The Bride Wore Size 12 (5 page)

“Your what?”

“My celebrity freebie. If I ever get a chance with you, Jamie says it’s okay to take it. Her celebrity freebie is Robert Downey Jr., but she says she only wants him if he’s in his
Iron Man
suit, so I don’t think that one is going to happen.”

“How nice,” I say. “Please will you just send the group text?”

“Okay, but I don’t know how many of those RAs are going to show up because of the
flu
.”

“Gavin, why do you keep saying it that way?”

“What way?”

“As if they don’t really have the flu.”

“I ain’t saying nothing,” Gavin says. “I ain’t no narc.”

“Gavin,” I say. “You grew up in the suburbs and now attend a major private nonsectarian American college in New York City. It doesn’t sound natural when you use double negatives.”

“Harsh,” Gavin responds.

A knock sounds on Jasmine’s door.

“I have to go,” I say, getting up to answer it. “Send the group text. And tell them if I hear about any RA faking sick, there’s going to be major trouble.”

“Oh, trust me,” Gavin says. “They ain’t faking.” He hangs up.

So do I, then open Jasmine’s door. I expect to see men and women in blue from the Sixth Precinct standing in the hallway.

But that’s not who it is.

6

I
got your boss to her apartment,” Cooper says gruffly by way of greeting. He immediately fills the small room with his strong masculine energy. “And that dog of hers too. I left her on her couch with her phone and a couple of bottles of ginger ale. You should call her husband to let him know how sick she is. I doubt she’s told him.”

He goes straight to Jasmine’s bed to peer down at the dead girl. “Christ, Heather. Are they getting younger or are we getting older? This one looks like she’s barely twelve years old. Are you sure she isn’t sleeping?”

“I’m sure,” I say. “Cooper, thanks for coming up to check on me, but the police are going to get here any minute. You’re probably getting DNA all over the place. And you know not everyone on campus likes you as much as I do, especially since you shot that guy over the summer.”

He looks hurt. “I got named Hot Stud of the Week by
New York College Express,
the daily student news blog, for doing that.”

“I know,” I say sympathetically. “And while they and
I
personally appreciated it very much, especially since you saved my life, I still think you’d better go. There’s that anti-gun-violence group on campus. They complain anytime anyone uses a gun, even against someone who deserves it.”

He ignores me, looking around Jasmine’s room. “Any sign that someone was in here last night when she died?”

I shake my head. “Sarah says everything was exactly like this when she arrived—and I want to keep it that way, so don’t touch anything.”

He gives me a sour look. “Who do you think you’re dealing with here? This is what I do for a living.”

“I thought you make your living sneaking into hotel rooms and planting hidden cameras to take pictures of people cheating on their spouses.”

“Well, that too,” he says, with a shrug of his big shoulders.

“Everything was exactly like this except that her computer was on—” I point to a laptop on Jasmine’s desk. “It was playing a song list set on repeat. Sarah switched it off in order to call the office, so she could hear me. That’s it.”

Cooper walks over to the desk, leaning down to look at the computer. “Weird that someone would have music playing when they’re trying to fall asleep.”

“Weird for you,” I say. “You live in your own multimillion-dollar brownstone. Try living in a noisy dorm, especially on a floor with a lot of new students across the hall, away from home for the first time. Lots of people in that situation can’t sleep
without
music playing. It drowns out all the ambient noise. These walls are thick, but not that thick. Cooper, what are you doing?”

He’s taken one of his ubiquitous handkerchiefs from his pocket and hit the return key on the computer keyboard. He always carries a neatly folded bandana (preferably in blue) somewhere on his person, a trick he picked up from one of his many formerly incarcerated friends. Keeps you from leaving fingerprints, he says.

“Just checking to see the last thing she was doing on the computer before she went to bed, besides listening to iTunes.” He squints down at the keyboard, then the screen. “Twitter,” he says with some disgust.

Cooper refuses to participate in any form of social networking. He doesn’t have a Web site advertising his private investigation business. His clients come from lawyers he knows, word of mouth, and a discreet listing in—of all things—the phone book. He seems to have all the work he can handle, though, proof that not everyone turns to the Internet for their professional needs.

