From Finland with Love E-Book

J. S. Volpe

• Herausgeber: J. S. Volpe
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Two years have passed since the fateful events of Book One. Now sophomores in college, Calvin and Cynthia investigate a campus murder linked to the legendary Ur-Tarot, the original Tarot cards created by a psychic monk a millennium ago. Along the way, the duo befriends Kaarina Nurmi, a beautiful bisexual Finnish girl who helps out with the investigation. Unfortunately Kaarina’s involvement might prove to be more trouble than it’s worth, given that Calvin is straight, Cynthia is gay, and both of them are frustrated virgins who see their sensual new friend as the answer to their lonely prayers. Will the duo’s ensuing rivalry for the delectable Finn derail both the investigation and their friendship? Then again, considering the way the dead bodies are piling up, they might not be alive long enough for it to matter…

Leseprobe

From Finland with Love

(Anomaly Hunters, Book Two)

J. S. Volpe

Copyright © 2013 J. S. Volpe

All Rights Reserved

CONTENTS

Title

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Also by J. S. Volpe

Chapter 1

“Okay, here’s a question for you,” Calvin Beckerman said. He took a quick sip of his jumbo coffee, then sat forward with a grin. “If you had to choose between sharing a true, undying love with someone for the rest of your life but never having sex ever again, or being able to have guilt-free, risk-free sex with whoever you wanted whenever you wanted but never being in love again, which would you choose?”

Frowning slightly, Cynthia Crow drank the last few drops of her own coffee (a small; it was late afternoon, and she didn’t want the caffeine keeping her up half the night), then chucked the cup into a trashcan a few feet away from the picnic table they sat at. They were in the plaza outside the Ames University Student Center. It was a sunny mid-September day, and overall the plaza was pretty crowded. Students lounged at picnic tables, lined the bench that ringed the fountain in the middle of the plaza, or just sat on the sun-warmed pavement. The west end of the plaza where Calvin and Cynthia sat, however, was more sparsely populated at the moment thanks to its being in the shadow of the seven-storey University Library on the plaza’s south side.

“That’s an interesting question,” Cynthia said. “Where’d you hear that?”

“I just made it up, actually,” he said. “I was thinking about something my Evolutionary Psychology prof said in class today. So what’s your answer?”

“Love, of course.” Her “like, duh” tone made it clear she didn’t see how anyone could answer any other way. Noticing his raised eyebrows, she said, “Let me guess: You’d choose the sex.”

“Well, yeah.” His “like, duh” tone made it clear he didn’t see how anyone could answer any other way.

She tutted. “That’s ridiculous. I mean, what, you’d throw away one of the most profound experiences a human being can have just to dip your wick?”

“Profound, my ass. Love is just hormones, a biochemical trick our brains play on us so we’ll form mating pairs. The whole point of it is to get us to dip our wicks. Or get dipped into.”

She cocked an eyebrow.

“Or, um…” He shrugged and gestured at her. “Sorry, I’m not really sure what the metaphor would be for lesbians.”

“Thank God for that.”

A flash of movement nearby caught their attention. The picnic table they sat at was right in front of the Marvin Osterberg Memorial Auditorium, aka the Moma, a squat boxy building that was connected to the west end of the Student Center and was used mainly for performances of student plays and for the Film Club’s Midnight Movie Madness every Saturday. A chubby girl with glasses and a Doctor Who T-shirt was pulling open the Moma’s front door. In her hand was a khaki messenger bag from the mouth of which bulged heaps of glossy hair of different colors—brown, blonde, black, white. Wigs, presumably. Unless she was toting around half a dozen severed heads.

The girl disappeared inside. The door thunked closed.

Cynthia turned back to Calvin. “Do you honestly believe all that crap about wick-dipping?”

“Of course.”

She tutted again.

“Look at it this way,” Calvin said: “Since we evolved into rational beings whose highly developed brains are our main mode of survival, we could no longer afford to be at the mercy of instinctive animal behavior like the rut, so evolution had to come up with more advanced, more abstract ways to get us to mate.”

“Oh, give me a break! How can you even say that? After…” She paused and looked around to make sure no one was too close, then lowered her voice and said, “I mean, after everything we’ve experienced and everything we’ve seen in the Collection, how can you be so reductionistic? We know there’s more to reality than just…just chemicals.”

