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scuff marks six feet below his window, and twenty feet below that, a series of diagonal scratches. He looked back at the deserted street.
    Something shiny lay on the sidewalk at his feet.
    He knelt down and carefully picked it up with the barrel of the gun. He recognized the dull gleam of an aluminum carabineer. An oval ring about the size of a half dollar with a clip on one side, it was a piece of mountain climbing gear designed for quickly snapping together ropes during ascents or rappelling. It screamed significance at him.
    Time to get inside.
    He dropped the carabineer in the pocket of his sweatpants and went back inside the hotel. The lobby was deserted. A light burned near the front desk, and soft Muzak droned from some inner office, but nobody stirred at the muffled sounds of Grove crossing the carpeted lobby in his soaked skivvies. Thank God , he thought, thank God nobody saw that .
    It was nearly dawn. He needed to get some sleep—at least an hour or two—before the funeral. He changed into dry underwear and lay down on the king-sized bed without even turning down the covers, and he lay there for endless minutes in the dark, thinking about what had just happened, thinking about De Lourde’s mysterious death and the things that did not add up. The dull metal carabineer sat on the desk across the room, gleaming in the darkness.
    Grove kept staring at that thing, and listening to the rain outside, and the endless sluicing of water running down the gutters of ancient paving stones. He could not sleep, and he could not take his eyes off that metal ring.
    He didn’t realize it then but a strange and deadly game had already begun.

2
    The wake was held in the Garden District, a couple of miles upriver from the French Quarter, in a small Unitarian chapel on Magazine Street. Grove arrived at five minutes to eight and stood in line for nearly twenty minutes in the rain with the other mourners.
    The modest little Georgian building—a stubborn survivor of Katrina, with its cracked faux-marble columns, its canopy of tattered live oaks, and its water-stained clapboards—could not begin to accommodate the eclectic throngs that had turned out for the beloved professor’s send-off. There were distinguished professors with their blue-haired wives looking pained and regal under lacy Laura Ashley umbrellas. There were tattooed street punks in combat boots and leather, disheveled grad students in shopworn tweed jackets, and nattily dressed old queens from the gay enclaves along Bourbon Street. There were somber clergymen, obese politicians, and a gaggle of cherubic little black children splashing through puddles and darting under people’s legs. There was even a heavyset Hispanic woman in spandex and feather boas who looked to be either a stripper or a prostitute.
    Grove searched the crowd for one particular mourner. He wasn’t sure if she would be there. She lived in San Francisco, and had spent very little time with the professor over the last year, and was also busy working on a book. But there was a slight chance she would be there. She was the type to show up to things such as this. It would be just like her to travel all those miles simply to honor a good and decent man such as De Lourde.
    By the time Grove reached the doorway, he was as damp as a wrung-out rag from the rain and emotions.
    The chapel smelled vaguely of mildew and body odor, the central aisle completely clogged with mourners. A small jazz combo was playing a slow blues up by the altar, the sniffling sound of a snare drum mingling with the whispered sobbing, the massive tarnished brass bell of a tuba reflecting the sad promenade. Grove glanced across the front of the room and saw familiar faces hovering beside the open casket.
    Edith Endicott, the matronly Scottish scientist who had helped build a case against the Sun City Killer, now stood in her black mourning dress, her gray, wrinkled face downturned. Father Carrigan, another