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  “Look, Colin. We only have to live with each other for another couple of months. In January, you’ll be out of here to do your internship, if you can find one. Which is if you pass final term. Which is a big ‘if’ at the moment.”

  Colin smiled. “And ten seconds ago, I was the one being accused of blackmail. How the pendulum does swing.”

  Watterson put his glasses back on and pulled himself forward, grabbing the mouse to open up his email. “Whatever. Believe it or not, I do actually have other work-related things to do this morning. Seth’s editor as of today. Try to keep your nose out of trouble and maybe we won’t have to do this again before the new year.”

  “Once again, you fail to grasp that the whole point of being a reporter is getting one’s nose into trouble, but we’ve been over that already. In any event, I can see that you’re subtly attempting to signal that you’d like me to leave, which I am more than happy to do.” Colin got to his feet. “I’ll leave you to your fat chicks and zucchini.”

  Watterson looked up sharply and was about to say something, but Colin was already out the door.

  -4-

  Ariel Linson was late.

  Ariel was a first-year Early Childhood Education student. She had signed up for the program at Westhill as a safety in the event she didn’t get into law school. Even as her fallback, Westhill was third on the list of preferred schools. Although she didn’t like to admit it, she blamed her current situation on her mother, who had gotten in a car accident when Ariel was in her last year of university. Ariel had been forced to move home since her mom couldn’t get around by herself and there was no one else available to help out. She had transferred as many credits as she could and taken correspondence courses to make up the shortfall, but her mind was elsewhere and her grades had been only so-so. She figured if she could get her ECE, it might boost her chances of getting accepted to teacher’s college, which she had decided she liked more than law school anyway. Westhill had been the only letter that came in with a big red “Congratulations!” on the front, so here she was.

  The ECE centre was located just north of the admin building. It was a small, circular building with a drop-off area at the front and a small, fenced play area in the rear that backed onto the woods. For ten months of the year it functioned as an actual daycare, and many of the college staff actually had their kids enrolled there. Because of the security concerns (one divorced father had picked up his child for a supposed dental appointment and lit out for Mexico), the doors were locked right after drop-off and did not open again until outdoor playtime started at 10 a.m. Getting in after the doors were locked was a huge pain in the ass. Ariel knew that her instructor would take her into the quiet room in the back to bawl her out where the kids couldn’t hear.

  She’d forgotten to charge her phone the previous night, so the alarm hadn’t gone off to wake her up in time. Once she got to school, the admin lot had been full, so she had been forced to park in the one on the other side of the arts building and take the forest path, which she hated because it was so dark and isolating. It was, in almost every measurable respect, shaping up to be a class-A shitty day.

  She remembered that she would need her ID to get in and pulled her backpack off her shoulder to get it. As soon as she opened the flap, the wind grabbed her notes from the previous day and scattered them into the trees.

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” she muttered as she watched the pages drift into the bushes. She knew she wouldn’t be able to curse when she got to class (anyone who did that in front of the kids was automatically sent home for the day), so she figured that she might as well get it out of her system now. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!”

  With a sigh, she closed her pack and stepped wearily into the woods to retrieve the pieces of paper. Fortunately, most of them didn’t appear to have gone very far. The undergrowth was pretty thick and the wind kind of died off a bit when she stepped off the path. She started grabbing up the pages, clamping them together in her free hand even though some of them were damp.

  “I don’t fucking believe this,” she hissed. “Of all the—”

  She had been reaching down to grab a list of class management tips when she stopped. A woman was lying on the ground staring up at her with wide open eyes. Or rather, the woman’s head was lying there. The rest of the woman was nowhere to be seen.

  Ariel stood up sharply and opened her mouth to scream. When nothing came out, she started running and didn’t stop for a long time.

  -5-

  As the newspaper’s production manager, CJ Mathews didn’t consider it part of his job to pull 5,000 copies of the finished product off the shelves two days after it went out.

  Technically, that was the responsibility of the distribution manager, Seth Reznik, but there were a couple of problems. First, Seth rarely made it in before 10 a.m. Second, Seth had just been promoted to editor. That meant he wasn’t here to do it and, even if he was, didn’t have to. In Seth’s absence, Hal had dumped the problem on CJ, who was already busy pulling the Devries story off the newspaper’s website and trying to find something else to fill the space. CJ had tried calling twice, but had gotten Seth’s voicemail both times. He knew Seth was up and around because Seth had posted on both the paper’s Facebook page and Twitter feed in the last half hour to announce that he was taking over as editor. The asshole just wasn’t answering his phone.

  CJ checked the Facebook page again and saw that somebody named Twiggy644 had posted a reply to Seth’s announcement. It was short and to the point: “Who the fuck cares?” As one of the content monitors, it was CJ’s job to delete abusive posts like that. He left it.

  Most of the copies were distributed on campus. Those ones were easy enough to get back. The college’s two satellite campuses in Guelph and Kitchener were a different story, though. Somebody would have to spend about an hour in the car to drive out and round those up. A set number of copies were also distributed to local shopping malls, student bars and restaurants. Getting them back would be a major pain in the ass.

