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pretty sure it was at least a few hours after we left her. But I’m going to need the name of that student you talked to yesterday, the one who threatened Rita.”
    “Felae? You don’t think he killed Rita, do you?”
    “Right now I’m not thinking, just investigating. How do you spell that name?”
    I had to check my archived class roster to get Felae’s last name, which I reminded myself was Popescu. I spelled the first and last names for Rick.
    “Jesus, whatever happened to names like Robert Smith?” he asked. “At least I shouldn’t find too many matches in the system.”
    “You should call the registrar. They’ll have his home address, phone number, email, that kind of thing. And they’re the only ones who can give out personal data on students.”
    I hung up and turned to Rochester, who was lying sprawled on the wooden floor of my office. “You hear that, boy? That nasty woman we met yesterday is dead.”
    Rochester lifted his head, but didn’t say anything.
    “She was a bitch, but she loved dogs, so she couldn’t be all bad. Don’t you think so?”
    Once again he declined to comment. Rochester seemed to have a nose for murder. He had helped me, and Rick, find Caroline’s killer, and dug up some clues that helped solve a murder on campus, too.
    I had to admit that I was a curious guy myself. I pulled out a copy of our college magazine in which I knew the Board of Trustees had been profiled, and read the article on Rita Stanville Gaines.
    She was an Army brat, born in 1946 at a military hospital in Bad Kreuznach, Germany. She had moved around the world with her family, until she was sent to a girls’ boarding school in Washington, DC. After she graduated, she enrolled at Eastern College. Then she had gone on to get her MBA in finance at Columbia University.
    She began her career on Wall Street as a trainee analyst (read glorified secretary), then worked her way up to a brokerage position, starting her own hedge fund in the glory days of the 1980s. She cashed out when Wall Street was on a high and retired to her farm to train dogs and run a private investment firm.
    It was interesting that she and I shared two alma maters—I had my undergraduate degree from Eastern, and an MA in English from Columbia, though I was about twenty years younger than she was. I remembered how blasé she had been about her connection to Eastern when I met her at the art exhibition, and it made me wonder again why she was so involved with the college if she didn’t care about it.
    I realized that I should probably let President Babson know that Rita was dead, and that one of our students might be a suspect if her death was a homicide. That was going to be a happy little meeting. But I bucked up and stood. “Hold the fort while I’m gone,” I said to Rochester. “Don’t bother to take any messages, though.”
    I walked down the narrow hallway, lined with old pen and ink drawings of the campus in the 1880s, and into the executive suite.
    “Do you think he’d have a minute for me?” I asked Babson’s secretary, an older woman named Bernadette Bridge. She had unnaturally red hair in a sprayed bouffant.
    “Mike MacCormac’s in with him,” she said. “I’ll buzz.”
    That was good. Since Mike was my boss, the director of alumni relations, I’d be able to kill two birds with one stone.
    Oops. Bad cliché.
    Bernadette hung up the phone and said, “You can go right in.”
    Babson was sitting behind his big oak desk when I walked in. He was a tall, rawboned man, with penetrating deep green eyes and dark, curly hair he styled with the greasy kid stuff I had abandoned when I reached puberty.
    The office was filled with all the trappings of his presidency. On the walls hung lots of Eastern memorabilia, including old football programs and pennants, interspersed with photos of him with prominent alumni. I recognized Rita Gaines in a photo of Babson with the board.
    Mike MacCormac was sitting across from Babson, in a