Security(24)

Henri’s French accordion ballads blast on. Justin is touching Henri’s shoulder and yelling. Justin’s mouth shapes, “Turn it—down!”

Jules has cranked the volume dial to the left. “They need the musique!” shouts Henri, though his sous--chefs rub white--sleeved wrists on their ears.

“He’s always in here,” Tessa says. She has broken her own rule and is standing in Franklin’s office. “I’m telling you, security busted him. He’s being fired right now.” She wilts against a filing cabinet. “A thousand more things for me to do.”

Brian’s hands are in his jacket pockets again, chastened. There is no evidence of foul play in Franklin’s office. “How’d he get hired if he’s such a crap employee?”

“He knows a guy who golfs with Charles’s uncle.” Tessa has slid a piece of paper from Franklin’s printer, has clipped it to her clipboard, is writing items down. “Actually, he f*cks a guy who golfs with Charles’s uncle.”

“Charles,” Brian says, nodding, distracted.

“Yeah.” Tessa is too distracted to note he’s distracted.

The intercom barks: “Zut, alors!” and “Tessa, come in, Tessa.” Jules is sort of laughing.

Tessa goes to the intercom on the wall two feet to Brian’s left and hits a button. Brian doesn’t move, as most people would when Tessa looks severe like this. “Talk to me.”

“We need you in the kitchen. Henri’s gone whatever’s French for ‘loco.’ ”

“Right up.” Tessa walks past Brian. He follows her. She stops in the middle of the foyer, where chandelier light burnishes the marble. It burnishes her, too—the curtain of her hair a long copper river, the line of her body a black slash in the white room. “Brian, I can’t do this. With Franklin fired, the opening’s in meltdown, and I can’t call Charles to tell him about it. So I need you to—”

“I’ll stay.” Embarrassed. Indifferent to embarrassment, or as close as he can manage. “I won’t get in the way. I’ll quit bugging you about what I came for, I’ll make an appointment to talk to you later, when you’ve got the time, but”—he shoots defiant distaste around the gleaming first floor—“I’m staying.”

“Why?” Tessa pretends this question is perfunctory, an annoyance. She does want to get upstairs as quickly as she can, but she also wants . . . Her body seems to change its mind millisecond by millisecond, limbs angling toward Brian and at the same time away.

Brian puts a hand to the small of her back and guides her toward the main elevator. He hesitated for a moment. He looked guilty. He looked afraid. He is fantastically readable, like Tessa. Most people are fantastically readable. That’s why masks are a great idea for killers.

“I’m learning about hotels,” Brian says, pressing the “Up” button. “You know how I love to learn.” He leaves his hand at the small of her back a few seconds longer than necessary. Not that his hand at the small of her back was ever necessary. He smiles. At her, and then at the floor. Then at her, and he keeps smiling at her. Tessa tries to mirror Brian’s sentiment, his light heart, but she has no talent for denial. The elevator arrives; they board. There is quite a long silence.

Then Tessa says, “Troy shouldn’t have pulled you out of school.”

“Mitch wouldn’t have gone without me.”

“Mitch shouldn’t have gone, then.”

Brian looks out of the glass elevator. They are passing the fifth floor. “Mitch hated school. When Troy took us along, summers, you saw. Mitch just lit up. Then Troy got the idea for the Domini Twins, and that was it. It wasn’t even a question.” He prods her with his elbow. “There are more kinds of education than what happens in a classroom.”

“Like the kind that teaches you how charred flesh smells?” Tessa regrets it the instant she says it. But she doesn’t take it back.

Brian watches the seventh floor pass. Room 717 is around a corner. The door is closed anyway.

Tessa hugs her clipboard. “Was Mitch—did he get burned when . . .”

“No.”

Tessa watches the seventh floor become the eighth.

“There wasn’t any pain,” Brian says. “There wasn’t any physical pain.”

Tessa’s eyes fall shut. She’s very tired. She slept two hours last night. “I’m sorry. I am.”

Brian is stony. He watches the ninth floor pass. “For what?”

The tenth floor passes.

“How about you tell me what you’re sorry for,” he says. “For bad--mouthing my career every chance you’ve gotten tonight? For calling me stupid, or—”

“I never—”

“For saying it’s my fault he’s dead?”

Tessa backs away from him. Her shoulders hit the glass. She mutely shakes her head. She shakes.

Brian watches the eleventh floor. The twelfth. He could be searching the carpet for bloodstains.

Tessa’s voice is too soft to hear.

“What?” Brian says, watching the fourteenth floor. There is no thirteenth floor.

“Look at me.”

Brian watches the start of the fifteenth floor.

Tessa hits the “Emergency Stop” button on the elevator. It rings up the shaft like an alarm clock. Jules, Justin, Henri, and the sous--chefs are in the kitchen, arguing about noise levels. Delores is the only person in the ballroom. She is the only person upstairs who would conceivably hear the alarm, but she has earbuds in. They are plugged into her iPhone, which is in her apron pocket. She hates French accordion music.