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some conspicuous acknowledgement.”
    —The Denver News-Post
July 8, 1987
     

    It was good to push my Plymouth out of that eternal curtain of brown smoke. Millions of bike-induced coronaries won’t put a dent in pollution, when the State House exempts its own “Public Service” gunk factories. With a cautious eye on the rearview mirror, I settled back and let the miles peel off—ice-blue Rockies on my left, Kansas somewhere off to the right—and tried forgetting corpses, Burgess, maybe even poor old Mac awhile. I couldn’t forget the body armor, though even with the drop in temperature outside the inversion-bowl that makes Denver the second-stupidest place in America to build a city.
    Once out of dispatcher range, I switched to the commercial band. There was a Jim Kweskin revival underway—beat hell out of what they’d been playing last year. Too soon, though, the real world horned in—what passed for news from New Guinea, Japan breaking relations, more ration reduction. I flipped over to CB for some amateur entertainment.
    There was plenty: farmers swapping yarns along their lonely furrows; truckers seditiously exchanging tips. Suddenly the band exploded with obscenity: President Jackson is a——, four or five unpopular federal agencies are——. The diatribe began to repeat itself. I slowed, listened—yes, there it was again: a CB “bomb,” a cheap, battery-operated tape player with a seven-minute loop, and an equally expendable transmitter, buried by the roadside and simmering up through a ten-foot copper wire, waiting for FCC gunships to triangulate and blast it to pieces. Remote-control radicalism. The People’s Committee for Free Papua entertained me almost all the way to Fort Collins, then quacked suddenly and went off the air.
    Spread across ten miles between I-25 and the foothills, to the south Fort Collins is a virtual ghost town of abandoned tract homes. The older section is a pleasant Edwardian-vintage hamlet with broad, tree-lined avenues. I’d been there before, and I liked it. Unfortunately, it takes federal permission to change a cop’s location, and seniority—meaning pensions—isn’t transferable. I stopped briefly for a Jaycee city map, then navigated my way to Colorado State University.
     
    I wasn’t GOING to like Dr. Otis Bealls or his little Errol Flynn mustache. A nicotine-stained yellow-gray, it was the only hair he had—except for a scraggly fringe around the back of his head—and appeared to be growing from his nostrils. Affecting baggy tweeds, cheap velveteen waistcoat, and rimless plastic spectacles he fiddled with continuously, he failed to convey the academic impression he aspired to. The whole ensemble reminded me of the proverbial dirty old man who “carved another notch in his gold-handled cane.”
    The bastard wouldn’t see me for an hour and a half. My idea of hell is a waiting room, plastic and tubular steel, a busy-busy secretary pointedly oblivious as you riffle through six-year-old copies of Today’s Health and Wee Wisdom. Only in this case it was journals filled with squiggles I wasn’t even sure were numbers. The street map was more entertaining. All that time, the fancy telephone blinked on and off like a horror-movie computer, burning up the lines.
    When he finally condescended, it was like being sent to the principal. He lounged behind an aircraft carrier of a desk, playing with his glasses and shuffling papers. Finally, glancing at his watch, he asked without looking up, “Well, what can the CSU Physics Department do for the Denver Police?”
    “Then you haven’t heard about Dr. Meiss?”
    “Heard? What kind of trouble is he in now?”
    “The worst. He was killed yesterday. I understand he worked—”
    “Officer, please! Ph.D.’s do not work here! Janitors, stenographers, other menials work here. If I may optimistically exaggerate, undergraduates work here. Professors pass the Torch of Civilization, deliberate our Vast Body of Knowledge. They