“What a shocker, a college student using Twitter,” I say sarcastically. “Now, come on, you know if the cops find you here they’re going to blame me for messing up their crime scene . . . if her death turns out to be murder.”

He pokes around a little more on her computer. “She wasn’t logged on,” he says. “To Twitter. It’s just the whaddayoucallit, home page. What was her Twitter handle?”

“How would I know?”

He looks around. “Where’s her phone?”

I follow his gaze. “I don’t know.”

“Do you have her phone number? We could call her phone.”

“Of course I have her number,” I say, pulling out my phone and—a little proudly—the wallet-size list of emergency numbers I’d made. “But why is it so important we find her phone?”

“Because then we can find the last person she was talking to. It’s possible that person could give us a little insight into how she died.”

“Or we could just wait for the OCME to tell us.” I’m dialing. “And don’t you have a case of your own you’re supposed to be working on?”

“It’s insurance fraud, a little less pressing than this,” Cooper says. “No dead bodies are involved.”

“Oh.” I hold my cell phone away from my ear. “That’s weird. Jasmine’s phone is ringing in my ear, but not in her room. And now it’s gone to voice mail.”

“Her phone’s not in here,” Cooper says, looking around the room.

“Of course it’s here,” I say, looking around as well. “She must have it on vibrate.”

The clothes Jasmine had worn the day before are in a heap on the floor beside her bathroom door. I walk over to the pile and begin to feel through the pockets of her jeans.

“What young person do you know who doesn’t take her phone to bed with her?” Cooper points at Jasmine’s nightstand, which sits beneath her wide casement window, between the two beds. “It should be right there. But it’s gone.”

“It’s not gone,” I say. Look, her wallet’s here.” I hold it up. “Cash, credit cards, ID, everything still inside. Even her keys.” I jingle them. “So she wasn’t robbed. Who would steal her phone and not her cash? There’s a hundred bucks in this wallet. And that laptop over there is top of the line. It’s not like someone broke in here—there’s no sign the door’s been tampered with. Who would take her phone but not her laptop and cash?”

Cooper shakes his head, unconvinced. “Then where
is
her phone?”

I eye Jasmine’s body. “Probably there.” I point.

Cooper’s gaze follows the direction of my finger, which is aimed at her bedclothes, tangled around the bottom of her legs. He takes a quick step backward.

“No way,” he says.

“Well, you’re the one who thinks all young people take their phones to bed with them,” I say. “Where else is it going to be? Except maybe under her.”

“Well,
I’m
not going to look,” Cooper declares. “You do it.”

“
I’m
not doing it,” I say. “That’s disturbing the dead. It’s my job to make sure no one messes with her . . . including me.”

“But how else are we going to know whether or not it’s there?”

“
We
aren’t going to know,” I say firmly, beginning to shove him toward the door. “The OCME will find it, if it’s there. The only thing either of us
has
to do is leave, meaning you, before the cops get here and arrest you for disturbing a potential crime scene. Go do your job, and I’ll do mine.”

“Fine,” he says, tugging on his shirt, which I’ve caused to become untucked with all my shoving. “I will. You don’t have to get so huffy about it. Just because your case is more interesting than mine—”

“This isn’t a
case,
Cooper. It’s a resident in my building who died, and it’s tragic, but you yourself reminded me just the other day that more young adults end up in hospital emergency rooms than any other age group . . . and more of them
die
in those emergency rooms than any other age group too. So I guess it’s natural that we might lose someone, even this early in the year. But you can’t leap to the conclusion that there was foul play involved, because we don’t know yet—”

Cooper turns by the door somewhere in the middle of this long speech to put his hands on my shoulders. When I’m finished, he says, “Heather. Heather, I know, okay? I’m sorry. I’m so sorry this happened, and I’m sorry to have upset you. That’s the last thing I’d ever want to do. I only wanted to help. I promise I’ll stay out of it from now on, if that’s what you want. I’ll go home and call Perry to cancel our lunch appointment. Okay?”

