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called out to me from
the second bedroom.
    "News to me." I closed the closet and went into the smaller room.
    There was a couch and a chair, and George was standing in front of a
chest of drawers, having pulled open each of the three levels. He was
dangling a pair of Jockey shorts on the end of his pen. "Get me some
bags from the kitchen. Let's see if we can find out who Mr. Size 40,
Briefs-Not-Boxers, might be."
    Mike noticed the end of a striped sheet sticking out below the edge
of the couch. He threw the cushions onto the floor and rolled out the
metal frame of the sleep sofa. He stripped the sheets off the narrow
mattress and folded the top and bottom ones separately. "Let's see if
the lab comes up with any love juice." He wrapped each one in an
ordinary brown paper bag, to avoid contamination from one surface to
another, and because sealing damp materials in plastic could cause them
to deteriorate.
    George chuckled. "So much for the mayor's theory that she threw
herself in the elevator shaft 'cause she was so despondent about having
Ivan arrested. Peterson told me the first thing I had to look for in
here was a suicide note. Damn, seems like she squeezed in one last
fling before it was lights out."
    "Let's just leave this all here and send a team in for the morning
with an Evidence Recovery Unit. Someone needs to go through this
stuff," Chapman said, waving his hand at the several pieces of men's
clothing hanging in this room's closet. "Got to check the labels, look
for ID. It'll take hours. We'll just seal off the apartment now and
have them put a uniformed post outside the door for the night."
    "Any mail here?" I was taking one more look around as I put on my
coat.
    "No. The brother-in-law said all her mail was being forwarded to her
office at school, then she went through it there. We'll have to pick it
up tomorrow."
    "Fat chance. I've had dealings with the legal departments, both at
Columbia and at King's. I can only tell you that if Sylvia Foote gets
to Lola's office first, everything will be so sanitized that you'll
think it had been swept by a CIA operative. Never a trace of Professor
Dakota."
    Foote was the general counsel of King's College, having served in
the same post at Columbia for more than a quarter of a century. She
would opt for protecting the institution every chance she had.
    "You know her personally?"
    "Yeah. And she's like fingernails on a chalkboard. 'Don't disturb
the students' is her mantra, but what she really means is that the
university's golden rule is not to scare the parents. Nobody paying
those tuition rates wants his kids to go to a school where there might
be a hint of scandal. We'd better try to get in there as fast as we
can."
    Chapman called the two-six and asked the desk sergeant for an extra
body to sit on the door of 15A. Then we said good night to George and
retraced our steps downstairs and out the rear door of the building,
around to Riverside Drive, where the car was parked.
    As we let the engine warm up, I reached for the radio and moved the
dial to 1010 WINS, the all-news station, to see when this arctic front
would pass through the city. I caught the tail end of the traffic
cycle, warning about icy patches on the bridges leading in and out of
town, and shivered again at the top of the early morning news.
    "This just in: the body of a Yale University senior, missing from
her New Haven dormitory since the day after Thanksgiving, was found
shortly after midnight, floating in the Hudson River, near the
promenade off Battery Park City. The content of the letters left behind
by Gina Norton have not been released to the press, but police sources
say that there are no signs of foul play."
    "So much for my mother's theory that the school yard was a safer
place to be than the streets—one more corpse tonight, we'll have a hat
trick. And how handy for Hizzoner. No foul play declared before she's
even been dried off, thawed out, and taken apart by the medical
examiner," said Chapman,