I click my pen. “Thank you, Tom Jones. You’ve been very helpful.”

He wasn’t, but I don’t have the same issue with lying as Teddy.

As he trudges away, I sense a change in the air. I turn to see Aisha closing the rear doors to the ambulance. She’s still wearing latex gloves as she taps the side of the vehicle. It speeds off, sirens roaring, although the guy’s no longer in a hurry to get anywhere.

I feel a rush of relief. Not because of the gawkers—they’ll linger as long as the crime scene tape’s in place—but because now I can finally concentrate. This whole time I’ve had one eye on the body, mindful of its presence as I ask questions and take notes, aware of the gradual cooling of its internal temperature, gravity pulling blood to the skin closest to the ground as I scan the crowd for outliers, but it’s not my problem anymore.

I stuff my hands in my pockets and turn toward the street.

I spent my whole life on this campus, straining against my mother’s grasp to watch tall cranes and men in hard hats build the Ramsey Center, later getting drunk outside her building and glaring as another group expanded the student learning center, bulldozed a parking lot, built a garage; the landscape ever changing, the skyline interrupted by new buildings, but always people shuffling to and from classes, a kaleidoscope of sounds and colors, the streets full of energy and life. Now, students trudge up Baxter Hill casting curious looks backward, faces peer down from the redbrick dining hall on the corner, and an outline of a dead boy glints in the middle of the gray asphalt.

I turn back to the students on the steps and withdraw a weepy, curly haired girl from under the sheltering wing of a boy, who looks embarrassed and uncomfortable. It’s clear he doesn’t know what to do with her blubbering, but two decades of training in southern-style chivalry have left him with no other option than putting his arm around her shoulder. He blinks at me when I call her over, and his relief is so palpable I almost laugh.

“Name?”

“Morgan Walker,” she says between sniffs.

“All right, Morgan,” I say kindly. “This is important. I need you to tell me everything that happened. Did you go to class this morning?”

She nods tearfully. “I have a nine A.M. biology class with Dr. Cho.” She adds the last bit hopefully like I might know the professor.

When I don’t say anything, she takes a deep breath and wipes under her eyelashes with her fingertips, smudging mascara across her cheeks like inky feathers.