Free Pulse by John Lutz Page B

Quinn said.
    “Because it’s summer.”
    “Still, only a mile away from a cold beer ...”
    The trees bordering the road suddenly looked a lusher green than the others, and they were well trimmed. There was a sign announcing the college turnoff was five hundred feet ahead.
    Quinn braked and made the right turn, and they were on smooth blacktop winding through more uniformly trimmed trees. Quinn and Pearl, New Yorkers, offered a few guesses about what kind of trees they were, but they probably weren’t even close.
    And there ahead was the college, an assemblage of similar redbrick buildings, most of which were at least half devoured by ivy. The largest building, brick and with a column-flanked entrance, loomed before them. Where the ivy had been trimmed away, carved stone lettering identified it as the administration building. All the ivy and other foliage lent the grounds a lush look, but at the same time everything was neatly manicured. Waycliffe had about it the burnished quality of the old and invaluable.
    There was a small gravel lot in front of the building. Half a dozen cars were parked in reserved spaces near the entrance. Quinn parked before one of the V ISITORS signs on the opposite side of the lot, in the shade.
    When Quinn and Pearl entered the building they were surprised by how cool it was. The only person in sight was a girl in her late teens or early twenties seated cross-legged on a lone wooden bench, diligently copying something from a netbook computer in her lap into a spiral notebook.
    “We’re looking for Chancellor Schueller,” Pearl said.
    The girl didn’t glance up but pointed with a long, decorous fingernail to her left.
    They walked down the hall about fifty feet, past a couple of blank wooden doors to a larger, six-paneled oak door with a brass plaque lettered OFFICE OF THE CHANCELLOR.
    Quinn knocked and opened the door simultaneously.
    They entered a small anteroom with book-lined walls and a narrow desk, behind which sat a gray-haired woman with a wasted look and a narrowed left eye that gave her a kind of shrewd expression. She’d apparently just closed a bottom desk drawer and sat up straight. She gave them a May I help you? smile.
    “We have an appointment to see Chancellor Schueller,” Quinn said. He and Pearl simultaneously flashed their identification.
    “Oh, yes, the police,” the woman said. “About poor Macy Collins, I would imagine.” Without waiting for her assumption to be confirmed, she rose from her chair and strode to one of two oak doors like the ones connecting to the hall. She knocked gently on the door on her left, pushed it open a few feet, and announced them.
    Then she opened the door wider, and Quinn and Pearl walked past her into Chancellor Linden R. Schueller’s office.
    Schueller was standing behind his desk, grinning widely, in meet-and-greet mode. He was a slender, handsome man, perhaps early forties, in a neat gray blazer with leather elbow patches. His dark hair was combed sideways with geometric precision from a perfect part. Gold cuff links flashed on white cuffs. His eyes, behind newly fashionable tortoise-shell glasses, were brilliant blue and aware. He looked too much like a rich playboy to be an academic
    After introductions and hand shakes, he motioned with his arm toward two small but overstuffed chairs facing the desk, causing a gold watch to flash beneath a white cuff. “Detectives, please make yourselves comfortable.”
    Quinn and Pearl did, while Schueller settled in behind his wide, cluttered desk. There was a green desk with narrow leather edging of the sort people stuck business cards and odds and ends under. An array of envelopes, slips of paper, and business cards were wedged beneath the rich-looking leather. It struck Quinn as odd that Schueller would have such disorderly layers of paper on his desk; didn’t college chancellors delegate most of the actual work?
    “You mentioned that this was about poor Macy Collins,” Schueller said.