My heart pounded as I surveyed the scene. It was a horrific, but oddly appropriate, image: a bright light pulsing on and off. The light was the setting sun, visible through the window, and the pulsing was caused by the rhythmic swaying of the corpse, dangling from a makeshift noose, as it passed in front of the blood-red disk.
“Another one, eh, Detective?” said Chiu, the campus security guard, from behind me. His tone was soft.
I looked around the office. The computer monitor was showing a virtual desktop with a panoramic view of a spiral galaxy as the wallpaper; no files were open. Nor was there any sheet of e-paper prominently displayed on the real desktop. The poor bastards didn’t even bother to leave suicide notes anymore. There was no point; it had all already been said.
“Yeah,” I said quietly, responding to Chiu. “Another one.”
The dead man was maybe sixty, scrawny, mostly bald. He was wearing black denim jeans and a black turtleneck sweater, the standard professorial look these days. His noose was fashioned out of fiber-optic cabling, giving it a pearlescent sheen in the sunlight. His eyes had bugged out, and his mouth was hanging open.
“I knew him a bit,” said Chiu. “Ethan McCharles. Nice guy—he always remembered my name. So many of the profs, they think they’re too important to say hi to a security guard. But not him.”
I nodded. It was as good a eulogy as one could hope for—honest, spontaneous, heartfelt.
Chiu went on. “He was married,” he said, pointing to the gold band on the corpse’s left hand. “I think his wife works here, too.”
I felt my stomach tightening, and I let out a sigh. My favorite thing: informing the spouse.
Cytosine Methylation:
The departmental secretary confirmed what Chiu had said: Professor Ethan McCharles’s wife did indeed also work at the University of Toronto; she was a tenured prof, too, but in a different faculty.
Walking down a corridor, I remembered my own days as a student here. Class of 1998—“9T8,” as they styled it on the school jackets. It’d been— what?—seventeen years since I’d graduated, but I still woke up from time to time in a cold sweat, after having one of those recurring student nightmares: the exam I hadn’t studied for, the class I’d forgotten I’d enrolled in. Crazy dreams, left over from an age when little bits of human knowledge mattered; when facts and figures we’d discovered made a difference.
I continued along the corridor. One thing
I shook my head. The halls of academe.
The halls of death.
I finally found Marilyn Maslankowski’s classroom; the arcane room-numbering system had come back to me. She’d just finished a lecture, apparently, and was standing next to the lectern, speaking with a redheaded male student; no one else was in the room. I entered.
