Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

“But again, I must stress how highly irregular this is,” the PA said. “Vice president of academic affairs Hynes doesn’t handle things like this. You’re in the wrong department.”

There was a lot of that going around, I thought. I’d just been to the chemistry department in Havemeyer Hall, across the quad, where I’d spoken to two other administrative people, Dean this and Department Head that, about trying to find some information about Dr. Ecstasy, and they kept saying I had to speak to somebody else.

My head was truly starting to spin from the academic bullshit runaround, so here I was, digging in my heels at one of the big kahunas’ offices.

“Then again, maybe I’m in the right place,” I replied with a shrug. “Who’s to say?”

“Like I said before…” Ms. Short began, but then the door opened behind her and a slim, attractive middle-aged woman with wavy brown hair and a crisp camel hair coat walked in.

“Hi, Vice President. I’m Detective Bennett. Could I have a few words with you?” I said, showing her my shield before the PA or anybody else could bullshit me some more.

The vice president surprised me with a wide, friendly smile. “Of course,” she said. “Please call me Reba. Come in.”

I thought her inner office would be as stuffy with dark wood paneling and bookshelves as the outer one, but the decor and walls had a clean, modern, soothing California aesthetic. There was a cream-colored distressed desk against a denim-blue wall and a comfortable slipcovered couch. Light flooded in from an oversize window onto a miniature driftwood sailboat propped on a coffee table.

On her desk was a photograph of a blond girl of about eight, a glassy canopy of teal-blue water over her head as she surfed.

“Wow. Great picture. Hawaii?” I said as I sat down.

“The Maldives, actually,” the surprisingly pleasant Reba Hynes said, smiling at the photo. “My daughter, Emilia, really loves the water. We joke that she has gills instead of lungs.”

She tilted her head as she leaned back in her chair, still smiling at me. She had sharp, intelligent gray-green eyes, I noticed.

“Detective, I normally don’t do this,” she said, “but I take it you’re here about Rafael? Dr. Arruda, right?”

Normally don’t do what? I wondered, squinting. Cooperate with the police?

“Yes,” I said. “I’m trying to find out all I can about him.”

“What is your particular interest, if you don’t mind my asking? Are you in the narcotics division? I believe we already spoke to some precinct detectives.”

“No, I’m in Major Case, currently working on a joint task force with the FBI,” I said. “We’re investigating a national security matter that may tie in with the murder.”

Reba Hynes suddenly sat forward in the upright position with a semiconfused expression on her face. “Oh, that’s getting a little ridiculous, now, isn’t it, Detective? First, Rafael is some sort of drug dealer, and now you think he was a spy or something? I knew Rafael personally. He was one of the most popular professors on campus. Plus his narrative, his background, where he came from to achieve all that he’s accomplished…” She waved her hand dismissively at me.

She folded her hands on her desk and looked me directly in the eye.

“Rafael was with some friends in the wrong place at the wrong time. It doesn’t make any sense for him to have done the things he’s accused of.”

“Well, we’re very interested in finding out who killed him,” I said. “I’d like to speak to his students and colleagues. They might be the link to finding his murderer.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Detective Bennett,” VP Hynes said, frowning. “We can’t release any information about students. We take our students’ privacy very seriously.”

“Not even to help solve the murder of one of your professors?”

“No, not without a subpoena. I’m sorry,” the attractive academic said, giving me her pretty smile again. “Now, if that will be all, Detective, I have a million meetings today.”

Chapter 19

But it wasn’t all. Not even close.

Instead of hightailing it off campus, I grabbed a quick lunch at the nearest Columbia cafeteria. I was jazzed to see that it had a Starbucks counter, so I picked up a turkey wrap with my Venti black.

As I tucked in at a corner booth, I watched as my new buddy, President Buckland, appeared on the TV over the counter.

On the news this morning, I’d seen that there had been a dustup in Russia near the Ukrainian border. A school and hospital had been blown up, and Putin was claiming it was from a Ukrainian mortar attack and was rattling his saber.

Putin was shameless in his desire to put the old USSR back together, with the Ukraine as his first target. His invasion strategy was straight out of Hitler’s playbook: claim that because there were ethnic Russians in the Ukraine, Russia needed to support them by invading. Hitler had said the same thing about Czechoslovakia. And before he’d invaded, he, too, had staged false flag border attacks inside the German border, which was exactly what Putin’s newest maneuver was looking like.