"You'll drive Foote crazy if you don't keep it straight that Dakota was teaching at King's College when she died, not at Columbia. They'll be very jumpy about that. They use some of the same facilities, and students enrolled in either school can take courses at the other, but they are entirely separate institutions."

I had spent a lot of time in Manhattan during my undergraduate years. My best friend and roommate at Wellesley, Nina Baum, met her husband, Gabe, when we were sophomores. He was a junior at Columbia, and I had often accompanied Nina when she came to the city to spend a weekend with Gabe.

As we drove uptown, I tried to fill Mike in on the bits of college history that I remembered. Columbia was founded in 1754, by royal charter of King George II of England, and its original name was King's College-the name recently adopted by the experimental school that carved out a piece of the neighborhood for itself at the start of the new millennium. The university's first building was situated adjacent to Trinity Church on lower Broadway, and some of its earliest students included the first chief justice of the United States, John Jay, and the first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton. The institution closed down during the American Revolution, and when it reopened eight years later, it had shed its imperial name in favor of "Columbia," the personification of the American determination for independence.

By 1850, the college had moved to Madison Avenue at Forty-ninth Street, shaping itself into a modern university by the addition of a law school to its undergraduate and medical faculties. In 1897, the campus was moved to its current site in Morningside Heights at Broadway and 116th Street; this academic village- modeled on the idea of an Athenian agora-represented the largest single collection of buildings designed by the great architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White.

"What's with this experimental school thing?"

"I only know what I've read in the news. King's is an effort to set up an alternative educational model, drawing from a few of the stars of the Columbia teaching staff, but trying to structure a fresh view of the process. It borrows some of the stature of the Ivy League reputation, but it's been spun off on its own, free and clear of the mother university."

"Who's in charge?"

"We're about to find out. Foote said she'd have the acting president at the meeting."

"Wanna take Third Avenue uptown? Stop for a minute at the corner of Seventieth Street."

I pulled up in front of P. J. Bernstein's.

"Hungry?"

"No, thanks. Had a salad at my desk."

Chapman got out of the car while I double-parked and waited for him. In a slight nod to Christmas, Bernstein's window displayed a few large smiling Santa faces. But there was also a huge menorah with electric candles on the countertop, while blue, gold, and white-fringed streamers declared a Happy Hanukkah to the deli's customers.

Mike returned in a few minutes with two hot dogs wrapped in a napkin, overflowing with sauerkraut and relish, and a can of root beer. "I know the rules. No droppings on the floor mat. No sucking the sauerkraut out of my teeth in public." He chewed on his lunch as I continued driving and cut through Central Park at Ninety-seventh Street, taking Amsterdam Avenue the rest of the way north to the campus.

"Had any cases out of King's College yet?" Mike asked, licking the mustard off his fingers and swigging from the can of root beer.

"Not one."

"Must be the only school in the country with no reported crimes. Wait till these kids find Cannon's and the West End." Those two bars were magnets for the collegiate community and havens for the binge-drinking students who found their way to our offices with every kind of problem that alcohol abuse created.

Mike displayed his badge to the expressionless, square-tinned security guard who sat inside the small gatehouse at the entrance to College Walk on 116th Street, barely looking up from the skin magazine he was holding in his bony hand. "Okay if we park this inside for a couple of hours? I'm taking my niece here for an interview, see if I can get her back into school. A mind is a terrible thing to waste."

The guard waved us in without looking up. I found a space in front of the Graduate School of Journalism, on the corner of Broadway, and Chapman locked his arm in mine as I lowered myself out of the Jeep; we jogged together across the double-wide street and headed down to Claremont, fighting against the strong wind as we ran.

Sylvia Foote's secretary was expecting us. She took our coats and led us into Foote's small office, which overlooked the avenue and Barnard Hall directly opposite. Foote extended a hand to both of us, and made the introductions to Paolo Recantati, explaining that he was the acting president of King's College, and formerly a history professor at Princeton.

Recantati invited us to sit in a pair of black leather seats with our backs against the large bay window, while he moved across from us to a straight-backed wooden armchair and Foote remained behind her desk. They offered nothing, and waited for me to speak.

"As you know, Sylvia, I'd been working with Lola Dakota on the case against Ivan for almost two years. And I'm sure she made you aware of what the New Jersey prosecutors were doing. Despite their best efforts, it's doubtful that Lola's death was an accident after all. Detective Chapman and I are here to try to get your help in finding out what was going on in her life and who else, besides Ivan, might have wanted her dead."

Recantati spoke to me before Foote even opened her lips to form a response. "I know what your area of expertise is, Miss Cooper. Are you telling me that someone sexually assaulted Lola and then killed her?"

"There's no reason to believe that at-"

"Then exactly why are you involved? Shouldn't we be working with Mr. Sinnelesi's office on this? Lola's case was being handled by his people."

"The Dakota matter has been my investigation for close to two years. I supervise the domestic abuse cases as well as sex crimes. The issues, the sensitivity concerns, the needs of survivors going through the system-many of the problems overlap in these situations. I know the background of Lola and Ivan's relationship, most of her history, a lot of the intimate details of her private life. If she was the victim of an attack-a murder-in New York, I will be the person in charge of the prosecution."

Recantati pursed his lips and looked off to his left, as though to take a cue from Foote. He was tall and lean, and for a few moments, the crossing and uncrossing of his long legs was the only obvious sign of his discomfort. He'd probably never dealt with anything quite like this in his idyllic ivory tower, before coming to Manhattan.

Chapman pushed himself to the edge of his seat and eyeballed Recantati. "You think if you don't give us what we need, we'll just fold up our tents in the night and slip off to the next unsolved crime? You got how many students here?"

"Almost three thousand at King's," he said softly."And how many next door at Columbia?"

"Close to thirty thousand," he murmured.

"So start out with something like sixty-six thousand mothers and fathers picking this up on the evening news, half of'em spread out around the country, who didn't want their kids coming to this city of perverts and potheads to begin with."

Foote and Recantati exchanged scowls.

"Best view of it is, you had a little marital discord that got out of hand, off campus, so nobody else here is at risk," Chapman said, brushing his hands against each other as though to wipe away the problem. "Worst view of it is that you got somebody roaming this neighborhood, making all these darling scholars and social saviors of the future vulnerable to violence. And exactly what are you two doing to make little Jennifer and little Jason safe at school?"