Step on a Crack (Michael Bennett 1)

Henri blushed.

“The master chef suggested perhaps that the First Lady snacked on a … candy bar before her meal arrived.”

So much for repairing French and American relations tonight, I thought.

“Has there been any turnover in the staff since the night she was here?” I said.

Henri tapped a long finger against his bloodless lips.

“Yes,” the maître d’ said. “Now that I think of it. One of the prep cooks, Pablo, I believe was his name, stopped showing up for work a day or so after the terrible accident.”

“Any last name on Pablo? An address? Off his employment application perhaps?”

Henri squinted as a pained, sorrowful, almost penitent expression crossed his features.

“It was like you were saying before about formal and informal. Pablo was more of an informal hire. We have no application per se,” he said. “His leaving was not even a real concern. Our turnover rate for prep staff, like in most restaurants, is quite high.”

“I’ll bet,” I said.

“Wait,” Henri said. “I believe he left some things in his locker. Would you like to come down and take a look?”

I did, and downstairs in Pablo’s old locker, I discovered two items.

A pair of dirty sneakers and a crumpled Metro North Hudson line train schedule.

The case of the dirty sneakers, I thought. Encyclopedia Brown would have been impressed.

Yet another dead end, or so it seemed at that moment anyway.

I stuffed the kitchen helper’s things into an empty Duane Reade bag I found under the locker. Maybe we could ID Pablo from prints. If he wasn’t already back in Central America.

It was a pretty sad lead, I realized, but better a sad one than none at all.

“Do you have a clue?” Henri asked excitedly, and I lifted the bag of “evidence.”

I slammed the locker with a resounding bang.

“Very rarely, Hank,” I said.

Chapter 50

IN HER DREAM, Laura Winston, the Vogue magazine–dubbed “Fashion Queen of the New Millennium,” was out on the lake at Ralph Lauren’s estate in northern Westchester. She was lying alone in a canoe dressed in a sheet of white muslin, and she was floating beneath a sky of bright, endless blue. The boat skimmed along the shore beneath the boughs of a stand of cherry blossom trees, and a blizzard of falling white petals, fine as angel eyelids, softly landed on her face, her throat, her breasts. When she tried to sit up in the canoe, she realized that the muslin was wrapped tightly around her arms. She was dead and in her funeral boat, she realized—and she began to scream.

Laura Winston woke with a start and banged her head hard on the wooden arm of the church pew she’d propped it against.

There was a heavy clop-clop of booted feet, and two ski-masked men with bandoliers of grenades strapped across the front of their brown robes passed slowly up the center aisle of the chapel.

What an idiot, she thought. Right now, if she had wisely begged off the funeral, she’d be thirty thousand feet above the South Caribbean in a Gulf Four, banking toward her twenty-one-million-dollar French Renaissance palace in St. Bart’s to put the finishing touches on her New Year’s Eve celebration. Giorgio, Donatella, Ralph, and Miuccia had already RSVP’d.

Instead, she had ignored that little voice, her prudent inner survivor that had piped up just the night before: Hel-lo! High-profile NYC event, neon bull’s-eye terrorist target. Stay away!

And then, of course, there was that other little secret voice that was just starting to warm up its dry, agonizing pipes.

She was out of her pills.

The OxyContin had originally been prescribed for a lower-back tennis injury. A month later, after learning that her doctor was more than willing to keep prescribing, she was taking them with her multivitamins. The ultimate energy boost, the ultimate stress eraser.

Laura didn’t want to admit it, but for about the last hour or so, she’d been jonesing. It had happened once before on a shoot that had gone a day over in Morocco. The withdrawal had started out like a tiny itch in her blood. Soon the itch got much worse, and she had started throwing up. After dry heaving for an hour or so, she couldn’t stop shaking. After ten hours, she would have gladly pulled out her own hair to make it stop. She’d managed to survive that episode with half a bottle of Valium mercifully given to her by the photographer.