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  “What if,” Sarah says, “Lindsay’s body isn’t in the river? Supposing it’s still in the building. Supposing… my God, supposing it’s still in Lindsay’s room!”

  “Then we’d have heard from Cheryl already,” I say. “Since she and Lindsay’s roommate swapped spaces first thing this morning.”

  “Oh.” Sarah looks disappointed. Then she brightens. “Maybe it’s somewhere else in the building! Like in someone else’s room. Could you imagine coming home from class and finding a headless body in your swivel chair, like in front of your computer?”

  My stomach twists. The café mocha is not resting well.

  “Sarah,” I say. “Seriously. Shut up.”

  “Oh, my God, or what if like we find it in the game room, propped up against the foosball table?”

  “Sarah.” I glare at her.

  “Oh, lighten up, Heather, “she says, with a laugh. “Can’t you tell I’m resorting to gallows humor in an effort to break the connection between such a horrifying stimulus and an unwanted emotional response, such as revulsion or fear, which in this case wouldn’t be helpful or professional?”

  “I’d prefer revulsion,” I say. “I don’t think anyone has to be professional when there’s a headless cheerleader involved.”

  It’s at this moment that Tom chooses to appear in the doorway to his office.

  “Can we not say that word?” he asks queasily, grasping the door frame for support.

  “What?” Sarah flicks some of her curly hair off her shoulder.“Cheerleader?”

  “No,” Tom says.“Headless. We have her head. Just not the rest of her. Oh, God. I can’t believe I just said that.” He looks at me miserably. There are purple shadows under his bloodshot eyes from his night spent at the hospital, and his blond hair is plastered unattractively to his forehead from lack of product. Under ordinary circumstances, Tom wouldn’t be caught dead looking so unkempt. He’s actually fussier about his hair than I am.

  “You should go to bed,” I say to him. “We’ve got things covered in here, Sarah and I.”

  “I can’t go to bed.” Now Tom looks shocked. “A girl’s been found dead in my building. Can you imagine how that would look to Jessup and everybody? If I just… went to bed? I’m still on employment probation, you know. They’d just decide I can’t hack it and—” He swallows. “Oh, my God, did I just say the word hack? ”

  “Go back in your office, shut the door, and close your eyes for a while,” I say to him. “I’ll cover for you.”

  “I can’t,” Tom says. “Every time I close my eyes, I see… her.”

  I don’t have to ask what he means. I know, only too well. Since the same thing keeps happening to me.

  “Hey.” A kid in a hoodie, with a tiny silver pair of barbells pierced through the bottom of his nose, leans his head into the office. “Why’s the café closed?”

  “Gas leak,” Sarah, Tom, and I all say at the same time.

  “Jesus,” the kid says, making a face. “So I gotta walk across campus to get breakfast?”

  “Go to the student union,” Sarah says quickly, holding out a meal pass. “On us.”

  The kid looks down at the voucher. “Sweet,” he says, because with the voucher, the meal won’t be subtracted from his daily quota. Now he can have TWO dinners, if he wants to. He shuffles happily away.

  “I don’t see why we can’t just tell them the truth,” Sarah declares, as soon as he’s gone. “They’re gonna find out anyway.”

  “Right,” Tom says. “But we don’t want to cause a panic. You know, that there’s a psychopathic killer loose in the building.”

  “And,” I add carefully, “we don’t want people finding out who it was before they’ve gotten hold of Lindsay’s parents.”

  “Yeah,” Tom says. “What she said.” It’s weird having a boss who doesn’t actually know what he’s doing. I mean, Tom’s great, don’t get me wrong.

  But he’s no Rachel Walcott.

  Which, on balance, is something to be grateful for… .

  “Hey, you guys,” Sarah says. “What am I? Ha, ha, ha, thump.”

  Tom and I look at one another blankly.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Someone laughing his head off. Get it? Ha, ha, ha, thump.” Sarah looks at us reprovingly when we don’t laugh. “Gallows humor, people. To help us COPE.”

  I glance at Tom. “Who’s with the birthday kid?” I ask him. “The one at the hospital? If you and I are here, I mean?”

