Friday, March 27, 8:15 p.m.

Fine weather late in March had brought the Los Santos gangs out in force, armed and belligerent. Detective Elena Jarvis figured every Crimes Against Persons detective who handled homicide and aggravated assault was out in the field that night. Sergeant Holiday's entire squad had been called in to cover a teen party in the Northeast, shot up by uninvited guests.

Her own squad, under Sergeant Manuel Escobedo, was investigating four deaths and seven injuries in a gang fight at Ascarte Park when Lieutenant Beltran radioed new instructions from headquarters. Elena was reassigned to an attempted homicide at Herbert Hobart University. Campus police would serve as her backup because Crimes Against Persons was stretched so thin. Unlike the state university, whose police force investigated its own crimes, H.H.U. had an agreement with the city police to handle felonies committed on its property. The campus police assisted.

As she drove across town, Elena wondered whether she had just been subjected to a sexist division of responsibility, H.H.U. being the less dangerous situation. On the other hand, Beltran might simply have decided that a female detective with a college degree would be more acceptable to the powers that be at H.H.U.

That heavily endowed, lushly landscaped oasis of education for the wealthy dominated the foothills of Los Santos to the west of the mountains. Los Santos itself was an arid, poverty-stricken city on the Texas-Mexico border. It hardly spoke the same language as Herbert Hobart, its articulate faculty, and its privileged student body. H.H.U. was to Los Santos what a magnum of Tattinger Extra Dry was to a can of Tecate. Although Elena customarily drank Tecate, with lime and salt on the side, Tattinger's was not beyond her experience. She and her ex-husband, Frank, had celebrated their sixth and last anniversary with a bottle.

Elena turned her unmarked police car off the interstate and headed up the mountain through middle-class suburbs that showcased NeoMission architecture, rock landscaping instead of grass, and cactus instead of flowers. At the ornate iron gates and stucco guardhouse of the university, she stopped for directions and was told that outsiders couldn't enter the campus after eight. "Even police?" she asked sarcastically. "Even city police called in by the university force?" The guard didn't know; nothing much ever happened here, so why would anyone have called the city police? He tried to telephone for instructions, but nobody answered.

Maybe they were at the scene of the attempted murder, she suggested. He peered at her suspiciously and asked to see her badge again. Then he decided to take a picture of it and her, which he did. They had to wait twice for the camera to whir, whine, and spit out the pictures, which the guard admired from different angles. Elena had heard that Herbert Hobart was a dingbat school. She now had supporting evidence.

"I suppose if someone dies while you're fooling around with that camera," she said, "you and the university would be legally liable."

He gaped at her, his Polaroid hanging in one hand, the other hand clutching an excellent photograph of her badge.

"If the students are as rich as people say--"

"They are," he assured her.

"Then the parents will have plenty of money to hire the best lawyers."

"Someone tried to kill a student?"

"Beats me," said Elena. "Here's the address. Is that a dormitory?"

"Nah," said the guard, relaxing. "That's the faculty apartment building. Still -Aattempted murder? You sure?" He decided to let her in; however, he provided poor directions, as if letting her in but keeping her from arriving at her destination would protect him from responsibility. In the police department they called it C.Y.A., cover your ass. Look for a ship-type building, the guard had said. What kind of sense did that make? She'd heard the architecture was funky, but she could hardly see it in the dark. The spotlights shone from the ground up so that everything above the second floor disappeared, as if a dense black cloud sat menacingly on top of the university.

What kind of attempted homicide had it been? Elena wondered. Two faculty colleagues attacking one another over some arcane scholarly point? Or a domestic squabble? Suddenly she wasn't sure about Lieutenant Beltran sending her alone. More officers died responding to domestic disputes than to gang fights. Her backup would be a campus cop, possibly as dumb as the one at the gate. He might have let the situation get out of hand. He might be dead. Or the victim might be dead. And why not? What did these campus police do on an ordinary working day--keep the rich kids from spray-painting the genitalia of the university statuary? Fine them if they defaced the tropical Florida shrubbery, which soaked up huge amounts of water from the university's private wells?