And what the hell good did that do? Nothing. Having him support her only in his mind was completely useless, unless he was able to telekinetically build a beautiful new wing of offices and classrooms onto the back of Denny Hall—a project she had secretly been hoping he might consider funding. She had been going to suggest they call it the Adel Wing, in an appeal to his vanity. Now it was nothing more than the Figment of Her Imagination Wing.

  “Thank you, Max. Your support means a lot to me.”

  Okay, she had promised she wouldn’t lie about being unhappy that he was pulling the scholarship. She never said anything about not lying during the rest of their conversation. Diplomacy was all she had left right now, and she had to protect the future doors it might open.

  He stood up and they said quick good-byes. He seemed as anxious as she was to end the meeting and go their separate ways now that the distasteful business had been settled. She paused in her doorway, debating whether she should shut herself in now or not, and saw Lukas Rivers peering around a corner at the end of the hall.

  “Luke?” she asked. “What the hell are you doing down there?”

  “Shh,” he said, hurrying toward her and practically pushing her into her office. He shut the door behind them. “I saw Max leaving and wanted to avoid seeing him, so I was hiding around the corner. Thanks for shouting my name and drawing attention to my cowardice.”

  “God, I’ve missed you,” she said with a laugh.

  “Me, too,” he said, pulling her into a squeezing hug. He leaned back a little and scanned her face. “Nice look. You’ve got quite the rainbow of colors on your face. Too bad it’s not Pride Month.”

  They sat down across her desk from each other. “I happened to have earned these by stepping in front of Chase Davies’s fist. Just another day as department chair. Max even called me valiant.” She paused. “Hey, why are you hiding from him? I thought you liked Max.”

  “I like him,” Luke said with a shrug. He leaned back and crossed his legs, managing to look as different as possible from Max. Where Adel was all neutrals, from his gray eyes to his black hair and clothes, Luke was color. Bright red hair, a riot of freckles across his pale skin, and green eyes that looked like they must be colored contacts but were really his natural color. He was wearing jeans and a sweater striped with multiple shades of blue and green. Luke talked with his hands, too, and there was nothing still about him.

  “I ran into him in downtown Seattle about two weeks ago,” he continued. “I was walking around, looking for a place to have lunch while Trevor had some tests run at Virginia Mason, and he was just coming back to his office after a meeting. We talked for a while. He’d heard about Trevor, and he offered to help pay some of our hospital bills. I said no, thank you, and now I’m trying to avoid him so I don’t risk changing my mind.”

  Tig waited for a moment, then realized she had the full story. “How rude of him. Don’t worry. If he comes back here and offers to buy us lunch, I’ll chase him away with one of my statues.”

  “Smart-ass. It was a nice gesture on his part, and more tempting than I care to admit, but Trevor would hate it if he thought we had to borrow money just because of him.”

  Tig frowned. “Is he okay? I thought he was doing better. Do you need money? Because I can…”

  She faltered to a stop when he gave her a sardonic look.

  “Oh, sorry. Now I’m doing it. We all care about you and want to help if we’re needed, you know that.”

  “I do, and we both appreciate it, but we’re doing all right.” His expression brightened again. “And yes, he’s doing much better. We’re counting down to the final treatments, and his test results have been promising. I should be back here before you know it.”

  “No.” She startled them both by saying the word vehemently and unexpectedly. But even when her brain caught up to her mouth, she was sticking to her response. “Luke, something bad is happening here, and for some unknown reason classics professors are being targeted. Or maybe it was just about these two, and they happened to be classics professors. Either way, I’ll feel much better if you stay away from here until the police figure out what’s going on. I’m sure Trevor will back me up on this, if you’d like me to call him and ask?”

  He whistled. “Low blow. You’re right, though. I need to stay safe for him right now. Still, I’d feel better if I was here keeping an eye on you, since you’re one of those professors, too.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I have all my friends looking out for me, as well as the police. They’ll protect me.”

  He nodded, watching her silently for a moment. “What’s her name?” he asked after a pause.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, although she was pretty sure she did.

  “You smiled in kind of a goofy way when you talked about the police protecting you. I doubt you’re in love with the entire department, so what’s her name?”

  Tig sighed. She needed to take some acting lessons because apparently everyone could read her every thought. “Kent,” she said. “Sergeant Kent. And I do not look goofy.”

  “You look happy,” he said. “That’s a good thing, Tig.”

  “It’s a complicated thing,” she corrected, then she changed the subject back to the reason she had asked him to come by the university when he had a chance.

  “Do you recognize this paper?” she asked, getting the essay out of her desk’s top drawer and handing it to him. “I thought it might be from your class on Cato.”

  His brow furrowed as he read quickly through the pages. “It seems familiar, but that was two years ago. No, wait. I remember this paragraph. Very insightful.” He reached into his pocket, pulling out a small black thumb drive. “Here, I put my class files on this flash and brought it like you asked. Can I borrow your laptop?”

