CAMPUS UNDERCOVER
Love in Plain Sight
Mật Vụ Sau Giảng Đường
CHAPTER SIX
The Suspended Professor
The email went out to the entire Media Ethics department at 6:14 on a Monday morning, which meant that by the time Harper rolled out of bed, half of Hudson Heights already knew something she hadn't been told directly.
*Effective immediately, Professor Daniel Rowan has been placed on administrative leave pending investigation. Classes will be covered by a rotating substitute for the remainder of the semester.*
There was no explanation. There didn't need to be one, apparently, because by the time Harper made it to her first class, the explanation had already assembled itself out of whispers: Professor Rowan, it was said, had been using students — *specific* students, people were careful to imply without quite naming names — to gather information under false pretenses. Some versions of the rumor called it inappropriate. Some called it a violation of academic ethics so severe it bordered on criminal. Nobody seemed entirely sure of the details, which had never once stopped a Hudson Heights rumor from spreading at full speed.
Harper found Elliot at their usual table, already looking like a man who had read the same email eleven times trying to make it say something different.
"They can't do this," she said, dropping into her seat. "This is insane. He hasn't done anything except his actual job."
"They can absolutely do this," Elliot said. "That's the whole point. It doesn't matter if it's true. It matters that it's plausible enough to freeze him out while it gets investigated." He turned his laptop toward her, showing a forwarded copy of the official complaint, carefully worded, citing "concerns raised by senior administration" without naming a single source. "This didn't come from nowhere. Someone built this."
"Eleanor."
"Eleanor has the exact kind of institutional standing to make an accusation like this stick without ever putting her own name near it," Elliot said. "And exact timing to do it right after we started asking questions about a room that officially doesn't exist."
Their phones buzzed at almost the same moment — a mass email from the dean's office, forwarded through the campus safety system, instructing all students to refrain from unauthorized contact with Professor Rowan during the pending investigation, under threat of disciplinary review for anyone who didn't comply.
Harper read it twice. "They're trying to cut him off from us."
"They're succeeding," Elliot said. "Officially, we can't talk to him. Officially, neither of us has talked to him in weeks."
"Unofficially?"
Elliot closed his laptop. "Unofficially, I have several thoughts about how much I care about 'officially.'"
• • •
They found Daniel that evening at the small apartment he kept two blocks off campus — the first time either of them had seen where he actually lived, a space so aggressively unadorned it looked less like a home and more like a hotel room somebody had rented indefinitely and never quite settled into.
He didn't look surprised to see them. He looked tired, in a way Harper hadn't seen on him before — not the careful, controlled exhaustion of a man managing a crisis, but something closer to genuine defeat.
"You shouldn't be here," he said, opening the door anyway.
"We know," Harper said, stepping past him before he could argue the point. "We came anyway. Get used to it."
Inside, Daniel had already assembled what looked like the beginning of a defense — printouts spread across a small kitchen table, a legal pad covered in his own cramped handwriting, a laptop open to what appeared to be his official personnel file.
"They've suspended me pending a review of 'improper use of student informants in an unauthorized capacity,'" he said, reading off the formal language like it tasted bad in his mouth. "Which is, on its face, not entirely inaccurate, given that I have in fact been using two students as informants in a wildly unauthorized capacity."
"That's different," Harper said. "We agreed to it. We're not being coerced."
"Try explaining nuance to a university review board," Daniel said. "They don't need it to be fair. They need it to be enough to justify freezing the investigation while they figure out how much of this they can bury."
Elliot, who had been quiet, studying the printouts with the specific intensity he reserved for problems that had solutions if you looked at them correctly, picked up one of the pages — a still image, grainy, timestamped, showing Daniel apparently meeting privately with a student in a stairwell after hours.
"This is doctored," Elliot said.
Daniel looked up sharply. "Explain."
"The timestamp says eleven forty at night. Look at the shadow angle. That's not eleven forty. Overhead stairwell lights don't cast shadows like that — that's daylight, coming through the window at the end of the hall, and this building's stairwell windows face east. That's a morning shadow. Someone took a daytime photo and relabeled the metadata."
