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corrosive burns on the dead man’s lips. “I’ll know better after I open him up.”
    “How soon?” she asked, trying to match Cohen’s dispassionate mood.
    He shrugged. “ There’s a drowning and two suicides ahead of you today, but ladies first, I guess. I’ll put yours at the head of the line. Nice threads,” he added reflectively, gazing at the no longer immaculate fawn suit and the crumpled and befouled paisley tie, which lay across the bottom of the stretcher. “Too bad they got puked on.”
    He dropped the sheet over Riley Quinn’s body again.
     
    Vanderlyn College employed its own security personnel to police the campus, but when Sigrid Harald was still a uniformed rookie, she had ridden a patrol car in this precinct for a few months before being transferred, so she had a working knowledge of the college layout. Except for the river promenade Vanderlyn’s tree-graced grounds were completely enclosed by a tall ivy-covered brick wall broken in several places by broad wrought-iron archways with gates, that could be locked at night. All legal spaces on both sides of the streets for a three-block radius were jammed with cars, motorcycles and mopeds, and several privately owned parking garages on side streets were guaranteed a turn-away business because of the warning signs posted on every gate onto the campus: Official Vehicles Only—Absolutely No Parking on Campus.
    Sigrid flashed her shield at a beefy-faced uniformed patrol officer lounging in front of the main gate.
    The officer gave her a dour nod and gestured toward a narrow service street to the left, which eventually brought her to the rear of Van Hoeen Hall where several other police vehicles were parked in a delivery zone. By the time she located the Art Department, it was nearly three-thirty. Personnel from precinct and headquarters were, as always, overlapping in the preliminaries, amiably arguing points of precedence; but the lab technicians seemed to have settled in with their usual efficiency.
    Another uniformed officer was posted at the top of the hall by the elevator doors to keep back a crowd of blue-jeaned students who craned their necks and jostled for good sight-seeing positions. Sigrid heard a buzz of curious speculation as she again flashed her shield.
    “What do you call a lady pig?” asked an adenoidal voice, but the gibe was good-natured and was even accompanied by a couple of embarrassed shushes. There had been no demonstrations at Vanderlyn in several years.
    She entered the Art Department’s main office by way of the nursery door, and her glance brushed over the group of people seated on a motley collection of ill-matched chairs around a long table in the front corner. The office reminded her of those in old precinct stations throughout the city. There were the same unlovely tile floors, a battered bookcase, a large desk canted across a rear corner and under the high windows a bank of ugly green, black and brown file cabinets, some with sprung drawers that would never again close flush.
    The resemblance to precinct houses ended there, however, for large bright paintings—mostly abstract—covered the cream-colored walls; baskets of Swedish ivy, asparagus ferns, spider plants and the like hung in front of the windows, and pots of geraniums stood on the file cabinets, softening the room’s bureaucratic feel. Someone evidently had a kelly green thumb or amazing luck, thought Sigrid, who never managed to keep a plant alive for more than a month and no longer tried.
    An assemblage of small white nonrepresentational sculptures, none more than eight inches high, stood on the file cabinets in front of the plants. They had all been carved from blocks of plaster of Paris, and each was intricately detailed with a variety of surface textures. One ambitious piece looked like a random pile of barred cages with small cubes inside. Not very aesthetic perhaps but remarkable when one realized that it had been carved from a solid chunk of