By the time Melanie fought her way to the escalators, crucial minutes had elapsed. She hadn’t seen which way Jasmine and Slice went, and now they were nowhere in sight. Think, think. Jasmine was trying to escape. She would have headed down, toward the exits. Melanie hopped onto the down escalator, scanning the floor below for them as she moved. Everywhere she looked in the crowd, tall girls in powder blue leather pantsuits tricked her eye. None of them was Jasmine. Desperately, she pulled her cell phone from her bag, dialing Dan’s pager as she rode downward, beeping him to her phone. Where was Dan now? Could he already be inside the Javits Center looking for her? Please, let him be. She needed backup, fast.
She stepped off the escalator onto the convention-center floor. Which way would Jasmine have run? Which way would Slice have taken her if he caught her? Straight for the nearest exit probably, but which way was that? She sprinted off in what seemed like the right direction, but again the crowds made for slow going. Running on the uneven floor was difficult-one moment plush carpeting dragged at her high-heeled shoes; the next, without noticing it, she’d stepped onto a rotating platform.
Disoriented and out of breath, she almost didn’t stop to investigate when several people ahead of her, who’d been milling around an enormous red Hummer, began pointing upward, toward the skylit ceiling. But then she heard their gasps.
“What the hell is that girl doing?” one of them asked.
“She’s out on the catwalk!”
Melanie looked up. Fifty feet above her head, a delicate metal catwalk hung suspended, connecting the mezzanine to the outside of a sky booth that overlooked the main floor. Jasmine Cruz stood completely motionless halfway across its expanse, gripping the flimsy handrail, paralyzed with fear. Up. Running, crazy with fear, Jasmine had gone up.
Melanie pulled out her credentials, displaying them as she waded into the crowd.
“U.S. Attorney, coming through, coming through,” she said, elbowing her way to a spot directly under the catwalk.
“Jasmine!” Melanie shouted as loud as she could. “What are you doing? Go back! Go back, and I’ll meet you at the top of the escalator.”
Jasmine didn’t appear to have heard her. The girl didn’t move a muscle. Melanie turned and ran back toward the escalators. Her phone began to howl from inside her bag. She dug it out as she ran, nearly dropping it.
“Hello?”
“You beep me?” Dan asked cheerfully.
“Where the hell are you?”
“Just pulled into the parking garage. Why, what’s wrong?”
“Slice is here! He chased Jasmine out onto a catwalk that goes to the sky booth! I’m trying to get up there to help her off!”
“Go! I’m coming as fast as I can.”
She hung up, throwing her phone into her bag. She was just about to step onto the up escalator when a piercing shriek split the air behind her. She whirled around to see Jasmine’s blue-suited figure hurtling to the ground, black hair streaming up toward the soaring ceiling.
MELANIE CLIMBED ONTO THE SLOWLY REVOLVING platform and approached the silver concept car, lit so brilliantly by overhead spotlights that it seemed to exude a supernatural force. Jasmine lay on her back on the car’s broad hood, staring numbly at the ceiling turning many stories above her. The stretchy blue leather of her pantsuit still hugged every curve of her perfect body, but her slender limbs were oddly twisted-splayed out, rigid, her feet in their stiletto-heeled boots pointing inward. Beads of sweat glistened on the heavy foundation makeup that coated her forehead.
“Just hang on, sweetie, help is on the way,” Melanie said softly. Jasmine’s hand hung off the side of the car. Melanie reached for it, squeezing the long, slender fingers, already cold and clammy to the touch. Feeling the slightest return of pressure from Jasmine’s fingers, Melanie stood on tiptoe and leaned forward.
“Do you want to say something?” she asked.
Jasmine’s lips worked, but no sound emerged at first. Melanie leaned closer, placing her ear against Jasmine’s mouth.
“What is it? Tell me.”
“Des-tiny,” Jasmine whispered hoarsely. Her daughter. She was thinking about her daughter, just as Melanie would if she were about to die.
Two paramedics carrying a folded stretcher made their way through the gawking crowd.
“ EMS! Over here, over here!” Melanie screamed.
“Somebody move her?” the taller paramedic, a commanding black woman with a powerful voice, asked, climbing up onto the platform. Her name tag read B. JONES. “The call said assault victim on the mezzanine level.”
“That’s somebody else,” Melanie said. “Take care of this woman first. She fell from that catwalk up there.”
“Two of ’em? Jesus! Miguel, call for backup while I get the collar on her,” Jones instructed her companion as she removed a large neck brace from her satchel. “Decerebrate posturing, indicates brain damage. We need to get her in right now!”
Melanie jumped out of Jones’s way, praying something could still be done. But Jasmine expelled a long, sighing breath-and then stopped breathing.
“Shit, went apneic on me!” Jones shouted to her colleague. Clambering onto the hood of the car, she began administering CPR as Jasmine’s eyes stared unseeing at the light streaming in from above.
“YOU SURE IT WAS HIM?” DAN ASKED Melanie as they watched the medical examiner’s van holding Jasmine Cruz’s body pull away from the Javits Center.
The afternoon was hot and airless. The scorching sun beat down on her as she struggled to breathe through the exhaust fumes. Dan and the police had searched the Javits Center thoroughly, but Slice had apparently made a clean getaway.
“How many times do I have to tell you?” Melanie exclaimed furiously, overwrought that they hadn’t been able to stop Slice, to save Jasmine, or even to apprehend him after the fact. “I never saw his face, but I know it was him!”
“I had the exits sealed as soon as I got off the phone with you. A guy at every door, couldn’ta been more than five minutes after we talked.”
“That obviously wasn’t fast enough to catch him.”
“I’m keeping an open mind, but you should, too, okay? Just hear me out on this scenario. You’re putting the screws to Jasmine. She freaks out, gets up and runs off like a bat out of hell, bumping into people left and right. She punched that broad so hard she fractured her jaw, you know. A guy grabs her. Not Slice, okay, just some moke she pissed off by bumping into him. He grabs her, but he doesn’t do anything to her. End of the day, she’s so freaked out, she runs out onto a catwalk, and she falls. By accident. A hundred people saw it. Every one of ’em says she lost her footing accidentally.”
Incensed, Melanie shook her head. “No, no way!”
“Okay, why not?”
“Because! The guy came from behind me. Jasmine only ran in the first place because she saw him coming, over my shoulder. And he followed her-I watched him. He followed her all the way to the escalator, at least fifty feet through a crowded room, before he grabbed her. That’s why! I’m telling you, it was Slice! I’m not saying he pushed her. But he chased her out there. He caused her to fall.”
Dan looked down at her steadily, an indulgent smile slowly spreading over his face.
“Okay. Melanie Vargas is so damn sure that’s what happened, then that’s what happened.”
“Don’t humor me. It’s condescending.”
He sighed. “What do you want me to say? Based on all the facts, honestly, maybe it was Slice, maybe it wasn’t. You never saw his face, so you can’t say for sure. Even if we caught him, you couldn’t ID him. Plus, maybe it’s too upsetting for you to think Jasmine freaked out after talking to you, ran away, and fell off a ledge, right?”
She grabbed Dan’s arm fiercely, her fingers digging into his forearm. “You’re kidding me! You’re not seriously suggesting I’m imagining things so I won’t have to feel guilty? I’m not like that.”