  Fuck it, CJ thought. He decided he would hold the ones that hadn’t gone out and pull the on-campus stuff, but the rest were in the wind. If Hal didn’t like it, he could drive out there and yank them out of people’s hands himself. The whole thing was ridiculous. In CJ’s opinion, pulling the paper would only draw more attention to the whole debacle than leaving copies out there. After all, it wasn’t like the Westhill Sentinel was Time magazine. It didn’t exactly rocket off the shelves.

  CJ tried to avoid the political side of the operation. He preferred the design and layout of the publication over what actually went into it. He already had a technical illustration diploma from Sheridan and was only taking journalism to get some news and magazine layout experience. He had picked Westhill because it had a fast-track study option that allowed him to pick up credits in the summer and be out the door faster. As far as academics were concerned, that was about all Westhill had to recommend itself.

  The newsroom was quiet. The only other people in the place were Matt Palczek, who claimed that he’d come close to getting a couple of photos published in National Geographic, but spent most of his time alone in the darkroom printing oversized black and whites of his girlfriend for some gallery show that never seemed to happen; and Shona MacGillivray, an international student from Scotland whose only claim to fame was submitting a story about a Take Back The Night-style march at the Guelph campus that had never happened—she got the names of the organizers and wrote the piece without interviewing anyone. The march had been cancelled due to rain. That didn’t stop her from submitting a dramatic, first-person piece in which one of the marchers was assaulted by a water balloon full of red food colouring tossed by an anonymous member of the crowd that was supposedly lining the path. Colin had been suspicious from the start and confirmed the whole thing was bogus with a single phone call. Even the picture she submitted to accompany the piece was a file photo from a student demonstration published two years previously in the Toron
to Star.

  Colin had hit the roof and demanded she be kicked off the paper and out of the program. Hal had refused for reasons that CJ suspected were more budgetary than ethical. It was no secret that international students paid about four times as much tuition as domestic ones.

  Most people wouldn’t show up until 10 a.m. The Sentinel was on a weekly publication schedule. Every Monday at 10 was the editorial meeting, where they would go over the previous week’s paper and then discuss story assignments for the upcoming issue, the deadline for which was Friday morning at 9 a.m. That was when the stories would be edited, sized and included (or not) in the next edition.

  CJ figured that this morning’s meeting would probably be shorter than usual since they didn’t, technically, have a previous week’s edition to review, but with the change at the top, it was hard to tell. Colin was ruthlessly efficient when it came to dealing with news content and usually had a pretty good idea of how the final paper was going to look even before the assigned stories were handed in. If the submissions came up short of his estimation, he wasn’t afraid of handing them back to demand more investigation, sometimes even doing the work himself without credit. He didn’t make a lot of friends in the newsroom that way, but Colin didn’t see it as part of a reporter’s job to make friends. In Colin’s mind, a reporter with a lot of friends was someone who might have second thoughts about writing a story that might embarrass one of them or who might write the story in such a way as to minimize or mask blame, and that person was no longer a real journalist.

  Most of the rest of the editorial staff did not share these principles. They took free drinks, music, merch and whatever they could get their hands on from the student association reps, who were always keen to get positive spin on their plans to expand the campus bar or build a new exercise centre using student money. As for the student body at large, most of them couldn’t care less. Their only priority was to graduate from Westhill as quickly as possible, preferably with a passing grade. The only reason most of them even picked the paper up in the first place was to get their hands on the discount coupons for the local bars that surrounded the campus, each one competing to see who could provide the cheapest pitchers, and seemingly (more or less concurrently) the highest proportion of collateral DUIs and date rapes.

  Not being able to get a hold of Seth, CJ decided to replace Colin’s original front page story with one of Matt’s about a proposed change to city bus routes that meant students who lived downtown would no longer have to transfer at the mall to get to campus.

  Ha, he thought. Take that, CNN.

  He had just finished doing this when he looked up and saw Colin walk into the room. Colin looked like hell. He probably knew this was going to happen and had tied one on the night before to make it bearable. CJ felt guilty, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do about it. As the old joke went, a free press only belonged to whoever owned the press.

  -6-

  Colin wandered over to the editor’s desk and looked at the inbox. The paper had an internal mailbox in the continuing education office on the first floor. Hardly anyone sent physical letters to the editor anymore, but they still came in occasionally. They were usually a predictable mixed bag of CDs from local musicians looking for some free promotion, sales announcements from nearby businesses, and the weekly letter from a lifeless wonder named Gareth Wigan who made a point of documenting every single typographical error in the latest issue and mailing in his findings with the admonishment that the staff “learn proper English usage and try to do better next time.” Colin had replied to the first of these letters to point out that strict observance of most grammar rules was pointless as most of the commonly accepted rules were originally designed for Latin and, since English was a primarily Germanic language, had no business being applied there.

