“Yup.”

“Which leaves how many suspects?” She stood.

“How many people live in this city?”

“I dunno. City proper, six hundred thousand, give or take; greater metro area, four million or so.”

“Then somewhere between six hundred thousand and four million suspects it is,” I said, “less two, give or take.”

“Thanks for narrowing it down, Skid. You’re swell.”

11

The second and third floors of McIrwin Hall housed the offices of Bryce’s Sociology, Psychology and Criminology faculty, including Eric Gault’s. The first floor contained classrooms, and one of those classrooms contained Jason Warren at the moment. According to Bryce’s course catalog, the class he took here, “Hell as a Sociological Construct,” explored the “social and political motives behind the masculine creation of a Land of Punishment from the Sumerians and Akkadians up to, and including, the Christian Right in America.” We’d run checks on all of Jason’s teachers and found that Ingrid Uver-Kett had recently been expelled from a local NOW chapter for espousing views that made Andrea Dworkin’s look mainstream. Her class ran three and a half hours without a break and met twice a week. Ms. Uver-Kett drove down from Portland, Maine, on Mondays and Thursdays to teach it, and spent the rest of her time, as far as we could see, writing hate mail to Rush Limbaugh.

Angie and I decided Ms. Uver-Kett seemed to spend far too much time being a threat to herself to possibly threaten Jason and eliminated her as a suspect.

McIrwin Hall was a white Georgian set off in a grove of birch and violently red maples with a cobblestone walk leading up to it. We’d watched Jason disappear in a crowd of students pouring through the front doors. We heard tramping and catcalls and then a sudden, almost total silence.

We had breakfast and came back to see Eric. By then, only a forlorn and forgotten pen at the foot of the stairs gave any indication that a single soul had been through the doors this morning.

The foyer smelled of ammonia and pine solvent and two hundred years of intellectual perspiration, of knowledge sought and knowledge gained and grand ideas conceived under the mote-rich glow of the fractured sunlight streaming through a stained glass window.

There was a reception desk to our right, but no receptionist. At Bryce, I guess, you were already supposed to know your every destination.

Angie took off her denim shirt, yanked at the hem of her untucked T-shirt to clear it of static cling. “The atmosphere alone makes me want to get a degree here.”

“Probably shouldn’t have flunked high school geometry.”

The next thing I said was, “Ooof.”

We climbed a curved mahogany staircase, the walls laden with paintings of past Bryce presidents. Dour looking men all, faces weighted and strained from carrying so much genius in their brains. Eric’s office was at the end of the hall and we knocked once and heard a muffled, “Come in,” from the other side of the pebbled glass.