Harry Potter had made an impact on fashion at the school.
In the short conversations she’d had with Neil in the past year, he’d informed her that the dynamics had changed at Richter. That the military-style training was there but saved for the upperclassmen. The prison-like rules had been eased, and no corporal punishment was handed down. Which meant no time in a dark cell when you acted out.
The headmistress, Lodovica, was still serving time for child endangerment, and her lover was serving a life sentence for murder.
As Olivia searched the grounds of the school for familiar faces in the staff, she found quite a few. She had snapshots of the administration; some had been there when she was a student. Professors that saw holes in the leadership and rushed to fill them.
But how many of them liked the old ways? Did they know where the students had been farmed out?
Olivia was fairly certain Neil already had this information, but asking him to find a name was like drawing a line on a map to who had shot her. At that point it would be a race to find the shooter before Neil could. Olivia had already learned that hacking into Neil’s system required her to be on the inside. And that was too risky.
Seven years ago, the information that would lead her to the shooter had been on campus, deep in the bowels of the school in a hidden room. Was it still there?
She doubted it, but needed to see for herself.
Over the course of the next few days, Olivia climbed a lot of trees, took plenty of pictures, and formulated a plan.
Getting inside was easier than it had been seven years ago. Yeah, she could have infiltrated at night, jumped the walls, dodged the cameras, hacked the system . . . but why bother?
A commercial laundry service used by the school was based twenty miles away. Obtaining one of their uniforms took up one evening, and perfecting her disguise took another.
With her car parked far away to avoid detection, and the laundry service truck on campus, she hopped over the wall to get on the school grounds. Once there, she worked her way to the backside of the dining hall and pushed open the door.
The sounds from inside instantly drove her to memories of her past.
Breakfast was in full swing. Noise from the kitchen where a small army of cooks were cleaning up one meal and prepping for the next. She shimmied past the dining staff and into the hall itself.
The smell of eggs, which never really tasted like eggs, and cooked breakfast meats made her pause. She opted for porridge most mornings when she was there, thinking the meat was too greasy and the eggs too wet or too dry.
Then there were the kids themselves. All ages from mid–primary school to college.
It was a school where rich parents tucked their children away so someone else could not only teach them but raise them. And the college students, at least in the past, were able to finish their university degree in three years instead of four.
And they were protected.
The school security kept the unwanted out and the kids in. But how had that changed?
“Excuse me.” A boy, maybe ten years old, stood in front of her with an empty tray of food.
She was standing next to the return counter, where dishes were stacked on top of each other, and flatware went into their respective bins.
Olivia spoke in German, as most of the local staff did, excused herself, and moved away.
The first sack of laundry she found sitting in the hall she grabbed and walked with as she searched the perimeter of the hall. When she worked her way to the back, where a stairwell to the lower levels once resided, she was met with a brick wall.
She followed the wall around the corner, and the space where the dumbwaiters had been was also bricked in.
What did she expect? The lower levels were where most of the shady shit at Richter took place. That didn’t mean the area wasn’t still there, it just had a different access. Unless the space was completely abandoned, including the storage room where Sasha had found all the blackmail crap.
She lowered her head and turned away from the walls.
She’d find another way.
With her bag of dirty laundry, she moved to the service area, dumped it in the bin, and grabbed a clean sack.
She started to the youth dorm, searching for floor guardians, often teachers who