  That hadn’t stopped Gareth, however. He continued to send in his weekly copy editing manifesto nonetheless. Colin had looked him up and found out that he was a former humanities teacher who had left on stress leave and never come back. Colin had taken to deliberately inserting the occasional dangling participle or sentence-ending preposition in the hopes of driving the old bastard off the edge, so far without success. Colin picked up his latest rant and dropped it in the garbage without looking at it.

  Underneath was a box roughly the same size as one that might hold facial tissues. There was no address on it. It was wrapped in plain brown paper and had some sort of symbol drawn on the top in what looked like red ink: a cross inside some sort of circle. Colin blinked his eyes and looked more closely. The circle was made up of two intertwining lines that looked like barbed wire.

  What the hell is this? he wondered, picking it up to examine it. People sometimes did some strange things to get attention. One guy out to promote a business called Northern Hempire had included a free joint with his grand opening announcement. The cops had swooped in pretty fast on that. The line between trafficking and distribution was a fine one.

  Colin picked up the box. It weighed about as much as a medium coffee. There was definitely something solid inside—he could feel it bumping around.

  “Hey man.”

  Colin turned to see CJ standing behind him. “Hey.”

  “I’ve got about four hundred copies of the paper in the trunk of my car. Wanna wallpaper Devries’s office windows with ‘em after he leaves?”

  Colin smiled. “Nah, let’s just burn them. We’ll stack them under his car first, though.”

  “I heard the tow truck did quite the number on his Merc.”

  “That was his own damn fault. He kept yelling at the guy and distracted him.” Colin pulled open the top drawer of the editor’s desk and removed his cell phone charger and camera. He checked the other drawers, but there was nothing else of his in them.

  CJ watched all of this with bemusement. “Is that really it? You’ve been sitting at that desk now for how long?”

  Colin shrugged. “I like to stay portable.” He looked at the mess of food containers, photos, cups, gadgets and clips on CJ’s desk. “You, on the other hand, could die under all this and nobody would notice until the smell drifted into the darkroom. Isn’t it a little early in the morning for a cheeseburger?”

  “I’ll have you know I started eating that last night.”

  “That would explain the presence of microorganisms, but not the continued presence of the item itself. Do you have anything I can barf into?”

  “Why don’t you barf in your top drawer? It was empty.”

  “It’s not my top drawer anymore.”

  “Right,” CJ said, mentally smacking himself in the forehead. “Sorry. Was Hal pissed?”

  “Hal doesn’t get pissed,” Colin said. “He just gets more or less worried about losing a job he doesn’t really do.”

  “Where’d he stick you?”

  Colin smiled. “Varsity sports.”

  “Well, you’re in luck. I think the women’s volleyball team is playing a game tonight in Cornwall. You can probably just make it if you leave now.”

  “Don’t worry. I have no intention of writing a single word on the subject.”

  “Great,” CJ said. “I hate laying out all those damn stats boxes. What does a paper need a sports section for, anyway?”

  The two of them were interrupted by Matt, who, along with Shona, had moved to the window and was looking out at something that was happening outside.

  “Hey,” Matt said. “Check this out!”

  Colin and CJ moved to the window, which looked down on the front of the arts building. Not one but three police cars had pulled to a stop across from the main entrance, completely blocking the road. One of the cruisers had its lights flashing and one of the cops was using yellow tape to mark off a large area around the access to the path through the forest.

  “Holy shit!” CJ said. “What d’you figure?”

  “Dunno,” Colin said. “Looks like they just pulled up.”

  “Maybe it’s like the time that engineering student called in a
bomb threat so he wouldn’t have to write one of his exams,” Matt suggested.

  “I remember that,” Colin said. “Dipshit did it from his own dorm room. Even our security knows how to use call display. They arrested him almost as soon as he hung up the phone.”

  “It was a nice break in the day, though,” CJ said.

  “That can’t be it,” Colin said. “Who’d plant a bomb in the woods? Or claim to have planted a bomb in the woods? The squirrels aren’t that annoying.”

  “Lookit that,” Shona said, pointing to a spot about 20 yards behind the cruiser where a van had pulled up. Colin watched as the officers who got out started pulling on large red hazmat suits.

  “Holy shit!” he gasped. He did a quick check to make sure that his camera and phone were fully charged and then ran out the door without waiting for anyone else.

  -7-

  Being a large man, Jerome Ludnick did not have any problem pushing past the secretary.

  True, he wasn’t in quite the same shape he had been in when he was a cop—he had thickened a little around the midsection and his back was prone to spasms if he stood up for more than ten minutes at a time—but, in his experience, none of that mattered much anyway. Force equalled mass times acceleration. So he didn’t run the hundred as fast as he used to. He still had the mass. That’s why Devries’s prissy new secretary was of little concern.

  “Mister Ludnick, it doesn’t matter if you are the head of security, you can’t just expect to walk in without—”

  Ludnick grabbed the secretary by the shoulder and rolled her sideways so she was no longer blocking the door. “Fuck off and make me a coffee or something. Stupid twat.” He said the last part under his breath, but not so far under that she didn’t hear it.