The Bride Wore Size 12 (6 page)

7

O
ne thing I did not expect when I took on the job as assistant resident hall director of Fischer Hall was that I was going to get to know so many investigators from the NYC Office of the Chief Medical Examiner on a first-name basis.

But thanks to there having been so many sudden deaths in the building over the past year, that’s exactly what’s happened.

“Hi, Heather,” says Eva, the MLI (medicolegal investigator) who shows up to examine Jasmine. “How’s it going? Oh, hey, thanks for the wedding invitation. Is it all right if I bring my mother as my plus one? She’s so damned excited about going to a real celebrity wedding,
and
she’s never been to a wedding at the Plaza before. Plus, you know the chances of
my
ever getting married at this point are slim to none—Mom says I scare guys off with all these tattoos—so you’d be doing me a real solid.”

“Oh,” I say, surprised to hear this . . . not that Eva wants to bring her mother to my wedding, but because these are not exactly the first words I expect to hear someone say as they’re walking into the room of a deceased twenty-year-old. “Sure.”

Also, I don’t recall inviting Eva to my wedding.

But this isn’t the most pressing concern on my mind at the moment.

The Housing Office has kicked into crisis mode, sending all its best people over to Fischer Hall to “deal with” the situation, including the on-staff psychologist, Dr. Flynn, and grief counselor, Dr. Gillian Kilgore.

It’s Gillian who—along with a nurse from Student Health Services—gets Ameera calmed down. She turns out to be way beyond my help. Every time she looked at me—and the female police officer—after we removed her from Jasmine’s room, all she seemed to able to see was the face of her dead RA.

That made her start weeping again, burying her head in her hands so that her long dark hair fell over her face.

It took two young male police officers to drag Ameera out of room 1416 and back into her own room. Afterward, they sat her down and explained that we’d found Jasmine that way—none of us had
done
it to her.

I don’t think she believed us, though.

“But she was
fine
at the party last night,” Ameera kept saying through her tears. Because of her English accent, she pronounced it
pahty
. “She was fine!”

“What party?” I asked, bewildered.

This only set Ameera off into a fresh fit of hysterics, for some reason.

So I’d gone back into Jasmine’s room, reflecting that I’d made a new discovery:

It’s sometimes preferable to sit with the corpse of a student than to be in the company of a live one.

Maybe Lisa’s right: this job
has
hardened me. What a depressing thought for a girl who’s supposed to be getting married in a month.

I tried not to dwell on this, however.

Death certificates can’t be issued for anyone who dies suddenly (and unattended by a physician) in New York State unless that body has first been seen by an MLI (then brought to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner—OCME).

Due to budget cuts, however, there are only a few MLIs assigned to each borough, so depending on how many deaths occur in the city on a given day, it can take anywhere from forty-five minutes to eight hours (sometimes more) for an investigator to show up after a death has been reported.

It took almost four hours for an MLI to show up to examine Jasmine.

Normally this would have meant my spending the afternoon hanging around with a bunch of yawning cops and uptight administrators.

But that’s not how things turned out this time. Because this time, Fischer Hall is housing a VIR, and the deceased lived one floor below him. And one of the first phone calls Dr. Jessup makes after learning about Jasmine’s death appears to have been to Prince Rashid’s special protection team, and they, in turn, have taken over the investigation.

“ID, please.” Special Agent Richard Lancaster, who looks devastatingly handsome in his dark suit and tie (not that I’ve noticed, since I’m a happily engaged woman), steps in front of the door to Jasmine’s room and holds out an intimidatingly large hand.

At least, it intimidates me. Medicolegal Investigator Eva Kovalenko, not so much. She looks as offended as if the agent asked to see something much more intimate than a mere ID.

“Who the hell are you,” Eva demands, “and what are you doing at my crime scene?”

“
Potential
crime scene,” Special Agent Lancaster corrects her.

“Who asked you?” Eva looks even more offended.

I don’t blame Special Agent Lancaster for not realizing who Eva is. With her spiky bleached-blond hair, eyebrow rings, and yellow-rose-of-Texas neck tattoo (the only tattoo that peeks out from beneath her clothes, as she’s wearing a long-sleeved coroner’s jacket. I’ve seen her in short sleeves, and know she has plenty more), Eva looks more like a student than an employee of the OCME.

Still, her attitude isn’t helping much.

“Uh, Eva,” I say. “This is Special Agent Lancaster. He works for the State Department—”

“Bureau of Diplomatic Security,” the agent elaborates woodenly. “It’s the security and law enforcement arm of the U.S. State Department.”

“Who the hell died?” Eva demands. “The shah of Iran?”

“Uh, no,” I say. “It’s a student.”

“The kid of the shah of Iran?”

“Ma’am,” Special Agent Lancaster says in a slow, impassive tone to Eva, “I’m going to need your full name and also the name of your supervisor—”

“My supervisor is the chief medical examiner,” Eva says, whipping a business card out from the pocket of her coat before jostling Special Agent Lancaster aside (and nearly running over his size-twelve feet with her wheelie bag). “Now get the hell out of my way so I can do my job.”

