Fair Game - lanyon Josh - Страница 2

“Sure.” If that wasn’t kosher, he’d know better next time.

“Are your office hours still from nine to eleven on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and two to four on Tuesdays and Thursdays?”

He had to think about it before he assented.

She gave him that blazing smile again. “Sweet! Then I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Elliot nodded politely, bemusedly. Leslie departed with the stoic Sandusky in tow. Elliot retrieved his phone and checked messages.

His father’s number flashed up.

The letdown caught him off guard. What—who—had he been expecting? Automatically, he gathered his tan Brooks Brothers raincoat and briefcase. Speaking of office hours, he was due in his hideout now.

He punched in the phone number as he walked. His office was located in Hanby Hall on the other side of the quad near the arboretum. The rain had stopped. The campus—tidy lawns, old-fashioned brick buildings, towering white birch and beech trees—sparkled in the fleeting sunlight. He could almost justify wearing his shades.

“Hey, Professor!” A student on a bike winged past like a giant bird.

Elliot flinched. At least he managed not to reach for a shoulder holster that was no longer there, so progress was being made.

The phone ringing at the other end picked up.

“Hel-lo.” His dad sounded like always. Relaxed, cheerful. Clearly it was no family emergency that had him ringing Elliot during class hours. Of course, they were a two-man family, so if there had been a genuine emergency Roland Mills probably wouldn’t be the one placing the call.

“Hey, Dad. You rang?”

“I did. How are you, son? Still on for dinner tomorrow night?”

They had dinner every Thursday. They’d been having dinner once a week since Elliot had left the Bureau and returned to teaching at Puget Sound University. Dinner at Dad’s was currently the high point of Elliot’s social calendar.

“Yep.” An uneasy thought occurred. “Why?”

Roland’s voice altered, though Elliot wasn’t sure how. “I was going to invite friends to join us. You remember Tom and Pauline Baker?”

“Vaguely.” He skirted two girls in boots and mufflers texting madly as they walked and mumbled to each other.

“Their boy Terry is a student at PSU. At least he was up until three weeks ago.”

“What happened three weeks ago?”

“He disappeared.”

“Boys do sometimes.”

“Not this boy. Terry was a very serious kid. Good grades. No trouble.”

Elliot said dryly, “Sounds like he was due some time off.”

“Only Tom and Pauline don’t believe he dropped out of sight voluntarily.”

Elliot had reached the long narrow steps leading up to bullet-shaped oak door of Hanby Hall. As always when faced with stairs he felt a twinge of anxiety. The pain after his knee replacement had been excruciating, beyond anything he’d imagined or previously experienced, barring the original experience of getting kneecapped. But he was recovering well now and stairs rarely gave him trouble.

He took them briskly, went inside the building already quieting down as the next session of classes began. He nodded politely to Ray, PSU’s facilities maintenance, as Ray shuffled past pushing his utility cart. Ray ignored him as usual. Elliot could hear muffled laughter from Anne Gold’s classroom. That reminded him that he had never responded to Anne’s invitation to get together for dinner one night. If he didn’t make an effort he was going to turn into one of those cranky old professors who talked to themselves and kept parakeets.

Keeping his voice down as he walked past closed doors, he said, “If that’s the case, and they have some grounds for believing foul play, they should go to police.”

“They’ve been to the police. They’ve been to the FBI.”

Funny, that twist his guts gave at hearing FBI. “I haven’t heard a word on campus about this.”

“Charlotte Oppenheimer asked them to keep it quiet for now.”

Oppenheimer was the current president of PSU. She had a vested interest in keeping rumors of possible malfeasance to a whisper.

“What is it you want me to do?” Reaching his office, Elliot put his briefcase down and found his keys, listening to the uncharacteristic silence on the other end of the line.

“I’d like you to talk to the Bakers.”

Not what he was expecting. “How is that supposed to help anyone?” Elliot had had his share of talking to grieving parents. If there was a bright side to losing a job you loved, it was not having to deal with terrified or distraught loved ones.

“I thought you could talk to them. Reassure her. Them.”

Stepping inside his office, Elliot closed the door and said quietly, “There may not be cause for reassurance.”

“I know. But you’ve got experience in this kind of thing. I thought you might be able to use that experience to help them navigate these waters.”

Here was irony. “You hated every moment I worked for the Bureau. All I ever heard was how I was wasting my life in the pay of a fascist organization working for a corrupt regime.”

“And so you were.” The years had only slightly mellowed Roland Mills’s militant and anarchist tendencies. Back in the day, he’d been right out there with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, flowers in his hair and screaming for revolution, before settling down to relatively staid life as the most liberal professor on the campus of one of the most liberal of the liberal art colleges on the West Coast. Elliot was his only child, the offspring of Roland’s third and final marriage. “So you were,” Roland repeated. “And squandering all the gifts and talents the universe bestowed on you. But here’s a chance to put those oppressor-of-the-people skills of yours to good use. These are friends and they need help.”

“Christ, Dad.” Elliot stared out the window, but he wasn’t really seeing the pale, glistening tree trunks or the silver-pink rhododendrons in this part of the arboretum. The museum of trees. He was seeing another rainy afternoon—a park of brick and granite and trees in Portland, Oregon. Pioneer Courthouse Square. That day had ended in bullets and puddles streaked with blood.

Hell. Maybe it was the weather. Washington’s dark, wet winters got to him sometimes.

Elliot shook off the shadowy feeling of premonition. “All right. But let’s not invite trouble to dinner. I’ll give them a call now. What’s the number?”

Chapter Two

Andrew Corian’s deep voice was echoing down the corridor as Elliot left his office later that afternoon to meet with Terry Baker’s mother.

“What I’m talking about, you cretins, is a realistic monism. A philosophy of life. Not realism in the trite, hackneyed sense of the traditional repertoire of literary schools. I’m talking about the blood and guts methods and processes emerging from the raw, untainted past. What I’m not talking about is artistic eclecticism…”

Christ. Only in academia did people talk such bullshit and expect to be taken seriously.

Elliot grimaced as he locked his office door. Corian was an arrogant ass, but he was undeniably gifted and, surprisingly, one of the most popular instructors at PSU. His political views, in particular his opinion of “totalitarian” organizations like the CIA and FBI, inevitably irritated Elliot, but that was easy to do these days.

Apparently his once healthy sense of humor had withered and died over the last year and a half. Too bad, because he’d never needed it more. Even he couldn’t help seeing the paradox: after determinedly rejecting his father’s plans for him—stubbornly charting his own course in law enforcement—he’d ended right back where he’d started. And with a bum leg. That was now aching like a sonofabitch.

He started down the long polished hallway and nearly collided with Corian, who swept out of the seminar room followed by three of his acolytes. The great man wasn’t in the middle of a lecture, just pontificating for the amusement of the three denim-clad Graces hanging on his every word.