“What the hell do you think those lyrics mean?”
“Means he’s got the gun.”
She continued to stare at him but couldn’t make out his eyes behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses.
Pearl settled back in the Lincoln’s plush upholstery and crossed her arms. She tried to doze off, but couldn’t.
Run, bitch, run.
The drive had taken them a little more than an hour. Waycliffe College was about a mile outside Putneyberg, a town easy to miss if you weren’t paying attention and drove past the “Business Loop.” The town proper was an assemblage of clapboard shops and shaded side streets. Quinn wouldn’t have been surprised to see Andy and Barney patrolling.
Traffic was sparse. So was paint. The structures that weren’t brick had taken on a gray, weathered look. Quinn decided what the hell, call it rustic.
As they drove along Main Street (what else?) the few people on the sidewalks didn’t pay much attention to the Lincoln. They were probably used to luxury vehicles coming and going, many of them carrying present and future trust-fund babies. The loop off the highway was now mostly for the college.
Waycliffe wasn’t large enough to transform Putneyberg into a college town. Only one of the two local bars looked like the kind of place Waycliffe students would frequent. A twenty-four-hours place called Price’s. Of course, there was always the other bar, a dump called Eddies (without an apostrophe), if some dumb college kid wanted to pick a fight. Probably at either place they could score drugs.
The newest-looking object in Putneyberg was the big shiny sign informing Quinn and Pearl that Waycliffe College was one mile ahead, and that Putneyberg wished them good-bye. Quinn looked for a HELLO sign on the other side of the street where traffic ran the opposite direction, and there it was.
“No gown versus town here,” Pearl said. “It looks like gown won a long time ago.”
“I didn’t see anyone of college age,” Quinn said.
“Because it’s summer.”
“Still, only a mile away from a cold beer…”
The trees bordering the road suddenly looked a lusher green than the others, and they were well trimmed. There was a sign announcing the college turnoff was five hundred feet ahead.
Quinn braked and made the right turn, and they were on smooth blacktop winding through more uniformly trimmed trees. Quinn and Pearl, New Yorkers, offered a few guesses about what kind of trees they were, but they probably weren’t even close.
And there ahead was the college, an assemblage of similar redbrick buildings, most of which were at least half devoured by ivy. The largest building, brick and with a column-flanked entrance, loomed before them. Where the ivy had been trimmed away, carved stone lettering identified it as the administration building. All the ivy and other foliage lent the grounds a lush look, but at the same time everything was neatly manicured. Waycliffe had about it the burnished quality of the old and invaluable.
There was a small gravel lot in front of the building. Half a dozen cars were parked in reserved spaces near the entrance. Quinn parked before one of the V ISITORS signs on the opposite side of the lot, in the shade.
When Quinn and Pearl entered the building they were surprised by how cool it was. The only person in sight was a girl in her late teens or early twenties seated cross-legged on a lone wooden bench, diligently copying something from a netbook computer in her lap into a spiral notebook.
“We’re looking for Chancellor Schueller,” Pearl said.
The girl didn’t glance up but pointed with a long, decorous fingernail to her left.
They walked down the hall about fifty feet, past a couple of blank wooden doors to a larger, six-paneled oak door with a brass plaque lettered OFFICE OF THE CHANCELLOR.
Quinn knocked and opened the door simultaneously.
They entered a small anteroom with book-lined walls and a narrow desk, behind which sat a gray-haired woman with a wasted look and a narrowed left eye that gave her a kind of shrewd expression. She’d apparently just closed a bottom desk drawer and sat up straight. She gave them a May I help you? smile.
“We have an appointment to see Chancellor Schueller,” Quinn said. He and Pearl simultaneously flashed their identification.
“Oh, yes, the police,” the woman said. “About poor Macy Collins, I would imagine.” Without waiting for her assumption to be confirmed, she rose from her chair and strode to one of two oak doors like the ones connecting to the hall. She knocked gently on the door on her left, pushed it open a few feet, and announced them.
Then she opened the door wider, and Quinn and Pearl walked past her into Chancellor Linden R. Schueller’s office.
Schueller was standing behind his desk, grinning widely, in meet-and-greet mode. He was a slender, handsome man, perhaps early forties, in a neat gray blazer with leather elbow patches. His dark hair was combed sideways with geometric precision from a perfect part. Gold cuff links flashed on white cuffs. His eyes, behind newly fashionable tortoise-shell glasses, were brilliant blue and aware. He looked too much like a rich playboy to be an academic
After introductions and hand shakes, he motioned with his arm toward two small but overstuffed chairs facing the desk, causing a gold watch to flash beneath a white cuff. “Detectives, please make yourselves comfortable.”
Quinn and Pearl did, while Schueller settled in behind his wide, cluttered desk. There was a green desk with narrow leather edging of the sort people stuck business cards and odds and ends under. An array of envelopes, slips of paper, and business cards were wedged beneath the rich-looking leather. It struck Quinn as odd that Schueller would have such disorderly layers of paper on his desk; didn’t college chancellors delegate most of the actual work?
“You mentioned that this was about poor Macy Collins,” Schueller said. He shook his head and appeared genuinely sad. “Such a bright young woman. Such a terrible waste.”
“Did you know her personally?” Quinn asked.
“Oh, we in administration know all our students, especially those with the potential Macy Collins possessed.”
“Then you might know which students were her particular friends,” Pearl said.
“She had many friends, but mostly on a casual basis. Students in the Vanguard program are kept quite busy. They’re primarily here to learn, and they want to learn. They form fast friendships, but it takes a while. Macy hadn’t been in Vanguard quite long enough to make those connections.”
“She was a sophomore,” Quinn pointed out.
“Yes, but a Vanguard program sophomore.”
“She was that from the beginning?”
“Oh, yes. She was chosen for her exceptional abilities. Most of her qualifying and placement test scores were well above the ninety-nine percentiles group. Our Vanguard students quite often are recruited into responsible, high-paying jobs immediately after they obtain their degrees.” He beamed, proud of his students. “Waycliffe alumni do quite well in the world. You might pause on your way out to examine our Wall of Fame.”
“Macy Collins will never be there,” Pearl remarked.
“Sadly, that’s true.” He looked at Pearl as if disappointed that she’d stated the obvious. Pearl would never make the Vanguard program.
“Macy lived in a dorm,” Quinn said. “Is it unusual that she didn’t have a roommate?”
“No. All our Vanguard students have private rooms.”
Why am I not surprised? Pearl thought. Her college years before she’d dropped out were, to her recollection, a haze of arguments with her instructors, parties, and putting up with people who mostly infuriated her. And, oh, yeah, there’d been sex. The kind that didn’t budge the earth an inch. Criminology courses had been her only refuge.
“We’d like to take a look at her room,” Quinn said.
Schueller nodded. “Of course. It’s relatively barren. She took most of her possessions with her to the apartment she subleased in the City. The apartment where she was living when she…”
“Died,” Pearl finished for him.
