The Bride Wore Size 12 (Heather Wells 5)

“Weird for you,” I say. “You live in your own multimillion-dollar brownstone. Try living in a noisy dorm, especially on a floor with a lot of new students across the hall, away from home for the first time. Lots of people in that situation can’t sleep without music playing. It drowns out all the ambient noise. These walls are thick, but not that thick. Cooper, what are you doing?”

He’s taken one of his ubiquitous handkerchiefs from his pocket and hit the return key on the computer keyboard. He always carries a neatly folded bandana (preferably in blue) somewhere on his person, a trick he picked up from one of his many formerly incarcerated friends. Keeps you from leaving fingerprints, he says.

“Just checking to see the last thing she was doing on the computer before she went to bed, besides listening to iTunes.” He squints down at the keyboard, then the screen. “Twitter,” he says with some disgust.

Cooper refuses to participate in any form of social networking. He doesn’t have a Web site advertising his private investigation business. His clients come from lawyers he knows, word of mouth, and a discreet listing in—of all things—the phone book. He seems to have all the work he can handle, though, proof that not everyone turns to the Internet for their professional needs.

“What a shocker, a college student using Twitter,” I say sarcastically. “Now, come on, you know if the cops find you here they’re going to blame me for messing up their crime scene . . . if her death turns out to be murder.”

He pokes around a little more on her computer. “She wasn’t logged on,” he says. “To Twitter. It’s just the whaddayoucallit, home page. What was her Twitter handle?”

“How would I know?”

He looks around. “Where’s her phone?”

I follow his gaze. “I don’t know.”

“Do you have her phone number? We could call her phone.”

“Of course I have her number,” I say, pulling out my phone and—a little proudly—the wallet-size list of emergency numbers I’d made. “But why is it so important we find her phone?”

“Because then we can find the last person she was talking to. It’s possible that person could give us a little insight into how she died.”

“Or we could just wait for the OCME to tell us.” I’m dialing. “And don’t you have a case of your own you’re supposed to be working on?”

“It’s insurance fraud, a little less pressing than this,” Cooper says. “No dead bodies are involved.”

“Oh.” I hold my cell phone away from my ear. “That’s weird. Jasmine’s phone is ringing in my ear, but not in her room. And now it’s gone to voice mail.”

“Her phone’s not in here,” Cooper says, looking around the room.

“Of course it’s here,” I say, looking around as well. “She must have it on vibrate.”

The clothes Jasmine had worn the day before are in a heap on the floor beside her bathroom door. I walk over to the pile and begin to feel through the pockets of her jeans.

“What young person do you know who doesn’t take her phone to bed with her?” Cooper points at Jasmine’s nightstand, which sits beneath her wide casement window, between the two beds. “It should be right there. But it’s gone.”

“It’s not gone,” I say. Look, her wallet’s here.” I hold it up. “Cash, credit cards, ID, everything still inside. Even her keys.” I jingle them. “So she wasn’t robbed. Who would steal her phone and not her cash? There’s a hundred bucks in this wallet. And that laptop over there is top of the line. It’s not like someone broke in here—there’s no sign the door’s been tampered with. Who would take her phone but not her laptop and cash?”

Cooper shakes his head, unconvinced. “Then where is her phone?”

I eye Jasmine’s body. “Probably there.” I point.

Cooper’s gaze follows the direction of my finger, which is aimed at her bedclothes, tangled around the bottom of her legs. He takes a quick step backward.

“No way,” he says.

“Well, you’re the one who thinks all young people take their phones to bed with them,” I say. “Where else is it going to be? Except maybe under her.”

“Well, I’m not going to look,” Cooper declares. “You do it.”

“I’m not doing it,” I say. “That’s disturbing the dead. It’s my job to make sure no one messes with her . . . including me.”

“But how else are we going to know whether or not it’s there?”

“We aren’t going to know,” I say firmly, beginning to shove him toward the door. “The OCME will find it, if it’s there. The only thing either of us has to do is leave, meaning you, before the cops get here and arrest you for disturbing a potential crime scene. Go do your job, and I’ll do mine.”

“Fine,” he says, tugging on his shirt, which I’ve caused to become untucked with all my shoving. “I will. You don’t have to get so huffy about it. Just because your case is more interesting than mine—”

“This isn’t a case, Cooper. It’s a resident in my building who died, and it’s tragic, but you yourself reminded me just the other day that more young adults end up in hospital emergency rooms than any other age group . . . and more of them die in those emergency rooms than any other age group too. So I guess it’s natural that we might lose someone, even this early in the year. But you can’t leap to the conclusion that there was foul play involved, because we don’t know yet—”

Cooper turns by the door somewhere in the middle of this long speech to put his hands on my shoulders. When I’m finished, he says, “Heather. Heather, I know, okay? I’m sorry. I’m so sorry this happened, and I’m sorry to have upset you. That’s the last thing I’d ever want to do. I only wanted to help. I promise I’ll stay out of it from now on, if that’s what you want. I’ll go home and call Perry to cancel our lunch appointment. Okay?”

I groan. I’d forgotten all about our meeting with the wedding planner.

“Oh God. We’re never going to be able to get another appointment with her after canceling like this. You know how she is.”

It’s only because of a sudden cancellation (the bride left the groom for his brother) and Cooper’s father pulling a few strings to get us moved up the waiting list (apparently you can do this if you’re the CEO of a large recording company) that we managed to get a wedding booked at the Plaza at all. Perry, our wedding planner, can’t stop reminding us how fortunate we are, because it’s rare that any size wedding—let alone one as large as ours—is “thrown together at the last minute” in New York City like this. Apparently by “thrown together at the last minute” she means had tens of thousands of our own dollars—many of which are going to her—poured into it weeks in advance.