Special Agent Lancaster eyes her. Is it my imagination, or is he smiling a little? If so, it would be a first.
“That depends,” he says drily. “Your boy Ramon have ID?”
“No,” Eva replies sarcastically. “He likes to roam around the city with body bags and a gurney for fun.”
I’ve sunk down onto the bed opposite Jasmine’s body, feeling a little queasy, and hope it’s because of the situation—or the tuna salad sandwich I hastily grabbed for lunch from the dining hall—and not because I’ve picked up Lisa’s flu. It’s close to five o’clock, and all I want to do is go home, crawl into bed, and stay there, preferably with my dog, Cooper, some popcorn, the remote, and a large alcoholic beverage. Maybe not in that order.
“Looks like you lucked out this time.” Eva’s conversational tone rouses me from my fantasy of a vodka-and-cheese-popcorn-soaked Say Yes to the Dress marathon. “No blood spatter or body fluids for your housekeeping crew to have to clean up. God, we couldn’t believe how many messy ones you guys had last year. Those girls in the elevator shafts? Oh, and the head in the pot in the cafeteria? Man, that one took the prize.”
“I’d have preferred not to be eligible for that contest, especially not this year,” I say weakly. “It’s freshman orientation week right now.”
“I see what you mean.” Eva is raising the dead girl’s eyelids to examine her pupils. “It’s kind of early to say what the cause of death is without tox screens, but I don’t see any sign of trauma. You find any prescription pill bottles lying around?”
I’m not surprised by the question. Prescription drug overdose, we were told at an incredibly boring drug-and-alcohol-awareness training session over the summer, is one of the leading causes of death for young adults (after accidents). Someone dies of a prescription pill overdose every nineteen minutes in this country.
“No.” Surprisingly, it’s Special Agent Lancaster who replies. “There’s a bottle of Tylenol in her medicine cabinet.” He nods toward 1416’s bathroom. Unlike many residence halls, all rooms in Fischer Hall have private baths. The building once housed floor-through apartments for some of Manhattan’s wealthiest socialites. Few of the architectural details of those days remain (except in the lobby and cafeteria, which used to be a ballroom), but residents don’t have to go down the hallway to shower. “But it still has the protective seal on it.”
Eva nods as if this is what she expects to hear. She’s feeling the victim’s jaw. “She’s been dead at least twelve hours. Probably passed away last night sometime around . . . I’m going to say three in the morning. She have any preexisting conditions that you knew of?”
“Asthma, according to her student file.” I’d grabbed it on my way upstairs, then skimmed it during the elevator ride to the fourteenth floor.
Special Agent Lancaster says, “Her inhaler is over there on the dresser. It seems like it’s plenty close enough for her to grab.”
“And it’s practically full,” I say, then blush, not having meant to let that slip. We weren’t supposed to have touched anything, but the inhaler is something I found after Cooper left and, because his paranoia about Jasmine’s missing cell phone had made me suspicious, I’d lifted it—using Jasmine’s discarded shirt from the day before—and given it a shake.
Eva doesn’t notice. She picks up the inhaler and gives it a shake herself, then drops it into an evidence bag.
“We’ll take a look at it,” she says, marking something down on her clipboard. “You know, people don’t take asthma as seriously as they should. About nine people a day die from it. It’s one of this country’s most common and costly diseases. She could have had an asthma attack brought on by a reaction to an allergen. Speaking of,” she adds, “my mom thinks she’s allergic to gluten. She’s not, of course. But I’m putting up with it to keep the peace. So if you guys could serve some gluten-free stuff at your wedding, that would be great. Not necessarily a whole separate gluten-free cake, but like some fresh fruit, or whatever.”
“Um,” I say. “Okay. I’ll have the wedding planner make sure the caterer knows.”
Not that I mind that Eva and her mother are coming to my wedding, but I wonder again how they got an invitation. I know I didn’t put them on my list. Granted, my list is pretty lame—it has fewer than fifty people on it, most of whom work either for New York College or the NYPD. From my family, there is only my father and his sister. I haven’t spoken to my mother in over a decade. Even if I had her address—which I don’t—no way would I have invited her. Weddings are supposed to be occasions for joy, not psychodrama.
So while the addition of a cool punk medical examiner and her mom at my wedding is definitely a plus, I’d still like to know how it happened. Did Cooper add Eva and her plus one because he felt sorry for me, as there are so many more people (at least three hundred) on his side?
It’s all very baffling, but again, not something I have time to figure out just now.
“And there’s no sign of, um, vomit in her toilet or trash can,” I volunteer. “So I don’t think she had that stomach flu so many people have.”
Eva looks at me like I’m nuts. “What stomach flu?”
“You know,” I say. I’m still sitting on Jasmine’s visitors’ bed, looking at the posters she’d hung on her walls. “That stomach flu that’s going around.” Then I gasp. “Oh God! Casino Night . . . if there’s a virus or whatever going around, won’t they all get it if they’re confined to a small space, like on a boat? I saw on Voyage to Death that that happened on the Queen Mary 2. The entire ship got the norovirus, a thousand passengers or something, even crew members. The toilets got clogged from everyone’s vomit.”