Chapter Thirty-Nine - Asako Kato
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Asako Kato
“I DEFINITELY SHOULD not be doing this. How far are you willing to go for the story, Kato?” She whispered to herself.
Asako stood in the shadowed hallway of the psychology building. Her stomach roiled and that blueberry Danish was doing cartwheels in her stomach. The eerie silence of the hallway did nothing to calm her nerves, the corridors had emptied out hours ago. The chatter of students begging professors for extensions on homework or extra credit was long gone by now. She clutched her small crossbody bag tightly against her side, her heart hammered in her chest.
The thought of walking away, leaving questions unanswered — Bellamy, Ethan, Jason, Naomi, her sister — she was too close to give up now.
She owed it to her sister.
Taking a deep breath, she remembered the steps from the YouTube tutorial she watched earlier in the student union, How to Pick a Lock in Five Steps Flat. The title had sounded so confident, the narrator’s chipper voice made it sound easy.
Her fingers trembled as she slid the bobby pin from her pocket and approached the lab door. The plaque glinted faintly from the dim hallway lights .
The lab plaque seemed to mock her.
There was a story behind the door of that lab. Asako could feel in her chest, in her bones, it was an itch dying to be scratched. Every instinct screamed at her that something was amiss. Coffee with Jason had only aggravated her suspicions — his furtive glances, the way his jaw tightened when she pressed him for details.
He was holding something back. Jason wasn’t just some overly protective boyfriend. No, there was more to it than that. She took a calming breath, staring at the lab’s frosted glass door. Inside, were the answers she needed. She just needed to dig deep and find the courage.
The questions rattled in her brain. How was Ethan connected to Naomi? Did she know Asako’s sister? That thought was the one that twisted the knife the hardest. Asako had followed lead after lead, but this one felt personal. If Naomi and her sister had crossed paths through Sil Clearwater, she had to know. That woman’s name stuck in her brain like a bur in a shoe. Sil Clearwater the apparently elusive caseworker no one knows how to get ahold of, having seemingly vanished from the public eye. Every time Asako thought she was close, thought she had found a thread to pull, it unraveled into a dead end.
But Sil’s name popped up over and over again.
And there was Dr. Richard Bellamy, Asako’s stomach churned every time she thought of his name. What was his angle? His interest in Ethan wasn’t purely academic. That much she knew. Coupled with Jason’s cagey demeanor, it was practically confirmed. Was Ethan just another subject in Bellamy’s history of questionable experiments?
Her mind reeled with the possibilities. Why was Jason so hard to get a hold of? A boyfriend that protective should have been easy to find, yet every time she tried to reach him, he had slipped through her fingers. What was he hiding and why?
The university’s involvement in all of this only made things murkier. Naomi’s death had been ruled a suicide, right then and there. But, Asako couldn’t shake the feeling that something far more sinister had happened. The administration’s swift, almost panicked move to freeze Bellamy’s research funding was proof enough that they were aiming to bury something.
But what?
The questions piled up, each one only more infuriating than the last. The connections were there, the pieces sat on the table, but all she had to do was to connect them. This wasn’t a story anymore. It was a puzzle and she had to solve it. Not just for Naomi, not for her sister, but herself.
“This is crazy, Kato,” She whispered. Glancing down the hallway, she approached the lab door. Her steps softly echo. She crouched by the door handle, glancing over her shoulder once more. The building was dead silent, save for the ventilation system.
“No turning back now, Kato,” she muttered. She inserted the bobby pin into the lock, fumbling to get into position. “Alright, here we go.”
Whatever Bellamy was hiding, she’d find it. There wasn’t just a story behind this door. She wasn’t leaving without the truth.
Just as she began jiggling the lock, a raspy voice shattered the silence.
Her stomach fell directly into her ass.
“Miss, what do you think you’re doing?”
Whipping around, Asako met eyes with a kindly looking elderly black gentleman. He adjusted his circular spectacles as they glimmered under the overhead fluorescent lighting. He wore a neatly pressed blue uniform, his namepatch read, Mr. Archie.
He leaned against a thick wooden mop handled, the smell of industrial cleaner stung Asako’s nose, “Can I ask what you’re doing?”