Authors: Alafair Burke
Never Tell (8 page)
Ellie didn’t want to be like everyone else.
Then, like she’d been sucker-punched in the head, Ellie realized what had really been nagging at her about that scene at the Whitmires’. She suddenly stopped pummeling the bag. She held her gloves to her chest and bent over while she caught her breath, favoring one side to forestall an oncoming cramp.
Rogan had a good point. She had to get herself right on this one.
Ramona
A
s an investigator, Ellie firmly believed she was best at her job when she could live inside the heads of her victims. That kind of empathy hadn’t been as important to her when she was working property cases and vice busts. But coming up on two years of cases in the homicide squad, she knew that some little part of her would always be able to imagine what the final moments of each of those lost lives had been like for the victim.
Ellie liked to think she had a natural ability to imagine the life of another person. She’d grown up watching people. She noticed patterns. She read facial expressions. She had a good sense for what made people tick.
But, other than imagining what it must have been like to write that suicide note, Ellie was having a hard time inhabiting the world of Julia Whitmire.
She surely did remember the emotions that came with being a teenage girl. She also remembered the pressure to mold one’s body into perfection.
You don’t become Miss Teen Kansas with all that baby fat.
And she knew what it was like to pine for the attention of a parent. She had idolized her father. He protected people. He was like a superhero in the battle between good and evil. She remembered playing on the basement floor in the makeshift office he had created, the walls decorated with photographs of the victims of the College Hill Strangler and a map filled with pins—red for known kills, yellows for suspected. Ellie would bounce her psychedelic-colored rubber ball and pick up jacks, offering questions and theories for her father as she played. Usually he shushed her, but the days when he’d actually talk through the case with her, despite her mother’s scolding that it “wasn’t right”? Those were Ellie’s most cherished memories of her father.
But, in too many ways, a life like Julia Whitmire’s was so completely unlike anything in her prior experience. From a three-bedroom wood-frame ranch house in Wichita, Kansas, Ellie could never have dreamed of having the independence that Julia Whitmire enjoyed. Once her dad was gone, to describe their family as middle class was overly generous. Ellie had never been east of Kansas City or west of Dallas until she followed her brother up to New York City.
She’d told herself at the time that the move was to allow the one responsible Hatcher child to keep an eye on the other, but in retrospect she knew she had hungered for a different life. As much as was missing in her life, though, she’d never been unhappy. And she’d definitely never been ungrateful.
She had no idea how to get into the mind of a girl like Julia. With the Whitmires’ money and the streets of New York waiting just outside her townhouse door, Julia already had a more sophisticated life than most people could ever imagine. And yet she was miserable.
Ellie and Rogan sat side by side at her squad desk, scrolling through Julia Whitmire’s Facebook profile, hoping to find some clues about her last days.
“The girl’s final status update was Friday night,” Rogan observed. “
‘Just noticed the name of this toe polish color: Ogre the Top Blue. Groan!’
Those are some lame-ass last words. Don’t you think a girl who killed herself Sunday night would post some kind of goodbye message?”
“She did,” Ellie said. “With a suicide note.”
By now, that last comment typed by Julia on Facebook was buried deep at the bottom of the page, replaced by more than two hundred comments posted since news of the girl’s death had leaked out. Most of them appeared to be from strangers sending condolences to Julia’s father.
“I didn’t know you, Julia, but I’m sorry you weren’t able to find joy in this life. May music follow you to the next.” “Your father changed the face of rock and roll. RIP to his little angel.”
“I swear,” Rogan said. “I just don’t get people.”
They continued to scroll through the comments, compiling a list of the Facebook friends who appeared to be closest to Julia in life. They had already spoken to Julia’s brother, Billy, that morning. Despite being distraught and still in a state of shock, he tried his best to be helpful. Like most college freshmen, however, his recent attention had been focused on classes, parties, and hooking up, not on his little sister back home.
Rogan clicked on the Facebook tab marked “Photos.”
Most of the pictures were the typical ones that teenage girls posted online these days: close-up self-portraits with a cell phone, lips pursed as if saying the word
prune.
There were a couple of bikini shots on a beach with Ramona. Snapshots of ridiculously overpriced dresses she admired. Pictures from recent trips to Rome, Paris, Madrid, and Belize. A face mask from last summer’s Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most recently, a picture of her appearing relaxed and makeup-free on open country land.
“That’s the fattest goat I’ve ever seen,” Rogan said of the animal whose long neck Julia Whitmire had draped an arm around. In the background stood a red post-frame barn with a sloped green metal roof. It was a perfect rural shot.
