“Can I roll back any video I have on the hallway outside his room during the evening?” Pete echoes, in a rude imitation of my voice. He makes it much higher-pitched and Valley Girlish than I believe I sound. “Why should I? Do you know how hard it is to work these fricking things?”
He gestures at the stack of video monitors in front of him, which has grown much larger since Prince Rashid moved into the building.
“I barely know how to work my kid’s Xbox,” Pete complains, “and you’re asking me to play back something—”
“I’ll buy you lunch,” I say. “Not from the caf. From wherever you want. A sandwich from Murray’s. Dumplings from Suzie’s. A slice from Joe’s Pizza . . .”
His gaze flicks toward the cafeteria doors. This early in the morning, the week before classes have begun, there’s no one but us two in the lobby, and the student worker behind the desk, who happens to be Gavin, dressed in his pajamas and dozing. He’s desperate to earn as much money as he can before school starts so he can buy, he explained to me in excruciatingly boring detail, some kind of camera, with which he intends to film the greatest American horror story ever told.
It was at that point that I’d stopped listening and gave him all the hours at the desk that he wanted. No one else had volunteered, so it worked out great for both of us.
“Choza Taqueria?” Pete asks. “And you won’t tell Magda? Because she’s been ratting me out to my kid every time I eat anything over four hundred calories.”
“Of course I won’t tell Magda,” I say. “Choza Taqueria it is.”
Pete hands me the sign-in logs and begins to fiddle with the monitors. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to find anything,” he says. “I think these things record back over themselves after twenty-four hours.”
“Just do your best,” I say.
I don’t know what I expected to find in the sign-in logs, but certainly not what I end up finding: a big fat zero. Prince Rashid’s signature is nowhere. I wonder if the prince is even required to sign in his guests, or if he has some kind of special privileges we don’t know about, passed down to him from the president’s office. I wouldn’t be surprised.
Kaileigh Harris, on the other hand, seems to have had numerous guests: she’s signed in her mother and father three to four times a day, poor thing. Other residents have signed in their parents multiple times a day as well.
I never went to college, of course—until now—but I can’t see either of my parents expressing the slightest interest in coming to visit me if I’d gone, unless somehow I’d been earning money for them on campus. Then I’m sure they’d both have come to visit me a lot, maybe even as often as Kaileigh’s mom and dad.
Scanning the sheet from the night Jasmine died, I see that she signed in no one. No guests—at least from outside the building.
“Pete,” I ask, looking up from the log, “does our VIR get special sign-in privileges? I can’t find any trace of his signature on these logs, but Julio tells me he’s been partying every night.”
“He don’t got any special privileges with me,” Pete says, his gaze still on the monitor. “I don’t know about any of the other guards. On the other hand—”
He crooks a finger at me. I circle around to the back of the desk. He’s found the footage I’m looking for, and all for the price of a few tacos.
There, on the grainy black-and-white video surveillance tape, are a number of young people walking down the fifteenth-floor hallway toward room 1512—Prince Rashid’s room. They look happy and smiling.
And many of them are extremely familiar.
“Wait a minute,” I say, stunned by what I’m seeing. “What night is this?”
Pete squints at the numbers on the bottom of the screen. “Monday. No, wait. Tuesday. Yeah, Tuesday. Night before last.”
The night Jasmine died.
12
New York College Alcohol Policy
Residents of New York College residence halls are required to abide by all New York State and New York College regulations regarding the use of alcohol. These rules specify that persons under twenty-one years of age are prohibited from possessing and/or consuming any alcoholic beverage while on New York College property.
In residence halls, persons under the age of twenty-one are in violation of the New York College alcohol policy if found to be in the presence of alcohol. Any resident over the age of twenty-one found to have given and/or purchased alcohol for residents under the age of twenty-one will also be found in violation of that policy, and subject to appropriate sanctions and/or punitive action.
No,” Lisa says. Her face has turned slightly green, as if the burrito she had for breakfast is coming back up. “It isn’t possible.”
“It’s right there on the monitor,” I say. “You can go down to Pete’s desk and see for yourself.”
“Oh,” Lisa says, swallowing hard. “I believe you. It’s just that—”
“Or Gavin can tell you about it. Can’t you, Gavin?”
I turn to Gavin, whom I’ve dragged to the hall director’s office, hanging a “Closed—Back in Five Minutes” sign on the front desk, and another one that says please knock! on the door to our office, which I’ve closed and locked so we won’t be disturbed, though it’s doubtful any residents will drop by so early in the morning.
Parents, on the other hand, are another story.
Gavin’s sitting in a chair across from Lisa’s, looking miserable. And not only because he’s been hauled into his boss’s office before ten in the morning, wearing only the Goofy slippers his mother gave him, a moth-eaten New York College T-shirt, and a pair of plaid flannel pajama bottoms, but because he’s been caught in a lie he can’t get out of.
Only he doesn’t consider it a lie.
“I told you before, I ain’t no narc,” he says, folding his arms across his chest. His protest, however, sounds weak.
“Gavin,” I say. “I am seconds—literally seconds—away from calling Detective Canavan down at the Sixth Precinct, and you know how disappointed he was in you the last time he was in this office. Do you really want to go through that again?”
Gavin looks sullenly down at his floppy-eared slippers. “No, ma’am.”