The Collection in question was a vast assemblage of objects pertaining to anomalous phenomena. Calvin had inherited the Collection and the old, sprawling house that contained it from Cynthia’s weird old neighbor Robert May, who had spent his life investigating things that mainstream science regarded as abnormal or impossible—everything from poltergeists to rains of frogs, from UFOs to abiogenic oil. After being briefly mentored by Mr. May right before his death and then experiencing some highly unusual phenomena themselves, Calvin and Cynthia had vowed to follow in his footsteps. That was two years ago. They had spent the bulk of their extracurricular time since then reading through the files Mr. May had kept on the nearly four thousand anomalies he had investigated and collected evidence of. Calvin and Cynthia were reading the files in chronological order and were only up to 1977. Sometimes it felt like they would never reach the end.

Calvin shrugged. “Sure, there’s more to reality than chemicals, but the chemicals are still there. They still do what they do. And one of the things they do is turn people into moon-eyed morons.”

“You know what I think?” Cynthia said. “I think you’re just kind of soured on the whole subject because your parents split up last spring.”

“That has nothing to do with it,” Calvin muttered.

The Moma’s front door flew open, and the chubby girl stumbled out. Her face was warped with terror.

“Oh, God!” she cried. “Help! Someone help!”

Calvin and Cynthia shot to their feet and hurried over to her, as did a few other nearby students.

“What’s wrong?” Calvin asked.

The girl took a few gulping breaths, then managed to say, “I—I went in to set things up for rehearsal, and—and—there’s a dead guy in there. On the stage. Oh, God, there’s blood everywhere.”

“I’ll call the cops,” said a square-jawed, bristle-haired fellow in an Ames U sweatshirt. He whipped out his phone and started dialing.

As the others led the hysterical girl to the picnic table recently vacated by Calvin and Cynthia, Calvin glanced around to make sure everyone was focused on the girl, then nudged Cynthia’s arm and said, “Come on.”

“What?” she said. “Where?” But even as she asked the question, she saw that he was making a beeline straight for the Moma’s front door. “What are you doing?” she whispered, hurrying after him.

“It’s a mystery,” he said. “Let’s investigate.” He opened the door and slipped inside.

“Yeah, it’s a mystery for the cops,” she said, darting in after him. “It’s not anomalous or anything.”

“You never know. It’s worth a look.”

“Curiosity killed the cat.”

“Feh. They’ve got nine lives.”

“All right. But we’d better be out of here before the cops come. As we well know, they don’t look too kindly on outside investigators.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

They crossed the lobby to the wooden door that led to the auditorium proper. Calvin laid a hand on the knob and glanced at Cynthia.

“You ready?” he said.

“Not really. But let’s hurry up and get it over with.”

Calvin opened the door, and they stepped into the auditorium. Curving tiers of seats descended toward the stage. The stage curtains were up, and the stage was partially set up for a play. A backdrop painted to resemble a stone wall stood at the rear of the stage. Two black floor candelabra were stationed in front of it. In the middle of the stage was a high-backed wooden throne. A man sat slumped in the throne like a sleeping king, his chin on his chest, his arms hanging limp over the chair’s sides. But this man definitely wasn’t sleeping: Even from across the room Calvin and Cynthia could see blood splashed all over the chair’s backrest. A faint stench of cordite hung in the air. The chubby girl’s messenger bag lay on its side on the floor just inside the doorway. Wigs and props—a dagger, a crown, a bottle marked with a skull and crossbones—had spilled from the bag and lay strewn across the blue-gray carpet. The auditorium was as still and silent as a tomb. Which made sense, since that was pretty much exactly what it was at the moment.

“Whoever did this might still be here, you know,” Cynthia whispered as they stepped over the props and descended the steps to the stage.

“The girl got in and out okay,” Calvin said.

“She might have been lucky.”

They stopped at the edge of the stage. The stage floor was level with their chests, and from their low vantage point, they could see up into the dead man’s face. He was middle-aged, with receding gray-brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard. His face was frozen in an almost comical look of surprise. In the center of his forehead was a small red hole. He wore a white shirt, blue jeans, and brown leather cowboy boots. The front of his shirt and the crotch of his pants were dark and sodden with blood. It glistened in the bright work lights above the stage. Calvin and Cynthia could make out grayish blobs of brain matter clinging to the backrest amid the splashes of gore. The raw, coppery stink of blood blotted out all other smells. Both Calvin and Cynthia had seen a man with his brains blown out before, but they discovered now that it wasn’t something that got easier to deal with through repetition.

