Mercer, Mike, and I were sitting in my living room eating takeout from Shun Lee Palace at midnight. I had kicked off my boots, still damp from my trek through the snow-covered ground at the gorge, and was curled up on the sofa working the crispy sea bass with my chopsticks.

Mike poured us a second round of drinks as we tried to figure out the next day's plan of attack.

"The computer guys promised me answers from Emily Upshaw's hard drive," Mercer said. "I'd like to revisit Teddy Kroon to confront him about his DNA on the mouse, if they've figured out what files he tried to get into."

Mike eschewed chopsticks in favor of dipping his spring rolls into the duck sauce and popping them into his mouth. "I located Noah Tormey, the professor who bailed Emily out."

"I looked in the phone book this afternoon and couldn't find him."

"That's why I've got a gold shield, kid, and you've got a desk job. I guess he got flopped. I had somebody back in the office Google him while we were at the precinct. He's teaching now at Bronx Community College."

"Where's that?" I asked.

"And she thought I'd never be so useful, Mercer. Isn't that right? Coop's own little outer-boroughs guy. Your second Bronx geography lesson in one day. Till 1973, NYU used to have a campus in the Bronx. It was called the Heights-all male, very prestigious-much more so in those days than the one in the Village. They sold it to the City University in the Bronx, once all of NYU's focus shifted to its Washington Square facility."

"You want to drop in on Professor Tormey in the morning? I'm with you."

"Yeah. Scotty's going to attend at the Ichiko autopsy. Will you be in the office or you want me to pick you up here at nine?" Mike asked, trying to keep the honeyed baby spareribs from dripping onto my rug.

"Here is good. How about the Raven Society?"

"No listing under that name in the Manhattan directory. And no individual's name associated with the number we have came up in the Coles directory. Just an address in the East Fifties that's linked to the phone listing. We can rendezvous with Mercer and check it out tomorrow afternoon. You didn't mention it to McKinney, did you?"

"Not once he screwed up the chance to get Gino Guidi to cooperate," I said. "It just slipped my mind."

Mike tossed each of us a fortune cookie and I tore open the plastic wrapper to break it in half and read mine. "'Happiness returns when black cloud departs,'" I said aloud.

"I hope the weather pattern doesn't stall over Manhattan. She's always more cheery when she's getting some. What's yours?"

Mike ripped his open while Mercer answered, "'Avoid temptation. Tastiest dishes in your own kitchen.'" He smiled as he stood and carried his dishes to the sink. "I'm afraid the kitchen will be closed by the time I get home tonight."

Mike tossed the little slip of paper onto his empty plate. "'Bad news travels faster than lightning.'"

"I thought I paid Patrick extra for good fortunes," I said, referring to our favorite maître d' at Shun Lee. "These are as gloomy as this week's forecast. I'll pick up the rest of the mess. Why don't you guys get going?"

The alarm went off at seven and was followed immediately after by the ringing telephone. "You up?"

"Thinking about it, anyway." It was Joan Stafford, one of my best girlfriends, calling from Washington. "It's too cold and gray to get out of bed."

"What are you doing next weekend?"

"Saturday? I'm right in the middle of a very complex investigation. I can't-"

"No, not this one. The one after?"

"I don't know how this thing is going to break, Joanie. I think I'm grounded for the foreseeable future."

"We'll come to you. I've got a guy I want you to meet."

I groaned and threw back the covers. Joan had kept her apartment in New York despite her engagement to a Washington foreign affairs columnist. "I'm through with reporters. And none of your foreign diplomats. I don't even want to talk to any man who has a valid passport. I'm thinking local talent only."

"He is local. You have to do me a favor, Alex. Just this once. It's one evening, one night of your life-it's not like I'm asking you to marry him. Pick a restaurant and we'll just have a quiet dinner for four."

"Maybe in a couple of weeks, when this settles down," I said, in an obvious effort to stall her well-intentioned matchmaking. "What are you two doing for Valentine's Day?"

"We'll be in the city. I took a table for the museum benefit."

"Count me in. Chapman's betting me I can't get a date."

"That'll work fine. I'll see if I can put this together for the fourteenth."

"Who is he, Joanie?" I could lose him at a group event. The benefit would actually be an easier setting than an intimate dinner for four.

"No names. You're not going to check him out with anyone. He's a writer. He came to one of my readings last month and Jim and I have had him for dinner three times. He'd be perfect for you. Completely available, no professional competition, very dishy."

"Well, it's a great big 'if' until the cases are solved. But in case Chapman asks you, tell him I jumped at the offer."

I showered, dressed warmly, and caught up on the news until the doorman buzzed to announce that Mike was waiting for me in the driveway. We sipped coffee on our way up the Major Deegan Expressway until we exited at West 183rd Street. The old NYU uptown campus had been purchased, Mike told me, in the late 1890s, and the great architect Stanford White had been commissioned to build a Beaux Arts complex on a grand scale.

We drove through the makeshift guard station where a young woman handling security directed us to the administration building. From blocks away I could see the monumental dome of the Gould Memorial Library with its distinctive green copper patina, clearly a copy of the Roman Pantheon.

As we pulled up in front of the entrance, another guard directed us to a parking area on the far side of the steps. Mike decided not to put the police parking plaque on the dashboard, as there was no need yet to declare our presence on the small campus.

Students milled inside the lobby of the old great hall. No one was dawdling on the cold, windswept grounds between the buildings that towered over University Park and the highway below. Somehow, the massive interior columns of verdigris Connemara marble, the Tiffany stained-glass windows, and the fourteen-karat gold-leaf coffered dome that once had graced this scholarly outpost seemed terribly inconsistent with the poorly funded community college population the institution now serviced.

The faculty listings and campus map were tacked to a board inside a display case with a cracked glass door. Noah Tormey was listed as a member of the English department, with an office on the third floor of the old library.

"How are you going to start this off?" I asked as we climbed the dark staircase.

"Just follow my lead. It's a work in progress."

Adjacent to Tormey's empty room-number 326-was a small lecture hall. An instructor's voice carried into the corridor and I motioned to Mike to stop and listen. The schedule posted on the wall next to the door had the week's classes listed, and this was one of Professor Tormey's. I could see some of his thirty or so students slumped in their chairs, while a handful were furiously taking notes as the lecturer spoke.

"Coleridge's Biographia Literaria is the greatest single book of literary criticism ever written. It suggests to you all the things you must consider to discuss a poem, it clears out whatever gets in the way of your understanding of reading poetry. It was written, of course, because he believed the work of his dear friend William Wordsworth was the greatest poetic achievement of his time."