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“Scanner wouldn’t detect poison. Why should it?” she mused. “Pressure syringe, same thing. Killer or killers could have walked right in, at any time, with both.”

“You’re clear.” He stood a moment, scanning the area. “So what are we doing here?”

“Not sure.”

“Not, I imagine—unfortunately—to play teacher-keeps-the-naughty-student-after-school.”

“No,” she agreed. “Empty schools are even creepier than when they’re otherwise.” She slid her hands into her pockets as she walked.

“The ghosts of students past. Bloody prisons, really.”

She laughed, gave him a friendly elbow bump. “Yes!”

“Not that I spent a great deal of time inside places like this. At least not until Summerset took charge of me. He was rather insistent about attendance.”

“The state-run schools I was stuck in weren’t like this. None of this air of privilege, and the security was a hell of a lot tighter. I hated them.”

She stopped by an open classroom door. One of the cells—or so it had seemed to her—of the prison. “First few years I just felt scared and stupid, then later it was ‘Okay I get all this. When can I get out?’”

“And once you did, you jumped right into the police academy.”

“That was different.”

“Because it was a choice.” He touched her arm, just a brush of understanding. “And a need.”

“Yeah. And nobody in the academy gave a shit if you recognized a dangling participle or could write a brilliant essay on the sociopolitical ramifications of the Urban Wars. Then there was geometry. That’s sort of the thing, though.”

“Geometry’s the thing?”

“Lines and spaces and crap. Area, radius, blah, blah. It gave me a headache. But I’m thinking geometry. The distance, the angles, the shortest route between two points.” She started up the stairs.

“First vic’s classroom. That’s the—Shit, what’s the middle of the thing.”

“Which thing?”

“The middle of the space.” She lifted her hand, fashioned a space in the air.

“Well, that would depend, wouldn’t it? If you’re meaning a circle, it might be simply the center. Or, staying with a circle as the space, you may mean the central angle, and that’s the angle whose vertex is at the center.”

She stopped walking at vertex to stare at him.

“Then, as every central angle cuts the circle in two arcs, there’d be the minor arc—the smaller, which would be less than one hundred and eighty degrees, and the major, the larger, which is always more.”

“Jesus.”

He grinned, shrugged. “I always liked geometry.”

“Geek.” She scowled down the hallway. “Now I forgot what I was doing.”

“Or you may be after the tangent,” he said, unconcerned. “The point of tangency would be the point where a line intersects the circle at precisely one point, and one only.”

“Shut up.”

“You asked. Of course, your shape might be a triangle, say, and in that case—”

“I’m going to draw down on you in five flat seconds and stun you senseless.”

“You know what I liked even more than geometry? Finding the blind spots on the security cams,” he said. “Which, in fact, geometry helped me with. Then snagging some sweet young thing, and—”

He snagged her, whipped her around, back to the wall, and, grinning, kissed her lavishly.

His mouth managed just what geometry did. It fuzzed her mind.

“Work now, tonsil hockey later.”

“You romantic fool. Now then, I think I understand what you’re trying to figure out, and it’s more to do with intersections and betweenness.”

She actually had to press her fingers under her eye to still a twitch. “‘Betweenness’ can’t possibly be an actual word.”

“It is, in fact, in math language. And I think it would be your first victim’s classroom. That’s the point between the others. And also, I’d think, where your lines intersect, in the first theorem.”

“Let’s just leave the higher math out of it because it’s going to separate my mind from my body, and I’d rather save that for sex. Foster’s classroom.” She gestured. “Which was empty for at least fifty minutes, twice that day—before class and during his fourth period, giving the