I don’t think she believed us, though.
“But she was fine at the party last night,” Ameera kept saying through her tears. Because of her English accent, she pronounced it pahty. “She was fine!”
“What party?” I asked, bewildered.
This only set Ameera off into a fresh fit of hysterics, for some reason.
So I’d gone back into Jasmine’s room, reflecting that I’d made a new discovery:
It’s sometimes preferable to sit with the corpse of a student than to be in the company of a live one.
Maybe Lisa’s right: this job has hardened me. What a depressing thought for a girl who’s supposed to be getting married in a month.
I tried not to dwell on this, however.
Death certificates can’t be issued for anyone who dies suddenly (and unattended by a physician) in New York State unless that body has first been seen by an MLI (then brought to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner—OCME).
Due to budget cuts, however, there are only a few MLIs assigned to each borough, so depending on how many deaths occur in the city on a given day, it can take anywhere from forty-five minutes to eight hours (sometimes more) for an investigator to show up after a death has been reported.
It took almost four hours for an MLI to show up to examine Jasmine.
Normally this would have meant my spending the afternoon hanging around with a bunch of yawning cops and uptight administrators.
But that’s not how things turned out this time. Because this time, Fischer Hall is housing a VIR, and the deceased lived one floor below him. And one of the first phone calls Dr. Jessup makes after learning about Jasmine’s death appears to have been to Prince Rashid’s special protection team, and they, in turn, have taken over the investigation.
“ID, please.” Special Agent Richard Lancaster, who looks devastatingly handsome in his dark suit and tie (not that I’ve noticed, since I’m a happily engaged woman), steps in front of the door to Jasmine’s room and holds out an intimidatingly large hand.
At least, it intimidates me. Medicolegal Investigator Eva Kovalenko, not so much. She looks as offended as if the agent asked to see something much more intimate than a mere ID.
“Who the hell are you,” Eva demands, “and what are you doing at my crime scene?”
“Potential crime scene,” Special Agent Lancaster corrects her.
“Who asked you?” Eva looks even more offended.
I don’t blame Special Agent Lancaster for not realizing who Eva is. With her spiky bleached-blond hair, eyebrow rings, and yellow-rose-of-Texas neck tattoo (the only tattoo that peeks out from beneath her clothes, as she’s wearing a long-sleeved coroner’s jacket. I’ve seen her in short sleeves, and know she has plenty more), Eva looks more like a student than an employee of the OCME.
Still, her attitude isn’t helping much.
“Uh, Eva,” I say. “This is Special Agent Lancaster. He works for the State Department—”
“Bureau of Diplomatic Security,” the agent elaborates woodenly. “It’s the security and law enforcement arm of the U.S. State Department.”
“Who the hell died?” Eva demands. “The shah of Iran?”
“Uh, no,” I say. “It’s a student.”
“The kid of the shah of Iran?”
“Ma’am,” Special Agent Lancaster says in a slow, impassive tone to Eva, “I’m going to need your full name and also the name of your supervisor—”
“My supervisor is the chief medical examiner,” Eva says, whipping a business card out from the pocket of her coat before jostling Special Agent Lancaster aside (and nearly running over his size-twelve feet with her wheelie bag). “Now get the hell out of my way so I can do my job.”
Special Agent Lancaster looks a little startled. He’d had no trouble at all running off the cops from the Sixth Precinct (although they were still in the building. They’d merely retreated downstairs to the dining hall to drink coffee, which Magda, the cafeteria’s extremely popular head cashier and one of my best friends, had been only too delighted to offer to them for free), not to mention everyone who’d shown up from the Housing Office, who were now gathered downstairs in the second-floor library, holding their crisis resolution meeting, which I had to admit I was a little relieved not to be attending.
But the agent was going to have his hands full with Eva, and I could tell he knew it. I saw him touch the wireless communication piece in his ear, then begin speaking softly to someone, most likely in the bureau’s makeshift headquarters in the first-floor conference room. He was probably calling for reinforcements.
“So, um, this is the deceased,” I say to Eva, stepping past the special agent and into room 1416, then pointing Eva in the direction of Jasmine’s body, though of course she’d have had a hard time missing it. It was the only corpse in the immediate vicinity.
“Her name is Jasmine Albright,” I say to Eva. “She’s twenty, a junior. Sarah, our grad assistant, said she had dinner with Jasmine last night—they both had falafel—and Jasmine was fine. Then we tried to reach her this morning and she didn’t pick up. That’s all I know.”
I don’t mention the thing Ameera had said, about Jasmine having been at a pahty the night before. None of us—at least those of us who’d been there at the time—had been able to get another word out of her about it. Hopefully Drs. Flynn or Kilgore had better luck, but so far I haven’t heard anything.
Eva mutters a curse word as she looks Jasmine over while simultaneously taking a pair of latex gloves from the kit she carries with her—literally a wheelie bag filled with tools used for collecting postmortem evidence.
“Sorry about this, Heather,” Eva says sympathetically. “I couldn’t believe it when I got the address. I was like, Noooo. Not Death Dorm again!”
“Thanks,” I say. I’m as used to Eva’s quirks as I am to her spiked blond hair and tattoos. Contrary to popular belief, medical examiners are usually quite cheerful, though not surprisingly a bit prone to gallows humor, since they spend the majority of their time around dead people.
“What’s up with the suit, though?” Eva asks, flashing a look of annoyance at Special Agent Lancaster. “This girl have rich parents or something?”
“Not that I know of,” I say. “He’s here because we have a Very Important Resident who lives—”