"Why would you bring in the big guns? Coop tells me you're the legal eagle." He smiled at her. "Save those administrators some money. Feldman's hourly rates are sky-high."

"There could obviously be a conflict of interest between the college and some of the individual employees you'll be talking with. I'm sure we could get him to do this pro bono. Justin's a Columbia man-college and law school."

"Boola book."

"That's the wrong-"

"I know that, Ms. Foote. But the only academic tunes I know the lyrics to are that one and 'Be True to Your School.'" He sang her a few bars of the Beach Boys classic while she opened her briefcase and put her glasses on, then he settled in with his notepad.

"Let's see how far we get without resorting to outside counsel, Sylvia, shall we?" I tried to keep the beginning of this conversation on course. "Why don't you tell me what concerns you have, and then we'll ask you for the things we need."

She looked over her shoulder as though Paolo Recantati would reappear at any moment.

"I didn't think it's my business to tell you what's been going on with the grant money that's been disappearing from the college, but Recantati's in charge and he has directed me to be candid with you about it."

Foote fidgeted with her papers, having mistakenly made the assumption that the subject she was about to disclose was what had rattled the acting president and caused him to storm out. "He's not responsible for this, Alex, I can assure you. We've been trying to look into this ourselves since the federal investigation started in the spring.

"Why the missing cash from the anthropology department would have anything to do with Lola Dakota's death is beyond me, but I did come prepared to discuss it with you this morning."

Neither Shreve nor Recantati had mentioned any financial improprieties at the college. Mike and I were both thinking of Lola's shoe boxes and whether this would be a connection to the unexplained cash.

"Have either of you heard of Dr. Lavery? Claude Lavery?"

Neither one of us answered.

"He was thought to be a trailblazing anthropologist. We hired him away from John Jay." John Jay was New York City's college of criminal justice. "The administration convinced me, at the time, that it was quite a coup for us.

"Lavery's expertise was urban drug use." She extracted several clippings from her leather case. One of them was a John Jay alumni magazine, several years old, featuring a cover photo of Lavery and heralding an article on his inner-city work. He sported a colorful dashiki, unkempt dreadlocks, and a tangled beard. He was holding a crack pipe in his hand.

"I'm upping my contribution to the Jebbies this year. The closest this guy could get to the faculty of a Jesuit college like Ford-ham would be the service entrance."

Foote narrowed her eyes and examined Mike more closely. If she thought he was crossing the limits of political correctness, she hadn't seen anything yet.

"What came with Dr. Lavery to King's College was a grant of three million dollars, courtesy of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. That's a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services. It made him even more attractive to us than his resume.

"The first problem we faced was where to put him. Winston Shreve was running the anthropology department and, quite frankly, didn't want a thing to do with Lavery's study. Shreve is a classicist, really. He has very little experience with modern urban culture and certainly not this kind of thing. He wanted us to put Lavery in the sciences, or with sociology."

"Anybody want him?"

"Actually, yes. There was a bit of competition to get him. Professor Grenier runs the biology department and was very interested in carving a position out for Lavery because of the potential for health-related studies of drug use. Long-term physical problems of heroin addicts, everything from HIV infection to dental deterioration. It fit nicely with their premed courses, overlapped with the chemistry curriculum, and linked them more tightly to the social sciences.

"And poli sci wanted him as well. Lola staged quite a campaign to convince us. She thought it was a wonderful basis to study the city, everything from the criminal justice reaction to the drug issue, the competition for funding between prison facilities and treatment programs, and the political response to substance abuse in society."

"What was your solution?"

"It was one of the few battles that Winston Shreve has lost here. Dr. Lavery calls himself an anthropologist, and that's the department in which we saw fit to place him. Much like the Black-wells Island project-"

"Is Lavery involved in that?"

"Not that I know. But it's a similar situation in that Lavery created a multidisciplinary approach to his issue, so the other departments could each get a piece of his very large and quite delicious pie. Money for everyone."

"What's the problem, Sylvia?"

"A complaint was initiated by the government a few months ago. Not in your office, but with the feds. Southern District of New York. It seems that a substantial sum of the money he was awarded is missing and unaccounted for.

"The grant came with a discretionary fund. It made one hundred thousand dollars available annually for Lavery to use as he saw fit. Related to the research, of course." She was thumbing through documents that appeared to be spreadsheets and accounting records.

"Lavery claims that he purchased computer equipment and office supplies and gave cash to student interns who researched short-term matters for him. There don't seem to be records to support him, but most academics wouldn't be surprised by that."

"What's the theory?"

Sylvia Foote studied a point on the floor between her shoes and Mike's desk. "Drugs, Detective. Sort of everyone's worst fear about this grant from the outset. That the cash was being used to buy drugs-illegal street drugs-to keep his worker bees happy. Perhaps to use for his own pleasure. The investigation is still ongoing."

"But how-?"

"Claude Lavery is a unique character. Kind of a Pied Piper in a college setting. Smart and creative, but gave the impression of being the anti-academic at the same time. He has a very laid-back style, and early on, right out of the London School of Economics Lavery would venture into the bleakest parts of the city. Central Harlem, Bed-Stuy, East New York, Washington Heights. He bonded with street characters, the kind who would never let outsiders into their world. That's why his research was unique.

"He wrote about phenomena that made him the darling of scholars in urban studies-both the hard government types and the more 'touchy-feely' sociologists. And then, all the major newspapers picked up his theories as though they were gospel."

"Like what?"

Foote pulled a copy of a Washington Post front-page story from her briefcase. "Citing data from Lavery's studies, the story backs his claim that it was the federal government's strict interdiction policies about marijuana back in the seventies and eighties that created the market for international cocaine trafficking to fill the void.

"The students were wildly enthusiastic whenever they came under his spell. They would walk into a neighborhood with Claude-the kind of place these middle-class kids wouldn't dare to go on their own-and find that he had established this wonderful rapport with the locals. That led him, and them, to the addicts and, finally, to the dealers."

"You thought maybe by bringing this guy to the college he was gonna be hanging around on Sesame Street? What's the surprise here?"

"Frankly, Detective, you're right. That's why some of my colleagues aren't the least bit shocked. They expected no less. I presume," she said with great resignation, "that some of them are the people who sparked this formal complaint. Caribbean vacations to study island sources and native drug use, major foundations pouring money in on top of the government grant-things quite likely to make other serious academics a bit envious. And then you have the real distress. What if Claude Lavery was literally putting money into the hands of these students to enable them to buy drugs themselves?"