“We already knew the place was wiped clean,” Jack responds, his arms folded.

We’re in the command center, convening. More like kibitzing, firing out ideas, hoping something will stick. Everybody is pumped. Hope is alive, feeding us energy.

“Teddy? Find out if there are traffic cams on Harvard Bridge. If so, we need access to any recordings within, say, a two-week time frame.”

Naomi leans back from her desk. Her eyes have that faraway look that means she’s processing information. We all wait. Thirty seconds pass. A very long half minute. I’m studying my nails—what to do about the cuticles?—when she snaps back, totally in the moment, and goes, “What about Shane? He started out as a computer geek, right? Therefore he would have had a laptop, at the very least. Was it recovered at his motel room by the state police?”

“If so, they’re not sharing,” Jack says thoughtfully. “But you’re right, he’d have had a laptop. Absolutely.”

“So that’s another question that needs answering: where is Shane’s laptop?”

“Wait,” says Jack, sitting up even straighter. “Damn! He has an iPhone. That’s how he called me. Not on the professor’s landline, because his name popped up like it always does, and when I met him in Kendall Square he had the iPhone in his hand, slipped it into his pocket.”

Naomi considers, then pronounces, “Forget the phone. His assailants will have seized that, and accessed whatever it may or may not contain. But the laptop is interesting. Obviously he didn’t have it with him when he came to us. That leaves three possibilities. One: he left it in his motel room, and it has been seized and taken into evidence by law enforcement. Two: he secreted it somewhere in his vehicle, which has been impounded and, we assume, thoroughly searched by Cambridge felony detectives. Three: he hid it elsewhere.”

Jack is already shaking his head. “No way he left it in his ride. He knew the car would be impounded at the scene. He assumed the vehicle was compromised because his gun had been taken. That’s why he abandoned the car and proceeded on foot to Kendall Square to meet me.”

“He told you that, specifically?”

“Didn’t have to. That’s what I would have done. The missing gun told him everything. From that moment, Shane knew he was in the middle of a frame. He couldn’t risk driving the car—for all he knew, it had already been tagged with a GPS tracker.”

“Again, he discussed this with you?”

“No discussion required. It’s an understood thing.”

“So you and Shane have, what, a psychic connection?”

Another man might have been insulted by the caustic comment, but Jack, knowing boss lady’s methods, shrugs it off. “We received the same training. To a certain extent, in operative terms, we think alike.”

“Operative terms.”

“Correct.”

“Acknowledged,” she says, satisfied. “Good point. Find out if the Cambridge cops found a tracking device in his car.”

“Done,” says Jack. He opens his cell and steps out of the room.

Naomi swivels in her chair. “Teddy? Any joy on the traffic cams?”

Teddy looks up from the screen, grimaces. “Nope. None on Harvard Bridge. There may be MIT security cameras somewhere in the area, farther up Mass Ave. If so, they won’t be advertised. I’m looking.”

The swiveling chair turns in my direction. “Alice? Are you up for another visit across the river?”

Silly question.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology spans a mile or so of Cambridge frontage on the Charles River, facing Boston and the world. Love that dirty water, as they used to sing. And still do in certain Boston bars at closing time. Or so I’ve heard. I’m not a closing-time kind of girl, for the most part. Not surprisingly my ex-husband, the con man, he knew all the words to “Dirty Water” so he could croon along with the inebriated locals, even though his knowledge of the city, as I now understand, came mostly from old reruns of Cheers.

Enough about my ex. He can’t even really be my ex if he was still married to the last three wives he bamboozled, right? They didn’t call him Wedding Willy for nothing. Okay, so I’ll shut up about Mr. Adorable, whatever his real name is. May he rot in hell, or Toronto, or wherever they’ve got him under lock and key.

I’m over him. Totally.

It being a fair kind of late-spring day—blue skies, warm breezes wafting the perfume of steaming asphalt— I retrieve my bike from the garage, don the dorky helmet and pedal across the river on my new Trek Soho, the urban model with the cool carbon belt instead of a chain. Knowing full well that to impress a typical MIT undergraduate I’d have to be riding a unicycle on top of a skateboard while juggling spheres of plutonium. No, not common old plutonium, that’s so yesterday—make it antimatter. Anything less and a fully adult female becomes invisible to college kids, assuming she’s more or less fully clothed and hasn’t had humungous breast implants recently. Not that it matters—I’m not here for the undergrads, and a little invisibility might be useful, even if it doesn’t exactly keep the ego properly inflated.

The quarry, courtesy of a boss lady brain fart—excuse me, sudden inspiration—is the faculty lounge in the Department of Physics. Not as easy as it sounds, because it turns out the physics department is spread all over the campus, and the physics professors, all hundred and twenty of them, find all sorts of places to consort with each other. Like extremely intelligent cockroaches, as one undergraduate blogger put it. Charming thought. I envision a bunch of geeky dudes with unbrushed mandibles, chittering away as they consume, cups and all, Styrofoam containers of heavily sugared coffee. The same blogger (he calls himself “Gregor,” by the way, and yes, I got it) refers to the physics faculty as “8-Ballers” because the courses all begin with that number. 8.01 being the introductory course, 8.04 being Quantum Physics and so on.

8-Ballers. Sounds sort of cute. In contrast to the hollow-eyed summer-semester students who stumble around campus fueled by energy drinks, swelling their talented brains with ever more information. None of those spotted in the halls of physics actually have white tape wrapped around the stems of their glasses, clichéd geek style, but pocket protectors are much in evidence—almost, it seems, as an act of defiance, or even a badge of honor. A fair description of the average complexion would have to include the word pasty, and that applies to the dark-skinned students as well as the light. Every last one of them looks like she or he could use a day at the beach. I never do find a faculty lounge—so much for boss lady’s big idea—but instead eventually stumble upon a cubicle corral of administrative assistants, one of whom instantly bursts into tears when I ask if any of them knew Professor Keener.

“Oh my God, it’s so, so sad,” she says, sniffing. “Are you a friend?”

“Yes,” I tell her, and then amend, “Well, not exactly, but I have good intentions.”

The weeper, a slightly heavy woman of forty or so, wears large thick-lensed glasses that magnify her watery blue eyes, distorting what would otherwise be an attractive, lightly freckled face. The fact that she’s weeping makes me like her instantly—she’s the first to exhibit an openly emotional reaction to the professor’s violent death. Without saying another word—her cubicle mates are eyeballing the stranger who started the waterworks—she gets up from her desk and indicates that I should follow out into a foyer area that serves as a waiting room. No windows, pale walls, the only decoration a series of neatly framed black-and-white high-speed photographs of a bullet piercing a textbook, finally emerging with a little puff of exploded paper. Is shooting books an MIT thing? Somehow that seems unlikely. Whatever, it’s not the mystery I’m here to solve.

The weeper plops heavily onto a couch, opens her purse and removes a tissue, using it to wipe her delicate, upturned nose. She sniffs, takes a deep breath and then in a surprisingly strong voice demands, “What do you mean, ‘good intentions’?”