Cold Winter Rain by Steven Gregory Page A

corner.
    Cream walls almost completely covered with posters of soccer stars in action.  In one, Mia Hamm raised her arms in triumph, a huge smile splitting her face.  Another poster featured a grimacing Hope Solo crouching to prepare for a penalty kick.
    And one small poster almost hidden by posters of recent or active players featured an ageless Pelé, body parallel to the ground in a bicycle kick, the great thigh muscles looking as inhuman as oiled machinery.
    I didn’t search any drawers or look under the bed for clues.  The Birmingham police, detective novels to the contrary, would have been as thorough as the KGB.  After absorbing the visual patterns, I stood at the foot of the bed, closed my eyes and entered into the stillness of the closed room, the only movement my breath.  My inhalations and exhalations connected us; I was the room, the room was me.
    What do you have to tell me, Kris?  Are you out there somewhere?  What are your secrets?  Why have I heard different versions of when you were last seen?  Do you want to be found?
    After a couple of minutes, I didn’t have any more answers than I’d ever had, so I opened the door, closed it softly behind me, walked down the stairs and let myself out of the house.
    Grubbs was waiting in his car with the engine running.  When I got in, he drove away without a word.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER EIGHT
    The board of trustees of Alabama Southern probably started every meeting with a prayer that God would move the campus to another location.
    If they didn’t, they should.
    Alabama Southern squatted just off I-20 near the rotting old stadium called Legion Field, in a neighborhood otherwise filled with crack houses, shot houses, shooting galleries, boom boxes and nightly gunfire.
    Businesses move.  Upwardly mobile couples build, buy, sell, trade, swap houses like old men at a coin show.
    But once a college decides on a campus location, it’s pretty much stuck there.  During real-estate bubbles or during the recessions that follow, there isn’t much of a market for a nice, clean-but-lived-in early-70's biology building.
    So Alabama Southern opted for the only alternative: they got serious about security long before September 11, 2001.  They surrounded the campus with a twelve-foot fence of brick pillars and wrought-iron spikes. They installed gates with twenty-four-hour guards and security cameras.
    To a visitor from out of town, these measures probably seemed paranoid or elitist.  To Birmingham natives, they were no more than a display of common sense.
    I had an appointment with the chief of the campus police at two o’clock in the afternoon. After Grubbs dropped me at the hotel, I had a sandwich sent up to my room, read through the notes in the qui tam file again, then took off my shoes, lay down on the bed, and rested for twenty minutes.  Then I washed and dried my face, put my shoes and coat back on, collected my rental car, and took the ramp to I-59/I-20 South.
    The Alabama Southern campus sat just east of the interstate off the Arkadelphia Road exit.  I had a note from Leon Grubbs to show to the campus cop manning the gate a hundred yards inside the road approaching the campus.  The cop nodded when he saw my note and told me to wait.  He stepped inside his little guard house and spoke into his radio.  Then he raised the red and white stick gate and gave me a half-wave, half salute.
    The administration building could have housed the HQ at a Marine base: three stories, rambling, an indeterminate beige concrete on the exterior.
    Inside, the building had a peculiar odor; not unpleasant, a mix of county courthouse and floral shop.  An office directory on the wall near the elevators directed campus police department visitors to the basement.
    I took the stairs.
    Square green plastic signs suspended from the ceiling pointed to the right above the legend: Director of Campus Security.  The chief’s office suite occupied the northwestern corner