“Oh, God,” Cynthia muttered, cupping a hand over her nose and mouth. Her face had gone the color of cottage cheese. She glanced around the auditorium, partly to make sure the killer wasn’t creeping up on them to increase his body count, but also so she wouldn’t have to look at the grisly mess on the stage. “Let me repeat my earlier comment about hurrying up and getting this over with.”

“Yeah,” Calvin said. His face had gone as pale as hers, and his stomach was tightening in a way that made him wonder if he was about to get a second look at the cinnamon roll he had eaten half an hour ago. But then he frowned and peered more closely at the man in the throne. “Wait a minute. I know this guy. I’ve seen him around campus before. I think he works here. Maintenance or something.” He climbed up onto the stage.

“Yeah, you’re right,” she said. She followed him onto the stage, her curiosity roused. “Now that you mention it, I recognize him, too.”

They stopped a couple of feet from the fake throne and studied the body slumped there. Now that they were closer, they could see the exit wound in the back of the man’s head. Jumbled brain matter gleamed in its depths. The hair around it was slick and matted with blood.

“I think it’s safe to say he was killed here,” Cynthia said.

“And not too long ago, from the look of it,” Calvin said. “Apparently with a gun.”

“One with a silencer, too. Otherwise we would’ve heard the shot.”

“Not necessarily.” Calvin nodded at the walls. “I think I heard somewhere that the auditorium is soundproof.”

“Oh, lovely,” she muttered, looking nervously around the room. “On stage, no one can hear you scream.”

Calvin scanned the bare wooden floor around them. “No spent shells anywhere,” he said. “No clues of any kind.”

Turning his attention back to the body, he noticed a rectangular bulge in the breast pocket of the man’s shirt. Excited, sure that he had found a clue, he got out a pen, then leaned over the body and used the tip of the pen to pull open the pocket to see what was inside. His excitement died when he found that it was only a pack of cigarettes.

“Hmp,” he said, straightening up.

“We’d better think about getting going,” Cynthia said. “The cops’ll be here any minute. Besides, this doesn’t look anomalous or paranormal or anything. It was probably just a lover’s quarrel or a drug deal gone bad or something.”

“Yeah,” he said with a sigh. He started to turn away, then froze. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

Calvin crouched down next to the throne. The thumb and forefinger of the dead man’s left hand were pinched together. Sticking out between them was a small triangular piece of paper.

Taking care not to touch the corpse’s flesh, Calvin took the edge of the paper between his own thumb and forefinger and wiggled it free.

Looking at it more closely, he found that it wasn’t paper after all. It was parchment. Two of its edges were smooth and the third rough. It was clearly a corner torn from a larger piece. On one side was a fragment of a painted pattern of intertwined flowering vines that looked like it might be a decorative border. The other side was painted solid black.

“That looks really old,” Cynthia said. “Look how the paint’s all faded and flaking.”

“Yeah, and it feels really brittle.” He frowned and raised the parchment for a closer look. “This looks familiar, too.”

“What does?”

“The viny pattern. I think I’ve seen it before.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. But I have a feeling it was in a context that was somehow related to strange phenomena.”

“One of the files maybe?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. It could be. But it could just as well have been something I came across online or in a book or something.” He handed her the parchment. “Hold this up so I can see it.”

He got out his phone and used it to take a few photos of the parchment. When he was done, he took the parchment from Cynthia, then squatted down and carefully tucked it into the V formed by the body’s pinched thumb and forefinger.

He stood up.

“There we go.”

The paper dropped out of the V and landed in a small puddle of blood on the floor.

“Oh, that’s just fucking great!” Cynthia said.

Calvin squatted again and reached out toward the paper, but then stopped when he realized there was no way to pick it up without touching the blood, too.

He looked up at Cynthia. “I don’t suppose you have a pair of tweezers handy?”

“Why would I have tweezers handy?” she said.

“I don’t know. Don’t girls use tweezers for things?”

“Yes. But they don’t normally carry them around.”

“The ones with purses do.”

She spread her arms. “Have you ever seen me carry a purse?”

“I’m just saying.”

He stood back up. They stared at the paper in silence. It sat there atop the blood like a lily-pad on a pond.

“Well, it’s not like the blood’ll totally ruin it or anything, right?” Calvin said.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Cynthia said. “But seeing as how you just fucked up a crime scene, I’d say the need to hurry up is now more pressing than ever.”

“Agreed. Let’s take a quick look backstage, then skedaddle.”