  She spun her computer around to face him, and he plugged the drive into the USB port. After a few moments of searching through files, he nodded and looked up at her. “Spencer Cassidy. Good student,” he continued, as if connecting the name to the paper jogged his memory. Tig had had the same thing happen to her before, when all the details about a student came back to her years later, triggered by a random memory.

  “He got an A on this paper, and in the course,” Luke continued. “I almost dropped him down a grade because he was so shy he didn’t participate much in class, but he did outstanding work when he was able to write out his thoughts.”

  Tig sighed, jotting down what he said because she’d need to share it with Kent and Clare when she went by the station later. She turned her laptop back to face her and did a quick check on past graduate students. Then she got out two more papers.

  “What about these? Do you recognize them?”

  “They’re not from my classes, but they seem similar in style to Spencer’s. Both his, I expect?”

  She shook her head, tapping her finger on the two papers. “This one was written for a class offered three years before the Cato. The other was just last spring, after Spencer had already graduated with his master’s.”

  She handed him one more small stack of pages. “Now this.”

  “Research notes? Wait, isn’t this the paper Chase Davies was working on? I remember him talking about doing…What the…” He fell silent as he picked up the Cato paper again and looked through it. Soon he was moving from one to the other among the four samples, probably connecting the similarities the same way she had done until…

  “He wrote all of them?” he asked incredulously. “Chase wrote that paper for Spencer? He got a good grade, he got a fucking degree…Tig, what the hell is going on here?”

  She felt the heat of his fury as if it was a physical flame, and his reaction terrified her. Not because she was afraid of him, but because he was as outraged as she needed to be by this situation. When she had been discussing it with Kent and Clare, they hadn’t fully recognized the ramifications of Chase’s actions if the papers turned out to have been actually used by students, and she had let herself ignore the full consequences, as well. Now she couldn’t, not when she was sitting across from someone who understood. Fraudulent degrees, accusations of complicity. Add those to two murders, and her department was starting to collapse in front of her eyes.

  For the very first time, she wondered if the university really should shut them down, if they were too far gone to ever come back to any semblance of credibility.

  “What do we do now, Tig?” he asked, seeming to deflate right in front of her as the enormity of the situation sank in for both of them.

  “You go home and take care of Trevor,” she said firmly. He was looking to her to be a leader, but she didn’t have much to offer him, except to remove him from the situation. She couldn’t face another death like Laura’s, of someone she truly cared about. “Don’t say anything about this to anyone else, okay? And just…just stay away from campus for now, please. Let me worry about this mess, and the police will worry about catching the murderer. Then we’ll see if there’s anything salvageable left in the department. Oh, and you might want to update your CV while you’re at it. Just in case.”

  He nodded, then piled the papers back into a neat stack and handed them to her. They stood up and hugged once more.

  “Be careful, Tig,” he said, and then he walked out of her office.

  She sank back into her chair and rested her forehead on her desk. With all that was going on, her foremost thought was how much she missed Kent, even though they’d only been apart for less than a day. She had been concerned last night when Kent hugged her, and she had momentarily given in to the desire to rest near her, let her be the strong one. She couldn’t just sit back, though, and let someone else take care of her. Not anymore.

  Being the head of a Classics Department had long been a goal of hers. She had imagined herself solving disputes with the wisdom of Solomon and lovingly guiding her students and faculty to new heights of academic achievements. Her parents had both had long, happy careers as professors, and never once had they mentioned that the job might entail murder, fraud, and some sketchily acquired ancient vases.

  The next position she got, she was going to be damned sure to read the job requirements more carefully than she apparently had for this one.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Kent opened the glass front door of Denny Hall and held it for Clare, but she paused on the top step instead of following her.

  “You go on,” she said. “I just need to tie my boot lace—then I’ll meet you in Tig’s office.”

  Kent sighed. “Is this some juvenile attempt to give us time together? Because it’s really not necessary.”

  Clare shrugged. “Fine with me. I just thought, because you haven’t seen her since last night, and there’s a lot going on, you might want a few minutes to be alone. But I guess I was wrong.”

  Kent held out her arm to block Clare’s entrance. “Oh, tie your damned boots,” she said. “But don’t take too long, or I’ll write you up for insubordination.”

  “Tig’s a lucky woman to have found someone so charming,” Clare said, turning away before Kent could say anything else.

  She smiled and shook her head as she headed toward the stairs, the sound of her boots echoing as she walked across the marble floors. She was going to find it more challenging than she cared to admit to go back to being mere coworkers with Clare, leaving behind their teasing and relaxed relationship when they were no longer partners. She’d have to make more of an effort to make friends outside of the department. And possibly to find someone else to date, if Tig was gone.

  Maybe just the friends. If she wasn’t with Tig, dating didn’t seem appealing at all.

  She got to Tig’s office and found the door open. Tig was inside, her head resting on her desk atop her folded forearms. She looked defeated.

