students making their way up and down steps in the central courtyard, across wide grassy spaces and concrete walkways.
Icicle-blue sky, temperature in the low eighties. Your basic perfect Texas spring day outside your basic perfect campus office. It was a view Dr. Haimer had earned through twenty years of tenure. A view Aaron Brandon had enjoyed for less than ninety days.
I turned back to the dead man's office.
Yellow loops of leftover crime-scene tape were stuffed into the waist-high metal trash can between Brandon's desk and the window. On the corner of the desk sat a pile of ungraded essays from the undergraduate Chaucer seminar. Next to that was a silver-framed photo of the professor with a very pretty Latina woman and a child, maybe three years old. They were all standing in front of an old-fashioned merry-go-round. The little boy had Brandon's blue eyes and the woman's smile and reddish-brown hair.
Next to the photo were the death threats - a neat stack of seven white business envelopes computer-printed in Chicago 12-point, each containing one page of well-written, grammatically correct venom. Each threat was unsigned. The first was addressed to Theodore Haimer, the following six to Aaron Brandon. One dated two weeks ago promised a pipe bomb. One dated a week before that promised a knife in Brandon's back as a symbol of how the Latino community felt about the Establishment replacing one white racist with another. The campus had been swept and no bombs had been found; no knives had been forthcoming. None of the letters said anything about shooting Brandon at home in the chest with a .45.
"You have leads?" I asked DeLeon.
She gave me the Sub-Zero smile. "You know Sergeant Schaeffer, Mr. Navarre?"
I said, "Whoops."
Gene Schaeffer had been a detective in homicide until recently, when he'd accepted a transfer promotion to vice. Sometimes Schaeffer and I were friends. More often, like whenever I needed something from him, Schaeffer wanted to kill me.
"The sergeant warned me about you," DeLeon confirmed. "Something about your father being a retired captain - you feeling you had special privileges."
"Bexar County Sheriff," I corrected. "Dead, not retired."
"You've got no special privileges with me, Mr. Navarre. Whatever else you do, you're going to stay out of my investigation."
"And if the person or persons who killed Brandon decides I'm Anglo racist oppressor number three?"
DeLeon smiled a little more genuinely. I think the idea appealed to her. "You cover your ass until we get it straightened out. You can do that, right?"
How to say no to a job offer. Let me count the ways.
"I'd have to talk with my employer - "
"Erainya Manos," Dr. Mitchell interrupted. "We've already done that."
I stared at him.
"The provost is more than agreeable to retaining Ms. Manos' services," Mitchell said wearily, like he'd already spent too much time haggling that point. "While you're teaching for us, Ms. Manos will be finding out what she can about the hate mail, assessing potential continued threats to the faculty."
"You're wasting your money," DeLeon told him.
Mitchell continued as if she hadn't spoken. "The campus attorney's office has employed private investigation firms before. Confidence-building measure. Ms. Manos considered the contract a more-than-fair trade for sharing your time with us, son."
"I bet."
I looked at DeLeon.
She shrugged. "Say no if you want, Mr. Navarre. I've got no interest in your P.I. business. I'm simply not opposed to the campus hiring somebody who can stay alive for longer than three months."
I gave her a 'GeeThanks' smile.
I sat back in the late Aaron Brandon's chair, understanding now why Erainya Manos had cheerily let me take the morning off. You have to cherish those open employer-employee relationships.
Mitchell was about to say something more when there was a knock on the office door.
A large young man leaned into the room, checked us all out, focused in on me, then wedged a plastic bin of mail through the doorway.
"You're the replacement," he said to me. "Thought so."
I'm of the opinion that you can categorize just about anybody by the type of vegetable their clone would've grown from in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The guy in the doorway was definitely a radish. His skin was composed of alternate white and ruddy splotches and gnarled with old acne scars. On top of his head was a small sprig of bleached hair that matched the white rooty whiskers on his chin. His upper body sagged over his belt in generous slabs of red polo-shirted flesh. His face had upwardly smeared features