"But there was no excuse for the way Professor Dakota made fools out of us. Made students stand up for ten or fifteen minutes at a clip, firing questions at us about obscure political events of 1893. Questions nobody could answer unless you'd gone beyond the course materials and guessed correctly which year she might focus on that particular day. She reduced a couple of my classmates to tears, and she seemed to enjoy doing that. That sign on Dakota's door-badlands? She relished that reputation."

"Was Charlotte Voight one of those students? Was she in your class?"

"Who?"

"A junior, the one who disappeared from school last April."

"Never heard of her."

"What do you know about the drug scene there?"

"Like every other college campus, it was huge. Just happens not to be my thing, but you can find plenty of people to talk to about that."

"D'you have anything to do with the dig that Professor Dakota was working on, on Roosevelt Island?"

"No, but Skip knows about that. Professor Lockhart." Gloria blushed again, this time as though she had slipped in a too familiar reference.

"The one you said Dakota was rumored to be involved with?"

She twisted the ringlets behind her right ear. "Well, that's one rumor I know wasn't true. I mean, I was involved with Skip, junior year. We were sort of having an affair."

That helped account for the A in American history, I guessed. "Mind telling us about him?"

"I mean, he was single. There wasn't anything wrong with it." Gloria was looking at Mike for approval now. She seemed proud of herself, in that foolish way that girls sometimes are when they take a lover under inappropriate circumstances. "But I'd been seeing him since the summer after my sophomore year. That's why I confronted him about the stories that he and Professor Dakota were involved." She looked so earnest. "I guess I was jealous." "What did he tell you?"

"Not to be ridiculous. Skip told me that he used to spend a lot of time with her, because their intellectual interests were the same. But he said she was a real gold digger. Not his type at all."

"What did he mean, gold digger? Was that his word for her, or yours?" From what I had learned during my initial investigation of Lola's marital situation, she seemed to have a very comfortable nest egg of her own. She had invested her money intelligently, with Ivan's professional assistance at first, through all the years of their marriage. She didn't seem to have a penchant for jewelry or fancy clothes, as I had observed in our many meetings, and it was obvious that she hadn't spent big dollars on decorating her new apartment.

"It was something like that. Treasure hunter. Gold digger. That's all I could get out of him, really. You can ask Skip yourself. I'm sure you'll be speaking with him. He's part of that multidisciplinary project they were working on at some old loony bin. Just don't tell him I told you about our relationship, okay? The administration wouldn't approve."

"So what was the buzz on campus before everyone left town? Who killed Lola Dakota?"

"I went to the service on Friday night. Not 'cause I was heartbroken about the professor. But a lot of my old friends were going to be there, so we figured we'd go out together before everybody split town.

"By midnight, after a few drinks, we all began to look guilty to each other." Gloria laughed. "A few of my friends-the ones who'd done well in class-defended her. The rest of us had gripes to air and stories to tell. A lot of guys figure it's just some bum from the neighborhood who knocked her off. Everybody worries about getting mugged up here. It's a constant problem, on campus and off. One guy was a suitemate of that kid who hanged himself the next night. Julian? You know who he is? That's how I heard about Lola and her crazy husband." "Heard what?"

"Apparently Julian used to brag about being on Ivan Kralovic's payroll. That the husband paid him for information about Professor Dakota-what her hours were, when she was at her office, where she had moved, when she was out in the field on her new project. In fact, that's the reason some of the guys think Julian hanged himself. That he didn't realize Kralovic wanted the information so he could kill his wife. Julian just thought he was harassing her. And believe me, there were plenty of people on campus who wanted her harassed."

I was thinking out loud, directing my question to Mike. "Where in the world do you think Julian Gariano would have crossed the path of Ivan Kralovic?"

"Not hard to figure," Gloria responded. "My friend was there the day they met. Julian's dad had just hired a lawyer to handle his drug case. Turned out to be Ivan Kralovic's defense attorney, too. They met in the waiting room at the lawyer's office. Julian was wearing a King's College sweatshirt. Said Kralovic started asking him a million questions. That same night, back in the dorm room, Professor Dakota's husband called to talk to Julian again. Offered him a ton of money to rat on his wife. There was nothing Julian wouldn't do for money. He didn't think anyone would get hurt." Mike gave Gloria his card. "Call me if you hear anything else." We thanked her and walked back across Amsterdam Avenue, passing the car and continuing on to keep our appointment with Sylvia Foote at the King's building on Claremont Avenue.

This time, she was expecting us. I suspected it gave her a good deal of pleasure to tell us that she had been unable to comply with our request to have students lined up ready to talk with us. "You know what this season means to so many families. Despite my best efforts, most of the young people from out of town wanted to keep to their plans and get home to their folks. I've got a few local students here, and you're welcome to use my deputy counsel's office now."

She smiled wanly and I guessed she had sanitized their stories pretty well.

Mike had opened his notepad and was ticking off his new requests. "We'll move on to the permanent residents, Ms. Foote, faculty and administration. Here's a list of the people I'd like to see tomorrow. At my office. Let's start with the acting president, Mr. Recantati. I'd like Professor Lockhart-he's the historian, right?-and Professor Shreve, from anthropology, and the heads of each department involved in the project Professor Dakota was working on. I want-"

"I'm just not certain of the availability of these people on such short notice."

"Coop, have you got any paper with you?"

I opened my folder and removed several grand jury subpoenas. Foote knew exactly what that meant. "They can be in Detective Chapman's office in the morning, or they can come directly to the courthouse at the end of the week and be questioned by me, under oath, before the grand jury. Their call, Sylvia." I scribbled in the names and dates while Chapman kept talking.

Foote ushered us into a small room adjacent to her own. For the rest of the afternoon, we saw a stream of young adults who attended King's College and lived in the five boroughs or surrounding suburbs. Most of them acted as though they would rather be boarding the Titanic than talking to a detective and a prosecutor. Not one of them admitted to having any personal knowledge about Lola Dakota or Charlotte Voight. Drugs were everywhere on campus, they seemed to agree, but none of these kids had ever inhaled and didn't know who the dealers or steerers were.

One of the last to straggle in was a senior who had lived on the same floor as Charlotte during the spring semester. Kristin Baymer was also twenty. Her home was a Fifth Avenue apartment, where her father and stepmother were raising her infant half brother. She parked herself on the sofa opposite the desk at which I had been working and curled up with her knees underneath her, stifling a yawn as she greeted us.

"I'm not gonna get in trouble for this, am I?"