Trying to move fast, yet also trying to be cautious in case the shooter was still around, they rounded the castle-wall backdrop and entered the cavernous backstage area. Here and there stood bits of scenery: more backdrops, plaster battlements, wooden tables and benches. No one was in sight, and nothing looked amiss. But something sure sounded amiss: Police sirens. Lots of them.

“Oh, shit,” Cynthia said. “It sounds like they’re in the parking lot already.”

“Why the hell didn’t we hear them before?” Calvin asked.

She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the auditorium. “Soundproofing, remember?”

“Oh. Yeah. Crap.”

They spotted a glowing exit sign on the rear wall. They started to race toward it, but then stopped when they saw that the double exit doors beneath the sign were chained and padlocked shut.

“Isn’t it a violation of the fire code to lock the doors like that?” Cynthia asked.

“I don’t know,” Calvin said. “But we need to find another way out of here. If we try to go out the front door, we’ll be spotted for sure. And I really don’t want to have to explain what we were doing here.”

“Isn’t there a stairwell that connects the lobby with the second floor of the Student Center?”

“Yeah! I forgot about that!”

They sprinted across the stage, leaped off, and raced up the carpeted steps to the lobby door. There they paused and listened at the door a moment to make sure no one had already entered the lobby. They heard tires squeal not far away.

They burst through the door and hurried to another door at the east end of the lobby. A sign on the wall next to the door read, “Stairs.” As they flung open the door, they heard the rapid clatter of running feet in the plaza outside. A deep voice barked an unintelligible command. Calvin and Cynthia raced up the stairs. The door to the stairwell clacked shut behind them.

They had just reached the landing at the top of the stairs when they heard the Moma’s front door bang open. A cacophony of footfalls filled the lobby. Calvin quietly opened the plain wooden door at the top of the stairs, and he and Cynthia stepped through.

They were at the end of a long hallway on the second floor of the Student Center. To their left were closed doors that led to restrooms and conference rooms. To their right, a row of dark-red couches faced the tall plate-glass windows that overlooked the plaza below. At some of the more distant couches students sat chatting or reading or dozing. The nearer ones appeared to be empty.

Calvin and Cynthia strode down the corridor, staying well away from the windows so no one in the plaza would see them. Before they had gone twenty paces, a voice behind them said, “Hey, there!”

They whirled, their hearts jumping. A long, grinning head with spiked, black-dyed hair and thick-rimmed glasses rose up over the back of one of the couches they had presumed to be unoccupied. It was Brandon Taylor, a fellow sophomore and longtime acquaintance from Calvin and Cynthia’s hometown of May, Ohio. He was officially a Graphic Design major, but he dabbled in practically every known art form, from sculpture to acting to poetry.

Brandon folded his arms atop the backrest of the couch, his black leather jacket creaking softly with the movement, and rested his chin on his crossed arms.

“So what’s up, guys?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing,” Calvin said, trying to sound blasé.

“Just passing through, really,” Cynthia added with a forced smile. “What’s up with you?”

“Eh, not much. Just sitting here skipping my drawing class. The prof is such a fascist.” He held up a battered composition notebook. “I decided it’d behoove me better to work on some poetry instead.”

“Ah,” Cynthia said, barely suppressing a wince. She hoped this wasn’t the prelude to one of his impromptu poetry recitals. Although Brandon was a talented artist in many respects, poetry was definitely not his forte. Thankfully he set down the notebook without opening it.

Calvin glanced at the door to the stairwell with a small frown.

“Say, how long have you been sitting here?” he asked Brandon.

“Oh, about an hour, give or take.”

“Has anyone else come out of the stairwell?”

“No. No one. It’s been totally dead down here. Well, except there was this one guy in cowboy boots who came clopping down the hallway like Gene Fucking Autry and interrupted me right in the middle of working on a really kickass metaphor. He was going into the Moma, though; not coming out.”

“When was that?”

“Maybe twenty minutes ago.” He cocked his head. “Why are you so interested in the traffic patterns down here?”

“Oh, um…” Calvin’s mind raced in search of a plausible excuse. Brandon didn’t know about their anomaly investigating. Hardly anyone did. And Calvin and Cynthia wanted to keep it that way. “We were, um…”

“We were supposed to meet someone,” Cynthia said, coming to his rescue. “We thought they might have gotten the wrong door by mistake.”

“Huh.” Brandon eyed them dubiously, clearly not convinced.

A thump echoed up the stairwell.

“Well, we’d better get going,” Cynthia said. “We’ve got a lot to do.”