  Kent stepped inside and quietly closed the door, glad now that Clare had given them some time alone. She leaned against the desk, her hip resting against Tig’s arm, and placed her hand on the back of Tig’s neck, ruffling softly through her hair.

  “Bad day, sweetheart?” she asked.

  “Horrible,” Tig said, her voice muffled since her face was still burrowed into her arms. “But no one on my faculty has been killed yet today, so I really can’t complain.”

  Kent gave a short laugh. Then they sat in silence for a few moments. Tig moved one arm and placed it over Kent’s thighs, pulling her closer.

  Eventually, she sighed and sat up, keeping her hand curved around Kent’s hip. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just too much to handle at times.”

  Kent leaned over and kissed her softly, letting her lips linger against Tig’s for far too short a time. She should have sent Clare back to the station to tie her boots. She pulled back again.

  “Sawyer is just behind me. She’ll be here any minute.”

  As if on cue, Kent heard a knock on the door. Tig waited for her to move to the other side of the desk and sit down before she called out for Clare to come in.

  “Hey, Tig,” Clare said as she came in the room, shutting the door again behind her. She walked over and gave Tig’s shoulder a squeeze before joining Kent on the far side of the desk.

  “So, what’s been going on, Tig?” Kent asked. Tig seemed noticeably lower in spirits than she had been last night. Either the shock of Kam’s death had worn off and she was suddenly feeling the full force of grief, or she’d gotten more bad news today.

  She listened as Tig told them about Max’s visit. She couldn’t help but admit to herself that his reasons were valid, but she hated him for abandoning Tig and her department. He could have used his reputation to support her, but instead, his desertion only made the situation look even worse.

  “Just how important was this scholarship, anyway?” Clare asked, with an angry edge to her tone. She apparently shared Kent’s opinions of this jerk.

  “It was a nice opportunity for select students,” Tig said, rubbing her hand wearily over her eyes. “But it was more about his endorsement than that single scholarship. A lot of people who either were connected to him in the community, or who wanted to be, gave to us because of him. Money, artwork, reference materials. The ripples from his one endowment—sizeable as it was—far outweighed it. I don’t know what will happen, but I’m assuming most of the others will pull their funding after hearing that he did.”

  “Who got these scholarships?” Kent asked, taking notes as usual. She had pages and pages of them by now but felt no closer to finding the connecting lines that would lead to the killer—or killers—than before.

  “It was a typical selection process,” Tig said. “Need and merit were both considered. Chase Davies actually was his representative and handled most of the details, but there were a couple other professors on his committee. I’ve had a few of the recipients in my classes, and they were very bright, enthusiastic students. To be honest, though, most of our grad students are here on grants or fellowships or scholarships, so I can’t always keep track of who belongs to which funding source. I can compile a list of the winners, if you’d like.”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure if it would help. Were Davies and Max close?” Kent asked.

  “Not especially, I don’t think,” Tig said, frowning as if she was trying to recall. “When the scholarship was first proposed, he volunteered to be in charge. Chase volunteered for a lot of things. He liked to be involved.”

  Kent personally doubted whether his intentions were altruistic. What better way to find out about rumors and other things that might prove to be sources for blackmail than by insinuating himself into every aspect of the department that he could reach?

  “After he left, Lukas Rivers came by.” She looked at Kent, her expression weary. “Here’s where you’ll want to take lots of notes, by the way. He recognized the paper as one he got from a student named Spencer Cassidy.”

  “Huh,” said Clare. “So he did give the essays to students after all. Do you think he was charging for them, or just doing special favors for ones he liked?”

  “I’ll bet your friend Lukas wasn’t thrilled about being fooled by Davies,” Kent added with a bitter laugh. She stopped at the look on Tig’s face. “What is it? Is there something else?”

  “No, but this is serious enough. Take Spencer. He graduated and received a degree from the university, but if he really did cheat, then that class grade is invalid. There will be hearings, investigations, possibly charges filed, degrees revoked. If they can prove anything, that is. I’m exhausted just thinking about all the actions that will have to take place if word gets out about this.”

  Kent watched Tig talk, only now realizing what a fiasco this would be for Tig and the struggling department. Clare was right—they really did need Tig to help them see the complete picture when they were dealing with university life. Tig related her full conversation with Lukas, then stopped and stared at her desk.

  “I’m sorry, Tig. I hadn’t fully grasped what this would mean to you or the university. I was thinking about the papers as potential clues, in a detached way, but they mean something more real and immediate to you.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” Clare said. She looked at Kent. “Can you imagine if someone helped a bunch of people cheat on their police academy entrance exams, and then those people got jobs with different departments using those fraudulent scores? What a mess.”

  Kent sighed. She didn’t even want to think of the time it would take to untangle and fix such a disaster, and she wished Tig wouldn’t have to deal with all this. Of course, by lateraling to another university, she might be able to avoid it altogether…