  “Oh, crap,” Tom says, looking ashen-faced. “I forgot about him. I got the call, and—”

  “You just left him?” Sarah rolls her eyes. Her contempt for our new boss isn’t something she tries to hide. She thinks Dr. Jessup should have hired her to take over, even though she’s a full-time student. A full-time student whose part-time hobby is analyzing the problems of everyone she meets. I, for instance, allegedly have abandonment issues, due to my mother running off to Argentina with my manager… and all of my money.

  And because I have not pursued the issue as aggressively as Sarah thinks I should via the courts, I allegedly suffer from low self-esteem and passivity, as well. At least according to Sarah.

  But I feel like I have a choice (well, not really, because it’s not like I’ve got the money to pursue it in the courts, anyway): I can sit around and be bitter and resentful over what Mom did. Or I can put it behind me and just get on with my life.

  Is it wrong I choose the latter?

  Sarah seems to think so. Although this is only the stuff she tells me when she’s not busy accusing me of having some kind of Superman complex, for wanting to save all the residents in Fischer Hall from ever coming to harm.

  It really isn’t any mystery to me why Sarah didn’t get the job and Tom did. All Tom ever says to me is stuff like he likes my shoes, and did I see American Idol last night. It’s much easier to get along with Tom than it is with Sarah.

  “Well, I think murder trumps alcohol poisoning,” I say, coming to Tom’s defense. “But we still need to have someone there with the resident, especially if he doesn’t end up getting admitted… .” If Stan finds out we have a resident in the ER with no one there to supervise his care, he will flip out. I don’t want to lose my new boss just when I’m starting to like him. “Sarah—”

  “I have a lab,” she says, not even looking up from the sign-in sheets she’s gathering to photocopy, ostensibly so the police can check to see if Lindsay had any guests the night before who might have decided to repay her hospitality by cutting her head off.

  Except, of course, Lindsay hadn’t. We’d been over the logs twice. Nothing.

  “But—”

  “I can’t miss it,” Sarah says. “It’s the first one of the new semester!”

  “I’ll go, then,” I say.

  “Heather, no.” Tom looks panicky. I can’t tell if it’s because he genuinely doesn’t want to put me through a New York City ER waiting room after what I’ve already been through this morning, or if it’s just that he doesn’t want to be left alone in the office, considering the fact that he’s so new to his job. “I’ll get one of the RAs… .”

  “They’ll all have classes, too, just like Sarah,” I say. I’m already on my feet and reaching for my coat. The truth is, I’m not trying to be a martyr. I’m actually seriously welcoming the chance to get out of there. Though I try not to act like it. “Really, it’s fine. They’ll have to admit him soon, right? Or let him go. So I’ll be back soon. It is a he, right?”

  “What girl would be stupid enough to try to drink twenty-one shots in one night?” Sarah asks, rolling her eyes.

  “It’s a guy,” Tom says, and hands me a slip of paper with a name and student ID number on it, which I shove into my pocket. “Not the most scintillating conversationalist, but then, he was still unconscious when I was there. Maybe he’s awake by now. Need petty cash for cab fare?”

  I assure him I still have what I’d grabbed from the metal box earlier, when I’d been on my way to sp
ell him… before we’d found out about Lindsay.

  “So,” Tom says to me in a quiet voice, as I’m about to head out the door. “You’ve dealt with this before.” We both know what he means by this. “What, um, should I do? ”

  He looks really worried. That and the bed head make him seem younger than he really is… which, at twenty-six, is still younger than me. Almost as young as Barista Boy.

  “Be strong,” I say, laying a hand on his massive, Izod-sweater-clad shoulder. “And whatever you do… don’t try to solve the crime yourself.Believe me.”

  He swallows. “Whatever. Like I want to end up with my head in a pot? No, thanks.”

  I give him a reassuring pat. “I’ll be on my cell if you need to reach me,” I say.

  Then I beat a hasty retreat into the hallway, where I run into Julio, the head housekeeper, and his newly hired nephew—nepotism is as alive and well at New York College as it is anywhere else—Manuel, laying rubber-backed mats along the floor in order to protect the marble from salt the residents will track in when it finally starts snowing.

