Gus had found an excuse to slink out of the office before his shame could be revealed, and ran directly to the registrar’s office to drop the class. That was the last time he’d seen Langston Kitteredge.

But it was the rare month that went by without Gus thinking about his old professor. It wasn’t that he regretted not spending his life in the study of old paintings. But he’d rarely met anyone whose passion for life, whose devotion to his obsessions, was so total. He couldn’t help but wonder every now and again what he might have done with himself if he had actually spent a few minutes studying for that midterm.

When Gus had received the letter, he’d been stunned. Not so much at the fact that Kitteredge was asking for help, but at the very idea that the professor had any idea who he was. With all the students that passed through his classes every year, with all the yearning souls desperate to join the ranks of slavish acolytes, it was amazing that he would have any memory of a kid who’d sat in the fifth row of his lecture course for a half a quarter more than a decade earlier.

Amazing or not, Professor Kitteredge had reached out to Gus for help, and now he was in serious trouble. It was up to Gus to help him.

“Say, exactly what is the case we’re here for?” Shawn said.

“I don’t know,” Gus said. “The letter only said it was of vital importance. But now that Lassiter and Jules are here-”

“That means it’s in our wheelhouse,” Shawn said. “Although why you’d put wheels on a house is beyond me. Unless it’s just to annoy people driving behind you on the freeway. But we should talk about traffic patterns later. There seems to be some kind of crime here.”