I groan. I’d forgotten all about our meeting with the wedding planner.

“Oh God. We’re never going to be able to get another appointment with her after canceling like this. You know how she is.”

It’s only because of a sudden cancellation (the bride left the groom for his brother) and Cooper’s father pulling a few strings to get us moved up the waiting list (apparently you can do this if you’re the CEO of a large recording company) that we managed to get a wedding booked at the Plaza at all. Perry, our wedding planner, can’t stop reminding us how fortunate we are, because it’s rare that any size wedding—let alone one as large as ours—is “thrown together at the last minute” in New York City like this. Apparently by “thrown together at the last minute” she means had tens of thousands of our own dollars—many of which are going to her—poured into it weeks in advance.

Sometimes I want to punch Perry in the throat.

“I think we have a fairly good excuse for canceling,” Cooper says soothingly. “So you let me handle Perry. You take care of the situation here.”

The weight of his strong hands on my shoulders—not to mention his deep voice—has a soothing effect, and for the first time since I entered the room to find Jasmine lying there—maybe for the first time since her resident’s mother Mrs. Harris took a seat next to my desk—I begin to feel calm.

I wrap my own arms around Cooper’s waist, comforted, as always, by his warmth, and the smell of the fabric softener we use, mixed with his own innate Cooperish scent.

“I’m sorry I snapped,” I say. “It seems horrible to say under these circumstances, but I was really looking forward to going over the seating arrangements with you.”

“Not horrible,” he says. “Human. And another one of the many reasons I love you.”

He kisses me, then, almost as abruptly as he appeared, he slips out the door to room 1416 and disappears down the back staircase, well before the elevator doors open and several uniformed officers from the Sixth Precinct show up, looking around questioningly.

“Down here,” I call, raising an arm.

It’s a good thing Cooper isn’t here, I think, or he’d comment on how the cops look as young as Jasmine.

At that very moment the door to room 1412 opens, and a pale brown, inquisitive face, framed by a mass of dark curling hair peers out, first at me, then at the approaching police officers.

“What’s going on?” the girl asks drowsily.

“Nothing,” I say, noting that the handmade tag on her door—in construction paper cut into the same cloud shapes as the ones on Jasmine’s ceiling—has the names Chantelle, Nishi, Kaileigh, and Ameera written on it in sparkly silver cursive. “Go back to bed.”

The girl doesn’t listen. Even washed free of makeup, her eyes are huge and dark and beautiful.

“Why are there police here?” she asks in a sleep-roughened voice. She has a British accent. “Has something happened?”

“Nothing for you to worry about, miss.” The first officer is a gangly young man, the leather of his gun belt creaking noisily as he strides toward us. “We got it under control. Go on back inside your room.”

It’s too late. By now the girl is standing in the middle of the hallway in her cream-colored slip and flowered silk dressing gown, her brown feet bare, her hair a riotous ebony halo around her slim shoulders. She wears no jewelry except for a single gold chain around her neck, from which dangles a pair of interlocked silver rings, which jingle softly when she walks.

I know that all the other residents of room 1412—
Chantelle, Nishi, and Kaileigh—are out to lunch at Nobu with Prince Rashid. This girl, then, must be Ameera, the one Kaileigh’s mother described as “a slut.”

I’m not sure what a slut is supposed to look like, but to me, Ameera looks more like an angel. I remember what Prince Rashid said, about Ameera being “amiable.” She seems like the kind of girl a prince—or any boy—would find amiable indeed.

Her gaze travels past me, into Jasmine’s room.

“That’s where my RA, Jasmine, lives,” she says, fully awake now. “Is she there? Jasmine?” Ameera darts toward the door I’ve foolishly left opened behind me. “Jasmine?”

I manage to catch her around the waist—she’s slim as a child, and doesn’t weigh much more than one. One of the female officers darts forward to help me, but Ameera is much stronger than she looks. She manages to drag both myself and the female officer a few steps into Jasmine’s room . . . enough so that she sees her RA’s dead body on the bed.

That’s when Ameera begins to scream.

It’s a long, long time before she stops.