Pulse by John Lutz Page A

earlier today?”
    “No. Sorry. Chancellor Schueller might be able to help you there, but I’m not sure you should bother him with business other than Waycliffe’s.”
    “Macy was a Waycliffe student,” Jody pointed out.
    Professor Pratt laid a hand on her wrist and gave a little squeeze. “If I were you, I wouldn’t talk to the chancellor, or to the police, about Macy Collins. Remember what I said about compartmentalizing. Well, this isn’t the time for you to be distracted. Concentrate on your studies and let the detectives go ahead and detect. You shouldn’t get enmeshed in a murder case, Jody. For a number of reasons, not the least of which is that nothing about this case involves you. As far as you’re concerned, what happened to Macy Collins exists in another dimension, and one you shouldn’t visit.”
    “I suppose you’re right,” Jody conceded, smiling as if the professor had persuaded her.
    How wrong you are .
     
     
    “So what kind of place is Waycliffe College?” Fedderman asked Quinn and Pearl, after they’d returned to the office.
    Pearl had made a fresh pot of coffee and was pouring some into her initialed mug. “Kinda place where half the girls are nicknamed Muffy, and the boys Bunny.”
    “Like state prison,” Fedderman said.
    “I won’t even ask what that means,” Mishkin said. He and Sal Vitali had divided the notes from the interviews with Macy Collins’s neighbors and were poring over them to find items of interest or contradictions.
    “It looks like minor league Ivy League,” Quinn said, leaning back in his desk chair. “Small and secluded.”
    “Very picturesque,” Pearl said.
    Sal growled something unintelligible.
    “And it looks like money,” Pearl said.
    “That, too,” Quinn said.
    “But I think secret suits it better than secluded .” Pearl sipped her coffee and made a face. “Maybe that’s an odd word to describe it, but that’s the impression it gives. Like there’s some dark and musty secret hanging over the place.”
    Quinn swiveled slightly in his chair and said nothing. He’d had the same feeling as Pearl’s, that something just beyond sight or sound was lurking in the ivy. Or maybe that was because it had been a long time since either of them had been on a college campus. The quiet, shaded grounds and buildings of Waycliffe were a detached world of their own. One conducive to pondering and discussing rather than conducting police interviews.
    After all, the Collins murder had occurred in the real world, beyond the rows of oak and maple trees that marked the boundaries of the academic enclave. In the world of Waycliffe, everything had to make sense. In Quinn’s world there was chaos.
    “Are we going back there?” Harold asked.
    “Right now we don’t have a reason,” Quinn said. “There doesn’t seem to be anything connected to the college that figures into Collins’s death. And there wasn’t anything useful in her dorm room.”
    “No computer there, either,” Pearl said. “And the crime scene unit didn’t remove one from her apartment.”
    “No computer, few friends,” Sal growled. “Makes things difficult.”
    “On the other hand,” Harold said, “Macy hardly knew anyone in New York, so if a serial killer didn’t do her, there aren’t too many suspects.” Harold, looking on the bright side.
    “You don’t have to know someone in New York to get murdered,” Sal said.
    Helen Iman, the NYPD profiler, came in, making the office suddenly smaller with her six-foot-plus height. She was wearing khakis and a white pullover shirt with a collar and looked like a women’s basketball coach. Quinn wasn’t sure if she’d ever actually played basketball.
    She was sweating, as if she’d been running up and down the court.
    “Hot out there,” she said, pulling a plastic water bottle from a khaki pocket and taking a hearty swig. “I was by earlier and you weren’t here,” she said to Quinn, backhanding away water that was dribbling down