The Square Root of Murder (Professor Sophie Knowles)

shouted, “Eureka!” And then Virgil would go out with handcuffs and an arrest warrant and bring in the killer. Bruce and I could go away to the Cape for a few days and I’d be back to prepare fall syllabi and lessons as I always did in August. I longed for reuniting with my steady, well-behaved math majors.
    A girl can dream.
    Once again I found myself in the waiting area of Henley’s police station. I tucked the paper bag of handwriting samples near my legs, checked my email using my phone, and replied to a few students with applied statistics questions. Then I resumed my practice of staring at the bulletin board across from me, with its wealth of memos and flyers.
    Last time I’d focused on the fascinating stats about my hometown. This time I looked at the material around the charts. Wanted and missing persons flyers. A bicycle and pedestrian safety notice. A policy statement regarding abandoned vehicles. A bright orange “buckle-up” bumper sticker. I chuckled at a little cop humor: a cartoon picturing one policeman giving another the Heimlich maneuver while a doughnut pops out.
    I remembered that two simple themed crosswords were due to one of my children’s puzzles editors in a couple of weeks. Why not use the surroundings for inspiration? I whipped out a small pad and pen. My vast experience in waiting rooms like this during the past week told me I had plenty of time before I was summoned. Working on puzzles would be a good release of the nervous energy coursing through me.
    For the first level puzzle I sketched out a simple grid with four across and ten down and only nine common letters. I drafted simple fill-in-the-blank clues like “A (blank) is pinned to a police officer’s uniform” and “A policeman’s car is often called a (blank).” The next level would have a much larger grid. I’d use my standard fifty across and fifty down. I started making a list of words I’d fit into the intermediate level grid. Beretta. Miranda warning. Canine. Search warrant. I looked at the bulletin board for ideas. Mug shot. Home security.
    The background noises of chatter and ringing phones didn’t bother my concentration. But a sudden burst of screaming startled me. Two officers had entered the front door. The inordinately loud yelling came from an old man with a leathery face and a long, unkempt gray ponytail being dragged between the uniformed men.
    “I know my rights. Check your own laws. I did nothing wrong,” I heard between yelps of “police brutality.”
    Virgil came out of the office area at the same time that the old guy was spitting out terms like “fuzz” and “pigs,” epithets I thought had died with the sixties. The man himself was a throwback to photos I’d seen of “the good old hippie daze,” as my mother called them, spelling out the last word for me each time.
    “It’s Dweezil,” Virgil said to me. “He’s harmless.”
    “I take it this is a repeat performance?”
    “Oh, yeah. There’s a little settlement on the west side of town. A bunch of people who were in college in the sixties and haven’t quite adjusted to real life. They have their own little pot farm out there.”
    “I thought marijuana was decriminalized a couple years ago.”
    “They go back and forth, the state legislature. Right now a small amount of marijuana is just a ticketable offense, except Henley passed a town ordinance prohibiting smoking it in public. The state law is so complicated and basically unenforceable that most uniforms ignore it, unless someone makes a nuisance of himself.”
    “Like Dweezil.”
    Virgil nodded. We walked back to the office area where it was significantly quieter.
    “Funny how different people turn out,” Virgil said. “My dad has newspaper photos on his office wall of himself and his buddies with their arms locked, protesting this and that. You can tell they’re yelling at the cops and you know my dad must be pretty proud of his past or he wouldn’t be displaying the pictures. But probably a couple of years after the pictures were taken he goes to law school, then he marries my straight-arrow mom and ends up a prosecuting attorney. He’s probably the same age as Dweezil.”
    “It was an interesting generation,” I said, my mind wandering to my own mother and her political activism in her heyday.
    Then my renegade mind wandered farther from home. To Dean Phyllis Underwood. There had to be some important reason why she wanted whatever was left in Keith’s office.