The morning drizzle tightened the District’s notorious braided-knot commute into a noose of traffic. But true to his word, Drayco picked Sarg up from the train station in his faithful blue Starfire, and they headed toward Parkhurst College. Their only conversation in the car was Sarg reading snippets from the case file he’d made and answering Drayco’s questions.
No talk of the upcoming Washington Capitals season opener. None of Sarg’s tirades over his Fredericksburg neighbor, the one who staged Civil War re-enactments in his yard—with action figures as Confederates and garden gnomes as Union soldiers shot to smithereens with a BB g*n.
When they pulled into a Parkhurst lot, it didn’t take long to spy signs of the college’s deep-pocketed endowments. The campus coffeehouse where Drayco and
