The echoes inside the rotunda had a melancholy sound, more like the noise of a tomb than a school. Across the bright blue school crest were muddy footprints. Hawthorne turned toward his office. As he got nearer, he saw that the door was open. He even heard a voice, though it didn’t sound right—there was a staticky quality. Then he heard what it was saying. “Call me as soon as you can, professor. I’ve got something to tell you.” It was the answering machine with Moulton’s message repeating over and over. “Call me as soon as you can, professor. I’ve got something to tell you.”

Hawthorne hurried into the outer office. It was empty. The message kept repeating. He walked to the answering machine on Hilda’s desk and shut it off, but the message didn’t stop. “Call me as soon as you can, professor. . . .”

Hawthorne felt a chill, then he saw that the voice was coming from a voice recorder. He shut it off as well.

Then someone spoke to him from his own office, just beyond Hilda’s: “As soon as you can, professor. Beep. As soon as you can, professor.” Then there was a laugh. It was LeBrun.

With a mixture of relief and dismay, Hawthorne walked to the door. LeBrun sat in Hawthorne’s chair with his boots up on the desk. He had a bottle of Budweiser in one hand and something small and shiny in the other. His dark hair was plastered down across his forehead. He wore his white cook’s jacket unbuttoned over a white shirt.

“Making yourself at home?” Hawthorne tried to smile. Something had changed with LeBrun. It wasn’t just his expression, it was his electricity. His face kept moving, he kept wrinkling his forehead and pursing his lips.

“You look like a fucking snowman. You got to watch out, professor, playing in the snow. You could catch pneumonia and die.” LeBrun spoke quickly, clipping his words.

“I’ve been trying to see if anyone’s got a cell phone. I have to call Kate.” Hawthorne kept his voice relaxed. He didn’t want to mention Chief Moulton, that he wanted to get the police over to Bishop’s Hill as soon as possible.

LeBrun reached inside his green hunting jacket and drew out a cell phone. “Looky here, professor. My boss gave it to me as a present. Just so we could chat. Nice guy, right?”

Hawthorne took a step forward. “Can I use it?”

“Fat fuckin’ chance. I’m expecting a call. My stockbroker’s got a hot tip. He’s got the Japanese on the line.” LeBrun laughed and put the phone back into his coat. “Actually, your time’s up, professor. The big finale. Guess it had to happen.” LeBrun stretched both arms high into the air, holding the beer bottle up like a torch. He had put the shiny thing on the desk, where it glittered. “I don’t want you here no more.”

“What do you mean?”

“You got wax in your ears?” LeBrun took a drink, then clunked the bottle down on the desk. “I got work to do and I don’t want you around. You’ll distract me.”

When LeBrun picked up the shiny object, Hawthorne saw that it was a small ice pick. LeBrun’s movements were jerky and he kept recrossing his boots, as if someone had turned up his speed. And his voice was higher. It seemed clenched and barely under his control.

“I’m not following you,” said Hawthorne. He wiped the snow from his coat and moved back to the door.

“It’s a joke right? You’re the professor and you don’t know shit. I’m the idiot and I got all the answers. Beginning, middle, and end. Like all of a sudden I’m the fucking teacher. I’m the big chastiser. That’s what they said in school when I was a kid, ‘We’re going to have to chastise you.’” LeBrun picked up a piece of paper and pretended to read. “Let me see, do I got your name here? This one, that one. Hey, professor, you’re not on the agenda. Let me tell you, that’s good luck for you. You hear what elephants use for tampons?”

“Sheep. You already told me.”

“That was the old elephants. The new elephants use Canucks.” LeBrun leaned his head back and laughed. His teeth shone in the light.

Hawthorne waited for LeBrun to stop laughing. “What don’t I know?”

“You don’t know that Skander wants you out of here. Sewed up and put to sleep.” The lights dimmed, then came back again.

“Fritz?”

LeBrun cackled, then scratched his head, mussing his hair. “What do you think, his fucking wife, the tub of lard? You’re messing up Fritz’s plans, you’re keeping him from being boss of the bosses. He wants you dead. Him and that fag Bennett. Like you’re a chalk mark on their blackboard and they want you erased. And guess who’s the big eraser?”

“You wrecked Clifford’s office.”

“That’s old news, that was last month. You don’t know shit, do you? That’s why I want you gone. Just go home and you’ll be okay.”

Hawthorne put his ski cap in his pocket. He needed to keep LeBrun talking. “I don’t understand.”

LeBrun starting shouting. “Because I don’t want to kill you, you hear what I’m saying? I mean, I could do it. No fucking sweat. Like this!” LeBrun swung the ice pick down and hit the desk, then he withdrew his hand, letting the ice pick quiver in the wood. “But I don’t like being told what to do. I don’t like some scummy hunk of shit saying if I don’t do something, I’ll get arrested. I’ll go to jail. I’ll get butt-fucked. I’ll die. Fritz thinks he can scare me into doing his dirty work and he’s too cheap to pay me! Two hundred fucking bucks for the office! I would of killed you for a grand—at least I think so. But maybe I wouldn’t take the job. I mean, you haven’t been in my face. But let me tell you, that’s nothing in your favor. It doesn’t pay to like people. A friend is just a guy who hasn’t knifed you in the back yet. He’s still working out the details.” LeBrun laughed and looked angry at the same time. The words tumbled from his mouth. “Know what I got offered for the girl? Ten grand. Even if Fritz had come up with ten grand for sticking you, I might not of done it. And now the fucker’s saying that, if I don’t do it, I’ll get fried. He said you were going to the cops. He said you’d bring in the fucking army!”

“You killed Scott.”

“Doo, dah, doo, dah, professor.”

“But why?”

“He’d seen something he shouldn’t of, it was like an accident. But it was Fritz who told me the kid had seen it. The kid went to him when he couldn’t find you. He told Fritz all about it. I mean, I knew somebody’d seen it. I seen him hiding in the bushes. But just a shape, you know what I mean? I didn’t know who it was till Fritz told me. Then it was easy. I only had to be patient. You be patient and you wait for the other guy to be impatient. The kid’s dorm room was on the first floor.” LeBrun reached into his pocket, took out a key ring, and jingled it. “And I got keys, I got all the keys.”

“He was just a kid.” Hawthorne told himself that he had to make some sort of plan, but his mind felt frozen.

“‘Just a kid’—exactly, professor. Look at it this way: I saved him. A kid like that, a little dicking in his past, some old fart holding his mouth open with his thumbs and banging past his tonsils. I saved him from being sent away, from fucking up too bad, from going to jail, from a bunch of guys using his asshole like a revolving door, from being like me. I fucking liberated him, you hear what I’m saying? He’ll never be like me. He’s safe. Now he’s one liberated little kid. Dead, though.”

“Where’s Jessica?”

“She don’t like being called Jessica. Her name’s Misty. She’s fucking trouble. I thought it’d be a piece of cake.” LeBrun pinched his lower lip, drew it forward, and let go. Then he took a drink from his bottle and belched. “You ever have a job you’re supposed to do, that you’re paid to do, but something’s not right about it? You keep putting it off. You don’t feel like it. I don’t even like the little bitch and she’s got that fucking cat. Well, maybe she’s not so terrible. She just talks too much. But maybe it’s because I never stuck a girl. Maybe I don’t like the guy with the money. But it’s business, right? No kill, no dough. And now she’s figured it out. She saw us today. She knows what’s coming. You got to do what you’ve been paid to do. That’s ethics, right? The big fucking morality.”