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tweed and turned away. Couldn’t be zesty
little Tal. Tal had been like a father, no, more like a playful
uncle, from the time Charlie had first joined the department. He
couldn’t be dead. This was a nightmare. A horror flick. Not
real.
    But the cops were real
enough. There were gray-shirted men from the Campus Security
Office, and solid fellows in navy uniforms from the Laconia city
police. And there were plainclothes detectives moving through the
little crowd. Sergeant Hines was in charge, a big black man with a
light blue summer blazer stretched across his muscular shoulders.
As Reggie Hines he’d been a running back for Syracuse, Charlie
remembered someone saying. A smart player, not quite good enough
for the pro leagues but graduating with a good record and working
his way up through the Laconia police steadily. He’d been calm and
efficient questioning Charlie, his face stolidly neutral, as though
carved in ebony, but his questions were alert and to the point.
O.J. Simpson turned cop.
    Charlie was standing at
the bend where the trails angled up, partly because he couldn’t
look at the crumpled heather-gray heap farther down. The cops had
shooed everyone back up the trail, gray uniforms and blue uniting
in their insistence that civilians keep their distance. Hines had
arrived soon and taken charge. He’d set his own men to work
measuring, photographing, cordoning off a large area of the path
and woods, searching the trail and creek banks. He’d rounded up the
witnesses and put them under the supervision of a couple of Campus
Security cops, telling them all not to discuss the scene. One at a
time, he drew the witnesses aside and asked them his
questions.
    Near Charlie, the young
woman student who’d found the body had
stopped sobbing at last. She had caramel-colored hair and
square-framed glasses. Dorrie something, she’d said. Maggie’s arm
in the loose blue shirt lay across her denim jacket like a soothing
wing. Maggie was murmuring comfort, but her keen blue eyes were
panning across the scene, checking trail, woods, cops. Half Irish,
half eagle, she’d said. She saw Charlie looking at her and gave a
small sad shake of her head. He realized that she believed Tal was
dead and suddenly he began to believe it too. He smacked his fist
into his hand again and glared at Hines. What the hell was the man
doing? Why wasn’t he chasing down Tal’s killer instead of talking
to Bart? Tal deserved police helicopters, bloodhounds,
searchlights, SWAT teams. Instead Hines was asking Bart Bickford
the same calm questions he’d already asked Charlie and Maggie and
Dorrie. He’d taken Bart a few yards down the trail, but Charlie
could still hear most of it above the gurgling creek and the
whispering leaves.
    “ Yes, he’d asked me to
meet him for lunch,” Bart said. He was fidgety, his big hands
knotted in his jacket pockets, his heavy brow thickened in a
frown.
    “ Did you pass this part of
the trail on the way to Plato’s?”
    “ I used the upper trail.”
Bart nodded at the green-painted bridge, dull against the
sun-sparkled foliage at the top of the ravine.
    “ This was a few minutes
before noon?”
    “ A quarter of, maybe,”
Bart amended. “I went early because I wanted to drop off some film
to be developed.”
    Hines was making notes.
“In Collegetown?”
    “ Yeah. That place around
the corner on Jefferson. A block off College. Quick
Prints.”
    “ And then you went to
Plato’s?”
    “ Yes. Pretty damn close to
noon.” Bart shifted his weight to his other foot.
    “ Did you meet or see
Professor Chandler on your way?”
    “ No. Saw a woman with a
little girl taking a walk down here on this trail. They were the
only ones on it.”
    Hines’s expression didn’t
change, but Charlie sensed a new tautness in the broad shoulders, a
brightening interest. “Can you describe the woman?”
    “ Young, slim, brown hair,
about—God, it’s hard to judge height from above, isn’t it?” Bart’s
sunken eyes