Chapter 3 #3
I’ve spent the last six days going through our security videos, and after hours of work and a few sleepless nights, I finally have a better picture of how our uninvited visitor has been getting inside and moving around the house.
And a way better picture of just how extensive the secrets behind the walls of this place actually are.
The hardest part of all of this has been trying to figure out how he’s getting into the building, and after days of running programs and watching hours and hours of footage, I finally learned that he’s been exploiting a series of blind spots in our outside security network to get from the back parking lot to a small shed about fifty yards from the house, then he disappears from view.
I assumed he was using some sort of entrance or passage that connects the shed and the house, but after examining the whole structure with Rath, we couldn’t find anything even remotely resembling a door or hatch.
Not knowing how he’s getting inside the house is driving me crazy, but at least now I can use my newfound knowledge of the blind spots in our system to track him.
It doesn’t take long to realize that he’s both a creature of habit while also being relatively unpredictable.
He doesn’t come to the house every night, but when he does, he always shows up between ten and eleven. He stays until between four and five in the morning, and he always wears all black with either a hood or a hat to hide his identity.
He also seems to know exactly where the security cams are, even the hidden cams and dynamic ones that shift and change what they monitor based on whatever algorithm Liam inputs into the system, so even after combing through weeks of footage, I can’t find a single frame where even a portion of his face is showing.
Whoever this guy is, he has skills that most students here don’t, and that makes his presence in our house even more dangerous, especially since he’s using knowledge about our house that most of us will never have access to.
Like most students on campus, I thought the rumors about the secret passages in the house were exaggerated, but after spending the last week compiling all the information I could find on them, I have a much better understanding of exactly what’s going on behind our walls.
While I was trying to source my own info, Liam did his thing and found a stash of historical maps of the house that were buried somewhere no one but him would be able to find. And instead of handing the maps over to the house leadership like he was supposed to, he gave them to Hazen.
Most of the maps were from the early days of the frat, and several had detailed renderings of the many passages and trapdoors on them, but even after Hazen layered them all and created a master map, there are still huge gaps in the coverage and entire sections of the house that don’t exist on paper.
At least not on any of the paper we found.
The other thing that’s making it hard to track our unwelcome guest is how he doesn’t take the same route once he’s inside the house.
And he’s exceptionally good at staying out of view of the cameras, so there are nights when I have video proof of him coming and going, thanks to now knowing where the blind spots in the yard are, but no idea where he went or what he got up to while he was here.
The part of this situation that doesn’t make any sense to me is how he doesn’t seem to be doing anything when he’s here. There’s no evidence of any sabotage or tampering or theft or even intel gathering, but who knows what he’s doing during the hours when he’s in the house and no one can see him.
And I’m not the only one searching for him. Liam’s been keeping a close eye on our systems, and he’s pushed through several security patches that have fixed issues we weren’t aware of until now, like the blind spots in the yard and the weaknesses in our camera network.
Under any other circumstances, Liam would have already taken all this information to the leadership, but since he hasn’t been able to find any evidence that whoever is breaking in is doing anything nefarious, he can justify keeping things quiet while we figure out what the fuck is going on.
We just need to get it all sorted before the clock runs out and he has no choice but to take things up the chain of command.
A flash of movement on the video feed catches my attention, and I move the counter back, then slow down the playback speed and zoom in on the bottom corner of the screen.
The video plays again, and now that I’m focused on it, the dark flash I saw was someone dressed all in black darting across the hall.
I slow the playback speed down again and replay the last ten or so seconds of the video. It’s not very clear, and the camera only captured part of their back and one of their arms, but it’s definitely him.
The time stamp on the video says it was taken two nights ago at around four fifteen in the morning, which is when our intruder is usually on the move.
Just to be sure I didn’t miss anything, I pull up all the cameras in that part of the hall and check the footage. One of the dynamic cams catches him slipping out of a supply closet.
He manages to evade the other cams as he darts down the hall, but he’s picked up again on another cam as he sneaks into one of the senior lounges.
I quickly pull up the cams from the lounge, but there’s nothing on them other than a shadowy outline moving across the room and disappearing out of frame.
Why didn’t my program find the footage of him leaving the supply closet? Was that just a one-off mistake? Or did I fuck up the coding, and there could be a ton of evidence in the archives that I missed?
Going back to the footage of him leaving the closet, I restart the video and watch it at regular speed, then slow it back down and watch it again.
There’s something familiar about the way he’s moving, and the video itself is giving me a weird sense of déjà vu.
It could just be that I’ve spent so many hours searching for him and analyzing the limited footage we have that I’ve become hyperaware of him and that’s what’s making me feel like I’ve seen this footage before when I know for a fact that I haven’t.
I’m so hung up on the intense feelings of familiarity I’m having that I don’t realize my mistake until I rewatch the footage for a third time.
I didn’t see it at first, but the door he came out of isn’t a supply closet—it’s someone’s dorm room.
Has he been sneaking into the house to see one of the brothers? Did I just spend the last week of my life tracking down a very elaborate booty call?
But why would this guy go through all that trouble and risk getting caught breaking into the house and sneaking around the walls just to bang one of the brothers?
We don’t have house rules about overnight guests or limits on when people can come and go, and while it’s not common for guys to bring other guys here, it happens, and no one makes a big deal out of it when it does.
Why would an intruder go through all the trouble of sneaking around our passages and break half a dozen of not just our rules, but also Silvercrest’s rules, when he could just walk through the front door?
Is he a member of one of the other frats? That’s pretty much the only reason he wouldn’t be able to just come over whenever he wants.
I pause the video of him closing the door to the room he was sneaking out of and pull up the student manifest for the house on one of my other screens. I need to know whose room that is.
Damon Cosgrove.
Leaning back in my chair, I let that name percolate in my thoughts and try to make sense of everything I’ve just learned.
I’ve known Damon since I first started at Silvercrest, and he’s West’s best friend, so he’s been on my radar more than a lot of the other brothers, but I don’t really know much about his personal life because he’s quiet and keeps to himself.
Is he dating, or at least sleeping with, someone in a rival frat?
My gaze returns to the paused video of our intruder.
I don’t know what it is about the still frame, but I still can’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen it before.
On a whim, I open a screenshot from the video I took of Xave breaking into the mystery room at Baxter House and do a side-by-side with the paused video still on my screen so I can compare them.
Just to be sure I’m seeing what I think I am, I take a few measurements from both images and plug them into one of my editing programs to make sure they match.
A smile stretches across my lips as the results pop up on my screen.
Well fuck me sideways.
The person who’s been sneaking around in our walls is Xavier Hawthorne, and instead of infiltrating the house to wreak havoc on our security or to fuck with us, he’s doing it so he can get laid.
Huffing out a laugh at the strange turn of events, I save the proof of my discovery to both my hard drive and a flash drive, then shut my computer down.
Now that I know the “intruder” isn’t really a threat to us, I have time to figure out what I want to do with this information and how I can best use it to my advantage.