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tucked into his breast pocket is crumpled, as if someone—exercising my superlative investigative skills, I surmise that someone was Dr.
    Jessup himself—has actually been using it. Sitting slumped in a chair at a sticky cafeteria table for the past half hour hasn’t done much for the creases in Dr. Jessup’s suit, either.
    “Heather,” Dr. Jessup says to me, a little too heartily, as I come toward his table, having been summoned away from my desk—where I went directly after Pete’s revelation to begin calling everyone I could think of, including Dr. Jessup and my boss, Tom—by one of the police officers. “Detective Canavan wants to talk to you. You remember Detective Canavan from the Sixth Precinct, don’t you?”
    Like I could forget.
    “Detective,” I say, extending my right hand toward the slightly rumpled-looking middle-aged man with the graying mustache, who stands with one foot resting on the seat of an empty cafeteria chair.
    Detective Canavan looks up from the cup of coffee he’s holding. His eyes are the color of slate, and the skin around them is wrinkled from overexposure to the elements. It’s no joke, being a New York City homicide detective. Sadly, not all of them look like Chris Noth. In fact, none of them do, that I’ve noticed.
    “Nice to see you again, Heather,” the detective says. His grasp is as formidable as ever. “I understand you’ve seen it. So. Any ideas?”
    I look from the detective to the head honcho of my department and back again.
    “Um,” I say, not sure what’s going on. Wait—do Dr. Jessup and Detective Canavan actually want my help in solving this heinous crime? Because this is so the opposite of how they were about my helping them out last time…. “Where’s the rest of her?”
    “That isn’t what Detective Canavan meant, Heather,” Dr. Jessup says, with a forced smile. “He meant, do you recognize…it?”
    Carol Ann Evans, dean of students—yeah, the same one who won’t admit me into her college until I show her I can multiply fractions—happens to be seated nearby, and makes a kind of gagging noise and covers her mouth with a wadded-up tissue when she hears the wordit.
    And, to my certain knowledge, she hasn’t even taken a peek at what’s inside that pot.
    Oh. They don’t really want my help. Not THAT way.
    I say, “Well, it’s kinda hard to tell.” No way am I going to announce, in front of all these people, that Lindsay Combs, homecoming queen and (now no longer) future roommate of her best friend Cheryl Haebig, had apparently been decapitated by person or persons unknown, and her head left in a pot on the stove in the Fischer Hall cafeteria.

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    I know. Ew.
    “Come, now, Heather,” Dr. Jessup says, with a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. To Detective Canavan he says, loudly enough for everyone in the caf to hear, apparently in an effort to impress President Allington, who wouldn’t know me from Adam—though his wife and I were once nearly murdered by the same person—“Heather here knows every single one of Fischer Hall’s seven hundred residents by name. Don’t you, Heather?”
    “Well, generally speaking,” I say uncomfortably. “When they haven’t been set on simmer for a few hours.”
    Did that sound flip? I guess it did. Dean Evans is gagging again. I didn’t mean to be flip. It’s just that…comeon.
    I hope the dean isn’t going to hold this against me. You know, admission-to-the-College-of-Arts-and-Sciences-wise.
    “So who is she? The girl.” The detective seems unconscious of the fact that nearly everyone in the cafeteria is eavesdropping on our conversation. “A name would be nice.”
    I feel my stomach roll a little, like it had back in the kitchen when Pete had lifted the lid and I’d found myself staring into those unseeing eyes.
    I take a deep breath. The air in the cafeteria is pungent with ordinary breakfast