Waking Hours by Lis Wiehl

industry and robber barons and Wall Street tycoons built their castles and gentlemen’s farms specifically to get away from the urban din and clamor.
    As the train pulled out of the station, Dani recalled riding into Manhattan with her parents to visit the Museum of Natural History or the MoMA or to see the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden. She’d been fascinated as a child by how rapidly the landscape beyond the window changed from rural to suburban to city to inner city, how it started with trees and fields and ponds full of ducks and geese, then houses, then the ugly hindmost parts of warehouses and storage sheds, more and more decay, old tires, broken glass, graffiti, and occasionally homeless people sleeping under cardboard boxes. Then the train would be swallowed up in darkness as the rails led underground, until it stopped and her mother or father led her by the hand into Grand Central Station and the world turned magic again.
    She remembered looking at the businessmen and women on the train and wondering what she would do with her life. She’d gone into medicine because her father was a doctor. She’d turned to psychiatry because she’d found illnesses of the brain to be the most complex, challenging, and endlessly fascinating. But there were days when she wished she’d stuck to her original childhood plan of going out west and feeding wild horses by dropping bales of hay from a hot air balloon.
    “I don’t think wild horses need to be fed from a hot air balloon,” her father had told her. “They already have lots of grass to eat where they live.”
    So much for that dream.
    At Grand Central she took the shuttle to Times Square and the uptown local to 56th Street, where she walked the short distance to John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a collection of buildings between 10th and 11th on Manhattan’s West Side. John Jay was a unique school where the athletic department included men’s and women’s rifle teams, and undergraduates took all the usual liberal arts requirements in literature, philosophy, and the social sciences before pursuing law enforcement specialties as graduate students. The previous semester Dani had taught Psych 716, Assessment and Counseling of the Juvenile Offender. This semester she was teaching Psych 701, Psychology of Criminal Behavior.
    The morning passed quickly, the Bull’s Rock Hill murder never far from her thoughts. She delivered her lecture on crime and birth order (last-borns were generally more trouble than firstborns), met with an advisee, spent a few minutes chatting with a colleague, and was about to collect her mail when she saw a familiar figure browsing the employment notices on the bulletin board outside the graduate studies office. He was wearing Skechers, jeans, and a black leather jacket over a white dress shirt.
    “Tommy, I think this is a little much,” she said. “If you want to talk to me, just call my office—don’t follow me around.”
    He smiled at her. She had to admit he had a nice smile.
    “I’m sorry?” he said.
    “What are you doing here?” she asked him. “How did you know I’d be here?”
    “I had no idea you’d be here,” he said. “I mean, I knew you taught here, but I didn’t know when. It said you taught here on your bio.”
    It was then that she noticed a leather strap over his broad shoulder, connected to a briefcase. He seemed to be trying to hide it.
    She waited.
    “I’m taking a class,” he said. “And honest, I didn’t know you’d be here. But I’m glad to see you.”
    “What are you taking?” she asked.
    “CJ 727.”
    “Cybercriminology?”
    “Yup,” he replied. “It’s really interesting. Do you have any idea how many bot-networks there are out there? I’m never going Wi-Fi in an airport again.”
    “So . . . why are you taking this class?” she asked. “What does it have to do with running a fitness center?”
    “Nothing,” he said.
    “So?”
    “Maybe running a