“Um, all right. Catch you later, then.”

Leaving behind a clearly befuddled Brandon, Calvin and Cynthia hurried downstairs and headed out of the Student Center’s southeast exit, which was on the opposite side of the plaza from the Moma. They had hoped to watch the police activity from there, but a slowly growing crowd of students and other curiosity seekers blocked the Moma from view.

Calvin and Cynthia crossed the plaza to the library and took the elevator to the third floor. There, they stood at a window that overlooked the Moma, and surveyed the scene below.

Three uniformed cops had been posted in front of the Moma to keep the crowd at bay. Half a dozen police cars were parked along the curb on University Drive just west of the Moma, their bubble lights strobing. A cop stood next to one of the cars, speaking urgently into his radio.

The Moma’s front door opened and another cop emerged and hurried toward one of the cars. In the brief interval before the front door closed again, Calvin and Cynthia caught a glimpse of a man in a black suit talking to a uniformed cop in the Moma’s lobby.

Calvin and Cynthia remained at the window for nearly two hours, watching. They saw the coroner’s van arrive. They saw a pair of paramedics wheel out the sheet-shrouded corpse. They saw cops interviewing students in the crowd. They saw news vans arrive. They saw no sign that the police had found anyone in the building aside from the dead man.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Calvin said. “We were sitting right in front of the Moma; we would’ve noticed it if someone came out that way. And Brandon would’ve noticed someone leaving by the upstairs door. And the back door was locked from the inside.”

“Maybe the killer’s still in there. Maybe he just found one hell of a good hiding place.”

“I suppose that’s possible.”

“Or maybe Brandon wasn’t on the couch the whole time. Maybe he got up to go to the bathroom, and while he was in there, the killer slipped out of the stairwell.”

“Maybe. We should’ve thought to ask him about that.”

“Or, hey, maybe Brandon’s the killer.”

Calvin laughed. “What, you think maybe the dead guy was a part-time art critic, and he dissed Brandon’s work?”

“Sure, why not? At least it would mean this isn’t some horrible locked-auditorium mystery, right?”

Calvin watched a cop emerge from the Moma with the chubby girl’s bag of props in his latex-gloved hand.

“Somehow I have a sinking suspicion that’s exactly what this is,” he said with a sigh.

Chapter 2

The murder was the lead story in the next day’s Daily Ames Record, the campus paper. Calvin and Cynthia sat reading it in Lecture Hall 2 of Chandler Hall while they waited for World History I to begin.

According to the paper, the dead man was Judd Skerrit, 52, a campus maintenance worker. Skerrit’s supervisor, a man named Lou Guglio, said that Skerrit was supposed to have been in the Student Center’s basement replacing a light fixture at the time the murder occurred. Guglio had no idea why Skerrit had been in the Moma.

Robyn Blair, the girl who found the body, claimed she thought she had heard someone moving around in the Moma when she first entered, but the police searched the place thoroughly and found no one. The coroner estimated that Skerrit had been dead for no more than five or ten minutes before Miss Blair arrived.

The police were interested in talking to two students, a male and a female, who had been seen entering the Moma shortly after the body was found.

“Aw, crap,” Calvin muttered.

“What, did you get to the part about the two students?” said Cynthia, who had just finished the article and was folding up her paper.

“Yeah.”

“Well, keep reading. You’ll like the next paragraph even better.”

The detective in charge of the investigation was Lee Anderson.

“Oh, shit,” Calvin said.

The paper had run an article about Detective Anderson two weeks earlier. He had just received something called the Ames Distinguished Service Award, which was reserved for public employees whose accomplishments were particularly notable in some way. In Anderson’s case, his notability rested on the fact that he had solved every single case to come across his desk in his ten years as a detective.

“Then again,” Calvin said, “he probably won’t be able to track us down. I mean, there are thousands of students at Ames. How’s he gonna find us?”

“I hope you’re right,” Cynthia said.

Calvin put his paper into his backpack, then looked around the room. It was ten forty-four—a minute till class started—and the room was nearly full, but there was no sign of Professor Byrne. Usually Byrne arrived early to set up his notes on the podium at the front of the room. Today, though, the podium was empty. It would be surprising if Byrne didn’t show up; this was supposed to have been the first class in a week. Byrne had canceled last Thursday’s class because he was flying to Milan, Italy, that morning to take part in a three-day medieval history symposium. He was supposed to have been back by now, but maybe there had been some kind of delay. Or maybe he had decided he liked Italy better than dreary old Ohio and had ripped up his return ticket.

