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dorm. The throbbing music segued into another dark piece with a ghostly Irish influence as Garrett found Landauer in the Cauldron crowd and filled him in, shouting over the banshee wail of violins and harmonica. He watched Landauer’s eyes take on a sudden gleam in the dark.
    “What do you think?” Garrett shouted into his partner’s ear.
    “Hell, yeah, let’s go,” Landauer shouted back.
    Garrett looked up at the massive, Gothic clock face on the wall. It was already half past midnight and a good hour and a half drive up to Amherst, and it was too much to hope (
Too easy
floated through his brain again) that they could make an arrest that night. But if there was even a remote possibility, they would do whatever it took. College students were apt to be up at all hours on a Saturday night, anyway, and there was much that could be useful about questioning a witness/potential suspect who had been awakened from a sound sleep.
    The partners wound their way back through the gyrating crowd and ordered large coffees to go from the corseted bartender, whoflipped Garrett a suggestive “Come again,” before they turned away from the bar and headed for the road.
    The road to Amherst was a dark and misty highway, the thick forest an oppressive tunnel around them: nothing but the dark silhouettes of trees and the occasional roar of a big rig at this hour. At the wheel, Garrett swilled coffee and stared out the windshield at the reflecting center line, his only guide through the drifting fog. Landauer smoked cigarette after cigarette; Garrett could feel lung cancer taking root from the secondhand smoke, and thought for the ten millionth time that he had to put a stop to it, somehow, soon . . .
    But not tonight.
    He hit the window button and let the cool night air blow against his face.
    Garrett had lived in Massachusetts his entire life, but had never been to the town of Amherst until a month ago, on a weekend trip with Carolyn when she’d been a guest speaker at the summer session. He remembered uncomfortably that the trip had not gone well. Amherst was Carolyn’s alma mater, one of the most prestigious and elitist institutions in the country. Garrett admitted to a chip on his shoulder about his education: a BA in Criminal Justice at the truculently blue-collar U Mass, Boston, and he was the first of his father’s side of the family to finish an undergraduate degree at all. Amherst was U Mass’s opposite in every way, a rarefied world Garrett had never been part of, and it grated on him to see Carolyn so obviously in her element, speaking as an intimate to the sons and daughters of the richest men in the state, taking her privilege as a God-given right. Garrett had made unfortunate quips about blue blood and silver spoons and consequently there’d been “no dancing,” as Elvis Costello used to snarl euphemistically, that supposedly romantic weekend.
    Garrett suddenly remembered that Carolyn was expecting him sometime that evening, and grabbed for his cell phone. He got her voice mail and left an update that was more professional than personal, but utterly failed to fool Landauer, who waggled his tonguelewdly and pumped his hips like a spastic sixteen-year-old before lighting up yet another Camel and dropping his head back against the headrest, closing his eyes as he smoked.
    Garrett punched off the phone and drained the last of his coffee, watching the signs for the Amherst turnoff and brooding about Carolyn and Erin. Both blond and beautiful, children of wealth—and now it seemed their best lead was, too.
    Landauer suddenly spoke. “You know the part I don’t want to think about?” He crushed out his cigarette, stared out the passenger window into the rush of dark. “What’s he doing with the head and one hand?”
    Garrett felt his stomach tighten. He didn’t want to know.
    Sprawled on a hill overlooking the tiny, pastoral town, the college offered a breathtaking, panoramic view of blue sky and the Holyoke mountain