We referenced a directory right inside of the doors, then followed the directions up to the appropriate office. The president’s outer office door was open, so we stepped in. Two secretarial desks flanked another door leading into a second room. That door was closed. The two women sitting at the desks looked up as we stepped in.
“May I help you gentlemen?” the woman on the left asked me. I glanced at the nameplate, but she wasn’t who I needed, so I gave her a smile.
“No ma’am, but it looks like your coworker is who I need to see.”
“Indeed she is.” Mack noted with a smile of greeting to the other secretary. “Ms. Constance Narcine? I’m Mackenzie Lafayette from the FBI Paranormal Activity Division. This is my partner, Brandon Havili.”
The woman looked both relieved and agitated as she rose quickly from her desk, scurrying around it on her high heels. She pushed back her bobbed black hair as she moved, speaking in a low tone. “I’m glad you gentlemen have come. Y’all are more prompt than I expected, which is even better. Things have been escalating, but here ain’t the right place to talk about it—”
In an abrupt movement, the president’s office door jerked open and a trim man who looked to be in his sixties stepped smartly out. He was straightening his red tie, a question or statement clearly on the tip of his tongue, but he paused when he saw us. “Who’s this, a prospective student?”
“No,” the other secretary, still seated, said in resignation. “Connie, you might as well tell him. Cat’s out of the bag.”
“Well it is now,” Constance responded in exasperation. She gave us a pause sign with her hand, then straightened her shoulders before turning to face her boss. It looked like she was gearing up for a throw down. “Sir. These gentlemen are from the Paranormal Activity Division of the FBI.”
The president rolled his eyes to the ceiling in a clear bid for patience—or maybe he was praying for strength—then glared at his secretary. “There’s no such thing as ghosts! I can’t believe you called them because a student tripped on the stairs—”
“She was pushed down the stairs, the security camera clearly shows that motion, and there was no one behind her,” Constance argued in a rising tone that indicated she’d said this more than once already. “And that ain’t the only case! We’ve now had multiple students stuck in an elevator, two others pushed on the stairs, three of them have woken up with mysterious scratches, and that’s just from the ones brave enough to report it to me! Y’can’t keep burying your head in the sand. Something is wrong.”
Whoa. That was quite the laundry list of injuries. Certainly more than our initial report indicated. I shared a glance with Mack and found my medium’s mouth set in a grim line. Yeah, this sounded like bad news. I was very glad now we’d called the extra team in.
“This is a prestigious school, and we’re not going to teach our students that occultism is something viable!” the president shouted back.
I internally groaned. The disbelievers could be a pain in the ass.
Mack took two steps forward, placing himself next to Constance and clearly putting himself on her side. “I am Special Agent Mackenzie Lafayette. Sir, quite frankly, it doesn’t matter if you believe in the supernatural or not. A possible apparition has been reported on these grounds, and that apparition has been accused of assaulting multiple students. If that is not the case, we will prove it and deal with whatever is truly going on here. If that is the case, then I will deal with it personally. Either way, this is no longer in your jurisdiction. It’s in mine.”
He sure was sexy when he was mad, my cute Creole. Or maybe I just enjoyed seeing him whittle grown men down to size.
The president spluttered, flabbergasted someone would have the gall to tell him he couldn’t do something on his own turf.
“I,” he said with great importance, “have not given anyone leave to investigate any trumped-up charges on these grounds.”
“I,” Mack repeated sarcastically in the same tone, “do not need your permission. The FBI is above you, sir. Now, we have reports of multiple students being hurt on this campus, all in the same dormitory building. I will investigate until I am satisfied the issue has been dealt with, whatever that is. If you interfere with my investigation, I will have you brought in on charges of interfering with a federal case. Is that clear enough for you?”
The president was red in the face, and seriously in danger of bursting a blood vessel, but he managed a mutinous nod.
“Good. In the meantime, I’m borrowing your secretary so she can grant me all the access I’ll need. I’ll give her back when I’m done with her.” Mack extended an elbow to the secretary with a tight smile. “Ms. Narcine, if you’d be so kind.”
Constance looked ready to hug him for putting her boss in place. She promptly took his arm, and the two of them led the way out of the office. I followed, mentally making a note to report all of this to Sylvia later. Just in case an official complaint came in.
“Thank you so much, Agent,” Constance said to Mack as we walked, her heels clicking on the tile floor. “I swear to you, he’s a good man and a good boss, but there are times I just want to shake him. He’s strongly against anything occult and does the adult version of drumming his heels against the floor when it’s brought up. He threatened to expel the first student for spreading ‘salacious rumors’ when she first came in to report it.”
“I hate stubborn men like him,” Mack said flatly. “They make my life hell some days, so I was glad to shut him down. Now, if you don’t mind telling us in more detail about what’s going on?”
“I’d be pleased to. But let’s go to the building in question, that way I can show you exactly where everything’s happened.”
“We’d appreciate that,” I assured her. “And we’ll do a conference call while we’re there. We have another team coming in to help.”
Constance glanced back at me, brows raised hopefully. “It ain’t just the two of y’all?”
“No, ma’am. We’ve got three more people who will arrive later this afternoon.”
“Oh good. It’s such a large building, and things seem to be happening on two of the floors. I wondered how you’d manage.”
We stepped outside, back out into the humidity, and Constance dropped Mack’s arm to look at both of us equally. The wide smile on her face spoke of relief. “Thank you so much for coming. Truly. The students are so scared in that dorm. They’re literally sleeping anywhere else to avoid coming back to it.”
“We’ll get to the bottom of it,” Mack promised her firmly. “I’m not leaving until we do.”
11
I fumed as we walked out. I didn’t like the attitude of that man one iota, but I could admit to myself that I might have lost my temper just because he’d struck an ugly, dark part in my mind. A place of pitch-black pain existed in me because of adults just like him who had made my childhood hell. I could feel my adrenaline kick up a notch, the fight-or-flight instinct rearing its head, although I was all fight at the moment. I was not about to be bullied, not as an adult. Not when I knew that I was right. I hoped being an FBI agent would afford me some protection here and keep the president from trying anything.