Page 37 of Absent Reason

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They seemed to keep returning to the math department of the university. The answer had to be here somewhere. It was still bustling when Amber and Simon got there. Students were moving between classes, and staff members were talking in the corridors, but there was a nervous edge to it now as if the most recent murder had brought it home that their department was at the heart of everything that was going on.

Amber looked around for anyone who might be able to help them. She spotted the younger professor they'd spoken to before and headed over, hoping that he would prove as helpful as he had last time.

"Excuse me," she said. "Do you have a moment?"

The professor smiled as she and Simon approached.

"Of course. It's Agent Young, isn't it?"

Amber nodded. "Yes, and I don't think I caught your name last time around. Professor..."

"Just Doctor, I'm afraid," he said. "Dr. Iain McCloud. I'm on the regular teaching rotation, but I'm a long way from tenure yet."

The slight note of bitterness in the words hinted at a whole world of departmental politics that Amber didn't have enough time to get into unless it started to prove relevant to the case.

"We're looking for someone with a particular interest in impossible puzzles," Amber said.

The professor frowned in thought. "Well, there are a few people who come to mind. They’re helpful in understanding mathematical limits and paradoxes. There's Professor Henderson in number theory. He's always talking about the Riemann hypothesis. Then there's Dr. Lee in combinatorics. She's been working on the P vs. NP problem for years. And there's a student, Alex Kim, who's been making waves with his work on the complexity of the game Go."

The latter didn't sound like the kind of thing they were looking for. Go wasn’t impossible, merely complex. Amber was about to ask about the other two when Dr. McCloud kept going.

"Of course, when it came to collectingimpossibleproblems, there was no one here quite like Professor Arran. He used to devise them; he said that showing that something was definitively impossible showed us as much about math as all the positive proofs in the world."

That sounded like exactly the person they needed to see.

"Where is he?" Simon asked, looking around at the offices.

"Oh, he's not here anymore. Officially an extended sabbatical."

"And unofficially?" Amber asked, her interest caught.

Dr. McCloud sighed, looking a little embarrassed as if he didn't want to bring any of this up. "I don't want to be one to gossip, but... he had a breakdown. He thought he'd come up with an impossible problem. He thought he'd come up with a proof that it was impossible, but then one of our TAs went and found a solution."

"One of the TAs?" Amber asked, her attention caught even more firmly. "It wasn't Victoria Crossing, was it?"

"I..." Dr. McCloud hesitated for a moment or two. "Actually, I think it might have been."

Amber looked over to Simon. If that was true, then they had a new lead suspect. They needed to find Professor Arran before he had a chance to kill again.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

Nicole had just finished a major study session when she went down to get the mail. Her head hurt from trying to cram in so many details of her Math 101 class, and it still felt as though none of them had stuck. She'd only taken it because somehow it was a required course. It didn't seem to matter that she planned to major in drama and couldn’t see what math had to do with any of that. Nicole imagined that somewhere, a college administrator was laughing at that.

Even before going down to get the mail, Nicole checked her appearance. She wasn't going to go outside looking less than perfect. Not today, not ever. You never knew when a casting director might be walking past. Okay, so it probably wouldn't be outside a shared house just off campus in Verdice, but it wasn'timpossible. People had been discovered in stranger places. Besides, there might be a cute guy or something.

So Nicole fixed her dark hair, tying it back, put on what she considered to be the bare minimum of makeup, and checked that her sweater and jeans combination actually worked for her. It did, of course, it did.

Thenshe went down for the mail, taking the stairs two at a time.

There was the usual collection of fliers from fast food places, a letter from the administration of the university about her course choices for next year, and a handwritten note that stood out from the others mostly just by not having an address on it, simply her name. Someone must have slipped it into the mail with the rest.

The fliers went into the trash, but Nicole took the note with her back up to her room. The room was small, with a twin-sized bed and a desk in the corner. She flopped down on the bed and opened the note, her curiosity piqued. Maybe someone had seen her and was trying to be romantic.

As soon as she opened the letter, Nicole stared in horror at the contents. There was a crudely drawn map of the city, little more than outlines of the islands and the bridges.

You must walk all of the bridges, each no more than once. Do it by midnight. Fail, or try to tell anyone, and you will die.

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