“I’m just about a block away, so I’ll come get you,” Clare said. The slam of a car door punctuated her sentence.

  “Good. I’ll call dispatch, see if anyone’s on patrol in the area.”

  They ended the call abruptly, and then Kent called in the location. When she finished, she and Tig stood facing each other. The sudden silence after the frantic calls and rushed words of the past few minutes fell heavy around them, sucking them into a small, private sphere that only they shared, but she knew the explosion was coming that would thrust them back into the world.

  “Maybe he fell again,” Tig said quietly, as if unwilling to break the spell around them. “He tripped and fell and broke his phone, and now he can’t call me back. We’ll find him sitting there on the path, wrapping yarrow leaves around his calf.”

  “Maybe,” Kent agreed. It wasn’t the most implausible prediction she’d ever heard, but neither of them seemed wholly convinced. She reached for Tig and pulled her into a tight hug, not ever wanting to let her go. Tig remained stiff for a moment—Kent knew she was trying very hard to keep herself pulled together—before tucking her head into Kent’s shoulder and wrapping her arms around Kent’s waist. How had it only been three days that they’d known each other? Kent never wanted to let her go.

  She understood that relationships tended to intensify quickly when they were grown in stressful situations like this one, but nothing about her feelings for Tig felt contrived by circumstances. They were living with a clock ticking relentlessly beside them—with a murder that needed solving and Tig’s potential departure—but even though they might have fallen more deeply and more quickly than they would have otherwise, Kent had no doubt they were falling into something real.

  And the clock was about to get louder if her fears about this phone call came true. If Kam, alleged plagiarist and plant thief, wasn’t as okay as they wanted him to be.

  Clare screeched to a halt beside them in her God-awful green car. At least she parked on the street this time and not up on the curb. In another situation, Kent would have joked with her about getting to be the driver, but not now. She climbed into the back seat, letting Tig sit next to Clare and give her directions.

  What would have been a long run across campus turned out to be a quick drive in Clare’s car. She turned east on Pacific, bounded on one side by health services and the medical center and on the other by the science buildings, and pulled her car as far off the road as she could, parking on a narrow grassy verge. The three of them got out and crossed the Burke-Gilman Trail, skirting the Life Sciences Building and arriving at the entrance to the herb garden. She wanted to send Tig away, or at least have her wait in the car until they were certain Kam was even here, let alone alive and well, but she didn’t want Tig out of her sight right now. She and Clare automatically flanked her, protecting her from both sides without needing to say a word.

  The sign identifying the garden sat at the head of a path lined with delicate shrubs. Delicate, yes, but still obstructive. This was another of those hidden areas on campus, where you stepped beyond the border and felt cut off from the bustle outside it. That was fine during the day, when other people were a mere shout away, but on a dark and rainy fall evening like this one, the garden was full of shadows and blind spots, and even the well-traveled footpaths around it were practically deserted.

  The crunch of boots on gravel was startling to all three of them. Kent and Clare already had their guns in hand, and they turned to face whoever was coming toward them.

  “It’s Pickett and Larson,” Katie Pickett called quietly. The two officers approached them, and Kent lowered her weapon. “Didn’t mean to sneak up on you, Sergeant. We didn’t see you with all these bushes.”

  “The damned things will be gone tomorrow, if I have to pull them myself,” Kent said. This fucking garden was probably identified on campus maps as a very convenient place to stage a murder. “Larson, I need you to stay back here with Professor Weston. Tig, please,” she said when she started to protest, not caring who heard her use Tig’s given name. “Let us do our job. If Professor Morris is hurt, we’ll be there to help him.”

  Tig didn’t look happy with the decision, but she finally nodded and stayed next to Miles as Kent and the others walked farther along the path. Kent still hated leaving her behind, even though she trusted Larson to protect her, but she needed her focus to be on her job, not on her…well, whatever Tig was to her. She barely managed to stop herself before letting the entire word girlfriend form in her mind.

  The walking path meandered for a few yards before opening up to a more ordered garden area. Neat rows of rectangular herb beds were lined by white gravel paths that glowed faintly under scattered and largely ineffective lights.

  Dim as they were, they still managed to reveal the dark form of a body lying between two of the beds, standing out in sharp relief against the white stones.

  Kent sighed. “Call it in, Pickett. Come on, Sawyer.”

  They approached slowly, their flashlights skimming over the scene and into the surrounding shrubs and trees. Kent figured whoever had done this was long gone, but they didn’t want to be surprised by either a lingering attacker or a wandering innocent student. They stopped several feet away and surveyed the scene.

  This was becoming far too big a part of her job. She had seen only one murder since coming to this department until this year. She was up to four for this quarter alone, and it wasn’t even the end of October yet. Three were from the Classics Department, making it the most dangerous job on campus at the moment. Kent pushed away the sudden image of Tig lying on the ground in some secluded part of campus. Focus. The only way to keep her safe was to figure out who was doing this and stop them.

  “It’s Kam Morris,” Clare said, which wasn’t a surprise. She was reciting the details more out of habit than a need to explain what Kent was perfectly capable of seeing, too. Still, Kent let her talk without interrupting. “Bullet to the forehead, but he also has a nasty-looking wound on his right cheekbone. There’s his phone, too. Looks smashed.”

