden camera behind the girls’ dormitory. He scanned through the flickering video images until he arrived back to the day that Amanda disappeared, denoted by the time and date in the bottom right corner of the feed.

  At approximately 21:02 (9:02 PM) on September 23rd, a young girl with long black hair appeared in the camera’s view. As she peered around, Walker clearly saw it is Amanda Bryson. She reached out her hand, and another hand suddenly came into view, which helped lift her up from the sunken enclosure around the window. The second figure was dressed in a long brown robe with a hood that obscured the stranger’s face from the camera. Amanda willingly went with the robed figure, and they moved off into the clearing, the same spot where Walker had stood earlier that day.

  Walker rewound the footage and watched it again. He still could not make out the face of the person who helped her out of the enclosure. Walker watched the footage for a third time. Something finally caught his attention, so he paused the tape, zoomed in on the hand pulling her up, and peered at the still image on the screen. There was a ring on the person’s right hand, a distinctive ring with the image of a owl scrawled in the top. He had seen this ring before...on Josh Easterly.

  At the same time, the door to the outer room made a distinctive click. Someone had used the keypad. The door opened and a person entered the outer room. Walker jumped from his chair and moved swiftly to the closet door, pushing it closed until only a sliver of open space was visible. He peeked into the adjacent room.

  Walker didn’t recognize the male visitor, but he wore a security uniform similar to the surveillance technicians. The stranger was all business as he glided across the room and started to place a manila folder on the desk. He looked weirdly at the light, and called out to his colleague still out in the hall. “Was Castillo in here? The light is on.”

  “I think so. I saw him earlier.” Another male voice responded from the hallway.

  The technician simply shrugged and continued placing the file on the desk and walked out. The door closed behind him.

  Walker breathed a sigh of relief as his heart settled back into a normal rhythm. He knew his luck was about to run out, so he quickly restored the video feed to its current image capture, exited the small closet, and rapidly headed to the office door.

  He swung it open and there in the doorway, staring at him, was Joaquin Castillo.

  Chapter 18

  “I’m telling you...the door was open,” Walker pleaded, now sitting in the chair across the wide desk from Castillo, the overhead fluorescents brightly lighting the room. “I swear to you. I was actually looking for you.”

  “You expect me to believe that? You’re telling me one of my technicians left it open?” Castillo demanded.

  “Must have.”

  Castillo leaned over the desk. “That would never happen. Don’t lie to me, Mr. Walker. You’re here by invitation, and that invitation can easily be revoked. I’ve been more than forthcoming with you. There’s no need to sneak around a secure area to try and find what you’re looking for.”

  Walker returned the stern expression. “Have you been forthcoming with me? Have you given me everything you have?”

  Castillo crossed his fingers and leaned on his elbows. “And what makes you think I haven’t?”

  “Come on, Joaquin, look around. All the cameras. All the surveillance. All the secure areas. Is this to keep the people on this campus safe, or to keep everyone else out?”

  Castillo laughed. “My job is the security of this campus, and I will not allow anyone to get in the way of that. Remember, nothing happens here without me knowing it.”

  “That’s exactly what concerns me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If you know everything that happens on this campus, how did a girl disappear from it two days ago without a trace?”

  Castillo glared. “I told you. If you know how to avoid the cameras, you can avoid the cameras.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes, all of them. Depends on your motivation.”

  Many thoughts were running through Walker’s mind. Firstly, that Castillo obviously knew the hidden camera footage from behind the girls’ dorm revealed Aman
da’s escape, and secondly, if he watched the video, he also knew about Josh. So why would he be protecting him? Walker didn’t mention the secret footage from the closet or question why Castillo was hiding it from him, but thought he would at least plant the seed in Castillo’s mind that he suspected him of hiding something. Fortunately, it appeared that Castillo did not yet know his keycard had been used, but Walker wasn’t sure how long until they discovered the intrusion. For right now, Walker was in the clear, so his immediate concern was simply to extricate himself from this uncomfortable situation.

  “Very well,” Walker said flatly. “Can I please go now?”

  “Listen, Dr. Ellis agreed for you to be here. I did not. He’s asked me to help you investigate. I’m trying to assist you, but I can’t do that if you’re going behind my back. You had better be careful. Remember, one person has already disappeared,” Castillo said with a seriousness that unnerved Walker.

  He ignored the threat. “Can I go?”

  Castillo waited for a moment then said. “Yes. One of my techs will escort you out of the building. And try not to get in any more trouble, Mr. Walker. We have a busy day tomorrow.”

  ***

  Walker was exhausted by the time he made it back to his residence. He hadn’t worked this hard in a long time, and he needed some rest. He desperately needed to sleep, but sleeping wasn’t that restful. His present-day nightmare would only be replaced by the nightmares from his past. He typically used alcohol to dull his senses and drift to sleep, but this time was different. As he had told Meredith, he wanted to stay alert and aware. He had to be at his best to find Amanda. His other cases simply didn’t matter that much to him. This one did.