“Oh joy,” I said.
“So,” she said, “what’s our plan?”
“Go sit on Jason again, maybe drop by Eric Gault’s office, see if he can tell us anything.”
“And we continue to work under the assumption that neither Jack Rouse or Kevin sent the photo.”
“Yup.”
“Which leaves how many suspects?” She stood.
“How many people live in this city?”
“I dunno. City proper, six hundred thousand, give or take; greater metro area, four million or so.”
“Then somewhere between six hundred thousand and four million suspects it is,” I said, “less two, give or take.”
“Thanks for narrowing it down, Skid. You’re swell.”
11
The second and third floors of McIrwin Hall housed the offices of Bryce’s Sociology, Psychology and Criminology faculty, including Eric Gault’s. The first floor contained classrooms, and one of those classrooms contained Jason Warren at the moment. According to Bryce’s course catalog, the class he took here, “Hell as a Sociological Construct,” explored the “social and political motives behind the masculine creation of a Land of Punishment from the Sumerians and Akkadians up to, and including, the Christian Right in America.” We’d run checks on all of Jason’s teachers and found that Ingrid Uver-Kett had recently been expelled from a local NOW chapter for espousing views that made Andrea Dworkin’s look mainstream. Her class ran three and a half hours without a break and met twice a week. Ms. Uver-Kett drove down from Portland, Maine, on Mondays and Thursdays to teach it, and spent the rest of her time, as far as we could see, writing hate mail to Rush Limbaugh.
Angie and I decided Ms. Uver-Kett seemed to spend far too much time being a threat to herself to possibly threaten Jason and eliminated her as a suspect.
McIrwin Hall was a white Georgian set off in a grove of birch and violently red maples with a cobblestone walk leading up to it. We’d watched Jason disappear in a crowd of students pouring through the front doors. We heard tramping and catcalls and then a sudden, almost total silence.
We had breakfast and came back to see Eric. By then, only a forlorn and forgotten pen at the foot of the stairs gave any indication that a single soul had been through the doors this morning.
The foyer smelled of ammonia and pine solvent and two hundred years of intellectual perspiration, of knowledge sought and knowledge gained and grand ideas conceived under the mote-rich glow of the fractured sunlight streaming through a stained glass window.
There was a reception desk to our right, but no receptionist. At Bryce, I guess, you were already supposed to know your every destination.
Angie took off her denim shirt, yanked at the hem of her untucked T-shirt to clear it of static cling. “The atmosphere alone makes me want to get a degree here.”
“Probably shouldn’t have flunked high school geometry.”
The next thing I said was, “Ooof.”
We climbed a curved mahogany staircase, the walls laden with paintings of past Bryce presidents. Dour looking men all, faces weighted and strained from carrying so much genius in their brains. Eric’s office was at the end of the hall and we knocked once and heard a muffled, “Come in,” from the other side of the pebbled glass.
Eric’s long salt-and-pepper ponytail fell over the right shoulder of his blue and maroon cardigan. Underneath the cardigan was a denim Oxford and a hand-painted navy blue tie with a plaintive baby seal staring out at us.
I cocked an eyebrow at the tie as I took a seat.
“Sue me,” Eric said, “for being a slave to fashion.” He leaned back in his chair and waved a hand at his open window. “Some weather, isn’t it?”
“Some weather,” I agreed.
He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “So, how’s Jason doing?”
“He lives a very busy existence,” Angie said.
“He used to be an insular kid, believe it or not,” Eric said. “Very sweet, never a moment’s trouble to Diandra, but introverted since day one.”
“Not anymore,” I said.
Eric nodded. “Ever since he came here, he’s broken out.
It’s common, of course, for kids who didn’t fit in with the jock or beautiful-people cliques in high school to find themselves in college, stretch a bit.”
“Jason does a lot of stretching,” I said.
“He seems lonely,” Angie said.
Eric nodded. “I could see that. The father leaving when he was so young explains some things, but still, always there’s been this…distance. I wish I could explain it. You see him with his…”—he smiled—“…harem, I guess, when he doesn’t know you’re watching, and it’s like he’s a completely different person from the shy kid I’ve always known.”
“What does Diandra think about it?” I said.
“She doesn’t notice it. He’s very close to her, so when he talks to anyone with any degree of depth, he talks to her. But he doesn’t bring women home, he doesn’t even hint at his lifestyle here. She knows he’s holding a piece of himself back, but she tells herself he’s just very good at keeping his own counsel, and she respects that.”
“But you don’t think so,” Angie said.
He shrugged and looked out the window a moment. “When I was his age, I was living in the same dorm on this campus and I’d been a pretty introverted kid myself, and here, like Jason, I came out of my shell. I mean, it’s college. It’s study, drink, smoke weed, have sex with strangers, take naps in the afternoon. It’s what you do if you come to a place like this at eighteen.”
“You had sex with strangers?” I said. “I’m shocked.”
“And I feel so bad about it now. I do. But, okay, I was no saint either, but with Jason, this radical change and his charge into almost de Sadian excess is a bit drastic.”
“‘De Sadian’?” I said. “You intellectuals, I swear, talk so damn cool.”
“So why the change? What’s he trying to prove?” Angie said.
“I don’t know, exactly.” Eric cocked his head in such a way that, not for the first time, he reminded me of a cobra. “Jason’s a good kid. Personally I can’t imagine him being mixed up in anything that would harm either himself or his mother, but then I’ve known the boy all his life and he’s the last person I would’ve ever predicted would succumb to a Don Juan complex. You’ve dismissed the Mafia connection?”