high school,” she said. “Or a penitentiary.”
“Which, if memory serves me, is pretty much the same thing.”
They went inside. The interior wasn’t much of an improvement over the exterior. The lobby sported cracked green-and-white floor tiles. Somebody had made an attempt to brighten up the place by painting the walls a pale yellow. It was a dismal failure. Instead of sunny and cheerful, the walls looked sallow and jaundiced, like somebody in the advanced stages of liver disease. It wasn’t a look that BBCC wore well.
Lorna walked up to the reception desk and asked a corpulent woman in a fuchsia dress and a black telephone headset where she could find Sam Winslow. “Down the hall on the left, Arts and Sciences Department,” the woman said, and segued back into her telephone conversation without missing a beat. The two detectives followed her directions, passing a room full of vending machines, a couple of empty classrooms, then a bulletin board laden with notices: a reminder about the annual flu shot clinic; an announcement of a poetry reading taking place on Sunday afternoon at a nearby café; a photo of a 1999 Toyota Celica. Runs great, low mileage. $1500 or B.O. Call 555-3372.
The Arts and Sciences office was marginally more welcoming than the lobby had been. The secretary’s desk was sleek and modern. The overhead fluorescents had been left off in favor of the gentler, more muted glow of floor lamps, and the carpet, while an ugly dirt-resistant brown, appeared to be relatively new. A slender young woman with a magnificent head of red curls sat behind a flat-screen Gateway computer. She glanced up, gave them both the once-over. Lorna could see it in her eyes, the instant she recognized them as cops. It didn’t seem to faze her too much. Red’s gaze returned to Policzki. In spite of his aloof manner—or perhaps because of it—women always took a second look at Doug Policzki. Being a pretty boy was sometimes useful.
“Can I help you?” she said to him, pretending Lorna didn’t exist.
“Detective Policzki.” Doug held up his badge. “This is Detective Abrams, and we’re looking for Professor Winslow.”
“Sam? Is he in some kind of trouble?”
“No, ma’am,” Policzki said in that earnest, by-the-book manner that women seemed to find irresistible. “We just want to ask him a few questions. If you could point us in his direction, we’d greatly appreciate it.”
“I’d love to,” she said, “but I’m afraid you won’t find him. He came in earlier and worked in his office for a while, then he left. He isn’t scheduled to teach today, so I don’t have any idea where he went or when he’ll be back.”
Neither of them bothered to tell Red that they already knew they wouldn’t find the good professor on the premises. She might have turned really frosty if she’d known they’d seen him leave a half hour ago, then sat in a parking space halfway down the block and waited until they were pretty sure he wasn’t coming back.
“In that case,” Lorna said, “we’d like to speak to his supervisor.”
Red looked a little surprised by this rude reminder that there were three people in the room instead of two. Tearing her gaze away from Policzki, with his lantern jaw and his pure heart, she said, “That would be Lydia Forbes. Dean Lydia Forbes.”
“Is the dean in?”
“She’s in, but I’m not sure she’s available. I’ll have to check.”
The secretary left them alone, disappearing down a short corridor that led deeper into the suite of offices. Lorna took advantage of her absence to take a look around. There wasn’t much to see. A potted palm in a corner. A row of battered gray file cabinets. A wooden shelving unit that upon closer inspection turned out to be mail cubbies. She scanned the names beneath the boxes, pausing when she reached Sam Winslow’s. The professor’s mail slot was empty.
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