The Celebutantes by Antonio Pagliarulo Page B

changed his mind.”
    Park walked around to examine the other side of the body. “We saw him less than two hours ago, Madison. He didn’t strike me as the suicidal type.”
    â€œMaybe not outwardly,” Madison replied. “But who knows what was going on in his head?”
    â€œThat’s true.” Lex stood up. “We really didn’t know him at all.” She cupped a hand over her eyes and stared up. “But if he plunged from that penthouse balcony, he knew it would do the trick. That’s totally high. I think it’s forty-two stories.”
    â€œTallula,” Madison whispered suddenly. “Oh my God. What happened to her? What’s going on up in that penthouse suite?”
    Lex slipped an arm around her sister’s shoulder. “Just stay strong. Everything will be fine. I’m sure Tallula is…”
    â€œIs what?”
    Lex gulped uncomfortably as she looked up at the tower. “I’m sure she’s just…hanging out somewhere.”
    â€œHanging?”
Madison’s voice broke. “Oh my God! Oh—no!”
    Lex bit down on her lip. She probably shouldn’t have used that word.
    In the distance, sirens wailed.
    Park circled the body completely. She stopped when she was directly beside Elijah’s waist. She swept her eyes across the ground and trained her gaze in an outward circular motion, scanning the concrete for clues. The spatter of blood spiraled off to the left; several drops had sprayed Madison, so that was the trajectory that followed the impact. She had read all about body splats in one of her forensic textbooks. The cause of death would ultimately be hemorrhaging of the internal organs caused by blunt trauma, but when a body hit hard ground after a lengthy fall, what it left in its wake was an ugly, Spin Art mess.
    Splat.
    Without standing exactly where Elijah had been standing just before he took the plunge, Park couldn’t deduce all that much. There wasn’t anything too telling about the rivers of blood—except that they were plentiful. Crimson stained the sidewalk in ugly, jagged slats.
    She raised her gaze and scanned the crowds. Too much commotion for her and Madison and Lex to
really
be noticed. A monkey wearing Victoria’s Secret could have been hopping around out here, but all eyes would
still
be locked on the blood and gore.
    She was about to walk away when something caught her eye.
    Right there against the wall of the hotel, a good ten feet from the street and maybe four feet from the body, sunlight glinted off a metal object.
    Park walked over to it as casually as possible and bent down. Her lips parted in surprise when she saw a skeleton key lying beside the wall. It was silver and scratched…as if it had bounced off the ground and skidded across the concrete.
    A key; its stem was silver, its square top blue.
WTF?
    She knew leaving it there would be the right thing to do, but she gave in to impulse and picked it up, closing her fingers around it. She stood and threw a glance over her shoulder just as a long line of uniformed men poured out of the front doors of the hotel. Security.
    And careening down the avenue, the cops. Lights and sirens flashed everywhere as several cruisers screeched to a halt.
    â€œGet over here!” Madison ordered her, instinctively backing up, wanting to join the crowd of onlookers.
    Standing close together, they watched as security guards tried to fend off photographers, as uniformed cops dropped blue barricades into place, sealing off the street. A white sheet was immediately draped over Elijah Traymore’s body.
    â€œHey!” one of the onlookers said. “Isn’t that the famous sculptor kid? The one who was on
Entertainment Tonight
last week?”
    â€œI read about him in
Vanity Fair,
” another person said. “Oh, God—did he kill himself?”
    â€œYou see?” Madison whispered. “There’s no reason to suspect Elijah