Kiss Me, Kill Me

Trey would help her, she knew it. Her ex was still furious about the video, but they were talking again, and he’d told her that if she ever needed anything to just ask.

She saw a phone charger in the bedroom, but no phone. What if the owner had only a cell phone?

She crawled out of the bedroom and realized she hadn’t been outside the room since she’d arrived. The view of New York City from the picture windows took her breath away. She sat on the floor and looked around.

If she’d thought the bedroom was nice, the living room was gorgeous. Plush gray carpeting; dark-gray leather furniture; glass tables and splashes of blues and greens in paintings and throw rugs. This guy, Dennis’s brother, had to be rich.

She saw double doors across the room and made her way over, the effort depleting her energy. She was dizzy and tired.

The double doors led to a den. On the desk was an Apple computer.

“Thank you,” she whispered and crawled into the room.

She pulled herself up onto a chair. While she didn’t have Charlie’s password, she could access the guest account, and was able to get on the Internet.

She logged on to her Facebook page and was about to send Trey a message when she realized she didn’t know where she was. She needed to search Charlie’s office and find an address, anything, but she could barely see, as if everything on the periphery was black and she saw only what was directly in front of her.

She typed Trey a message and hoped it made sense. She didn’t know if she had the strength to crawl back to bed, but she had to try. She needed to sleep.

Don’t you dare, bitch …

SEVEN

At nine a.m. Thursday, Suzanne met Detective Panetta at the Starbucks around the corner from the apartment of their Jane Doe, identified this morning as Jessica Bell. “Light, no sugar,” Panetta said and handed Suzanne her coffee.

She didn’t hide her surprise. “After all these years, you remembered?”

He grinned. “My ironclad memory keeps my wife happy.”

They walked down West 112th Street, St. John the Divine Cathedral at the far cross street. It was a nice, clean neighborhood lined with apartment buildings of various ages, many filled with college students from nearby Columbia University. The wind had died down, but it had been drizzling on and off all morning.

“Did you see the Post?” she asked.

“Couldn’t miss it.”

“They make us look like idiots.”

“You got to ignore them.”

“It’s hard to ignore a front-page headline.”

Suzanne resented the media because they’d fucked up one of her cases a few years back. She pushed aside her frustration and changed the subject.

“So you ID’d the victim fast.”

“Had it by last night,” Panetta said. “She was reported missing by her roommate Monday morning, so we did a photo ID, then had the university send her prints in for confirmation. The coroner confirms that Jessica Bell was dead at least forty-eight hours before her body was found. It’ll be hard to get a specific time of death.”

“A range?”

“Not longer than a week, more than forty-eight hours. They’re performing some advanced tests that could possibly narrow it further, but those results won’t be overnight.”

“That’s good enough for now; we’ll be able to establish when her roommate last saw her and go from there. Chances are that she was at that party and died Saturday night.” Suzanne sipped her coffee as she walked. “She didn’t go to that party alone.”

“You don’t know that for a fact.”

“College kids may be idiots with their wild parties and drinking and drugs; they may leave with people they don’t know. But going to the party? Girls don’t go alone. Maybe guys do, but not girls. Or they meet up with someone when they get there.”

“Point taken.”

“So why didn’t one of her friends say something? Or look for her? Go to the police department and say, Hey, I was at a party with my friend Jessica and she disappeared.” Panetta opened his mouth to respond, but Suzanne answered her own question. “Because they’d be busted. Trespassing. Drunk and disorderly. Vandalism. Underage drinking. Possession of drugs. Whatever it was they were into, it was illegal. But more likely a misdemeanor, and we’d be on the case faster, talk to people faster, track down a witness, and maybe have a fucking clue who this bastard is.”

Panetta stopped walking and looked at her feet.

She glanced over her shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“Just looking at the soapbox you’re standing on.”

She grinned and shook her head. “Okay, I know, it’s a sore spot for me.” They continued walking. “But you have kids, right?”

“Three daughters.”

“What would they do?”

“Call me.”

“You sure?”

Panetta nodded. “My oldest has never been in any serious trouble, but the other two have called me several times over the years to pick them up from a party where things got out of hand. I told them they’d rather be grounded than dead, and they agreed.” He sighed. “My youngest is graduating from high school in June. She’s deciding between Boston U and Georgetown.”

“Two great schools,” Suzanne said, impressed. “I was a Terrier.”

“How’d you like Boston?”

She shrugged. “I like Manhattan more.” She’d hated Boston, partly because she’d felt sorely out of place there, a conservative small-town Southern girl going to an urbane, big-city university. It was perhaps ironic, she’d ended up falling in love with New York City after the FBI assigned her here when she graduated from Quantico ten years ago. Now she didn’t want to leave. She’d turned down a promotion last year because she would have had to move to Montana. New York was cold enough. She’d have been a supervisory special agent in the Helena regional office-a smaller office, different crimes, and in the middle of nowhere. The incremental increase in pay wasn’t enough for her to give up fieldwork, and sitting behind a desk issuing orders wasn’t her style.

Besides, she’d grown up in the middle-of-nowhere South; she wasn’t working in the middle-of-nowhere North.

They stopped in front of Jessica Bell’s seven-story apartment building. At one time, the building had been comprised of large one- and two-bedroom apartments; most had been divided and the place was now more like an off-campus studio dormitory than individual apartments.

Jessica Bell’s roommate, Lauren Madrid, appeared shell-shocked when she opened the door and faced Suzanne and Detective Panetta. Lauren was a young, attractive, light-skinned Hispanic-a little on the skinny side maybe, thought Suzanne.

“You’re here about Jessie.”

“May we come in?” Suzanne asked.

Lauren opened the door wider and Suzanne stepped inside. There were two rooms: a small living area with a kitchen, and a bedroom that they shared. Two twin beds on opposite walls could be seen through the open double doors.

Panetta closed the door when Lauren walked to the worn couch and sat down cross-legged. “She’s really dead.”

“Yes,” Suzanne said, taking a seat next to her. “We have some questions, and for us to catch Jessica’s killer,