SS(S)S - Emails

You close the door and get to work, kneeling by the bed to use the laptop. A tap of the browser and the letter G autofills Gmail and you’re in. It’s Sal’s personal computer; why would she ever log out?

Her inbox is full, mostly of junk, spam, and receipts from online purchases.

You are methodical. You start with a search for CCL in the search bar and get several hits, but they’re all innocent. It’s mainly emails with other students and faculty about normal sorority business. Complaining about CCL swooping on certain charitable events and how CCL is still getting buzz from what happened with Amy. There are, understandably, a ton of CCL mentions from back in the immediate aftermath of the killing spree.

It still shakes you inside that not one, but three CCL girls conspired to do something like that. What happened that night has been analyzed and picked apart at length by the media and the police. The motives of the killers are straightforward, or so it seems: Amy wanted to outdo her mother, who was the heroine of her own **** incident a long time ago, and then a successful CCL president and now CEO of a company. Aki, evidently, had roots in Japanese organized crime. So it’s been speculated that she went along with the plan because, maybe because of her upbringing, using crazy and **** means to achieve goals seemed less unreasonable. Olivia, meanwhile, would do anything to raise her profile. She’d been a rising influencer at the time. If she’d become, as she planned, a survivor of such an event—she would have been a hundred times more famous.

It was a bold, ambitious plan that would have led to huge payoffs for the people involved… just one thing had been missing: basic morality. These three girls just hadn’t had the mental guardrails that other people have.

You still don’t completely understand it, but… people do things that you don’t understand all the time. Gurlberg’s Chief of Police is a ruthless tyrant, but the people of Gurlberg keep electing the same Mayor who just keeps that Chief of Police in power. You don’t get it.

You search for Athena next. There is zero correspondence with Athena and basically nothing about her except a few offhanded comments from Sal to her officers about sorority business. Sal seems to dislike Athena and there’s more to it than rivalry, but the details are not in her email.

You search for the con. Nothing.

There are no clues in the email. You check Sal’s history and find that she’s quite a shopper, but that’s about it. If you dig deeper you’ll find some mildly personal stuff, but you are not here to be a creep. Your sense of ethics serves you well: once you’re away from that screen, your senses work again, and you hear the footstep in the hall. It might be Sal or it might be someone else, but you’ve taken a cautious approach to this infiltration so far and it’s worked for you. The conservative play is to hide. You should’ve scouted good hiding places before you looked at the computer, but it’s too late now.

Hide in the closet?

Or under the bed?