The Finishing School Read Online Free

dealing with, and then I called the commissioner. From this very phone, in fact,” he said, nodding toward the telephone on his desk.
    Melanie saw that Seward was watching her reaction carefully.
He’s worried his behavior looks fishy
, she thought.
    “Is there a reason you didn’t call the police immediately? As soon as Mr. Reyes told you he’d found the bodies?”
    Again Seward paused. “Ye-e-es,” he said slowly. “I knew I wanted to deal with this through my personal contacts, and I didn’t have the commissioner’s number with me. It’s unpublished, you see.”
    “But weren’t you worried that the girls might have needed medical attention, that perhaps they were—”
    “Still alive? No. If I’d felt that was a possibility, naturally I would have acted differently. But Luis made it quite clear they weren’t breathing. I felt there was nothing I could do except try to minimize the fallout from the situation for myself and my wife.”
    “How long did it take you to drive uptown?” Melanie asked.
    “Holiday traffic was awful. All the tourists looking at the tree. It took half an hour at least.”
    “You waited over half an hour after hearing that Whitney and Brianna were dead before you called the police?”
    Seward sighed. “To an outside observer, I understand that might seem cold. But put yourself in my shoes. I knew the second the press heard about this, they’d descend on us like a plague of locusts, and I was right. You saw what it was like downstairs, didn’t you? My wife is a very fragile woman, and she’d just learned of her daughter’s death. I couldn’t subject her to a horde of flashbulbs in front of the building, especially not when it was
my
political career bringing them to our doorstep. So I did what I had to do to ensure our privacy. I knew the girls were already dead, so I didn’t think it would matter. Please. Try to understand.”
    Melanie’s instincts were clanging like a fire alarm. She realized she suspected Seward of something. But what? When she thought about it, there was nothing here. Anything strange James Seward had done, he’d just told her about himself and provided a perfectly plausible explanation. Like most people, Melanie distrusted rich, arrogant politicians. She’d better be careful not to let that personal prejudice color her judgment.
    “Look,” Seward continued, reading the ambivalence in Melanie’s expression, “I may not have done things perfectly, but I’m in a very difficult position. I’m trying to be as cooperative as possible. In fact, if we’re finished with the preliminaries, I’d like to tell you where Whitney and Brianna got the drugs that killed them.”
    “You
know
?” she asked. Ray-Ray looked at her in astonishment.
    “I can’t know definitively, since I wasn’t there. But I have my suspicions,” Seward said.
    “Please, by all means, tell us what you think,” Melanie said.
    “Carmen Reyes, the super’s daughter, is—or I should say
was
—a classmate of Whitney’s at Holbrooke. She got in on a College Bound Kids scholarship. I had a hand in arranging that, and now I’m kicking myself. Because Carmen was here right before Whitney and Brianna died. The whole reason Luis used his passkey to get in is that Carmen hadn’t come home when she was supposed to, and he was looking for her.”
    “You believe that Carmen Reyes gave Whitney the drugs, Mr. Seward?”
    “Yes, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Carmen was here earlier tonight, right before this happened, and now she’s gone. Disappeared.”
    “She hasn’t returned home?”
    “That’s correct. And it’s…what? After four o’clock in the morning?”
    “So you think Carmen—”
    “Of course. She gave them the heroin, then she saw the terrible results of her actions, and she ran away. Carmen Reyes is the answer to this whole thing.”
     
5
     
    FOR THE FIRST MINUTE after she woke up, Carmen was sure she was dead. Everything was black. Something was weird with her