Chapter 8 - The Price of a Witness
The first public hearing was scheduled for Friday.
By Thursday morning, every witness except Ava had been contacted by the university's legal office.
One student had been offered a scholarship abroad.
Another had been told her visa paperwork might need review.
A laboratory assistant lost his campus job overnight.
None of those pressures established guilt by itself, but together they formed a pattern Elena could document.
Ava asked whether she should retract her statement.
I told her the truth.
“You are allowed to be afraid.”
“What would Chloe do?”
“She would want you safe before she wanted you brave.”
Ava chose to testify by video from a protected location.
She described hearing the three voices near the loading dock.
The defense attorneys attacked her memory and suggested Chloe had invented Blue Tide to attract attention.
Chad's attorney displayed a photograph of Chloe smiling at a university event beside Wyatt.
“Wasn't she friendly with these young men?”
“She tried to join the research program,” Ava answered.
“That doesn't give them permission to hurt her.”
The room fell quiet.
During the recess, I overheard a Kensington representative offer the university president a private meeting about future donations.
Marcus photographed the visitor log, not the conversation.
We were collecting proof rather than stories.
Then Elena received a sealed packet from a student employee.
It contained payroll records for campus security, including overtime approved on the night of the assault.
A supervisor named Felix Dunn had been paid an unusual special assignment fee.
His signature matched an authorization to disable maintenance cameras.
The defense called it routine servicing.
Marcus produced maintenance tickets showing the service was scheduled for the following week.
For the first time, the judge ordered the university to preserve all remaining logs.
That order mattered.
It also frightened someone.
After the hearing, the student employee who had delivered the packet disappeared from her dormitory.
Her name was Priya Shah.
Elena requested immediate assistance locating her.
A message arrived on my phone from a number tied to the same public-relations firm.
ONE STUDENT SAFE. ONE STUDENT MISSING. STOP NOW.
I showed it to Elena without answering.
She looked at the screen and said, “This is witness intimidation.”
Before midnight, a second message arrived.
This one included a photograph of Priya sitting in a windowless room.
May you like
On the table beside her was Rebecca's red satchel.