As Calvin looked around, his gaze fell on a blonde girl who was just coming in through the door at the back of the room. His jaw dropped at the sight of her, all thoughts of Professor Byrne and murdered maintenance men and everything else vanishing in the blink of an eye.

She was gorgeous. Long blonde hair. Smooth tanned skin. High cheekbones. Eyes the color of smoke. She was tall and slim yet still sported healthy curves in all the right places. Her high, firm breasts strained roundly against her black tank top, and the small hard bumps of her nipples and the way her breasts quivered with every step provided ample evidence she wasn’t wearing a bra. Her low-rise skinny jeans hugged her legs and hips like a second skin. A gap between the bottom of her shirt and the top of her jeans exposed a breathtaking expanse of her flat, tanned belly, in the center of which a gold navel ring glinted like a doubloon on a tropical beach.

“Whoa,” Calvin said.

“What?” Cynthia said. She followed his gaze. She saw the girl. “Whoa.”

They watched the girl settle into an aisle seat near the back of the room and pull a notebook and a pen from her backpack. They found themselves envying the long-haired dude who sat next to her, and with whom she exchanged a few words as she settled in.

“She must be new,” Calvin said. “I’ve never seen her in here before.”

“It could be that we just never noticed her,” Cynthia said. “It is a pretty big class, after all.”

“Trust me, I would have noticed her.”

Cynthia eyed the girl a moment longer, then sighed and nodded. “Yeah. Same here.”

They were forced to wrench their eyes from the girl when the side door near the front of the room opened and Professor Byrne strode in. He was a short, wiry, fortyish man with prematurely gray hair and a neatly trimmed mustache that still had some pepper mixed with the salt.

As he headed to the podium, his eyes scanned the sea of faces in front of him as if he were searching for someone. His expression was tight, closed.

He set a sheaf of notes atop the podium and began to shuffle through them.

“I, uh, I believe I left off with Attila the Hun,” he said.

A puzzled murmur ran through the crowd. Byrne noticed it and glanced up.

“No?” he said.

“Constantine’s conversion to Christianity,” someone called out.

“Oh. Right. Of course.” Frowning to himself, he reshuffled his notes.

The ensuing lecture was in the same vein: fumbling, distracted, disorganized. Midway through it, Cynthia leaned in and whispered to Calvin, “Wow, he must have the worst case of jetlag ever.”

“I’m surprised he isn’t talking about his trip,” Calvin said. “He’s usually eager to share his extracurricular projects with us. I mean, remember how he spent nearly a whole class talking about his research into Dagobert II?”

“Maybe the symposium didn’t go very well. Maybe his paper got hissed, or something.”

“I don’t think academics hiss each other. They just write vaguely snotty rebuttals in online journals.”

Apparently realizing his ineffectuality, Byrne ended class ten minutes early. As Calvin and Cynthia stepped out of the lecture hall and into Chandler’s main hallway, they saw the blonde girl striding away toward the building’s side door, her breasts and backpack bouncing. She pushed open the door and vanished into the rectangle of bright daylight outside.

Calvin and Cynthia wished they could follow, but their route, alas, took them out the main door, which was in the opposite direction.

“That was one stunning girl,” Cynthia said as they crossed campus toward Duffy Hall, their dorm.

“Maybe next time I see her I’ll ask her out,” Calvin said with a mack-daddy waggle of his eyebrows.

Cynthia barked out a laugh. “Oh, like you’d have the balls to even talk to a girl like that. She’s out of your league, my boy. She’s hitting homers in the World Series while you’re still playing around with your whiffle-ball bat.”

“Like you’re any better! You’re not even in the bush leagues yourself!”

“I never said otherwise. I’m more realistic about these things.”

“Since when? And what do you even know about ‘these things’ anyway? Your luck with girls isn’t much better than mine. I mean, aside from a brief trip to first base with that girl at the dorm party last spring—what was her name? Candy? Bambi?”

“Mandy,” Cynthia mumbled.

“Yeah, Mandy. I mean, aside from that, your love-life’s been about as unexciting as mine. Nothing but strikes and ground outs. And I don’t think Mandy was actually gay or bi anyway. I think she was just trying to freak out her boyfriend.”

Cynthia rolled her eyes. “You’re never gonna shut up about that, are you?”

“Probably not. At least not until I get Alzheimer’s and forget it ever happened.”

