Margaret Maron: One Coffee With

Which led to fertility symbols, Paleolithic cave paintings, Stonehenge, Toltec technology and present-day earthworks and "-so his uncle's in the business, and he can borrow a bulldozer whenever-"

"I'll be damned if I'll buy it. What kind of art is it if you've got to go up five miles in a frigging helicopter everytime you want to see the whole thing?"

"Ah, you're a reactionary-"

"-combines soft sculpture with collage and gets-"

"-so I told him where he could put holography, and she said-"

Nauman shook his head over so much simultaneous vociferous enthusiasm, but on the whole he approved. Some of his best paintings had been generated by freewheeling debate. He took a final gulp of the really unpalatable coffee and set the empty cup on the file cabinet between two of Sandy 's potted geraniums while he pulled out an elaborately carved meerschaum pipe.

As he lit it, he was cornered by Lemuel Vance, who began buttressing his demand for a new printing press for the graphics workshop with data from three different catalogs. He almost had to shout to be heard over the surrounding din.

In the midst of all the loud hilarity and noisy arguments Sandy noticed a girl hesitating by the mail rack. At Sandy 's gesture the girl, a student aide from Dean Ellis's office, edged her way over. Clearly such bedlam never occurred in the hushed sanctuaries below.

"The dean wants to know if Professor Quinn's all right," she whispered.

"All right?" repeated Sandy in a puzzled tone. The decibel level began dropping as others became aware of this new diversion and paused to eavesdrop.

The girl nodded. "Dean Ellis was speaking with Professor Quinn on the telephone when he suddenly started-I mean, the dean said it sounded like Professor Quinn was-" Embarrassed, she groped for a diplomatic term. "Like he was, well, you know, upchucking"

Sandy half rose. Nauman was closer to the door, but before he could move it was wrenched open and Riley Quinn staggered across the threshold. He clutched a wastebasket to his soiled shirtfront, and an acrid stench reached their nostrils as he heaved into it spasmodically. His eyes were glassy, his skin green white beneath its deep tan.

"Help me!" he gasped hoarsely, retching at every word.

"Oh, my God, I'm dying!"

The ambulance responded in record time, but Quinn had passed into a deep coma before it arrived. Death occurred shortly after twelve noon.

S IGRID HARALD was not a particularly fervent proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment. She waved no banners, marched in no demonstrations, signed no petitions for the advancement of women. She was aware of how much she owed to the feminist movement, but she also knew the worth of her own brains and stamina, and she had expected to reach her present position on the police force before she was thirty-five; ERA just speeded up the timetable. For that she was grateful; and when promotion to lieutenant and an opening in the Detective Bureau were offered so much earlier than she'd hoped and planned, she had accepted it for what it could be, not for what it was.

"I'm not here to be the department's token female officer," she'd told Captain McKinnon equably. "If you won't give me a share of the case loads just like any other officer-and paperwork and the street work-then you'd better get another female."

McKinnon had glared at her. Men he knew how to handle; men could be wilted by a blast of his anger; but women-he'd never commanded women on a regular basis, and this one wasn't easily intimidated. Those cool gray eyes refused to waver.

"You'll take what's assigned, and you'll work by the rules," he'd said. " My rules. The commissioner wished you on me, but I'm still running things here. I'll expect the same obedience and respect I get from all my officers, or by damn I will get another female!"

She'd nodded. She was a tall, slender woman. Slender almost to the point of skinny; only not skinny in the dried-up sense, thought McKinnon, but fined down like a greyhound or a ballet dancer. Hair as dark as her mother's had been; tall like her father with his fair Nordic skin. A self-contained person totally unlike Anne or Leif. Not at all pretty, yet there was something about those gray eyes, something that had made McKinnon hope she would work out here.

Nearly a year had gone by since then; and when the call came in from a local precinct station about a possible poisoning at Vanderlyn College, McKinnon checked the work sheets and was glad to see that Lieutenant Harald's was the lightest case load at the moment. The young woman had shown herself capable of handling violence, but (although he would have denied it) Mac always breathed easier when he could legitimately give Anne Harald's daughter what he privately tagged the 'amateur' murders: the single eruption of violence between friends or relatives that usually left a remorseful killer confessing at the scene of his crime. A homicide at a college-especially a poisoning-how dangerous could it be?

Lieutenant Harald was unaware that Captain McKinnon had once known her parents, and she would have been indignant if she'd heard his reasoning. When the new assignment was relayed to her, she was cleaning up the loose ends of a routine case, a dope-pushing doctor who'd been knifed when he refused credit to a young hophead desperate for a quick fix. The dreary incident had occurred during office hours in front of the doctor's receptionist and two patients, and the kid had been picked up a half hour later, so any reasonably competent prosecutor should be able to get a conviction. Always nice when the current assignment was wrapped up as the new one began; unfortunately it didn't happen often enough.

On her way to Vanderlyn College, Lieutenant Harald stopped by the small hospital where Professor Quinn had died. In a holding area off the emergency room, Cohen, an assistant from the Medical Examiner's Office, had finished his superficial examination and was waiting for her before removing Quinn's body for a complete autopsy.

"Offhand I'd say ingestion of some sort of metallic irritant," he said, pulling back the sheet and pointing to the corrosive burns on the dead man's lips. "I'll know better after I open him up."

"How soon?" she asked, trying to match Cohen's dispassionate mood.

He shrugged. "There's a drowning and two suicides ahead of you today, but ladies first, I guess. I'll put yours at the head of the line. Nice threads," he added reflectively, gazing at the no longer immaculate fawn suit and the crumpled befouled paisley tie, which lay across the bottom of the stretcher. "Too bad they got puked on."

He dropped the sheet over Riley Quinn's body again.

Vanderlyn College employed its own security personnel to police the campus, but when Sigrid Harald was still a uniformed rookie, she had ridden a patrol car in this precinct for a few months before being transferred, so she had a working knowledge of the college layout. Except for the river promenade Vanderlyn's tree-graced grounds were completely enclosed by a tall ivy-covered brick wall broken in several places by broad wrought-iron archways with gates, that could be locked at night. All legal spaces on both sides of the streets for a three-block radius were jammed with cars, motorcycles and mopeds, and several privately owned parking garages on side streets were guaranteed a turn-away business because of the warning signs posted on every gate onto the campus: Official Vehicles Only-Absolutely No Parking on Campus. Sigrid flashed her shield at a beefy-faced uniformed patrol officer lounging in front of the main gate.

The officer gave her a dour nod and gestured toward a narrow service street to the left, which eventually brought her to the rear of Van Hoeen Hall where several other police vehicles were parked in a delivery zone. By the time she located the Art Department, it was nearly three-thirty. Personnel from precinct and headquarters were, as always, overlapping in the preliminaries, amiably arguing points of precedence; but the lab technicians seemed to have settled in with their usual efficiency.