  “Tig said she heard a sort of grunting noise, then a crash, like his phone fell,” Kent added when Clare was finished. “He said he was being followed, so maybe whoever it was approached while he was talking and pistol-whipped him across the face to knock the phone out of his hand. Then shot him and crushed the phone.”

  “Quick and quiet, if you’re strong and ruthless enough,” Clare said. “And then you just stroll away down the garden path.”

  “You’re becoming our best customers.”

  Kent whirled to find the forensics officer from Davies’s scene standing behind her. His team swarmed into the area, setting Kent’s teeth on edge.

  “You probably can holster that now,” he said, nodding to her gun. She sighed, lifting her sweater slightly and tucking the weapon back into place. Clare did the same, with a look of resigned annoyance on her face. She was getting to be as territorial as Kent.

  “Stay here, and I’ll be back soon with a preliminary report.”

  “Is that a class forensics people take for their degree?” Pickett asked, stepping up beside them. “How to make other officers hate you in five easy steps.”

  Clare grinned at her. “I was thinking it’d be How to be a condescending ass.”

  Pickett nodded slowly, as if considering Clare’s choice. “Yes. Less wordy. It’ll look catchier in the course catalog.” She laughed, then cleared her throat and turned toward Kent, her face serious again, as if she’d momentarily forgotten that her sergeant was standing next to her.

  “We’ve got three more officers on the way, to control the perimeter. Should I have Larson escort Professor Weston back to the station?”

  “She can go home for the night, and we can get her statement tomorrow,” Kent said. She didn’t bother to add that Tig wasn’t a suspect since she’d been holding hands with Kent on the other side of the U District seconds before the murder occurred. Airtight alibi. “I’ll go talk to her, so don’t let Officer Arrogant give his report until I’m back.”

  She hurried back down the path, both because she wanted to see Tig and reassure herself that she was safe and sound, and also because she hated leaving her crime scene for too long. The first was a more pressing need, but she was bothered by how quickly Tig had become the center of her focus. She used to be far more single-minded, and keeping watch over her scene would have been more important than anything…

  She paused on the path, still hidden from the entrance by bushes. Her words weren’t quite true. During the last investigation, she had been concerned about Clare when she was hit on the head by the killer, and even more so when she was shot by her and attached to numerous drips and machines in the hospital. And about Libby when she was missing because she’d gone traipsing off into the woods with the same killer. The whole group of them were starting to matter too much. One would think she saw them as her friends, too. Not just as a random group of women who happened to have a knack for being around when horrible crimes were happening.

  Good thing they weren’t really her friends. They were a risky group.

  She got back to the herb garden sign and found Tig sitting on a bench while Larson circled around her like an animal protecting its young. She glared at him until he got her message and moved out of earshot.

  She sat next to Tig and took her hand. “Kam’s dead, Tig,” she said, figuring Tig could read it on her face and in her demeanor. No sense in dragging out the news. “He was shot.”

  Tig gave a weak laugh. “Yeah, I assumed the forensics team wouldn’t be here just to help locate the correct plant for a scraped knee,” she said.

  “Always with the sarcasm,” Kent said. She raised her hand and held it against Tig’s face, trying not to see an overlay of Kam’s wounds where she touched her. “I’m sorry this happened. I wish I’d…”

  She let the sentence trail off, not sure how to end it. She wished she’d caught the killer already—if it was the same person, of course. But she still felt far from figuring out this case.

  “You need to get home and get some sleep since I have a feeling tomorrow will be a long day. Miles will take you to your car. I would do it myself, but I—”

  Tig covered Kent’s hand with hers where it rested against her cheek, then kept hold of it and lowered both of them to her lap. “But you need to be here. I understand.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow. We’ll need you to come down to the station and give a formal statement about the phone call, but can you stay with someone tonight? With Libby or one of the others?”

  Tig held up her phone. “I’ve already had texts from the three of them, one fishing for information and all three offering to let me come over if I need to. Somehow they put it together that we’re connected to Clare’s abrupt departure from dinner.” She laughed. “And don’t worry, I’m not texting Libby a play-by-play account of my evening. I’ll probably stay with Ari since she lives close, and she’ll be less inclined to badger me.”

  “Ari,” Kent said with a nod. “The one you have no chemistry with. She’s my favorite.”

  Kent gave Tig’s hand a squeeze, then let go and stood up. “I’m sorry about tonight. This isn’t the way I wanted our date to end.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Tig said. “If it was, then I’d have to insist that I plan all our dates from now on, from beginning to end.”

  “Just as long as there’s going to be another one, I’m happy.” Kent stepped forward and brushed a quick kiss over Tig’s lips, not even bothering to care if Larson saw her. “Sleep well, Tig. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Even though they were back at the station by eleven, Kent felt as drained as if it was three in the morning. She heated up two mugs of over-roasted coffee that had probably been sitting in the break room pot since early afternoon and joined Clare in the meeting room where she had first interviewed Tig. She handed Clare one of the mugs, then sat in Tig’s chair and draped her legs over the arm. She was too tired to make the effort to sit up straight and look imposing. Besides, the pretense would have been wasted on Clare.