  “Heather,” Julio says to me worriedly as I breeze past, “is it really true, what they say? About… ” His dark eyes glance toward the lobby, in which police officers and college administrators are still swarming like fashionist as at a sample sale.

  “It’s true, Julio,” I stop to tell him, in a low voice. “They found a… ” I’m about to say dead body, but that isn’t strictly true. “Dead girl in the cafeteria,” I settle for finishing.

  “Who?” Manuel Juarez, an outrageously handsome guy I’d heard some of the female—and even some of the male—student workers sighing over (I don’t bother, because of course I don’t believe in romance in the workplace. Also because he’s never looked twice at me, and isn’t likely to, with so many nubile nineteen-year-olds in belly-baring tees around. I haven’t bared my belly since, um, it started jutting over the waistband of my jeans), appears concerned. “Who was it?”

  “I can’t really say yet,” I tell them, because we’re supposed to wait until the deceased’s family has been informed before giving out their name to others.

  The truth, of course, is that if it had been anyone but Lindsay, I’d have told them in a heartbeat. But everyone—even the staff, whose tolerance for the people whose parents provide our paychecks is minimal, at best—liked Lindsay.

  And I’m not going to be the one to tell them what happened to her.

  Which is one of the reasons I’m so grateful to have this chance to be getting out of here.

  Julio shoots his nephew an annoyed look—I guess because he knows as well as I do that I’m not allowed to give out the name—and mutters something in Spanish. Manuel flushes darkly, but doesn’t reply. I know Manuel, like Tom, is still so new that he’s on employment probation. Also that Julio is the strictest of supervisors. I wouldn’t want to have him as my boss. I’ve seen the way he gets when he catches the residents Rollerblading across his newly waxed floors.

  “I have to go to the hospital about a different kid,” I tell Julio. “Hopefully I’ll be back soon. Keep an eye on Tom for me, will you? He’s not used to any of this stuff.”

  Julio nods somberly, and I know my request will be carried out to the letter… even if it means Julio has to fake a spilled can of soda outside the hall director’s door, so he can spend half an hour cleaning it up.

  I manage to make it past all the people in the lobby and out into the cold without being stopped again. But even though—miraculously—there’s a cab pulling up in front of Fischer Hall just as I walk out, I don’t hail it. Instead, I hurry on foot around the corner, back toward the brownstone I left just a couple of hours before. If I’m going to be sitting in the hospital all day, there are a couple of things I need—like my remedial math textbook so I can be ready for my first class, if it isn’t canceled due to snow, and maybe my Game Boy, loaded with Tetris (oh, who am I kidding? Between studying and Tetris, it’s a solid bet I’ll be spending my morning trying to beat my high score). Still, maybe I can convince Lucy to come outside and get her business done, so I don’t have to worry about finding any surprises later.

  The clouds above are still dark and heavy with unshed moisture, but that isn’t, I know, why Reggie and his friends are nowhere to be seen. They’ve scattered thanks to the heavy police presence around the corner, at Fischer Hall. They’re probably in the Washington Square Diner, taking a coffee break. Murder’s as tough on the drug business as it is on everything else.

  Lucy is so puzzled to see me home this early that she forgets to protest about being let outside into Cooper’s grandfather’s cold back garden. By the time I’ve retrieved my textbook and Game Boy and come back downstairs, she’s sitting by the back door, her business steaming a few yards away. I let her back in and hastily clean up her mess, and am about to tear from the house when I notice the message light blinking on the machine in the hall—our house phone, as opposed to Cooper’s business line. I press PLAY, and Cooper’s brother’s voice fills the foyer.

  “Um, hi,” my ex-fiancé says. “This message is for Heather. Heather, I’ve been trying to reach you on your cell as well as your work phone. I guess I keep missing you. Could you call me back as soon as you get this message? I have something really important I need to talk to you about.”

  Wow. It really must be important, if he’s calling me on Cooper’s house line. Cooper’s family haven’t spoken to him for years—since they learned the family patriarch, Cartwright Records founder Arthur Cartwright, had left his black sheep grandson his West Village brownstone, a prime piece of New York City real estate (valued at eight million dollars). Relations hadn’t exactly been warm before that, though, thanks to Cooper’s refusal to enter the family business (specifically, Cooper refused to sing bass in Easy Street, the boy band his father was putting together).

