From the moment Emerson’s lifeless body hit mine to the second she was being zipped into a slick black coroner’s bag could have been five minutes or five hours. The studio was a buzz of muffled conversations and accusatory glances. I wanted nothing more than to crawl back to the cool, dark cave of an apartment and sort out what had just happened—and what it meant. I was ready to dash when a fat, round detective sidled up to me, flipping open his little leather notebook and breathing at me with his coffee breath. I had expected Officer Hopkins, but the gentleman before me was built like a fireplug and wearing his ill-fitting cotton-poly off-the-rack suit like it was an Armani.
“I’m aware of the previous case but I’m not at liberty to talk about it.” He shifted his eyes as though everyone were about to pounce in an attempt to overhear us.
“It just seems odd that they’d send a detective out for this case but not Reginald’s.”
“You are Nina LaShay, right?” the detective said, completely ignoring my question.
I nodded silently, my arms wrapped around my chest, gripping my elbows.
“I’m Detective Moyer. You were the last to see the decedent alive, were you not?”
“Well—no, not that I know of.” An image of Pike rushing out looking disheveled and nervous flashed through my mind, the image flitting so quickly I didn’t have time to dwell on it. “I saw her last night and then,” I gestured to the closet door, still gaping open, its emptiness a quiet screech that Emerson Hawk was dead.
“Then you found her this morning.”
“She . . . kind of . . . found me.”
“Were you and the decedent friends, Ms. LaShay?”
I wanted to focus on answering the detective’s questions, but every time he asked me anything, he smacked his lips in a weird kind of final gesture and it was turning my stomach. “I wouldn’t say we were friends, exactly. We were colleagues. And competitors.”
If I hadn’t been staring at Moyer’s fat, pale lips making that stupid smacking sound, I would have thought better of telling this man—who was tapping the end of his pen, looking thoughtfully at me—that I might have had motive to kill Emerson. I thought of Hopkins and his accusatory stare and then longed for it as Moyer’s eyebrows went up. He poised the pen over his notepad as though he were about to take down some frantic confession, and any inch of confidence I was harboring wilted.
“Isn’t it true that you two got into some kind of argument last night?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it an argument. Just a little disagreement. Emerson spilled a little wine on my dress, that’s all.” And by a “little wine” I meant half a bottle and by “on my dress” I meant soaked clean through until I had a faint purplish hue when I finally stripped the soaked garment off. I shrugged and tried to smile. “Crowded party and . . . accidents happen.”
Accident my slightly purple ass.
Moyer cocked his head. He was a one hundred percent cardboard cutout of every other detective my San Francisco roommate DVR’d each week, right down to his bulbous red nose and the aforementioned “isn’t it true.”
There was an uncomfortable beat of silence as though Moyer expected me to say more.
“And, that’s it,” I said.
Moyer cocked a single caterpillar eyebrow and shot me one of those “prove it to me” expressions. The kind of expression that is so disconcerting it encourages perfectly innocent and well-read people to start babbling like psychopathic idiots. I was a solid four minutes into my soliloquy that contained a good selection of incriminating myself and backpedaling when my voice was drowned out by the ridiculously loud squawking of a black bird pacing the ledge of the open window.
My God, New York was infested.
Though I pathologically hate birds—not fear, hate—as I mentioned before, I could have run up and kissed this one on its filth-infested birdie beak for creating just the distraction that allowed me a millisecond to give myself a mental head-slap and take the vampire equivalent of a deep, calming breath.
My mouth fell open again at the precise time the bird’s beak cracked wide, as though the foul thing was watching me.
“Someone shoo that bird away,” Detective Moyer said, clearly annoyed.
One of the pup cops used his hat to bat at the screen and the black bird did a patronizing flap of its enormous wings, circling about six inches from the ledge, still squawking like a maniac.
Moyer blew out a disgusted sigh and raked a fat hand over his round face. “We’ll need to have you come down to the station to answer some questions,” he said finally. “Now.”
I swallowed and glanced out the window, the sun catching the heavy leaded glass. Just the glare stung my bare shoulders and I inched away. “Can we finish the interview downstairs? Or in a non–bird-infested room? I just would like to not be here.”
Moyer looked around, his eyes landing on the pattern spread on my table, edged by a heap of fabric scraps.
“What’s all this about? You one of the, er, sewing students?”
I felt myself stiffen even though I knew it was not the time to throw my weight(lessness) around. “I’m a designer, actually. This”—I gestured to the tables, the dresses, the patterns—“is a contest. A competition.” I swallowed, thinking of the swish-swish sound Reginald’s shoes made as they scraped across the dining table, thinking of Emerson’s sightless eyes, the slack in her jaw as it stayed open, forever frozen in surprise.
Moyer eyed the fabric swatches and then eyed me, skepticism written all over his face. “Like a TV thing?”
I was about to correct him, but instead bet on the draw-to-Hollywood that most breathers in this anyone-can-be-a-star decade seemed to have. “Yeah.”
