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God, I’m dying!”
    The ambulance responded in record time, but Quinn had passed into a deep coma before it arrived. Death occurred shortly after twelve noon.
    C HAPTER 4
    Sigrid Harald was not a particularly fervent proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment. She waved no banners, marched in no demonstrations, signed no petitions for the advancement of women. She was aware of how much she owed to the feminist movement, but she also knew the worth of her own brains and stamina, and she had expected to reach her present position on the police force before she was thirty-five; ERA just speeded up the timetable. For that she was grateful; and when promotion to lieutenant and an opening in the Detective Bureau were offered so much earlier than she’d hoped and planned, she had accepted it for what it could be, not for what it was.
    ‘‘I’m not here to be the department’s token female officer,” she had told Captain McKinnon equably. “If you won’t give me a share of the case loads just like any other officer—the paperwork and the street work—then you’d better get another female.”
    McKinnon had glared at her. Men he knew how to handle, men could be wilted by a blast of his anger, but women? He had never commanded women on a regular basis and this one wasn’t easily intimidated. Those cool gray eyes refused to waver.
    “You’ll take what’s assigned, and you’ll work by the rules,” he’d said. “My rules. The commissioner wished you on me, but I’m still running things here. I’ll expect the same obedience and respect I get from all my officers, or by damn I will get another female!”
    She had nodded. She was a tall, slender woman. Slender almost to the point of skinny; only not skinny in the dried-up sense, thought McKinnon, but fined down like a greyhound or a ballet dancer. Hair as dark as her mother’s had been; tall like her father with his fair Nordic skin. A self-contained person totally unlike Anne or Leif. Not at all pretty, yet there was something about those level gray eyes, something that had made McKinnon hope she would work out here.
    Nearly a year had gone by since then; and when the call came in from a local precinct station about a possible poisoning at Vanderlyn College, McKinnon checked the work sheets and was glad to see that Lieutenant Harald’s was the lightest case load at the moment. The young woman had shown herself capable of handling violence, but (although he would have denied it) Mac always breathed easier when he could legitimately give Anne Harald’s daughter what he privately tagged the “amateur” murders: the single eruption of violence between friends or relatives that usually left a remorseful killer confessing at the scene of his crime. A homicide at a college—especially a poisoning—how dangerous could it be?
    Lieutenant Harald was unaware that Captain McKinnon had once known her parents, and she would have been indignant had she heard his reasoning. When the new assignment was relayed to her she was cleaning up the loose ends of a routine case, a dope-pushing doctor who had been knifed when he refused credit to a young hophead desperate for a quick fix. The dreary incident had occurred during office hours in front of the doctor’s receptionist and two patients, and the kid had been picked up a half hour later, so any reasonably competent prosecutor should be able to get a conviction. Always nice when the current assignment was wrapped up as the new one began; unfortunately it didn’t happen often enough.
    On her way to Vanderlyn College, Lieutenant Harald stopped by the small hospital where Professor Quinn had died. In a holding area off the emergency room, Cohen, an assistant from the Medical Examiner’s Office, had finished his superficial examination and was waiting for her before removing Quinn’s body for a complete autopsy.
    “Offhand I’d say ingestion of some sort of metallic irritant,” he said, pulling back the sheet and pointing to the