  In fact, if it wasn’t for me—and my best friend Patty and her husband Frank—Cooper would have spent Christmas and New Year’s by himself (not that the prospect of this seemed to have bothered him very much), instead of basking in the warm glow of family… well, Patty’s family, anyway, my own family being either incarcerated (Dad) or on the lam with my money (Mom. It’s actually probably good I’m an only child).

  Still, I’d found during the years I’d dated Cooper’s brother that what was important to Jordan was rarely important to me. So I don’t exactly scoop up the phone and call him right back. Instead, I listen to the rest of the messages—a series of hang-ups: telemarketers, no doubt—and then head back out into the cold toward St. Vincent’s.

  Now that I want one, of course I can’t find a cab, so I have to hoof it the five or six blocks (avenue blocks, not short street blocks) to the hospital. But that’s okay. We’re supposed to get a half hour of exercise a day, according to the government. Or is it an hour? Well, whatever it is, five blocks in bitter cold seem more than enough. By the time I get to the hospital, my nose and cheeks feel numb.

  But it is warm in the waiting room—if chaotic… though not as much as it normally is: the weather forecast has apparently frightened most of the hypochondriacs into staying home—and I’m able to find a seat with ease. Some kindly nurse has turned the channel on the waiting room television set from Spanish soaps to New York One, so everyone can keep abreast of the coming storm. All I need to get comfy is a little hot cocoa—and I come by that easily enough, by slipping some coins into the coffee vending machine—and some breakfast.

  Food, however, is less easy to come by in the St. Vincent’s ER waiting room, unless I’m willing to settle for Funyuns and Milk Duds from the candy machine. Which, under ordinary circumstances, I would be.

  But in light of this morning’s events, my stomach is feeling a little queasy, and I’m not sure it can handle a sudden influx of salt and caramel with its usual ease.

  Plus, it’s five of the hour… the time when the security guards open the ER doors and allow each patient inside to have visitors. In the case of my student, that visitor would
be me.

  Of course, when I need it, I can’t find the slip of paper Tom had handed to me, the one with the student’s name and ID number on it. So I know I’ll have to wing it when I get into the ER. Hopefully there won’t be that many twenty-one-year-olds in there, sleeping off way too many birthday shots from the night before. I figure the nurses might be able to help me out… .

  But in the end, I don’t need any help. I recognize my student the minute I lay eyes on him, stretched out on a gurney beneath a white sheet.

  “Gavin!”

  He groans and buries his face in his pillow.

  “Gavin.” I stand beside the gurney, glaring down at him. I should have known. Gavin McGoren, junior, film-making student, and the biggest pain-in-the-butt resident in Fischer Hall: Who else would keep my boss up all night?

  “I know you’re not asleep, Gavin,” I say severely. “Open your eyes.”

  Gavin’s lids fly open. “Jesus Christ, woman!” he cries. “Can’t you see I’m sick?” He points at the IV sticking out of his arm.

  “Oh, please,” I say disgustedly. “You’re not sick. You’re just stupid. Twenty-one shots, Gavin?”

  “Whatever,” he mutters, folding his IV-free arm over his eyes, to block out the light from the fluorescents overhead. “I had my boys with me. I knew I’d be all right.”

  “Your boys,” I say disparagingly. “Oh, yeah, your boys took great care of you.”

  “Hey.” Gavin winces as if the sound of his own voice hurts. It probably does. “They brought me here, didn’t they?”

  “Dumped you here,” I correct him. “And left. I don’t see any of them around anymore, do you?”

  “They had to go to class,” Gavin says blearily. “Anyway, how would you know? You weren’t here. It was that other tool from the hall office—where’d he go?”

  “If you mean Tom, the hall director,” I say, “he had to go deal with another emergency. You’re not our only resident, you know, Gavin.”

  “What are you riding on me for?” Gavin wants to know. “It’s my birthday.”

  “What a way to celebrate,” I say.