I pumped my head, growing more excited and happy that the majority of my never-lie-to-a-cop morals disappeared when my soul did. “Reality TV.”
Detective Moyer’s spider-veined cheeks reddened and pushed up into a smile. “Is that model going to be here?” He looked around as though we were storing her in a closet or a drawer. “The blonde one? The host? She’s from Sweden or Switzerland. Saskatchewan or something.”
“Uh, yeah, absolutely,” I said.
If necessary, I’m sure I could scare up a Saskatchewan model somewhere, right?
Moyer straightened his tie and yanked his pants up over his enormous keg of a belly, his eyes scanning the studio as if he had simply overlooked an enormous camera crew.
“Are you miked?” he asked in a gruff, low murmur.
“Miked?”
He raised his bushy eyebrows and I was amused and horrified that this man of the law would be so into grabbing his fifteen minutes that he would use a homicide to get there. And to get a piece of prime Saskatchewan model ass, apparently.
“No,” I said, leaning in. “This isn’t part of the show.”
I watched Moyer’s Adam’s apple bob as he considered. “I’ll meet you down in the lobby.”
My feet hadn’t so much as touched the lobby’s deco marbled floor when Pike met me at the elevator.
“What are you doing back here?” I wanted to know. “Coming back to make sure the job is done?”
Pike’s eyebrows went up and I tried my best to gauge everything about him—his body heat, the thunder of his heart—but he stayed completely still and relaxed.
It’s too bad the good-looking ones are always sociopaths.
“What are you—?”
I poked his chest with my index finger. “I know what you did.”
“You know that I got shit-faced drunk and slept in the stairwell because I lost my keys?”
“Lost your keys?”
Pike looked sheepish. “They were in my pants.”
I glanced down and realized that Pike was wearing a pair of ill-fitting pants instead of the slim pair that went with his suit. Perhaps earlier, I was too busy looking for bulges instead of the poorly stiched seams and unnatural fabrics to notice the change. But I still wasn’t convinced.
“So you lost your pants and your keys.”
Pike nodded then held my gaze, his eyes meltingly delicious and for the briefest of moments I considered what life with a serial killer might be like.
I shook myself from my revelry. “That’s a convenient story.”
The other elevator plinged! and Detective Moyer stepped out with another officer who was carrying two steaming cups of coffee. Moyer nodded to Pike, who raised his own paper coffee cup to the man.
I narrowed my eyes. “You know Detective Moyer?”
Pike’s eyes cut to me as the steam wisped from around his deep brown eyes. “Didn’t I tell you I work for a lot of people? Sometimes even the NYPD.”
“Right.” I felt myself grimace. “Crime scene photographer.”
I glanced back at where Moyer and the pup cop were setting themselves up, then back at Pike.
“Well you’d better stay around. They want to know who saw Emerson last.”
“And why do you think that was me?”
I narrowed my eyes and Pike narrowed his right back at me and stepped a little closer, his nose—his lips—barely inches from mine.
“Are you accusing me of something, Ms. LaShay?”
“Ms. LaShay?” It was Moyer’s deep voice and he was looking over his shoulder at me now, those heavy brows raised expectantly.
I poked Pike in the chest. “We’re not done.”
And though there is no reason in this realm or the other that it should have, the second we touched, a spark shot through me like delicious wildfire. I pulled my finger back as though it burned but it was too late; Pike’s eyes were low and hooded, and the half-inch of smile on his pursed lips let me know that he felt it, too.
Moyer asked me a rather routine, CSI-type series of questions that I answered with the practiced unease of someone who had seen her first dead body. No one needed to know that back home in San Francisco, my every day was spent with the dead. New York may be the city that never sleeps, but San Francisco was the city that never dies.
“Well,” Moyer said, his pale eyes scanning his notebook as his meat hook of a hand started to close it. “I think that’s pretty much all we need.”
I stood up, but Moyer stopped me. “Oh, Ms. LaShay, just one more thing. Did you recognize the scissors that were used to kill Ms. Hawk?”
My whole body stiffened and if my heart still beat, I knew it would be up in my throat, clanging like a fire bell. I swallowed slowly. “They were mine.”
The buzz and hum of the active lobby was suddenly plunged into a deep, uncomfortable silence as though everyone—from the half-conscious security guard to the honking cabbies right outside the door—had heard me.
“Yours?”
I wanted to lie, to shrug it off, but those scissors would be dislodged from Emerson’s chest eventually, and when they were, they would see my name engraved right across the blade.
“Ms. LaShay, I’m going to have to ask that you don’t leave town until we have this all sorted out. You’re free to contact your lawyer.”
“My lawyer?” I felt myself blanch. “Am I—am I suspected of something?”
Moyer didn’t answer me but his expression told me that his answer was nothing that I wanted to hear.
A cold stripe of fear shot down my spine and my whole body rang electric. I may have fangs, I may have walked this earth for centuries, but right now, I was in deep, deep trouble.