Free Nocturnal (episode n. 1) by Quelli di ZEd Page B

limbs.
    Amanda stared, amazed, unable to understand what she had just seen. She hadn't hit that hard. Then again, she wouldn't have been able to obtain a similar effect even if she had hit much harder than she had.
    Then she looked up and the mystery was no more. A man wearing a blue uniform walked to her, reaching out with a hand for some reason, as if he thought she needed help walking. «Are you OK, miss?»
    Police. WOW . Someone had really called the police.
    Now she was really going to be late.

    krystorrent04/02/2014 20.54.27672728

CHAPTER 2

    She was ready for an endless reproach when she left the station to go to the university, half the morning having been lost by then.
    Of course it wasn't her fault, as it would have been obvious for anyone that she couldn't refuse to answer the questions of a police officer just because she was late for work. Anyone would understand. Anyone would accept that justification. What not just anyone would notice, but the rector would for sure, was that if she had left her place a few minutes earlier she would have been able to avoid “such shortcuts” and the whole problem wouldn't have existed at all. Full stop. End of the debate. She would rather confront two or three more smugglers than having to justify even once with Parker. That man had the power to make her feel guilty even when her conscience was perfectly clean. Which admittedly didn't happen that often.
    She was so anxious for the unavoidable confrontation that, although she was going to regret it, when she saw the police marks around the building, and all of her colleagues kept outside by agents, she couldn't help feeling better. It took her a few seconds before she wondered what exactly she was seeing, and why.

    When the doubt that something bad could have happened to one of her friends – though that was too big a word for them – arose, she had already reached the enclosed space, and she was promptly stopped by one of the policemen surrounding it.
    «You can't pass.»
    Dry, quick, authoritarian like a monkey and just as well-mannered.
    «I work in here. I am a teacher.»
    The agent stared at her as if the word “teacher” had just been invented. «Wait here. Detective!»
    He kept staring, as if she could ran away if he dared to stop looking for a split second.
    After a little while, a second man in plain clothes reached them.
    "Plain", actually, was an exaggeration: he was wearing some green-fabric trousers under a turtleneck and a suit jacket of two different shades of brown. Altogether, he looked like an upside-down tree.
    «Who are you supposed to be?» he asked, not sparing a thought for introducing himself.
    Supposed to be? Amanda was reasonably sure that she was, with no conditions, but somehow she managed to keep the thought for herself.
    «Amanda Sheldon. I teach compared biology.»
    «Human?»
    «The biology or me?»
    The detective seemed to lose interest in the answer and carried on with a new question «Did you know Trey Parker?»
    Why was he using the past tense?
    «Of course.» The contrary would have been quite difficult. No one could work for Trey Parker and not know him.
    «When did you see him last?»
    «Yesterday morning. Barely.» They had met in a corridor just once in the whole day, and exchanged nothing more than a greeting. One of the best conversation they ever had, as far as she was concerned.
    «Do you know if he had any enemy?»
    Amanda stopped just short of answering "the whole staff of the faculty", and not only because she realized in time that she was included in that definition. Actually, no one of them could stand Parker, and even more his extreme precision and exaggerated straightforwardness, but enemies was too big a word. They didn't love him, but they respected him and no one hated him, for sure not so much as to... She realized that the information was still in mid-air, like electricity before a lightning. It seemed to her that the answer was obvious, but she needed to hear it