Free Long Knives by Charles Rosenberg

in its cradle. I finally got up and walked to the third bedroom, which I had converted into a study. It was the smallest of the three, and while the room I had rented to Tommy would have made for a more comfortable study, the third bedroom had the best view of the hills. I could even see the law school from its windows.
    I had furnished the room rather starkly—Lucite desk in red, pushed right up against the windows, black mesh Aeron desk chair and a set of floor-to-ceiling blonde oak bookshelves fastened to the wall just to the left of the windows. The carpeting was the same industrial gray I had chosen for the rest of the condo, but I’d splashed a bright rug on top of it, something I’d picked up in Guatemala on the previous summer’s treasure cruise. Against the back wall I had installed a pull-out sofa, also red. Not that it had gotten much use as a bed. It was rare that I had overnight guests. The only art in the room was a woodblock print of a monk in his red robes. It looked classic until you noticed that he was holding a brimming martini glass with a sliver of lemon hooked over the top edge.
    I sat down and turned on my notebook computer, which was sitting on the desk. It was an exact match of the one in my office. I had finally tired of carting a computer back and forth and had elected instead to have two, one left at the law school and one in my condo. All my files were stored in the cloud, backed up automatically every few minutes. All I had to do if I needed a file was pull it down from the Net, without regard to where I had been when I created it. Aldous had warned me that this created a greater risk of data theft, but I had ignored him.
    My first problem was what to do about my Law of Sunken Treasure seminar, which met for just over an hour and a half on Tuesdays and Fridays at 9:00 A.M. Tomorrow was a Tuesday. As I thought about it, there was something unseemly about meeting the day after Primo had died and just going forward as if nothing had happened. I would at least have to make some mention of it, and I really had no idea what to say. Or maybe the school was going to cancel classes for the day. No student had died during my almost four years at the law school, so I didn’t know what the drill would be. I needed to ask.
    I picked up my cell—my hand seemed to have stopped trembling—and punched in the dean’s number.
    He answered on the first ring. “Jenna, I’ve been sitting here waiting for your call for well over an hour. Did you find the map?”
    “Oh my God, I’m sorry. I totally forgot to call you. I’ve been kind of distracted.”
    “Understood. Was the map there?”
    “No, it wasn’t. I searched everywhere but couldn’t find it.”
    “Well, where is it?”
    “I have no idea.”
    “We have a big problem then.”
    “Dean Blender, there’s something you need to understand. All I ever saw was a red mailing tube. I have no idea whether there was a map or anything else in it.”
    “This Quinto guy insists that’s what was in it. He says he helped his brother roll the map up in the morning and put it in the tube so Primo could show it to you.”
    “I sound like a broken record, but, again, I have no way of knowing whether that’s true or not. I never got a look at the map, if it was even in there.”
    “All right, I’ll take you at your word.”
    “That sounds ominous. Why would you not take me at my word?”
    “I didn’t mean it that way. It was just a manner of speaking. Anyway, please let me know if you learn anything new. I have to go now. I have a lot to do to try to put a lid on this mess before it spins out of control. It’s one thing for a student to die, it’s another thing for his family to claim a professor stole something from him.”
    “They think I stole it?”
    “That’s the clear implication.”
    “That’s absurd.”
    “I know. Welcome to my job as dean. And as I said, I’ve got to go.”
    “Wait.”
    “What now?”
    “Are you going to cancel