Guns and Roses (47 page)

“Yeah.” Marty Huntsucker, the coroner, looked up from his notebook. “Eighteen stab wounds and she managed to connect on every one of ‘em, looks like. But it was this one on the throat that sealed the deal.”

“She?”

Marty shrugged. “Girls’ dorm, guys aren’t even allowed up here past midnight.”

Joe didn’t bother with the obvious: this one had found a way, and so had Robby Singh.

“Any ideas about time of death?”

“Yeah, between lividity and temp we’re thinking between one and three,” Marty said.

“And no one found him until six?”

Marty shrugged. “Saturday night, baby. Party hard and long, sleep in late. Good days, remember?”

Not really. During Joe’s days here, he hadn’t had a lot of time for partying. It had taken most of his energy just to reinvent himself, to shed the earnest conformity cultivated by his parents: the careful manners, the academic zeal.

“Hey, Joe, you thought about my offer yet?” Paulette asked, focusing not on him but on some invisible speck or fiber she’d managed to snag with a pair of tweezers. Joe grimaced—Paulette’s younger sister still needed a date to Paulette’s wedding. She had promised Joe that Tiffany Huang was cute and “not a head case,” but Joe, everyone’s favorite emergency date, had been burned once too often. He’d been meaning to line up his own date to head off any awkwardness with Paulette.

“Oh, sorry, I meant to tell you—I’ve been seeing someone. I’m thinking of bringing her.” Joe sounded evasive even to himself, and he pretended to be fascinated by the bloody bottle opener.

“Really.” The chill in Paulette’s voice seemed to bring the temperature in the room down a few degrees.

~*~

Back in the lounge, the girls looked even surlier, but Cabot Atley had arrived to help and Odell looked as though he felt a hundred percent better, helping himself to an onion bagel piled with pink cream cheese.

“Only one girl is missing,” Odell said. “Gia Hanover. And her friends say there’s only one place she could be, the gym.”

“On a Sunday morning?” Joe said with surprise.

“Yeah, I guess she does this just about every week. Army’s gone to pick her up.”

“That’s some kind of dedication.”

“Hey.” Odell glared a little balefully. “You want to talk dedication—I’m here, ain’t I?”

The girls had the television on the news, though no one was watching. Most sipped from paper coffee cups and sat in clusters of three and four. A few slept, their fuzzy printed throws making the room seem like one of Madiha’s sleepovers.

“Do we all have to talk to you guys?” one of the girls demanded. “Even if we were, like asleep the whole time?”

“An officer will need to speak with each of you,” Joe said firmly.

“Can we at least go see the guy?” another girl asked. “You know, like to identify him?”

“It’s Tank Nestor, isn’t it?” another said, prompting all the girls to talk at once.

But Joe’s attention was diverted. On the television they were showing footage of Shi’a Muslims in Islamabad observing the Day of Ashura by beating themselves with chains, some attached to razors and knives. It was the stock footage they ran every year during the Muslim month of Muharram, along with a few interviews with the faithful in the San Francisco bay area, sort of the Shi’a equivalent of the Charlie Brown Christmas special.

The casual way the media lumped it all together irked Joe. Only ten percent of Pakistani Muslims were Shi’a; most were Sunni, like his family. Matham, the ritual chest beating, was frowned upon. None of his parents’ friends in Fremont had flogged themselves with anything stronger than a Swedish massage yesterday; he was willing to bet. Ah, well, the blending of cultures took time, even here in the shadow of one of the most progressive cities in the country.

He forced his attention back to the girls.

“One at a time,” he said loudly, holding up a palm for emphasis. “Who is Tank Nestor?”

At this, the girls fell silent, eyeing each other with what might have been complicity or merely a sudden shyness.

“Kaylanna dated him,” a voice finally said uncertainly. Joe found the speaker, a plain-faced girl near the back who was marking her place in a textbook with a finger.

The girl who was wearing the “Boys Suck” T-shirt turned and glared at her accuser. “I wouldn’t call it dating.”

The girl who had spoken up shrugged and looked at the floor. “I just thought…”

Before she could finish her sentence, Army Fiske came through the door trailing a thin, shivering, wet-haired girl in oversized shorts. Gia Hanover, no doubt.

~*~

Joe asked Kaylanna Pace to speak with him and Trina privately, while Odell organized the girls to be interviewed and Fiske escorted Gia to her room to towel off her hair and put on a sweatshirt. Kaylanna sprawled in the same seat where Robby Singh had evaded Trina’s questions. Somewhere between Joe’s first encounter with her and now, she had managed to apply even more makeup, and her lips shone as though they were molded from wet vinyl.

“You dated the victim.”

“I didn’t date him. No one ‘dated’ Tank.” Kaylanna made air quotes using lacquered nails painted a shade of red so dark it was almost black.

“Okay.” Trina gave the girl a fraction of a smile, and not a warm one, at that. “How would you describe it?”

“We hung out. Look, Tank? He’s a
junior
. He’s a starter on the football team. He doesn’t really spend a lot of time with freshmen, get it?”

“What about Gia Hanover?” Trina said. So far, no one had been able to recall seeing Gia since the night before, and her roommate had gone home for the weekend.

The face Kaylanna made indicated that she didn’t think much of the girl either. “Look, Gia tried to be a Little Sister at Sigma Mu. But she wasn’t picked.”

“What’s a Little Sister?”

Kaylanna looked at Trina like she was stupid. “You know, like, the girls who get invited to all their parties. It’s only freshmen girls, before they join sororities. Anyway, if I was her…” Kaylanna paused and grimaced, as though the notion was too distasteful to contemplate. “If I was her I wouldn’t ever go back. But Gia just didn’t get it. She went to that party with some of the other…” Kaylanna let her voice trail away and then sighed.

