Wanting Sheila Dead(115)

“Oddly enough,” Borstoi said, “I think I know what you mean.”

“Yes,” Gregor said, “well. This afternoon, she would have had it in her bag, but it’s probably gone now. You need to search not just the handbags but the rooms. The bedrooms. I take it the video camera in the study didn’t give you anything you needed.”

“No,” Borstoi said. “It had been disabled. And it had been disabled a long time before the murder. The last footage was from the night before.”

“That’s about right. The murder had to have occurred in the morning, the very early morning, before breakfast. You said the body had been moved—”

“Not from very far. There’s a utility hallway—”

“Right behind, yes, I know. I suppose the body was left there for a while.”

“We can’t tell.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “Get somebody out there to look, or wait for me and we’ll go out there together and look. I’m a little worried about what’s going to happen if we don’t work fast, but I’d like to talk to you if you’re going to be at the station house for a while.”

“I’m going to go and see if I can’t get a search warrant,” Borstoi said. “If you’re coming right out, you shouldn’t have to wait long for me to get back. The girls’ rooms, and their handbags, looking for a glove.”

“That’s right,” Gregor said. “And you’re going to find that glove in the things belonging to a girl named Coraline Mays, and if we don’t get there fast, I think she’s going to commit suicide.”





SIX



1


The police arrived just as Janice Ledbedder was about to go into the interview room. She stood for a second in the hall to watch them pass. There were a lot of men in uniforms, and one of them stopped in front of Olivia Dahl to give her some paperwork. That had to be the warrant, Janice was sure. It made her more than a little nervous to realize that she didn’t know what was going on. She had watched millions of those shows, the documentaries and the mini-documentaries, and the police shows, like CSI Everyplace, and she’d thought she had a good understanding of how a police investigation worked. It turned out she had no idea. The police were not like the police on TV, even if the TV said it was presenting something real, the way it really happened.

Olivia Dahl came back down the hall and found Janice standing in place, staring.

“Go,” she said. “What are you waiting for? Sheila will have a fit. And you’re the last one for tonight.”

“What do you think they’re looking for?” Janice said.

“I have no idea. They want to look through the bedrooms. I’ve sent them upstairs. Now go do your interview while I go upstairs and watch.”

Janice went into the interview room. The lights shining on the chair she was supposed to sit in were too harsh. She was very nervous. She was as nervous as she’d ever been during the whole of this competition. She sat down and looked around. When they showed this on television, if they did, they would block out all the background and it would look like she was sitting in empty space. She didn’t know why they did that, but they were not the only ones. She adjusted her skirt so that it came down almost to her knees and smiled.

“Are you all ready?” somebody asked.

Janice couldn’t see who it was, but she knew it wasn’t Sheila Dunham. She knew Sheila Dunham’s voice.

“I’m fine,” she said. “The police are here. I’m a little nervous.”

“What are you nervous about?” Sheila Dunham asked.

“Well,” Janice said. “I’m nervous all the time, I guess. I didn’t expect to be on the show. I mean, I came to the audition and I had hopes, but I didn’t think I was actually going to get chosen. So, you know, I’m still having a hard time getting used to it. And there are things.”

“What things?”

“I didn’t expect to get on,” Janice said, “so I didn’t make any plans for it. Do you know what I mean? I had to call my mother and tell her I was staying on, and that got her all excited. It was in the papers, you know, about me being asked to the audition.”

“And has it been in the papers that you made it into the house?” That was definitely Sheila Dunham.

“I don’t know,” Janice said. “I haven’t had a chance to really talk to anybody. If I was going to change anything about this, I’d change the thing where we’re not allowed to make calls and we can’t have our cell phones. It makes me really crazy not to be able to talk to anybody. I mean, I know that you’re trying to keep it a secret, who gets into the house and who stays and who gets eliminated. But you see what I mean.”