Special Agent Lancaster looks a little startled. He’d had no trouble at all running off the cops from the Sixth Precinct (although they were still in the building. They’d merely retreated downstairs to the dining hall to drink coffee, which Magda, the cafeteria’s extremely popular head cashier and one of my best friends, had been only too delighted to offer to them for free), not to mention everyone who’d shown up from the Housing Office, who were now gathered downstairs in the second-floor library, holding their crisis resolution meeting, which I had to admit I was a little relieved not to be attending.

But the agent was going to have his hands full with Eva, and I could tell he knew it. I saw him touch the wireless communication piece in his ear, then begin speaking softly to someone, most likely in the bureau’s makeshift headquarters in the first-floor conference room. He was probably calling for reinforcements.

“So, um, this is the deceased,” I say to Eva, stepping past the special agent and into room 1416, then pointing Eva in the direction of Jasmine’s body, though of course she’d have had a hard time missing it. It was the only corpse in the immediate vicinity.

“Her name is Jasmine Albright,” I say to Eva. “She’s twenty, a junior. Sarah, our grad assistant, said she had dinner with Jasmine last night—they both had falafel—and Jasmine was fine. Then we tried to reach her this morning and she didn’t pick up. That’s all I know.”

I don’t mention the thing Ameera had said, about Jasmine having been at a
pahty
the night before. None of us—at least those of us who’d been there at the time—had been able to get another word out of her about it. Hopefully Drs. Flynn or Kilgore had better luck, but so far I haven’t heard anything.

Eva mutters a curse word as she looks Jasmine over while simultaneously taking a pair of latex gloves from the kit she carries with her—literally a wheelie bag filled with tools used for collecting postmortem evidence.

“Sorry about this, Heather,” Eva says sympathetically. “I couldn’t believe it when I got the address. I was like,
Noooo. Not Death Dorm again!
”

“Thanks,” I say. I’m as used to Eva’s quirks as I am to her spiked blond hair and tattoos. Contrary to popular belief, medical examiners are usually quite cheerful, though not surprisingly a bit prone to gallows humor, since they spend the majority of their time around dead people.

“What’s up with the suit, though?” Eva asks, flashing a look of annoyance at Special Agent Lancaster. “This girl have rich parents or something?”

“Not that I know of,” I say. “He’s here because we have a Very Important Resident who lives—”

“Ms. Wells,” Special Agent Lancaster snaps, pausing his phone conversation. “The reason for my presence here is on a need-to-know basis, and Ms. Kovalenko does
not
need to. It has nothing to do with this girl’s unfortunate death.”

Eva looks at me questioningly. I shrug. “As far as I know,” I say, “it doesn’t.”

“Well,” she says, her lips forming a hard line. “Ramon and I will be the judge of that, won’t we . . . if he ever finds a place to park the van. What’s going on out there in front of the building, anyway?”

“What do you mean?”

“There are all these buses parked outside, and kids getting onto them.”

Suddenly I remember.

“Oh God.” I put a hand to my mouth. “Casino Night.” I’d totally forgotten.

“
What
night?” Eva asks.

“Casino Night.” I shake my head. “It’s part of orientation week for the new students. All the kids are being taken on a harbor cruise around Manhattan for mocktails and gambling. Not real gambling, of course, there’s no cash involved, they win prizes like New York College sweatshirts and other swag.”

Eva shakes her head. “Things have certainly changed from when I went to college. We thought it was cool when they gave us free hot dogs to grill over a hibachi in the quad. Now you people take them on cruises around Manhattan.”

“Well,” I say. “Hibachis aren’t allowed anymore, because they’re considered a fire hazard.”

Eva rolls her eyes. “Of course. We wouldn’t want any of them learning a skill that might actually come in handy someday, such as barbecuing, would we?” She throws Special Agent Lancaster a narrow-eyed glance. “When my boy Ramon gets here you’ll let him through, right, 007? Or are you going to shoot him?”

Special Agent Lancaster eyes her. Is it my imagination, or is he smiling a little? If so, it would be a first.

“That depends,” he says drily. “Your boy Ramon have ID?”

“No,” Eva replies sarcastically. “He likes to roam around the city with body bags and a gurney for fun.”

I’ve sunk down onto the bed opposite Jasmine’s body, feeling a little queasy, and hope it’s because of the situation—or the tuna salad sandwich I hastily grabbed for lunch from the dining hall—and not because I’ve picked up Lisa’s flu. It’s close to five o’clock, and all I want to do is go home, crawl into bed, and stay there, preferably with my dog, Cooper, some popcorn, the remote, and a large alcoholic beverage. Maybe not in that order.

“Looks like you lucked out this time.” Eva’s conversational tone rouses me from my fantasy of a vodka-and-cheese-popcorn-soaked
Say Yes to the Dress
marathon. “No blood spatter or body fluids for your housekeeping crew to have to clean up. God, we couldn’t believe how many messy ones you guys had last year. Those girls in the elevator shafts? Oh, and the head in the pot in the cafeteria? Man, that one took the prize.”

“I’d have preferred not to be eligible for that contest, especially not this year,” I say weakly. “It’s freshman orientation week right now.”

“I see what you mean.” Eva is raising the dead girl’s eyelids to examine her pupils. “It’s kind of early to say what the cause of death is without tox screens, but I don’t see any sign of trauma. You find any prescription pill bottles lying around?”