Had he chanced to glance out his office window just a few minutes before noon, Professor Giancarlo Rosa might have seen, off in the distance, a solitary figure making his way across the near-deserted campus of Rhode Island College. It was the last week of May; commencement had already come and gone, and most of the faculty, save for those teaching a summer course, had vanished along with the students. The few laggards, Rosa among them, were busy collecting their things, finishing up last-minute paperwork, and doing whatever other odds and ends that required completion before staff members could escape to their own summer retreats. With no immediate plans for his vacation, and nothing particularly urgent on his agenda for the day, the professor of music was in no great hurry, so at the moment he was sitting at his computer, perusing the online edition of Il Centro, an Italian newspaper. Behind him a recording of Clementi sonatinas played on a little CD player atop the filing cabinet—or more precisely, atop a stack of papers, manuscripts, books, and other paraphernalia that teetered precariously atop the cabinet.

As absorbed in his reading as he was at the moment, the world outside his window held little interest for him. Not that it would have mattered even if he had just then taken a notion to look outdoors. Had he caught a glimpse of the person off in the distance, a young man of twenty-two years, Rosa would most likely have taken little note of him. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the young man’s appearance that would have caught his attention, no immediate indication that his journey across campus was tending in any definitive way toward the building in which Rosa sat, and certainly nothing to convey any augury that his path and that of the professor would very soon intersect.

For his part, the young man strode across the campus with an air of great purpose, though with a slight but perceptible limp, the remnant of an unfortunate though not terribly serious mishap on the rugby pitch some weeks earlier. His ankle had been unceremoniously stomped on while he lay defenseless on the ground at the bottom of a ruck, a pile of players struggling to obtain possession of the ball. The injury had not yet completely healed—every step was a small reminder of the incident—yet he took little notice of it. He was in a hurry, and the small discomfort was of little concern. Not completely certain of the exact location of his ultimate destination—the building housing the college’s music department—he paused as he passed the soccer field and track oval, and gazed ahead at the cluster of structures before him to get his bearings.