Page 143 of Where the Snakes Sleep

Except they don’t look like either.

They look happy.

Camille turns the photograph over. There is one word written beneath the date.

Encore.

I look from the photograph to the journal, then the password field glowing on his laptop.

“No fucking way.”

Camille types it.

The drive unlocks.

Neither of us speaks. The cursor blinks in the sudden silence. On the screen, a folder tree expands in clean rows, each one labeled.

“Alberte, you dramatic bastard,” I whisper.

Camille lets out something that might almost be a laugh, although his eyes are still wet, and the sound of it dies quickly in the dark room.

We lean in together toward the light of the screen, and the rest of the night disappears.

By three in the morning, I know more about illegal animal transfers, falsified research documentation, private payments, shell entities, and institutional corruption than I ever wanted to know in my life.

Camille understands most of it far better than I do, but he translates everything into normal-person language when I ask, and to his credit, he never takes control of the process.

Not once.

He asks before opening every folder.

He asks before enlarging photographs.

When we find a scanned page containing Nadia’s handwriting, and Camille goes completely motionless beside me, he still waits until I say, “Open it.”

That nearly breaks me.

The document turns out to be notes she had apparently made while tracing inconsistencies in Henri’s research accounts. There are names, dates, project numbers, questions written furiously in the margins. Some entries match Alberte’s copies exactly. Others fill gaps he didn’t catch.

Together, they make a pattern.

Not a perfect one.

Not the kind of magical evidence package where a dead woman has conveniently written, “Henri murdered me.”

But enough.

More than enough.

There are payments to private buyers who had no legitimate research affiliation. Transfers that Camille says would have violated multiple regulations even at the time. Photographs of animals that should not have been at Le Mas. Correspondence from Henri instructing staff to modify records after materials had already moved.

And then there are the things that make my skin crawl.

A file created after Josef disappeared documenting the removal of his access credentials before anybody officially reported him missing.

A memorandum referring to Théodore’s “departure” dated one day before the journal says anyone realized he was gone.

Correspondence between Henri and an intermediary discussing Alain Moreau’s supposed marital problems before police began focusing on him.