“What the fuck?” I exhale. “It’s his car?”

“Could be a car robbery gone wrong,” Teddy offers. “Some guy steals Jay’s car and then runs him over with it.”

I shake my head. “That might make sense in a parking lot. But Jay was coming from a pedestrian-only area on campus. The BMW was flying down Lumpkin.”

I think of our witness who insisted the driver looked identical to Jay. “Any better photos of the driver?”

“Here.” Teddy moves the top photo to reveal a grainy image of a man behind the wheel.

My stomach does a flip.

“Seriously, what the fuck?” I look at Teddy. The image is of a white male, young, early twenties, with a broad nose and high cheekbones. “Is someone messing with us?”

He smiles and pulls the Snickers bar apart into bite-size pieces. He offers me one, and I shake my head.

“Are you messing with me?”

“Me?” Teddy asks with a fake affronted look. “I would never.”

“Then why are you smiling?”

“Come on, Marlitt. For months, you’ve had nothing but that white van case, and it’s going nowhere and it’s depressing, making me worry about Cassandra and Josie—”

I think of Teddy’s sisters rolling their eyes in unison every time he tells them to be careful. It’s not entirely true. I’ve had other cases: drug-related, domestics, but lately I’ve been assisting Sex Crimes with a case that involves a white van–owning asshole who offers college girls rides home and then rapes them.

“—and now you’ve got something interesting. And you’re asking why I’m smiling? You wanted this case, remember? You could be buried in paperwork, proofreading a report for the third time—”

“All right, yeah, it’s fucking stellar,” I say. And then I do smile.

“Language,” Truman yells out his office door.

Four

Wednesday, November 13, noon

It’s a beautiful afternoon; a soft orange light casts hazy gray shadows through the oak trees. Students lie on their backs in the brittle grass, sweatshirts tucked under their heads. A pair throws a Frisbee; a shirtless guy in blue jeans strums his guitar. All fresh and lovely, they’re studying statistics and quoting their professors, enamored by their own thoughts, the mere thought of thinking, and all the radical, subversive ideas out there just waiting to be grasped. Old age is a distant, incomprehensible thing for other people to worry about. Young, they will live forever. They tremble with this new awareness, the connections they’re forming with the world around them; their classmates vibrate with an energy that’s so new and exciting that no one notices they’re tripping over power lines, one rogue spark away from disaster.

I clutch a paper coffee cup in my hand, and Teddy jokes about caffeine as a necessary evil that supports our partnership.

“Initial impressions?” I ask.