Daniel took the printout back, studying it with new focus. "You're certain."
"I've spent enough time in that stairwell waiting for Harper to run late to class to know exactly what the light does at eleven forty at night," Elliot said. "Which is nothing. It's pitch black. This photo has actual daylight in it."
For the first time all evening, something in Daniel's expression shifted from defeat toward something sharper.
"If the photo's doctored," he said slowly, "then whoever built this case had to have technical access to alter timestamp metadata convincingly. That's not something you do with a phone app. That requires someone with actual systems access."
"Someone like whoever runs campus IT," Harper said.
"Someone like whoever helped fake the archive footage that almost got me expelled," Elliot said, and the room went very quiet.
• • •
It took them two days of careful, entirely unauthorized digging to find him: a mid-level campus IT technician named Curtis Alvarez — no relation, they'd confirmed with mild hysterics, to the fictional art professor Harper had invented on the spot in the basement — whose login credentials showed up in the system logs for both the doctored stairwell photo and, buried under three levels of file renaming, the original unedited security footage from the archive room theft.
"He's not senior enough to have decided to do this on his own," Elliot said, cross-referencing employment records at their library table. "Curtis Alvarez makes maybe forty-two thousand dollars a year. People don't risk federal fraud charges for forty-two thousand dollars a year unless somebody's paying them considerably more under the table."
"So we follow the money," Harper said.
It turned out to be easier than expected, mostly because Curtis Alvarez was, by all accounts, a genuinely bad liar who had never anticipated anyone looking closely enough to ask. A single conversation — Harper, posing as a concerned student worried about a "computer issue," striking up friendly small talk in the IT help desk line — was enough to learn that Curtis had recently paid off a significant chunk of credit card debt, bought a new car, and mentioned, with the specific nervous pride of a man who wanted someone to notice his good fortune without asking where it came from, that he'd "picked up some consulting work" for "somebody connected to the board."
"Eleanor," Harper said again, back at the library table, practically vibrating with vindication.
"Or Graham," Elliot said. "Or both. The point is, it's not campus security acting alone. Somebody paid Curtis Alvarez to fake the footage that almost got me kicked out, and somebody paid him to fake the photo that got Daniel suspended. That's the same hand moving two different pieces on the same board."
• • •
They brought the connection to Daniel the next evening, and for the first time since the whole ordeal began, something like actual hope crossed his face — quickly followed, just as fast, by the specific caution of a man who'd learned not to trust hope until it survived contact with reality.
"This is good," he said. "This is genuinely good work. But it's not enough. I need Curtis Alvarez on record, formally, admitting he altered the footage and the photo, ideally with evidence of who paid him. Otherwise this is a theory, and theories don't reinstate suspended professors."
"So we get him on record," Harper said.
"You get *nothing* on record," Daniel said, sharp enough that both of them startled slightly. "I mean it. I am currently under formal review for using students improperly. If either of you approaches Curtis Alvarez directly, and it comes out — and it will come out, because Curtis Alvarez does not strike me as a man capable of keeping his mouth shut under pressure — it doesn't just end the investigation. It ends both of your futures at this university. I won't let that happen."
The room went quiet in a different way this time — not tense, exactly, but heavier, the specific quiet of people who cared about each other more than the shape of the mission technically allowed.
"You're really worried about that," Harper said slowly, "even now. Even suspended. Even with everything falling apart around you."
Daniel looked at her for a long moment, something almost gentle crossing his usually guarded expression. "You two are the only thing about this entire operation that's gone right," he said. "I'm not going to be the reason that stops being true."
Harper, who had spent the entire month carefully not thinking too hard about how much she'd come to care about a man who was technically her professor and technically an active federal agent and technically not supposed to matter to her this much, felt something in her chest tighten in a way that had nothing to do with the investigation at all.
"I don't want to lose you out of this," she admitted quietly. "Not just the case. You. I don't want you gone."
