That same week, in a dorm room three floors up, Nora Bennett was pursuing a very different kind of investigation. She had not stopped thinking about the sealed letter at the bottom of Joe's bag, nor about the strange, careful way people around campus had begun treating Joe since the cheating accusation broke. Something about the timing bothered her. The suspension had come not long after the gym floor incident, not long after Joe had without meaning to impressed half the campus in a way that seemed to sit badly with certain people. Nora did not believe in coincidences.
Her mother had taught her that too alongside the newspapers. She started small. She talked to a friend on the volleyball team casually over lunch and learned that the shared locker room had been left unattended during Tuesday's practice, the exact afternoon before the pages were found. She talked to another friend who worked part-time in the campus security office, filing paperwork three afternoons a week, and asked as casually as she could manage whether the hallway and locker room cameras had picked up anything unusual that day. The answer surprised her.
Yes, actually there had been footage, a grainy angle covering the locker room entrance timestamped showing someone entering during the empty practice window. But by the time Nora asked, the footage had already been flagged for deletion as part of routine monthly storage clearing, standard procedure. Nothing suspicious about the timing on paper except that Nora's instincts told her otherwise. She could not access it herself. She was not staff, but her friend, a sophomore named Dileia, who worked the security desk, mentioned almost in passing that the automatic deletion was not scheduled to run until the following Monday.
That gave Nora 4 days. She spent two of them working up the courage to ask Dileia for a favor that could, if discovered, get them both in serious trouble. She spent the third day deciding it was worth the risk anyway. On the fourth day, a quiet Sunday evening when the security office was mostly empty, Dileia let her sit at the terminal for exactly 6 minutes, just long enough to pull up the relevant clip and save a copy to a small personal drive Nora had brought specifically for that purpose. The footage was grainy, distant, shot from an angle that showed the locker room door, but not the interior.
It showed a figure entering during the empty window, staying just under 4 minutes, then leaving. The face was not clearly visible, not at this resolution, not without better equipment than Nora currently had access to. But it was something. It was proof that someone had been in that locker room during the exact window Joe's bag had been tampered with. Someone who was very clearly not scheduled to be there.
Someone whose build, even in the grainy footage, did not match anyone on the volleyball or cheer roster. Nora did not show it to Joe right away. She did not want to raise hope over something incomplete, something that might not hold up to real scrutiny yet. She saved the file in three separate places. The personal drive, a folder on her laptop, and for good measure, a backup uploaded quietly to her university email account, the way her mother had taught her to always protect a source before you ever thought about using it.
She had a feeling, sitting there in the empty security office with the small drive warm in her palm, that she was holding something that would matter a great deal. Very soon, she was right. By the following Monday, Joe's suspension had escalated. What began as a routine review by Coach Marsh's department had through channels neither Joe nor Coach Marsh fully understood, been pushed upward to the dean of students office. Preston Sterling had made two phone calls that weekend.