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wondering if Professor Jacobs was married. If so, this was about to be awkward. This is why I normally left this stuff up to local PD and just made my entrance after they’d done the scut work.
    The entry had a coat closet framed with a dark mahogany sliding door. I slid it open and looked to see a few coats hanging within. No women’s coats, though. All the shoes below were men’s, and there were only a half dozen pairs of varying kinds from dress to tennis shoes to snow boots, which probably ruled out a male domestic partner as well. I was also relieved to see no children’s shoes of any kind.
    “I think we’re on our own, here,” I said, stepping through the entry into a well-furnished living room area. There was a rug in the middle of the room that was squared to look like tile, each in a subtle different shade of grey moving across the spectrum to beige and brown. It was a little weird, but it kind of worked with the grey-scale sofa and two white leather chairs that stood with their backs to me. A coffee table anchored the middle of the room, cluttered with paperwork and further convincing me that Professor Jacobs lived alone.
    I took it all in, sniffing for the smell of cigarette smoke and finding instead some kind of faint vanilla scent mingled with one of the prominent brands of men’s deodorant.
    Reed stepped up next to me, still shaking his head.
    “What?” I asked him.
    “Still stuck on your erection joke back there,” he said, looking at me with faint disappointment. “I haven’t been this embarrassed since I had that party for the last Packer/Viking game, when you asked me which team was which.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, stepping around the wall at the far end of the living room to find myself in a kitchen separated by a long counter from another livingroom-esque space, this one coupled with a glass kitchen table sitting just on the other side of the counter. Beyond the brown leather couch in this room was a view of Lake Michigan on one side and to my right a commanding view back down the lakeshore toward downtown. “I know we’re the Vikings.”
    “Uh huh,” Reed said. “What are the team colors?”
    I looked out the windows, taking in the view. This place was expensive. “Uh … red and … green?”
    “Not even close,” Reed said. “That’s the colors for the North Pole Santas.”
    I blinked. “There are no North Pole Santas in the NFL.”
    “I bet you don’t know that for a fact,” he said, breaking off from me to go rummage through the kitchen. He pulled on a pair of leather gloves as he did so, opening the drawers and giving each a quick glance before shutting them again.
    I found myself drawn to the view. This was a corner apartment with a stunning view of both the lake and the city. “Reed?” I asked, looking at the Hancock tower glinting like a black obelisk in the distance, “what do you figure a place like this runs per month?”
    “A lot,” he said, opening drawers and closing them again. “Twenty, thirty grand a month, maybe?”
    “Does that strike you as a lot for a college professor?” I asked, turning my back on the view.
    “Four grand of cash rolled up in his pocket strikes me as a lot for a college professor,” Reed said, glancing up from his search to look at me. “Twenty or thirty K for rent on a monthly basis seems absurd.”
    “We should get his bank records,” I said, wishing I could call J.J. and get them right now. “Something funny’s going on there.”
    “Might be easier to get his payroll info from the college when they open,” Reed said idly, picking through a drawer. “Hmm. Receipts here.”
    “Anything interesting?” I asked, making my way past Professor Jacobs’s pretty damned luxurious furniture in order to take a look for myself.
    “Guy shops at the Whole Foods down on the Mag Mile,” Reed said, pulling a half dozen receipts out and laying them on the spotless counter, which was a hell of a contrast to the strewn