“I’d better start putting aluminum shavings in your food, then.”

They arrived at their dorm. They checked their mailboxes, threw away the junk mail they found therein, and then headed to the elevator. While they waited for the elevator to descend, a man’s voice behind them said, “Ah, just the two fine young students I’m looking for.”

They turned and found themselves face-to-face with a tall, dark-haired man in a black suit and tie. Calvin and Cynthia recognized him instantly. They had seen his picture in the paper. It was Detective Anderson. He was smiling. Or at least his mouth was. Despite the broad grin and the wall of dazzlingly white, even teeth it revealed, his eyes were as cold and pitiless as a raptor’s.

He pulled a badge from his inner jacket pocket and flashed it at them.

“Detective Lee Anderson,” he said. “Ames Police.”

“Um, hi,” Calvin said, trying to sound pleasant yet baffled, as if he couldn’t for the life of him understand why a policeman would want to speak with him. “Nice to meet you.”

“Yeah, same here,” Cynthia said, adopting the same tone.

“Why don’t the three of us chat for a minute?” Anderson said, taking each of them by the arm. His voice was calm and friendly, but his grip was like iron. He led them to a quiet corner nearby.

“So how can we help you?” Cynthia asked innocently.

“Cut the shit,” Anderson said, his smile already a memory. “I know you two were in the Moma yesterday. I’ve got five witnesses who saw you going in.”

“Us?” Calvin said, feigning surprise. “I think you’re mistaken. It wasn’t us. It must have been two other students.”

“Uh-huh. Right. If you can point me to another skinny young male with short blond hair and blue eyes and a skinny young female with long red hair and green eyes, both of whom are frequently seen in the company of each other on campus, I would be more than happy to talk to them too.”

“Um…”

“There was a piece of paper sitting in a puddle of blood. I get the impression the paper didn’t get there on its own. Do you know anything about that, by any chance?”

“No,” Calvin and Cynthia said in unison. They very carefully did not look at each other.

Anderson eyed them in steely silence for a moment. They could tell he could tell they were lying.

“Do you know what the punishment is for tampering with a crime scene?”

“Um, no,” Calvin said.

“Well, I’ll tell you right now, if you ever again tamper with a crime scene in this locality, you are going to find out. Do you understand?”

Both of them felt an urge to continue protesting their innocence. But they knew it was futile.

“Yes,” they said.

“Did either of you tamper with anything else, or take anything?”

“No,” they said.

“Did either of you see or hear anyone in the building?”

“No.”

“Do either of you have any other information that might be useful to this investigation?”

They immediately remembered Calvin’s certainty that he had seen the viny pattern before in some context connected with anomalous phenomena. But they said, “No.”

Anderson’s eyes narrowed. He seemed to suspect another lie but was less certain of it this time around.

“Are you sure?” he said.

They nodded.

“What would we know?” Calvin said. “We’re just students. We were just, you know, looking. That’s all. Curiosity. We won’t do it again.”

“We promise,” Cynthia said.

Anderson regarded them in silence for a moment, his raptor’s eyes darting back and forth between them.

Then he said, “You’d better not do it again.” He leaned forward. His eyes narrowed. “Especially at one of my crime scenes. Are we clear on that?”

“Um, yeah,” Calvin said.

“Yes, sir,” Cynthia said.

“Good,” Anderson said. He motioned at the elevator. “Now you two little lovebirds move along and get on with your educations, or your partying, or whatever it is you kids do these days, and leave the criminal investigations to the professionals.”

“Lovebirds?” Calvin muttered.

Cynthia waved an arm at Anderson. “Hello! Lesbian!”

Anderson blinked at her a moment. Then with a small frown he looked at Calvin. He opened his mouth as if to say something, then stopped himself and shook his head. “Whatever.”

Without another word, he turned and walked away. Worried that he might change his mind and come back, Calvin and Cynthia lost no time in vamoosing. Rather than wait for the elevator, they bolted through the door to the stairwell.

“Why are we always getting in trouble with the cops?” Cynthia asked as they plodded up the stairs to Calvin’s room on the fourth floor.

“It comes with the territory,” Calvin said. “Remember what Mr. May told us: When you’re investigating phenomena that lie beyond the boundaries of what society accepts as normal, you often have to cross those boundaries yourself. Which can lead to trouble.”

“Yeah,” she said. “But one of these days we might not get off with just a warning. We might wind up with criminal records.”

“It’s a risk we have to accept, I guess.”