Elliot, watching her say it, reached over — not toward Harper this time, but toward Daniel, an awkward, entirely unpracticed hand on the older man's shoulder that neither of them seemed to know what to do with. "For what it's worth," Elliot said, with the specific stiffness of someone attempting comfort for possibly the first time in his adult life, "you're doing a genuinely terrible job of seeming disposable."
Daniel looked at Elliot's hand on his shoulder, and at Elliot's deeply uncomfortable expression, and something that might have been the beginning of a real laugh cracked through the tension in the room.
"That may be the least comforting thing anyone has ever said to me," Daniel said.
"I'm aware," Elliot said, not moving his hand. "I'm working with limited material."
Harper laughed — a real one, startled out of her, and for a moment, despite everything, the small apartment felt less like the site of a crisis and more like three people who genuinely didn't want to lose each other, sitting together in the middle of one anyway.
• • •
The moment didn't last.
It ended at 6 a.m. the next morning, with a knock on Daniel's door that wasn't Harper or Elliot.
By the time Harper heard about it — a frantic, garbled voicemail from Daniel himself, cut off mid-sentence — two federal agents had already come to his apartment with a warrant considerably more serious than an academic review board's complaint. This one cited unauthorized possession of classified municipal financial records, evidence, according to the warrant, that had turned up in a search of Daniel's own filing cabinet: documents belonging to the New York City comptroller's office, sealed under an active corruption investigation entirely unrelated, on paper, to Hudson Heights.
"That's not possible," Harper said, standing in the middle of the library at eight in the morning, phone clutched so hard her knuckles had gone white. "He wouldn't have those. Why would he have those?"
"He wouldn't," Elliot said, grim. "Somebody planted them. Same as the photo. Same as the footage. Curtis Alvarez fakes digital evidence. Somebody else plants physical evidence. It's the same strategy, scaled up."
"Scaled up to what? Arresting him?"
Elliot didn't answer, which was answer enough.
They found out an hour later, from a terse, heavily lawyered statement issued by the New York field office, that Daniel Rowan — Professor Daniel Rowan, Special Agent Daniel Rowan, whichever name currently applied — had been taken into custody, pending arraignment, on federal charges serious enough that even the university's carefully worded internal email couldn't fully soften the language: *unauthorized possession and suspected transfer of sealed investigative material.*
"They didn't just discredit him," Harper said, sitting very still at their library table, the full weight of it finally landing. "They got him *arrested.* He's not suspended anymore. He's in custody."
"Which means he can't help us," Elliot said. "Which means whoever's doing this knew exactly how far this needed to go to take him off the board completely."
Harper's phone rang.
Unknown number. Not the threatening kind, not the anonymous kind — this one came through with the specific static hiss of a call routed through something official, something monitored, the kind of call made from inside a building where every conversation is recorded and every minute is counted.
She answered with hands that weren't entirely steady.
"Harper." Daniel's voice, rushed, low, urgent in a way she'd never heard from him before — not the calm, controlled urgency of a man running an operation, but the raw, unpracticed urgency of someone who knew exactly how little time he had. "Listen to me. I don't have long. Whoever set this up, they didn't just plant the evidence. They knew where to plant it because they had access to my own investigative files. Someone inside the Bureau is feeding information to whoever's running this. Someone with clearance."
"Daniel—"
"Don't trust anyone who comes to you with my badge," he said, fast, urgent, cutting through whatever she'd been about to say. "Don't trust anyone who says they're taking over my case. Don't trust anyone who—"
The line went dead, cut off with the abrupt, mechanical finality of a call ended from the outside rather than hung up from within.
Harper stared at the phone in her hand, the silence on the other end somehow louder than anything he'd actually said.
"What did he say?" Elliot asked, already reaching for her.
Harper looked up at him, something cold settling in her chest that had nothing to do with the New York morning outside the library windows.
"He said someone inside his own agency is working against him," she said slowly. "And he said not to trust anyone who shows up carrying his badge."