“You’ll get back in when I say you’ll get back in,” the cop is snarling at a skinhead with a lip ring who is going, “But I have to get to my room to get my project! If I don’t turn in my project by noon, I’ll get an F!”
“Excuse me,” I say to the cop. “Can you tell me who is in charge here?”
The cop glances at me, then jerks a thumb in Rachel’s direction.
“Near as I can tell, that one over there,” he says.
“No,” I say. “I mean, is there a detective, or—”
“Oh yeah.” The cop nods toward a tall, gray-haired man in a brown corduroy jacket and plaid tie who is leaning against the wall—and, though he probably doesn’t know it, getting glitter all down his back, since he’s brushing up against a poster urging students to attend an audition for Pippin that is heavy on the Elmer’s glued glitter. Except for an unlit cigar at the corner of his mouth that he appears to be chewing on, he is doing absolutely nothing at all.
“Detective Canavan,” the cop says.
“Thanks,” I say to the cop, who is telling another resident, “I don’t care if you’re bleeding out the eyes. You’re not getting back into this building until I say so.”
I approach the detective with my heart in my throat. I’ve never spoken to a detective before. Well, except for when I was pressing grand larceny charges against my mom.
“Detective Canavan?” I ask.
I realize at once that my first impression—that he is doing nothing—was totally wrong. Detective Canavan isn’t doing nothing at all. He is staring fixedly at my boss’s legs, which look quite shapely beneath her pencil skirt.
He rips his gaze from Rachel’s legs and looks at me instead. He has a bristly gray mustache that actually looks quite good on him. Facial hair so rarely flatters.
“Yeah?” he says, in a smoke-roughened voice.
“Hi,” I say. “I’m Heather Wells. I’m the assistant director here at Fischer Hall. And, um, I just want to tell someone—the elevator key is missing. It might not mean anything—keys go missing here all the time. But I just thought someone should know. Because it seems really weird to me, these girls dying from elevator surfing. Because, you know, girls just don’t. Elevator surf. In my experience.”
Detective Canavan, who has listened attentively to my whole speech, waits until my voice peters out before taking the cigar from his mouth and pointing it at me.
“‘Sugar Rush,’ right?” he says.
I am so surprised, my jaw becomes unhinged. I finally manage to stammer, “Um, yes.”
“Thought so.” The cigar goes back between his teeth. “My kid had a poster of you up on the door to her bedroom. Had to look at you in that damned miniskirt every time I went to tell her to turn down her damned stereo.”
Since there is absolutely no reply I can make to this statement, I remain silent.
“What the hell are you doing,” Detective Canavan asks, “working here?”
“It’s a long story,” I say, really hoping he’s not going to make me tell it.
He doesn’t.
“As my daughter would say,” Detective Canavan says, “back when she was your biggest fan, Whatever. Now what’s this about a missing key?”
I explain it to him again. I also mention, in passing, the part about Elizabeth being a preppie, and Roberta liking Ziggy, and how both of these facts made them highly unlikely candidates for elevator surfing. But mostly I dwell on the missing key.
“Lemme get this straight,” Detective Canavan says, when I’m done. “You don’t think these girls—who were both, if I understand it, freshmen, new to the city, and full of what my daughter, the French major, calls the joie de vivre—were going for joyrides on top of your building’s elevator cars at all. You think someone is going around, opening the elevator doors when there’s no car there, and pushing these girls down the shaft to their deaths. Have I got that right?”
Hearing it put like that, I realize how stupid my theory sounds. More than stupid. Idiotic, even.
Except…except Ziggy!
“Let’s just say you’re right,” Detective Canavan says. “How did whoever is doing this get the elevator key in the first place? You said you guys keep it in a lockbox behind—what is it? That desk there?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“And who has access back there? Anybody?”
“No,” I say. “Just the student workers and building staff.”
“So you think some guy who works for you is going around, killing girls? Which guy, huh?” He points at Pete, standing behind the guard’s desk, speaking to one of the firemen. “That one there? Or what about that guy?” He points at Carl, who is still visibly pale, but is nevertheless describing what he’d seen at the bottom of the shaft to a uniformed police officer.
“Okay,” I say, starting to feel like I want to die. Because I realize how stupid I was being. In about five seconds, this guy had shot so many holes in my theory, it looked like a big chunk of Swiss cheese.
But still.
“Okay, so, maybe you’re right. But maybe—”
“Maybe you better show me where you keep this missing key,” Detective Canavan says, and straightens up. I am delighted, as I follow him toward the reception desk, to see that I was right: There is pink glitter all over his shoulders, as if he’s been fairy-dusted.
As we approach the reception desk, I see that Tina has disappeared. I throw a questioning look at Pete.
“Packages,” Pete interrupts his conversation with the fireman to say to me, meaning that Tina is escorting the mail carrier to the room down the hall where we lock arriving packages until the students can be notified to come down to the desk to claim them.
I nod. Rain or shine, sleet or snow, the mail must get through…even if there’s a girl lying dead at the bottom of the elevator shaft.
I slip behind the desk, ignoring the phones, which are ringing off the hook, and head straight for the key cabinet.
“This is where we keep the keys,” I explain to Detective Canavan, who has followed me through the door to the reception desk and now stands with me behind the counter. The key box is large and metal, mounted to the wall. Inside the box is hanging rack after hanging rack of keys. There are three hundred of them, one spare for every room in the building, plus assorted keys that are for staff use only. They all look basically the same, except for the key to the elevator doors, which is shaped a little like an Allen wrench, and not a typical key at all.