They reached Calvin’s floor and headed to his room. Like Cynthia, he had a single room. Given their outré interests, it seemed wisest to pony up the extra cash for one. Many folks would look askance upon a roommate who stayed up half the night downloading photos of spontaneous human combustion victims and first-hand accounts of anal probing performed by little gray aliens. Besides, the two of them wanted to maintain a low profile. Cynthia in particular harbored an intense dread of waking up one morning to find their photos in the paper under the headline “The Real X-Files!” She valued her privacy and her dignity. Calvin, on the other hand, wasn’t quite as concerned about such things, caring only that they be able to do their work without interference.

Another thing he wasn’t terribly concerned about was housekeeping. As usual, his room was a mess. The bed was unmade. The desktop was a jumble of papers, books, notebooks, gadgets, pens, and countless other things. A computer sat in the midst of this jumble like a car in a snowdrift. Books on anomalous phenomena overflowed the numerous shelves and were heaped ten-high on the floor. Atop one of these heaps sat a Starbucks cup that contained half an inch of cold coffee overlain with a thin film of dust. The closet door stood open a crack and from the gap extended a single white sock, an outlier of the mountain of dirty clothes that lay inside.

Calvin plucked a used T-shirt from his futon so Cynthia could sit there, then tossed the shirt into the closet. He sat down on the desk chair, facing the futon.

“Have you heard about these newfangled contraptions called vacuum cleaners?” Cynthia asked as she brushed cracker crumbs from the futon’s seat. “I hear they’re all the rage these days.” Having created a crumb-free space, she sat down.

“Sorry. I keep meaning to clean up in here. I’ll get around to it sooner or later.”

“Yeah, probably when you move out.”

“Hey, at least I’m not anal-retentively neat like some people.”

“I’m not anal-retentive. I’m just well-organized.”

“Uh-huh. You have your self-delusions, I have mine.”

Cynthia noticed an odd assemblage of items on a small table next to the futon: a multi-head screwdriver, a tape measure, a Mini Maglite, scissors, tweezers, and a box of latex gloves.

“What’s all this stuff?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah!” Calvin’s face brightened with excitement and pride. “After that whole lack of tweezers thing yesterday, I decided to put together an investigator’s kit, with basic items we might need in the course of our work. I still need to get a few more things, though. Especially some small vials for collecting samples. Maybe a compass, too.”

She smiled and shook her head. “It’s like your own little Batman utility belt.”

“You may mock, but if we’re going to be investigating stuff, we need the proper tools. I refuse to be caught tweezerless again. Honestly, I always planned to put something like this together, but I figured I’d do it after we graduated and started investigating weird stuff full time. I didn’t think I’d need it this soon. I didn’t think we’d stumble onto our first real case here in college.”

Her smile faded. Her expression clouded. “If Detective Anderson catches us nosing around again, he’ll come down on us like a ton of bricks.”

He grinned. “That just means we’ll have to be super-careful from here on out.”

Instead of returning the grin as he had expected her to do, she said, “Are we sure it’s worth it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, are you sure about that vine pattern being from something connected with anomalous phenomena? We spent, like, three hours last night going through your books and browsing the internet in search of the pattern, and we didn’t find squat. I don’t want to wind up with a criminal record only to find out Judd Skerrit was murdered over an old and rare but hardly anomalous book.”

“I’d say I’m about ninety percent sure I saw that pattern in relation to something anomalous. I just can’t remember any specifics.”

“It was probably something from the Collection.”

“Maybe. But you’ve been going through that stuff with me. The pattern doesn’t ring any bells with you?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean much. We’ve looked at thousands of objects and read through thousands of files. And there’s still over a thousand more we haven’t gotten to yet. The pattern might be from one of those. It might have been something you saw while browsing through the Collection by yourself one day.”

“Yeah.” He sighed. “Well, let’s finish looking through these books tonight and then search some more on the internet. If we don’t find anything, then tomorrow after class we can head to May and start hunting through the Collection. But we should start doing more than that, too. I mean, it might take a long time to find the source of the pattern, if we even find it at all. We can’t just wait until we do. We have to be more proactive. We have to start investigating.”

“Investigating what, exactly?”

“Judd Skerrit, for one thing. We need to find out more about him. Maybe if we learn his interests, we’ll figure out what the viny pattern is from.”

She nodded. “Makes sense. We can start on that tomorrow, too.” She looked around the room at the stacks of books, then heaved a sigh. “I guess we’d better get to work…”