One Coffee With

new diversion and paused to eavesdrop.

The girl nodded. 'Dean Ellis was speaking with Professor Quinn on the telephone when he suddenly started-I mean, the dean said it sounded like Professor Quinn was-' Embarrassed, she groped for a diplomatic term. 'Like he was, well, you know, upchucking'

Sandy half rose. Nauman was closer to the door, but before he could move it was wrenched open and Riley Quinn staggered across the threshold. He clutched a wastebasket to his soiled shirtfront, and an acrid stench reached their nostrils as he heaved into it spasmodically. His eyes were glassy, his skin green white beneath its deep tan.

'Help me!' he gasped hoarsely, retching at every word.

'Oh, my God, I'm dying!'

The ambulance responded in record time, but Quinn had passed into a deep coma before it arrived. Death occurred shortly after twelve noon.

4

SIGRID HARALD was not a particularly fervent proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment. She waved no banners, marched in no demonstrations, signed no petitions for the advancement of women. She was aware of how much she owed to the feminist movement, but she also knew the worth of her own brains and stamina, and she had expected to reach her present position on the police force before she was thirty- five; ERA just speeded up the timetable. For that she was grateful; and when promotion to lieutenant and an opening in the Detective Bureau were offered so much earlier than she'd hoped and planned, she had accepted it for what it could be, not for what it was.

'I'm not here to be the department's token female officer,' she'd told Captain McKinnon equably. 'If you won't give me a share of the case loads just like any other officer-and paperwork and the street work-then you'd better get another female.'

McKinnon had glared at her. Men he knew how to handle; men could be wilted by a blast of his anger; but women-he'd never commanded women on a regular basis, and this one wasn't easily intimidated. Those cool gray eyes refused to waver.

'You'll take what's assigned, and you'll work by the rules,' he'd said. 'My rules. The commissioner wished you on me, but I'm still running things here. I'll expect the same obedience and respect I get from all my officers, or by damn I will get another female!'

She'd nodded. She was a tall, slender woman. Slender almost to the point of skinny; only not skinny in the dried-up sense, thought McKinnon, but fined down like a greyhound or a ballet dancer. Hair as dark as her mother's had been; tall like her father with his fair Nordic skin. A self-contained person totally unlike Anne or Leif. Not at all pretty, yet there was something about those gray eyes, something that had made McKinnon hope she would work out here.

Nearly a year had gone by since then; and when the call came in from a local precinct station about a possible poisoning at Vanderlyn College, McKinnon checked the work sheets and was glad to see that Lieutenant Harald's was the lightest case load at the moment. The young woman had shown herself capable of handling violence, but (although he would have denied it) Mac always breathed easier when he could legitimately give Anne Harald's daughter what he privately tagged the 'amateur' murders: the single eruption of violence between friends or relatives that usually left a remorseful killer confessing at the scene of his crime. A homicide at a college-especially a poisoning-how dangerous could it be?

Lieutenant Harald was unaware that Captain McKinnon had once known her parents, and she would have been indignant if she'd heard his reasoning. When the new assignment was relayed to her, she was cleaning up the loose ends of a routine case, a dope-pushing doctor who'd been knifed when he refused credit to a young hophead desperate for a quick fix. The dreary incident had occurred during office hours in front of the doctor's receptionist and two patients, and the kid had been picked up a half hour later, so any reasonably competent prosecutor should be able to get a conviction. Always nice when the current assignment was wrapped up as the new one began; unfortunately it didn't happen often enough.

On her way to Vanderlyn College, Lieutenant Harald stopped by the small hospital where Professor Quinn had died. In a holding area off the emergency room, Cohen, an assistant from the Medical Examiner's Office, had finished his superficial examination and was waiting for her before removing Quinn's body for a complete autopsy.

'Offhand I'd say ingestion of some sort of metallic irritant,' he said, pulling back the sheet and pointing to the corrosive burns on the dead man's lips. 'I'll know better after I open him up.'

'How soon?' she asked, trying to match Cohen's dispassionate mood.

He shrugged. 'There's a drowning and two suicides ahead of you today, but ladies first, I guess. I'll put yours at the head of the line. Nice threads,' he added reflectively, gazing at the no longer immaculate fawn suit and the crumpled befouled paisley tie, which lay across the bottom of the stretcher. 'Too bad they got puked on.'

He dropped the sheet over Riley Quinn's body again.

Vanderlyn College employed its own security personnel to police the campus, but when Sigrid Harald was still a uniformed rookie, she had ridden a patrol car in this precinct for a few months before being transferred, so she had a working knowledge of the college layout. Except for the river promenade Vanderlyn's tree-graced grounds were completely enclosed by a tall ivy-covered brick wall broken in several places by broad wrought-iron archways with gates, that could be locked at night. All legal spaces on both sides of the streets for a three-block radius were jammed with cars, motorcycles and mopeds, and several privately owned parking garages on side streets were guaranteed a turn-away business because of the warning signs posted on every gate onto the campus: Official Vehicles Only-Absolutely No Parking on Campus. Sigrid flashed her shield at a beefy-faced uniformed patrol officer lounging in front of the main gate.

The officer gave her a dour nod and gestured toward a narrow service street to the left, which eventually brought her to the rear of Van Hoeen Hall where several other police vehicles were parked in a delivery zone. By the time she located the Art Department, it was nearly three-thirty. Personnel from precinct and headquarters were, as always, overlapping in the preliminaries, amiably arguing points of precedence; but the lab technicians seemed to have settled in with their usual efficiency.

Another uniformed officer was posted at the top of the hall by the elevator doors to keep back a crowd of blue- jeaned students who craned their necks and jostled for good sight-seeing positions. Sigrid heard a buzz of curious speculation as she again flashed her shield.

'What do you call a lady pig?' asked an adenoidal voice, but the gibe was good-natured and was even accompanied by a couple of embarrassed shushes. There had been no demonstrations at Vanderlyn in several years.

She entered the Art Department 's main office by way of the nursery door, and her glance brushed over the group of people seated on a motley collection of ill-matched chairs around a long table in the front corner. The office reminded her of those in old precinct stations throughout the city. There were the same unlovely tile floors, a battered bookcase, a large desk canted across a rear corner and under the high windows a bank of ugly green, black and brown file cabinets, some with sprung drawers that would never again close flush.

The resemblance to precinct houses ended there, however, for large bright paintings-mostly abstract-covered the cream-colored walls; baskets of Swedish ivy, asparagus ferns, spider plants and the like hung in front of the windows, and pots of geraniums stood on the file cabinets, softening the room's bureaucratic feel. Someone evidently had a kelly green thumb or amazing luck, thought Sigrid, who'd never managed to keep a plant alive for more than a month and no longer tried.

An assemblage of small white non-representational sculptures, none more than eight inches high, stood on the file cabinets in front of the plants. They had all been carved from blocks of plaster of Paris, and each was intricately detailed with a variety of surface textures. One ambitious piece looked like a random pile of barred cages with small cubes inside. Not very aesthetic perhaps but remarkable when one realized that it had been carved from a solid chunk of plaster. Later Sigrid would learn that these sculptures were not the handiwork of art majors but had come