Size 12 and Ready to Rock (Heather Wells 4)

“But what about ATMs?” I asked. “You said—”

“The last time this guy made a withdrawal,” Cooper said, “was nine weeks ago. Guess how much is left in that account?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You said he probably doesn’t pay taxes, so I’m assuming a lot—”

“Zero,” Cooper said. “He withdrew it all. The guy is carrying a ton of cash on him . . . either that or he’s opened another account under another name, probably an alias, that we can’t locate.”

“But on TV—”

“If you say, ‘But on TV . . .’ one more time,” Cooper said, “I will refuse to discuss this further with you. Real life isn’t like TV. On TV the police have computers with facial recognition software that can hook up to security cameras in banks and scan photos of people, then match those photos up with a national database of known criminals. In real life, not only do most police stations not have this kind of technology, but even if they did, all the criminals would have to do is slightly alter their looks or even keep their faces in profile the whole time, and the whole thing would go kaplooey.”

“So . . .” I was stumped. “What about the IP address from his e-mail?”

“Nothing,” Cooper said. “He used a bunch of Internet cafés here in the city, just as I suspected. You know, I couldn’t find the divorce record between those two on file anywhere.”

“What?” I asked. “Didn’t you use your insouciance with the court clerks?”

“Every ounce I possess,” he said. “Plus multiple fifty-dollar bills and Tania’s real name and her stage name. But I came up with bupkus. I’m starting to wonder if they even—”

“ ‘If they even’ what?” I asked when he fell silent.

“Nothing,” he said. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

“No, really,” I said. “You can tell me. If they even what?”

But he only shook his head. “Tania has enough to worry about.”

She certainly did. After our trip to the Children’s Hospital of New York went so well—despite Cassidy and Mallory sulking all the way through it—word got out almost immediately that Tania Trace Rock Camp was going to “Rock On” (in the words of the Post) despite yet another tragedy in “Death Dorm.” I won’t say that that’s why I planned the whole thing, but it might have been in the back of my mind.

Stephanie Brewer got wind of our field trip—and of the tour we took to New York City’s greatest female-centric rock-and-roll sights afterward—and finally decided to get out of bed and convince the network executives (namely, Grant Cartwright) not to cancel Jordan Loves Tania preemptively.

I was never quite certain how she managed this, but once Gary Hall’s driver’s license photo got plastered all over the local papers and newscasts—which of course meant Cartwright Records had to make up a story about his being “an overly zealous longtime fan” of Tania’s, a story which was immediately picked up by every gossip website and media outlet known to man—the whole thing had avalanched well out of Tania’s control anyway. I don’t think anyone, with the exception of Cooper, Detective Canavan, and of course Tania herself, knew the truth about her relationship to Gary. But the media was hungry for more information.

As a result, we couldn’t walk outside the doors to Fischer Hall without running into paparazzi asking if we felt we were taking our lives into our own hands by living and working there.

“We’re taking it in stride,” I’d overhear the girls from the camp say from time to time. (They’d received extensive media coaching from Cartwright Records Television publicists, and of course there’d been some hasty salary negotiations to convince them and their chaperones to stay despite the fact that a psychotic killer was stalking their camp’s hostess. Three more girls had bowed out anyway, despite the new incentives.)

“It’s actually good training,” I’d overheard Cassidy say to a reporter from Entertainment Tonight, “for when I’m famous and have my own stalker.”

Not to be outdone, Mallory elbowed Cassidy out of the way and said, “Tania’s a really good role model of how you can’t let something like this keep you from living your life. I really admire her.” This sound bite was quoted in numerous newspapers and used over and over again online, to Cassidy’s fury.

“Not in my cafeteria,” I caught Magda saying to a CNN reporter. “The food we serve is always fresh and byootiful, and we never have any rats, ever!”

“Uh, Magda,” I’d whispered to her as we walked into the building together, “you know we actually do get rats sometimes, right?”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “But we put traps out for them, not poison.”

This really was the truth, so even if enterprising journalists had bothered to look into it, they couldn’t have corrected her. But of course none did. They were more interested in writing sensational pieces about how everyday items in your home might contain poison, such as those supposedly healthy vitamins you bought at the drugstore.

Tania may have seemed to others as if she were taking it all in stride—well, except for today’s filming—but those of us who knew her well could see that she was slowly crumbling under the pressure. Every day she appeared thinner and more fragile. Cooper reported that she barely ate—his sister Nicole had accused her of being “pregnorexic”—and Jordan said she couldn’t sleep.

Of course, neither Nicole nor Jordan knew the truth about Gary Hall. But the more Tania fretted that it was going to come out, the less likely it seemed it was going to. No one had yet made the connection between the New York Gary Hall, with the thick glasses and red hair and goatee, and the Florida Gary Hall, with the clip-on tie and conductor’s baton. The only way anyone might ever catch on was if Gary Hall himself spilled the beans.

And to do that, he’d have to come out of hiding, like one of those cockroaches Tania said used to live under the refrigerator in the first apartment she shared with him.

As soon as that happened, there were 36,000 NYPD officers—not to mention my boyfriend and me—waiting to squash him.

In the Fischer Hall library, Tania says “Okay,” with a nod as Stephanie backs away from her. “I got it.”