“Some other what?”

“Some of the other
losers
. Okay? I didn’t want to say it but, you know, you asked. Can I go now?”

“I’d still like to hear more about your own relationship with Tank,” Joe said. “Can you be more specific about what you mean by ‘hanging out’?”

Kaylanna Pace stared at Joe through half-lowered lids that were heavy with mascara, assessing him.

“Is this, like, off the record?” she finally asked.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Like if I say something, not about Tank but like, that could incriminate someone for something totally different —” Joe held up a hand. “We’re not interested in anything unrelated to Tank’s death.” He had a pretty clear idea where this was going.

“He gave me some Ritalin, okay? But only for finals.”

There was a knock at the door. Paulette Huang poked her head in, pushing her glossy hair behind her ears.

“Hey, Joe, Ed wants you,” she said. “It’s kind of a, you probably want to come now.”

“Go ahead,” Trina said. “I’ll finish here.”

Joe followed Paulette down the hall, neither of them speaking as they passed the line of girls waiting for interviews. She led him into a room that initially looked much like the others—two beds, two desks, and clothes and books strewn everywhere.

Ed knelt next to one of the narrow closets, shining a light into its corners.

“Blood everywhere,” Paulette said, pointing out red streaks on the side of a canvas hamper. The strong beam of Ed’s light revealed smears dried on the floor.

“Whose room is this?” Joe asked.

“Gia Hanover’s.”

~*~

Gia pinched the skin of the soft underside of her arm; a practice she’d recently discovered brought her some relief. The room they had brought her to, all the way downtown in a big brick and glass building, was nothing like the dim cinderblock rooms on cop shows; it was actually kind of nice, with a view of tree branches and a table with a smooth, cool synthetic surface. Someone had brought her a Sprite, but Gia intended to drink only water today.

She knew she’d think more clearly if she ate something, but she wasn’t going to eat. Not today.

She’d taken some extra time in the shower at the gym, the water turned up as high as she could stand, scrubbing herself hard with the scratchy industrial fabric of the washcloth. Afterwards she hadn’t bothered to dry her hair. She just wanted to get back to her room, but when she came out of the locker room, that police officer was waiting.

For one crazy minute, she thought he was there to talk to her about Tank, about what he’d done to her. The problem was that—though she had a good idea of what had happened—she wasn’t entirely sure. It was possible she hadn’t protested enough.

But no. The cop, Fiske, was nice enough, but it was clear that it was her they wanted to talk to. It had been hard enough to follow him meekly through the barely-stirring streets of campus; harder still to pass the open doors of the lounge. Everyone was in there, staring at her. And now this. How long had she been sitting here waiting — ten minutes, ten hours? It was hard to know, especially with her head pounding and the sick feeling in her stomach.

“God
damn
it, you can’t keep her in there!” The sudden and unexpected sound of her father’s voice outside in the hall jerked Gia wide-awake. Frank was loud. He used that voice to get what he wanted, around the house and presumably, on the job too, though now that he had been promoted to CIO or whatever it was, maybe he automatically got his way.

Gia got up and went to stand by the door, but she couldn’t hear anything more, so after a minute she sat down again.

Frank was here. That had to be bad.

~*~

Joe tried his mother again. The interview with the Hanover girl meant he’d be late to his parents’ place, but as usual, she wasn’t picking up her phone.

At least Trina had stayed back with Fiske to finish talking to the girls on the dorm floor after the body was taken to the morgue. Tank’s R.A. was on his way to id the body; the wallet in the pocket of the blood-soaked jeans contained both Terrence Nestor’s driver’s license and a pretty good fake Nevada license with the same photo, supposedly belonging to a twenty-two-year-old named Jackson Abernathy.

Once Joe finished with this interview, he’d be done until tomorrow, when the autopsy was scheduled. That would still give him time to get down to Fremont and back in time to watch the Raiders game that he’d recorded.

Joe wasn’t looking forward to interrogating the girl, who looked miserable, frail and most definitely underweight. Odell was dealing with the father, at least.

Joe entered the room, moving slowly, as you might around a skittish cat. Getting the preliminaries out of the way, he watched Gia carefully, but she spoke in a monotone and stared at his neck, never meeting his eyes, and picked at her wrists.

There was something Joe wanted to know before he started asking about the night before. “Where’s your mom?”

The girl’s eyes flickered. “Rehab.” The ragged fingernails of one hand skittered along the skin of her arm.

“Oh. You live with your dad, when you’re home?”

Gia finally glanced at him. “I don’t know. I mean, I never have before. But now, maybe I’ll have to.”

Despite the circumstances, Joe felt the beginnings of pity for the girl. Early stats were in—she was an only child, parents divorced three years, both parents’ addresses were in an expensive L.A. zip code.

“You mean, because your mom’s not there?” he clarified.

“Yeah.” Gia frowned. “Why else?”

Joe placed his palms flat on the table in front of him and tried to decide how to proceed.

“What happened with Terrence Nestor?” he asked gently.

“That’s his name? Terrence?” Gia seemed genuinely surprised.

“Tank, I understand he goes by.”

“Yeah, I never heard anyone call him anything else.”

Joe already knew that Terrence/Tank wasn’t exactly a gentleman around the girls that flocked to Sigma Mu parties. “He was hard to stop,” one of the girls had said when Trina grilled her. “You had to watch yourself around him. But everyone knew that.”

It was something she said after that, which had Joe feeling uncertain about which direction to go, “Not that Gia ever watched herself.” The girl clammed up when he pressed the point, but it had been clear enough—Gia went with nearly anyone who asked and did whatever they asked. She’d already earned a reputation for being a slut, and it was only January of her freshman year.

He watched Gia carefully; she practically vibrated with anxiety. “Did you know Tank well?” he finally asked.