Denton Reed spent Sunday afternoon in the den marking assignments. It was his undergrads' last project before the final exam. This was the assignment that always elicited the most audible groans when he announced it.

The students were supposed to use the techniques from the course to examine one room of a house and evaluate a total stranger. It had to be three to five thousand words and have photos documenting the conclusions. But no one ever wanted to ask someone they didn't know if they could poke around their bedroom and take pictures, so it was also the project where Denton encountered the most falsehoods and fabrications.

At least now, none of the students argued they couldn't do it because they didn't have access to a camera, like when he first started teaching. The cell phones glued to their hands solved that problem. Over the years, Denton often considered changing or scrapping the assignment altogether, even though of all the projects, it was the best indicator of how well they had absorbed the material. Instead of getting rid of it, he had developed a lenient grading policy. He chose to ignore the lies and the attempts to fool him and marked them as if the students had done the work properly. And he soothed his conscience by giving bonus marks to the few honest students.

It had already been a long, tedious day of wading through the papers, when he opened up Stephen Kaling's document on his computer. Kaling was a 75% student; he always scored an average grade. He put in just enough work to show that he was smart but never enough to do well. A quick look over it and Denton was certain that Stephen knew his subject.

There was always something that gave it away. Typically, it was by being too intuitive about the evidence in front of them. The line that jumped out at Denton was: "The copy of Henry James's novel, The Golden Bowl, on her nightstand clearly indicates that she is an English major."

A single novel was hardly indication of much and was conclusive proof of nothing. However, if you knew the person was studying literature, it was likely the only thing in the room that could be used to mention it.

At least, he hadn't actually staged examples like some of the others had done. But then, that probably would have been too much of an effort for someone like Kaling.

He read through the entire three thousand and seven words from beginning to end. He switched over to the grading system and entered 75. He was about to close Kaling's document, when something in the last photo caught his eye. The picture was of the subject's desk, close on a row of neatly lined up pens, to attest to her orderly personality. Slightly blurry and out of focus, in the background, there was a laptop. The top of it was covered in stickers. From the angle that the photo was taken, the stickers appeared to form an infinity symbol.

With his heart rate rising, Denton went back through the project, until he came across another photo of the desk in the background. He zoomed in on it and saw the same pattern. Now unmistakable from the new angle, it was a figure eight. Although indistinct in the enlarged image, Denton recognized banana labels from various brands forming half of one loop. The rest of them had been gathered from random sources and were mostly indecipherable in their pixelated state. He did identify the square, blue sticker that Milton had issued to active students last spring for their ID cards and the head of Porky Pig. The cartoon swine had been decapitated, a jagged tear clearly visible along the neck.

It's probably nothing, he thought. I'm beginning to see eights everywhere. But there was something nagging at him. He flipped back and forth between the two pictures a few times, before he focused in on the pens. She was neat, practically fastidious. Kaling had used the pens to point it out, but Denton had seen signs throughout the room. Not only that, Kaling had written, "She has an orderly mind." That wasn't a guess from a sophomore psychology student; it was a statement from a friend, possibly even a relative.

Why would someone so neat put random stickers on her laptop? And if she did put them there, then any pattern would be intentional. Denton went back over the project, zooming in on each photo, trying to see if there were any other clues.

He found the second eight hidden in the paperback on the nightstand. In the primary picture of the book, the eight couldn't be seen. The cover was in close-up and the angle was from directly above. But the book appeared again, off to the side in a shot of the neatly made bed. The top fifty pages or so curled up revealing an eight scrawled in the margin. Although, perhaps it was a three, since only half of it could be seen. The doodle was dark, the pattern repeated over and over again. Each arc hinted at a full loop. Denton could picture the girl's hand obsessively tracing the circles with her pen.

If he hadn't examined each section of each photo so carefully, he would have missed the third one. It was on the dresser. The subject kept her makeup and other odds-and-ends on the top of it. The photo showed them straight on. From that point of view, they appeared to be neatly arranged. But a mirror on the wall beside it, revealed something else in its reflection. Spread out across the full surface of the dark wood top, the bottles, tubes, canisters, jewelry, and other sundry items formed two perfect circles.

Were three—or rather, two and a half eights a coincidence or proof? And proof of what?

Denton removed his glasses and rubbed his strained eyes, trying to free them of their burning. The room was hushed, with just the sound of rain lashing against the windows. At some point, the CD he'd been listening to had ended without him noticing and Bill Evans's mellow piano had stopped.

He crossed the room to put a new disk in the player, glad to have a distraction. The den was his room of the house. Linda had her studio; he had this. It was an addition to the old house, put on sometime in the forties. Linda called it his man-cave, however it was far from a sports and beer atmosphere. It did have a cool, damp feeling about it, but it wasn't in the basement. It was two stairs down from the rest of the ground floor. There was no door, just an open archway, but its awkward location off of the laundry room gave it complete privacy from the rest of the house. Denton called it his study, and he used it as his home office, and he treated it like his sanctuary.

His old stereo was on the left-hand side of the stone fireplace, nestled in the built-ins, along with stacks of his jazz CDs. On the shelves on the other side was the makeshift bar, with his collection of scotch and a few crystal tumblers. When he had set up the room, he had pictured sitting in one of the leather arm chairs with friends sipping whisky by the fire. In five years, the only person that he'd had in there for a drink was Bill Stahl, and that was during his first winter in town.

Denton thought about calling Bill up to tell him what he had discovered but decided against it. He had already made enough of a fool out of himself.

First thing Saturday morning, he had called Bill up to ask about the police cars from the night before.

"Did he strike again?"

Bill had been clear: no. Nobody had been found dead on Friday. No major crimes had been committed. He had no idea what the police cars were doing, but as the lead investigator on the case, if anything happened, he'd be the first to know. Even if he weren't the lead, it was a small enough department that someone would have told him about a murder by now.

He called back twenty minutes later to tell Denton that he'd checked with dispatch, and the patrol cars had gone out to an accident on Route 52. There was a tone in his voice that made Denton suspect he was sorry to have brought him on board for the investigation. When he got off of the phone, Denton felt every bit of the silly academic jumping at shadows that Bill obviously thought he was.

He wasn't about to call him now and tell him about the pictures and drive the point home even harder.

He imagined what he'd say. "Hey, Bill. I was grading a student's paper, and I found two and a half eights in some photos. She's the next victim. You have to head out there right away. Oh, and no I don't have any idea who she is, or where she lives."

Denton cringed at the thought of it.

He hit play, and the warm summery notes of Sketches of Spain filled the room, giving a little relief from the gloom.

The only good thing about losing credibility in Bill's eyes was that he hadn't asked for his findings on the Grimshaw apartment. Denton had a six page document on the computer detailing everything he had been able to determine, which wasn't much. The report was a mess of half substantiated conjectures. Would he even have given himself a 75 on it? There was too much conflicting evidence to make sense out of the victim. He was a slob but bought expensive new clothes. He was a loner but went out socializing regularly. And there was no explanation to the most important question: why was he obsessed with eights?

Just like there was no explanation for that unnamed literature student to be obsessed with them. Or why she was driven to deface her laptop with one, or mar the margin of her book.

What was the connection?

He stared out the latticed window behind the desk at the barren and waterlogged side garden.

If he wasn't wrong—if it was something after all—a woman's life could be in danger. He needed to find her and get some proof. If he could put the pieces together, he could take it to Bill and stop this thing.