  Clare sniffed at the coffee, made a face, then drank it anyway.

  Kent waved the piece of paper she was holding, then tossed it onto the table next to her. “Ballistics report,” she said. “Inconclusive whether it’s the same weapon from Davies’s murder. No match to other crimes.”

  “Eh,” Clare said dismissively.

  Kent sighed, agreeing with Clare’s muttered opinion. The report wasn’t surprising, nor was it helpful. It was far too easy to get an unregistered .22, and the killer could either have used a different gun for the second murder or scrubbed the barrel to change the resulting stria enough to keep the bullets from seeming to be a perfect match. Since the victims were professors from the same department who had recently been in a fight with each other, the likelihood of these being two separate murderers was ridiculously low. Especially considering the similarities between the killings.

  “The autopsy will probably show a similar angle of entry, so that’ll connect them,” Clare said with a shrug. “What the hell is going on in that Classics Department?”

  Kent didn’t answer because she had no idea. Whatever it was, she was going to make sure Tig stayed with friends—if not with her, which was preferable—until the killer was caught. After that…well, classics had seemed doomed before, and now she was rapidly losing any of the hope she had still harbored that Tig might still have a place at UW when this was finished.

  “It probably won’t be a department anymore, given the rapidly growing ratio of murdered professors to live ones.”

  “Right,” Clare agreed. “But if the new program does survive, I don’t see them letting Tig lead it anymore.”

  “You think they’d blame Tig for this? Replace her as director?” Kent asked, startled by Clare’s comment. She had been assuming either Tig would get to stay, with her current title, or she’d have to go. As much as she wanted Tig to remain at the U, the thought of her being demoted over something that was clearly not her fault…well, if that happened, she’d maybe become the most unlikely of supporters for Tig’s move to a new university. Tig would probably be able to live with the public embarrassment of the situation, but the unfairness of it would be hard for her to bear. Tig took her role as department leader as seriously as Kent did as sergeant. She remembered Tig’s unconvincing expression when they last spoke in this room, and she said she’d be happy to give up the position of director to—

  “Professor Ayari,” she said, finishing her thought out loud. “She thought she’d possibly be named director before Tig was, and she might be pleased to see her lose her title. I have a hunch she still wants the position.”

  Clare snorted at that. “Do you think anyone would volunteer for the job with all this going on?” she asked, but then her expression sobered. “Still, I read Tig’s statement from the night Davies was killed. You seemed to think she was making some sort of threat toward Tig when she talked about wanting to head the department.”

  Kent nodded. “Tig didn’t see it that way, but when she was relating their conversation, it sounded like a vague threat to me. Or maybe a warning.”

  “She was close enough to the scene to have killed him, pulled him into the bushes, and then strolled away until…”

  “She met Tig, alone on a dark path,” Kent finished, feeling nauseated at the thought. She wanted Tig with her right now, where she could protect her. And if Tig decided she preferred living with Ari until this was over? Well, Kent might just decide to move in, too.

  Clare paused, clearly considering this possibility. “Do you believe she’s strong enough? Kam was hit fucking hard.”

  “I don’t know…maybe? She was wearing loose clothing the only time I saw her, so she might be hiding some serious muscle under there. Plus, anger and ambition can augment physical strength significantly, if they’re powerful enough.”

  Clare still looked unconvinced. “I understand wanting to be the one in charge. I’m ambitious, too, but I’m not planning on hurting you, or knocking off Landry and Pickett just to make it look like you’re a bad leader and should be replaced. That seems extreme.”

  “Well, I’m relieved to hear that,” Kent said drily. “Although admittedly a little alarmed that you already had two victims picked out.”

  Clare waved Kent’s comment aside. “I don’t, really. If I was willing to kill to get your job, you’d be my victim, not a handful of the people I’m hoping to lead.”

  “My relief was short-lived,” Kent said. “And remind me to pick up a restraining order next time I’m at the courthouse. Seriously, though, I believe you’re right. She’d be risking having the entire program shut down, let alone quite possibly being caught and spending her life in prison.”

  “That would be stupid,” Clare said. “And she definitely doesn’t strike me as stupid.”

  “No, but these people aren’t acting predictably anymore,” Kent said. She felt like an outsider peering into Tig’s world through a smudgy window. “This curriculum shift has everyone so far on edge that they’re toppling off one by one. To me it seems like a gross overreaction to a few course changes, but Tig and her faculty seem to be reacting like there’s more meaning under the surface than I can see. There’s subtext that I don’t understand, and it’s difficult to decide who’s capable of which actions under these circumstances.”

  “We should talk to Tig about this.”

  Kent shook her head. Tonight had scared her. Davies was obviously mixed up in something outside of class, with his vases and grad school papers, but now they had another victim on their hands. It looked less like a murder specifically aimed at Davies and more like a killing spree focused on the classics faculty. “She’s already too involved in this case. It’s Libby all over again, and I don’t want to put Tig in the same kind of dangerous situation.”