Parker opened the folder to find lots of photos of Hawaiian hibiscus flowers. Helen Lassiter didn’t seem like the kind of person who would particularly be into tropical flowers. Her house was very neutral, almost monochrome. He looked into the properties of each picture; he needed to figure out the key. He could tell this was basic steganography – the art of concealing hidden messages inside files in order to avoid suspicion when handing the messages from person to person. It wasn’t a particularly accomplished computing skill, you could get apps that helped you cover and uncover the messages and Parker had no doubt he would get inside them eventually. He looked through her desk and found an address book with passwords and codes scribbled inside it, clumsily scribbled between the details of actual contacts. He tried several but to no avail. It was a long shot, but he tried the same word he had used on Robert Coley’s computer: Chimera. The files unlocked. Another unimaginative genetics professor.

The files contained correspondence between four of the lecturers going back several years: notes from Robert Coley, Helen Lassiter, Hugh Norris and Gillian Mitchell. There was another person whose name was left out of all correspondence – it was definitely a man, but apparently he would only speak in person about what they were doing. They each had a candidate and the professors were toying with their pupils, literally – manipulating them into a game of sorts. Parker couldn’t figure out exactly what the stakes were, but it was obvious that the candidates were given risky assignments and for each assignment completed without complication and with evidence, the professors would gain points. The riskier the assignment, the more points the professors got. A fantasy psycho league. There were points for graffiti, points for stealing exam papers or important school trophies, points for intimate relations with certain untouchable professors, points for hurting people. There was something unspoken, too. The code speak they used was rudimentary at best, but to gain the biggest points of all there was a specific task: murder. Suicide was a deduction in points, and murder was the greatest point scorer of all. There were basically points for everything. Robert Coley was trying to recruit Abbey to be his candidate, to manipulate her into doing crazy things in order to win points for him. He had backed the wrong horse.

As Parker delved further into the details of the files, he was shocked to find that not only had this been going on for years, but it had gotten more extreme, with these people trying to outdo each other. He read through the correspondence and saw that they picked high-risk students with low entry grades, ones who had more to lose, and then leveraged something against them. With Abbey, it would have been something to do with the sexual assault. How low do you have to be to do something like that for entertainment? That’s all it was to them, entertainment. There was no purpose here. They had tried to justify it under the guise of some sociological experiment, but it wasn’t that, it was fun and games, nothing more. He had read about the Milgram studies on obedience and other experiments where children were taken to summer camps and forced to attack each other with knives, all trying to find out how far you could push a person against their own moral code. The success of these experiments lay in the small increments: start with something small, then build up to the big stuff. Many years later it had been discovered that many of the results had been falsified to prove the hypothesis, but that was less widely known; they left it out of the textbooks.