now,” he replied. “I only had the jitters once Lassiter asked us all to give it up, to help him. Tess made him quit,” he said with a grin. “Imagine, old Nail Eater being led around by a woman.”
“I doubt she’s leading him around. He probably loves her and wants to make her happy. He’ll live longer if he doesn’t smoke.”
“We’re all going to die eventually,” he reminded her. “Some of us might do it a little quicker, but we don’t have much choice.”
“The law of entropy.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?”
“That’s what scientists call it—the law of entropy. It means that everything grows old and dies.”
“As long as we’re scientific about it,” he said mockingly.
She adjusted her glasses, pushing them back up on her nose. “No need to be sarcastic. Turn here.” She pointed.
He drove into the parking lot and pulled into a space marked Visitors. “Why here?”
“You don’t have a sticker that permits you to park here,” she reminded him. “If you park in a student’s spot, you’ll be towed. I know you wouldn’t like that.”
“It’s not my car,” he reminded her.
“You rented it. You’d have to liberate it.”
“I love the way you use words,” he chuckled as he got out of the car and helped her out.
“Nice manners,” she said, tongue-in-cheek.
“You opened the door for me back when I broke my leg in your senior year of school. Drove me back and forth to work every day, too, on your way.”
“Wasn’t I sweet?” she asked wistfully. “Ah, those good old days.”
“You were less irritating then.”
“So were you,” she tossed back. She cocked her head and studied him. “Footloose Nick,” she murmured. “I suppose you’ll end up in a shoot-out with spies somewhere and they’ll mount you on a wall or something.”
He grinned. “Lovely thought. How kind of you.”
She gave up. “My office is on the second floor.”
She led him into the big brick building, past the admissions office and up the staircase that led to the history and sociology departments.
“I’m down the hall. The historians have this wing. The sociology department here is rather small, although we offer some interesting courses.”
“Anthropology is sociology,” he remarked. “I took one course of it in college myself. Sociology and law go hand in hand, did you know?”
“Sure!” she said, unlocking her office. “That’s the biology lab down the hall. They’re only up here temporarily while their facilities are being remodeled. They have snakes in there,” she said with a shiver.
A primal scream echoed down the hall with its high ceilings. “Is that one of them?” he asked.
“Snakes don’t scream,” she muttered. “No, that’s Pal.”
“Who? Or should I say what?”
“Pal’s a what, all right. He’s the missing link. That’s what we call him up here. Australopithecus insidious.”
“Greek.”
“Latin,” she corrected. “Pidgin Latin. What I mean, is that Pal is too smart to be a monkey. We have to lock him up. He likes to rip up textbooks. And if you ever leave your keys lying around when he’s on the loose, you’ll never see them again.”
“Isn’t he caged?”
“Usually. He picks the lock.” She laughed. “The last time he got out, the administrator and several members of the board of trustees were having a catered meeting in the conference room. Pal got in there and started pelting everybody with melon balls and rolls.”
“I’ll bet that went over well with the guests.”
“Guest,” she corrected. “It was a senator from Maryland. We never did get that funding we needed for a new research project.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me? Out of idle curiosity, what were you going to research?”
Her eyes brightened. “Primate social behavior.”
He burst out laughing. “It seems to me that you’re doing enough of that without funding.”
“That’s exactly what our president said. Here.” She opened the door to a Spartan office with a desk, a chair, and a bookcase jammed full of reference books. On her desk were stacks of paper and a college handbook. “Like most everyone else here, I’m a faculty advisor. In my spare time, I teach anthropology.”
He stood looking down at her with open curiosity. “You were always a brain. I used to feel threatened by you sometimes. No matter what I knew, you seemed to know more.”
“Brains can be a curse when you’re a young girl,” she replied with faint bitterness. “But they last a lot longer than a voluptuous figure and a pretty face,” she added.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he mused. “Except that you need feeding up.”
“Oh, I’ll spread out one day. This is where the artifact was lying when it vanished.”
She pointed to a central spot on the desk.
“How long ago did it walk off?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
He nodded and pulled a small leather-bound kit out of his pocket. “Go and read a book or make a telephone call for a few minutes while I do a little investigating.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Dust your desk for fingerprints and look for clues, of course. Has anyone been at this desk except you since the artifact was taken?”
She shook her head.
“Good. That narrows it down a bit.”
She started to ask him more questions, but he was knee-deep in thought and investigation. She shrugged and left him there.
Minutes later, he straightened, irritated by the lack of fingerprints. The desk had a rough surface, which made it hard to find a full print. But a tiny piece of what looked like hair lay on a white sheet of paper, and that he took with him, securing it with a pair of tweezers and sticking it in a tiny plastic bag that he then sealed. It wasn’t much, but if it was human hair, the lab over at the FBI could tell them plenty about it. It was amazing how much data one strand of hair could provide. It was strangely coarse. He dismissed it instantly when Tabby came in the door, his eyes watchful as they skimmed over her. She made him feel as if he’d only
