“Looks like I’m stuck fact-finding.” She puffed out an irritated little sigh.
Rummaging in her pack for her cell phone, she withdrew it, flipped it open, and glanced down at the screen. No messages. She’d been hoping the professor would call her back before she got tied up in classes all day.
Too late now. She turned off the phone, tucked it back in her bag, grabbed her coffee from the counter, paid the cashier, and hurried off.
She had classes back-to-back until 4:45 P.M., but the second she was done she was heading straight to the hospital.
5:52 P.M.
The Dan Ryan Expressway at rush hour was a level in Dante’s Hell.
Jessi was hopelessly gridlocked in stop-and-go traffic that was way more stop than go—so much stop, in fact, that she’d been working on homework for the past half hour—when her cell phone rang.
She tossed aside the notes she’d been taking, crept forward a celebration-worthy eighteen inches, whipped out her phone and answered, hoping it was the professor, but it was Mark Troudeau.
The statement was just forming on her tongue that there was no way she was taking on even one more paper to grade when he ripped all the words right out of her mouth by telling her he was calling to let her know the campus police had just informed him that Professor Keene was dead.
She started shaking, clenched the steering wheel, and exhaled a sob.
“And get this, Jess, he was murdered,” Mark relayed in an excited rush, clearly fascinated and clearly oblivious to the fact that she was crying, despite the wet snuffling sounds she was making. Men could be so dense sometimes.
Dimly, she realized traffic was creeping forward again. Eased her foot off the clutch. Dragged the sleeve of her jacket across her face.
“The cops are talking like he got mixed up in something bad, Jess. Said he recently pulled a lot of money out of his retirement and mortgaged his house big-time. I guess he owned some land somewhere in Georgia that he just sold too. Cops have no idea what he suddenly needed so much money for.”
Belatedly realizing the car in front of her had stopped again, she hit the brakes and came to an abrupt halt a bare inch behind the rear bumper of the car in front of her. The guy behind her honked angrily. Not just once, but laid on it, complete with assorted hand gestures. “Right,” she snapped through tears, making a gesture of her own in the rearview mirror, “like it’s my fault traffic stopped moving again. Get over it.”
Traffic was the least of her concerns. She closed her eyes.
The cops might not know why the professor had needed the money, but she did.
It would seem the mirror was a bona fide relic, after all, albeit one that had come—she was now willing to bet serious money—hot off the black market.
The professor had indeed gotten mixed up in something bad.
“Garroted,” Mark was saying. “He was actually garroted. Nobody does that anymore, do they? Who does that kind of thing?”
She palmed the microphone on her cell, stared unseeingly out at the sea of stopped cars. “What on earth is going on?” she half-whispered.
Mark continued talking, a distant, chafing din.
The professor and I have already had our time together this evening, the blond man had said. And she’d pushed the comment brusquely aside, too wrapped up in her own petty concerns and interests.
And now the professor was dead.
Correction, she thought, a little chill seeping into her bones, according to what Mark had just told her—time of death 6:15 P.M. Monday—he’d been dead before she’d even gone to pick up his books that night.
The whole time she’d been standing in his office he’d been dead.
“And get this,” said Mark, still blathering away, “Ellis, the department head, tells me I’m gonna have to take the professor’s classes for the rest of the term. Can you believe this shit? Like they can’t afford to hire—”
“Oh, grow up, Mark,” Jessi hissed, thumbing the OFF button.
When finally she managed to escape the tenth level of Hell, Jessi made a beeline for side streets and headed straight back to campus.
Thoughts tumbled in disjointed confusion through her mind. Amid them all was a single clear one, drawing her like a beacon.
She had to see the mirror again.
Why—she had no idea.
It was simply the only thing she could think of to do. She couldn’t bring herself to go home. In her current state of mind she would climb the walls. She couldn’t go to the hospital; there was no longer anyone to visit. She had a few close friends, but they tended to work as much as she, so dropping by unexpectedly wasn’t the coolest thing to do, and besides, even if she did, what would she say—Hi, Ginger, how have you been? By the way, either I’ve gone insane, or my life has taken on distinct shades of Indiana Jones, complete with mysterious relics, foreign villains, and spectacular audiovisual special effects.