Wanting Sheila Dead(114)

“Not bad,” Gregor said. “Come on out and get me. I’ll get something to eat. If I’m lucky, I’ll talk to Len Borstoi and we’ll be able to meet him at the police station. I don’t think I could stand to pay another taxi for that ride. They charge you enough to buy a house. I don’t even know if I’ve got enough money on me.”

“I’ll be right out,” Bennis said. “Eat something. You’re going to kill yourself with the way you’ve been behaving lately.”

“I’ll see you in a minute.”

It would, Gregor knew, be more than a minute, and probably more than ten. He got up and went to the counter. There were three big pizzas back there, all available to buy by the slice. He asked for a slice of sausage and a slice of onion and mushroom, and waited patiently while the man in the white apron slid them onto a paper plate. Then he asked for a bottle of water, and paid.

Back at the booth, he set his food and water down and took his notebook out of his pocket. The case of Sophie Mgrdchian had looked simple but really been complicated—that is, it had actually been a con game and not just an old lady passed out on her own foyer floor. The case of America’s Next Superstar looked complicated, but it was really entirely straightforward. It only seemed complicated because people kept insisting on making it make sense.

No, that wasn’t the way to put it.

Gregor paged through his notebook and came to the page where he had written out the names of the girls and their roommates. He looked down the list and frowned:



Shari Bernstein and Linda Kowalski

Janice Ledbedder and Ivy Demari

Coraline Mays and Deanna Brackett

Grace (Harrigan) Alsop and Suzanne Toretti

Mary-Louise Verdt and Alida Akido

Andra Gayle and Marcia Lee Baldwin

Brittney Cox and Faith Stackdopole



Fourteen girls, each of them chosen from thousands of applicants across the country, and then chosen again from the thirty applicants who had been allowed to do an on-camera audition. Fourteen girls—but it didn’t help, really, to know who roomed with whom unless he also knew the characters of the girls involved, and he only knew those sketchily. No, it wasn’t who they roomed with that was the key. It was—

He shook his head. The pizza was passable, but not spectacular. The water made him wonder when it had become commonplace for restaurants to sell the stuff in bottles instead of just give it away in glasses. Fourteen girls, plus a fifteenth who was not on anybody’s official list. She had not been asked to come in and audition. She had not been one of the thirty chosen for the on-camera auditions and the first on-camera elimination. She was just there, out of the blue, and if she had had a gun full of real bullets and disappeared afterward, that was all she would ever have been.

Fourteen girls, plus a fifteenth, dead in a room with a video security camera in it that apparently had been no use at all. If it had been, Len Borstoi would not be floundering around telling Gregor Demarkian he was hired.

He’d have to ask about the security camera. He’d have to ask about a lot of things. At the moment, he knew a couple.

He got out his phone and called Len Borstoi’s cell number, a number he’d had now for less than ten hours. He was thinking that if he got Borstoi at dinner, or in bed, he would probably hear about it.

He got Borstoi at the station house. He knew that because he recognized the sounds in the background. Police stations sound the same everywhere.

“Listen,” he said. “There’s something you need to do. Or to get the uniforms to do. And it had better be done sooner rather than later. Although I think it’s probably already too late.”

“Too late to find what?”

“A glove,” Gregor said. “A single, small stretchy glove. It might be a latex glove, but I doubt it. For one thing, you can sometimes get fingerprints off the inside of latex gloves, although I don’t know why I think our murderer would know that. What she’s much more likely to know is that a latex glove would be a red flag. If it was found on her, it would immediately cause suspicion. And she would have to have had it on her today.”

“We searched them all today,” Len Borstoi said. “Don’t you think you would have noticed a single glove?”

“No, I don’t,” Gregor said. “This afternoon, it would probably have been in her handbag. You’ve seen the handbags those girls carry around? They’re the size of suitcases. And they’ve got everything but the kitchen sink in them. Makeup. Pieces of clothing. If one of your guys was poring through a huge bag like that, a single glove wouldn’t look suspicious or like anything but one more bit of stray clothing shoved in the bag when she didn’t know what else to do with it. And my guess is that her bag would have had a fair amount of stray clothing in it. And maybe more than one glove. What you’re looking for is something stretchy that kind of contracts when it’s off the hand, and not too noticeable a color. Maybe a beigy kind of thing, what they call ‘champagne’ in stores. And my guess would be that it’s a lace thing, with mesh and little patches of stuff—I’m no good at describing women’s clothing. There’s this kind of stretchy lace they make gloves out of sometimes that has little appliqued things on it. Butterflies. That kind of thing.”