“I'm Jason.”
“I'm sick,” Trixie blurted out, cursing herself the minute she heard the words. Could she sound any stupider if she tried?
But Jason had just grinned, off-kilter, again. “Well, then,” he'd said, and started it all. “I guess I need to make you feel better.”
* * *
Zephyr Santorelli-Weinstein worked at a toy store. She was affixing UPC codes for prices onto the feet of stuffed animals when Mike Bartholemew arrived to talk to her. “So,” he said, after introducing himself. “Is now a good time?” He looked around the store. There were science kits and dress-up clothes and Legos, marble chutes and paint-your-own beanbag chair kits and baby dolls that cried on command.
“I guess,” Zephyr said.
“You want to sit down?” But the only place to sit was a little kidsized tea table, set with Madeline china and plastic cupcakes. Bartholemew could imagine his knees hitting his chin or, worse, getting down and never getting back up again.
“I'm good,” Zephyr said. She put down the gun that affixed the UPC labels and folded her arms around a fluffy polar bear. Bartholemew looked at her stretch button-down shirt and stacked heels, her eye makeup, her scarlet nail polish, the toy in her arms. He thought, This is exactly the problem. “I appreciate you talking to me.”
“My mothers making me do it.”
“Guess she wasn't thrilled to find out about your little party.” “She's less thrilled that you turned the living room into some kind of crime scene.”
“Well,” Bartholemew said, “it is one.” Zephyr snorted. She picked up the sticker gun and started tagging the animals again.
“I understand that you and Trixie Stone have been friends for a while.”
“Since we were five.”
“She mentioned that just before the incident occurred, you two were having an argument.” He paused. “What were you fighting about?”
She looked down at the counter. “I don't remember.”
“Zephyr,” the detective said, “if you've got details for me, it might help corroborate your friend's story.”
“We had a plan,” Zephyr sighed. “She wanted to make Jason jealous. She was trying to get him back, to hook up with him. That was the whole point. Or at least that's what she told me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I guess she meant to screw Jason in more ways than one.”
“Did she say she intended to have intercourse that night?”
“She told me she was willing to do whatever it took,” Zephyr said,
Bartholemew looked at her. “Did you see Trixie and Jason having sex?”
“I'm not into peep shows. I was upstairs.”
“Alone?”
“With a guy. Moss Minton.”
“What were you doing?”
Zephyr glanced up at the detective. “Nothing.”
“Were you and Moss having sex?”
“Did my mother ask you to ask me that?” she said, narrowing her eyes.
“Just answer the question.”
“No, all right?” Zephyr said. “We were going to. I mean, I figured we were going to. But Moss passed out first.”
“And you?”
She shrugged. “I guess I fell asleep eventually, too.”
“When?”
“I don't know. Two-thirty? Three?”
Bartholemew looked at his notes. “Could you hear the music in your bedroom?”
Zephyr stared at him dully. “What music?”
“The CDs you were playing during your party. Could you hear that upstairs?”
“No. By the time we got upstairs, someone had turned them off.” Zephyr gathered the stack of stuffed animals, holding them in her arms like a bounty, and walked toward an empty shelf. “That's why I figured Jason and Trixie had gone home.”
“Did you hear Trixie scream for help?”
For the first time since he'd started speaking to her, Bartholemew saw Zephyr at a loss for words. “If I'd heard that,” Zephyr said, her voice wavering the tiniest bit, “I would have gone downstairs.” She set the bears down side
