and early-morning chatter as students and designers closed in on our room and when I grabbed the handle of Emerson’s closet door—the one marked “personal”—I was in such a fury that I didn’t care as the voices closed in.
I should have.
It all happened in one elongated second—my hand closing on the knob; the voices of the contest director and models breaking over the threshold. Me pulling the closet door open. Emerson line-driving me from the darkness.
“What the—?”
“Oh, my God!”
“Are they fighting again?”
Though Emerson jumped out of her closet and pummeled me—then lay there like a dead weight—she was no match for my strength so I quickly rolled her off me, but in that millisecond my nostrils twitched and my mouth started to water. It wasn’t her usual noxious scent. It was something very, very different.
Heavy. Metallic.
Blood.
I felt my mouth drop open and my eyes bulge when I stared at my blood-covered hands, at the smear across my blouse.
And then I looked at Emerson.
“Oh, my—” I started to kick away, felt the inane need to put distance between me and her.
“What’s wrong with her?” one of the models asked.
“Is she okay?” Jason Forbes rushed toward me and Emerson. “Are you okay? What happened? If you ladies can’t—” Jason paused, looked down at Emerson, and then crouched slowly. A chalky white washed over his face. He glanced at me and I knew exactly what the hard look in his eyes meant: Emerson Hawk was dead. When I crawled over to see for myself, I wished I was, too.
Sticking out of Emerson’s concave chest were my lucky scissors. And it didn’t take an X-ray to figure out that their sharp double-blades were wedged firmly and deeply into her silent heart.
From the moment Emerson’s lifeless body hit mine to the second she was being zipped into a slick black coroner’s bag could have been five minutes or five hours. The studio was a buzz of muffled conversations and accusatory glances. I wanted nothing more than to crawl back to the cool, dark cave of an apartment and sort out what had just happened—and what it meant. I was ready to dash when a fat, round detective sidled up to me, flipping open his little leather notebook and breathing at me with his coffee breath. I had expected Officer Hopkins, but the gentleman before me was built like a fireplug and wearing his ill-fitting cotton-poly off-the-rack suit like it was an Armani.
“I’m aware of the previous case but I’m not at liberty to talk about it.” He shifted his eyes as though everyone were about to pounce in an attempt to overhear us.
“It just seems odd that they’d send a detective out for this case but not Reginald’s.”
“You are Nina LaShay, right?” the detective said, completely ignoring my question.
I nodded silently, my arms wrapped around my chest, gripping my elbows.
“I’m Detective Moyer. You were the last to see the decedent alive, were you not?”
“Well—no, not that I know of.” An image of Pike rushing out looking disheveled and nervous flashed through my mind, the image flitting so quickly I didn’t have time to dwell on it. “I saw her last night and then,” I gestured to the closet door, still gaping open, its emptiness a quiet screech that Emerson Hawk was dead.
“Then you found her this morning.”
“She . . . kind of . . . found me.”
“Were you and the decedent friends, Ms. LaShay?”
I wanted to focus on answering the detective’s questions, but every time he asked me anything, he smacked his lips in a weird kind of final gesture and it was turning my stomach. “I wouldn’t say we were friends, exactly. We were colleagues. And competitors.”
If I hadn’t been staring at Moyer’s fat, pale lips making that stupid smacking sound, I would have thought better of telling this man—who was tapping the end of his pen, looking thoughtfully at me—that I might have had motive to kill Emerson. I thought of Hopkins and his accusatory stare and then longed for it as Moyer’s eyebrows went up. He poised the pen over his notepad as though he were about to take down some frantic confession, and any inch of confidence I was harboring wilted.
“Isn’t it true that you two got into some kind of argument last night?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it an argument. Just a little disagreement. Emerson spilled a little wine on my dress, that’s all.” And by a “little wine” I meant half a bottle and by “on my dress” I meant