“Troubled? In what way?”
“Terrible home life. Parents divorced, father out of the picture, mother a big socialite who had no time for her. So Brianna acted out.”
“Acted out how?”
“She was dating this creepy kid, kind of a goth type. He used to come around the school a lot. Had a really scary affect. Like, made you think of Columbine. I wondered about his mental stability.”
“What was his name?” Melanie asked.
“Trevor Leonard. He goes to Manhattan Learning. It’s a high-end school for kids with behavioral issues who are mainstream academically.”
She noted the information on her legal pad. “Any reason to think he was into drugs?”
“That’s possible, sure.” Hogan nodded. “In fact, I’d bet on it.”
“Okay. Last question,” Melanie said. Hogan glanced nervously at the door again. Man, this guy was scared of Patricia Andover. Interesting, really, when you thought about it. “We’re very concerned about Carmen Reyes. Apparently Carmen went to Whitney’s apartment last night right around the time the girls were doing the drugs, and she hasn’t been heard from since. Is there anything you can tell us about Carmen, her friends, her connections, her habits? Anything that might help us locate her?”
“Carmen was relatively new to the school, and I didn’t know her well,” Hogan said. “I could give you my gut reaction. But I’d rather not.”
“Why not? What do you mean?”
“Well, it isn’t based on much, frankly, and I hate to speak ill of a kid.”
“What? Please tell me, Doctor. This is too important to stand on good manners.”
Hogan sighed. “Okay,” he said with obvious reluctance, “but you have to take this for what it’s worth, which isn’t much. As head of counseling, I knew that Carmen had real money problems. She was very concerned about paying for college, not only for herself but for her little sister, Lourdes, who goes to school here also.”
“What’s your point?”
“I don’t know a faster way for a kid to make money than selling drugs. And Carmen struck me as that desperate.” Hogan stopped talking and looked up at the ceiling, scratching his head. “Seems I’ll have to get back to you on the girls’ files. They’re not here.”
“Are you serious?” Melanie said.
“Yeah, I’ve gone through every pile. Somebody must’ve taken ’em. Unless they’re lost, which is always a possibility. As you see, organization is not my forte.”
“Who would take them?”
“You could try Ted Siebert, for starters. He’s been known to just walk into people’s offices and remove records when there’s some kind of legal issue.”
There was a sharp rapping on the frosted glass of the office door.
“Yeah!” Hogan called.
The door opened inward, slamming into the back of Melanie’s chair.
“Sorry, ma’am,” Ray-Ray Wong said.
“We’re just finishing up here, Ray-Ray,” Melanie said. “Any luck searching the lockers?”
“Oh, yeah. We hit the jackpot big time with Carmen Reyes’s locker. We found heroin. And it’s the right stamp.”
14
CARMEN REYES DRIFTED in and out of consciousness. She wanted desperately to stay asleep. Being awake was too horrible. But the physical agony of her confinement prevented her from escaping awareness for more than a few minutes at a time. She was in too much pain. Her limbs tingled with fiery numbness. She was parched and hungry. She needed to go to the bathroom. And breathing required actual thought, if she wanted to avoid swallowing the rag stuffed in her taped mouth.
In moments of lucidity, Carmen relived the events of the night before, seeing them again in the darkness with nightmarish clarity. Last night had felt like a bad dream even while it was happening. From the moment Carmen heard Whitney’s voice, she’d had a strange sense of foreboding. She just knew something was off. If only she’d listened to that instinct.
“Aw, c’mon, Carm, we’ll study for a while, then you can party with us,” Whitney had said, in a wheedling tone Carmen had never heard her use before. It was bizarre, in fact, for Whitney to want anything from Carmen, let alone her company.
“Gee, thanks. But I shouldn’t.”
“No, seriously. I want you to come up. It’s me and Brianna and a special friend of mine who really wants to hang with you.”
“Who’s that?”
Whitney gave an evil giggle. “It’s a surprise.”
Carmen felt sick with anxiety at the thought of what might be going on up there. Drugs? Orgies? She knew the gossip. Who didn’t? Whitney was all anybody talked about.
“I really can’t,” Carmen replied. “Maybe you’re ahead of where I am for the quiz. I really need to just, like, study all night.”
“I need your notes, girl,” Whitney insisted.
“Okay, well, I guess I could bring them upstairs. Do you have a way to copy them?”
“Duh, yeah, it’s called like a fucking Xerox machine. What do you think?”
Carmen didn’t exactly have a Xerox machine in her own apartment. “Okay. I’ll bring them up, but I can’t stay long.”
“Fine, be that way. But come up now, okay? I mean, right now.”
“Okay.”
She’d told Papi she was going upstairs to the Sewards’. His whole face brightened, like he was proud his daughter had such fancy friends, and it made Carmen pity him and want to protect him at the same time. How could she explain that it wasn’t like that?
She took the service elevator up to the penthouse floor. Inside the building, Carmen was help, not a tenant. Even if Whitney invited her, she wouldn’t presume to ride in the front elevator. The service elevator let her out in the back foyer, where the Sewards kept their trash cans. It smelled of garbage and brass polish. All day, every day, Papi polished the building’s brass fixtures. It gave him a rash that he had to treat with a special ointment.
Just as Carmen reached out to press the buzzer, the dead bolt opened from inside.
“Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!” Whitney exclaimed, holding a tiny pink phone up to her eye and pressing a button.
“Did you just take my picture?”
“Mmm-hmm. God, I’m starving. Fucking major munchies. Want some smoked salmon or something?” Whitney asked, backing into the kitchen. Her eyes were funny, the pupils nearly invisible pinpricks in the light blue irises. Carmen knew enough to realize that Whitney was high on something.
“No thanks.”
Whitney opened the door of an enormous stainless-steel built-in refrigerator and peered inside. She was dressed exactly as she had been in school earlier that day, in an abbreviated navy sweater, white thigh-highs, and electric blue Pumas, but she’d taken her kilt off and was walking around in teeny-tiny thong panties. She had a small flower tattooed on her lower back. Whitney turned, shoving a piece of orangey pink smoked salmon, sliced so thin it was nearly translucent, into her mouth with her fingers. The panties were sheer enough that Carmen saw Whitney had one of those Brazilian bikini waxes, everything gone except a small triangle, like a stripper. Carmen had read about that in a Cosmo magazine she kept hidden under her bed but had never seen it in real life. Whitney had a long, perfect torso and legs, tanned a dusky gold. Carmen tried not to stare, but it was almost impossible to look away from Whitney’s unreal beauty, so recklessly displayed. In Carmen’s house they didn’t prance around half naked.
“Mmm, yum. Salty.” Whitney licked her oily fingers.
“I brought the notes,” Carmen said, holding out her calculus notebook.
“We’ll get to that. Come on. Back in my room.”
Carmen followed Whitney down the hallway leading to the rear bedroom, marveling as she had the previous few times she’d visited at the enormous, empty rooms they passed. A darkened dining room with a glittering chandelier and elaborate murals of New York in the time of the Algonquins. A library whose floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookshelves were filled with perfectly aligned hand-tooled leather books. A “music room” that held no musical instruments but boasted numerous settees, ottomans, and window treatments in candy-hued silk. It went on and on, all of it looking as if no people ever set foot in it. A neutron bomb might’ve hit and killed all the humans, so undisturbed were the spaces. Strange to be fabulously rich and yet leave no impression on your own home.