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matter. I don’t know if you’ve ever faced anything like that, David. Something primitive takes over. Now, after the fact, I can reflect on how far he might have gone. He wanted to threaten me with the gun. He didn’t want to kill me. Maybe hitting him once was enough, maybe I could have kicked the gun away. I don’t know. I know I hated myself for letting him in the house. I hated him for making me afraid. I wanted him dead.
    “I drew the bottle back again, swung. It was a glancing blow, unsatisfying. The next time I was more careful. I took aim at his temple and swung with my whole body. Felt the bottle connect. He went down. I picked up the gun, stood over him with it. He didn’t move. After a while I nudged him with my foot, then turned him over onto his back. I went through the motions of checking for a pulse, but I knew he was dead.”
    Kristoll fell silent. They had passed through the city and were driving alongside the river north and northwest. Wind stirred the leaves of the branches that hung over the roadside. Loogan leaned his head against the glass of the passenger window and closed his eyes.
    “You’re quiet over there,” Kristoll said after a while. “What are you thinking?”
    Loogan let his eyes come open. “I’ve just been going over your story,” he said. “It’s not bad. If that’s the way you want it, it’s all right with me.”
    “I’m glad to hear it.”
    “Purely as an exercise, I’ve been trying to figure out how much of it is true. I’d like to think some of it is. I’d like to think you’re at least working your way toward the truth.”
    Kristoll’s thumbnail picked at something on the steering wheel. He wiped dust from the dashboard. “I’d like to be able to tell you the truth, David.”
    “I believe you would,” Loogan said, sitting up straight. “Maybe we should leave it at that. It’s late and we’re both tired. I meant what I said before: You can keep your secrets.”
    With infinite care, Kristoll guided the car through a gradual curve.
    “I appreciate that, David. I wish things were different but . . . I have my reasons.”
    “Of course you do. I don’t need to know what they are. A man gets himself killed in your home, that’s a heavy burden to bear. The details hardly matter. It’s a burden. Even if he had blood and skin under his fingernails, and you don’t have a scratch on you. Even if he struggled with somebody, but it wasn’t you. Even if you didn’t kill him.”
     
     
     
    The next day Loogan woke at two in the afternoon. His back ached as he sat up in bed; his legs ached as he climbed down the stairs; his shoulders ached as he filled a glass with water and reached for the aspirin on the high shelf of a kitchen cabinet.
    Though he had showered the night before, he showered again, and dressed. By three he had driven to the campus of the university. He left his car in a lot where he had no business parking and walked across the quad. The sun was out. He sat on a bench within view of Angell Hall. Students went by on the sidewalk, and a few of them gathered and passed around a pack of cigarettes. At twenty after three, Laura Kristoll came down the steps of Angell Hall. There were two students with her: a girl with long auburn hair and a boy with a black mustache and goatee and a shaved head. Loogan recognized them from parties at the house on the Huron River.
    Loogan rose from the bench and Laura spotted him. She said something to the students and they went on across the quad without her. The girl with auburn hair looked back at Loogan and then leaned in to whisper something to the boy with the shaved head.
    Laura Kristoll wore a long woolen coat and a silk scarf. Her blond hair fell over the silk. Loogan stood by the bench and let her come to him.
    “Hello, David,” she said. “I understand you and Tom hit the town last night.”
    “We did.”
    “A movie and a drink,” she said. “I suspect it was more drink than movie. Tom slept like a