I grinned as I struggled out of my tunic. I was pretty sure it had a secret mission in life to strangle me as I undressed. “Nah. I lack the shoulders.” Phoebe turned the showers on, drowning out anything else I might say. Once I got loose of the tunic, I followed her, standing to the side while the pins-and-needles water pelted from cold to too hot.
The beauty of university showers is that they never run out of hot water. I stood there, leaning my forehead against the wall, until my skin turned boiled lobster-red. Phoebe turned her shower off with a squeak of faucets, and in the fashion of community showers everywhere, the water in mine got significantly hotter. Turning it down didn’t help. That was the flip side of never running out of hot water: the only way I’d ever found to keep a public shower from being too hot was to run more than one at a time. “Ow. Turn that back on, would you?”
“Sorry.” The faucets squeaked again and after a few seconds my shower faded back to a bearable heat. Water lapped over the top of my feet, and I pushed away from the wall with another groan, listening to Phoebe slosh to the drying area.
“Thanks.” I reached for my shampoo, scrubbing a palmful through my hair. If I weren’t so fond of standing mindlessly in the hot water, it would only take me about thirty seconds to shower. A minute and a half if I used conditioner, which my hair was too short to bother with except occasionally. But I wasn’t quite late for work, so I luxuriated in the heat. Water crept up around my ankles. “I think the drain’s plugged.”
“Check,” Phoebe said. “I’ll call maintenance if it is.”
“Okay.” I rinsed my hair, turned the water off, and wrapped a towel around myself as I slogged through the shower room in search of the drain.
Two stalls down from me, a naked black girl, her skin ashy blue with death, lay with her hip fitted neatly in the hollow of the drain.
Chapter Two
“Phoebe,” I said, amazed at how calm my voice was, “call the cops.”
“You are the cops,” she said. I could hear the grin in her voice in the suddenly echoing shower room.
“Phoebe!”
“Yow, okay, what’s wrong?” Phoebe didn’t call the cops. She splashed back through the showers, rewetting her feet. “What’s wrong, Joanne?”
“There’s a dead girl in the shower,” I said, still very calmly. “Please go call the police, Phoebe.”
“There’s what?!” Phoebe looked around the edge of the shower stall and went pale under her olive skin. “Oh my God. Oh my God, we have to do something!” She surged forward. I grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back.
“We have to call the cops,” I repeated. “She’s dead, Phoebe. Look at her color. There’s nothing we can do. We shouldn’t touch her.”
“You are the cops!”
“I’m also the one who found the body. Again,” I added in a mutter.
“Again?” Phoebe’s voice rose and broke.
“I found a murder victim in January,” I said. My boss was going find a way to blame me for this. He was convinced I lived out each day with the deliberate intention to piss him off. Some days he was right, but it hadn’t been in my game plan today. I didn’t get up at five in the morning to volunteer at protests with irritating my boss in mind. Rather the opposite, in fact, not that I’d admit that out loud.
I took Phoebe’s other shoulder and steered her away from the body. “Shouldn’t we at least check to make sure she’s dead?” she demanded, voice rising. I exhaled, nice and slow.
“She’s dead, Phoebe. Look, okay.” I let her go and waded to the dead girl. She looked like she’d been posed for a photograph, her back against the tile wall, her bottom leg and arm stretched out long and her top leg folded gracefully forward into the water, bent at the knee. Her head was thrown back, slender neck exposed, as if she were laughing without inhibition. The edge of the drain was just barely visible beneath her hip, all of the drain holes covered. I wondered who would take that kind of picture, then remembered that if nobody else would, the police photographer would have to do the job.
“Christ.” I crouched and pressed two fingers against her neck, below her jaw. She was