Ellie spooned out a bite of Nutella from the jar she kept in her desk. “I think it’s an alpaca. It’s like a small, hairy llama. They’ve become sort of a status symbol for country homes because they’re super expensive—something about their fur or whatever.”
“How the
hell
do you know that?”
“When are you going to learn there are no boundaries to your partner’s knowledge?” Her ex-boyfriend, the finance guy, had been close to buying two alpacas a few years ago when she’d moved out. “They also spit and make this creepy humming sound like injured cows.”
“The poor thing’s so ugly he’s almost cute.”
“You’re such a softy,” she said. “Any word from Julia’s doctor?”
With the parents’ permission, they had contacted Julia’s physician about the Adderall capsules they found in her purse. “The nurse just called. The only prescription drug her doc had for her was the birth control. And no referrals to a psychiatrist, either. The bottle wasn’t labeled. Maybe she didn’t have a prescription for them.”
Ellie opened a new window on her computer and searched for “Adderall.”
She clicked first on a video titled, “Teens and ADHD Medications: Intervention or Addiction?” Four panelists sat side by side at the front of a generic lecture hall. A purple velvet curtain adorned with NYU’s torch logo served as the backdrop.
According to one psychologist—her nameplate was blocked by a pitcher of water—psychotropic drugs were wildly overprescribed, especially in kids, where use was up nearly four hundred percent in a decade. About eighty percent of cases were “off label,” meaning doctors were prescribing the drugs in ways the FDA never approved.
Equally convincing was the psychiatrist who saw the drugs as the best prospect to save children from needless heartache. He spoke with passion about children who worked as hard as they could, only to throw their books against walls, feeling stupid and hopeless.
Rogan reached over and clicked the mouse, pausing the video.
“Hey!” she complained.
“Clock’s ticking, woman, and that video’s nearly an hour long. You’re digging that shrink a little bit, aren’t you?”
She looked at the face paused on the screen. According to his nameplate, the doctor espousing the pro-drug views was David Bolt and, she had to admit, he was in fact attractive.
She gave Rogan a fake sneer and took control of the mouse again. “Take a look at this.” The article was called “Students Seek Competitive Edge with Adderall
.
” She scrolled down the screen as they skimmed together, catching bits and pieces.
Perfectly healthy, undiagnosed teenagers . . . Mixture of amphetamine salts . . . Usually snorted . . . Helps you study . . . Have to get any academic advantage possible . . . Buy it from friends who have been legitimately diagnosed with ADHD . . . Effects on the brain similar to cocaine or methamphetamine . . . One in five students . . .
“Look,” Ellie said, pointing to the penultimate paragraph. “ ‘Can cause depression and social anxiety when abused.’ Let’s try to get a rush on the toxicology reports. It’s one more indication she did this to herself.”
“Let’s also try to find out where she got it,” Rogan said.
Ellie clicked back to the Facebook “wall” filled with comments. She began to click on the names of Julia’s friends who had left notes on her page.
She clicked on the profile of Marcus Graze, whom Ramona had described as Julia’s on-and-off-again fling.
Sorry, this Profile is currently unavailable. Please try again shortly.
As she began to click through Julia’s list of friends, she got the same message for several of the profiles.
“Maybe some kind of system glitch,” Rogan said.
“But I just looked at a couple of these half an hour ago,” Ellie said. She typed
Jess Hatcher
into the Facebook search box, and her brother’s profile appeared, third down on the list and open to full view without any problem, complete with latest ironic status update:
I think I have Bieber Fever
. “Seems weird.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll track these kids down in person at the school, anyway.”
“Ah, the very two people I was looking for.” Lieutenant Robin Tucker gazed down at them from the other side of the desk. “Jesus, Hatcher, how can you constantly have a spoonful of pure sugar and fat in your mouth and still fit into your pants? Never mind. Just please tell me your eyes and that computer are focused entirely on Julia Whitmire.”
Rogan gave her a casual wave. “All good, Lou.”
“Not all good. I must have taken fifteen phone calls about the way you marched out of there yesterday. I just got another call from the dad trying to make sure you weren’t just shining him on when you went back last night.”
Tucker was staring straight at Ellie as she spoke, but Rogan was the one to respond. “We’re working on it.”
“How the hell did it take you so long to see that notepad issue?”
Rogan was still speaking for them both. “It’s generational. Suicides are for people facing terminal cancer, divorce, financial ruin. People that age write their final letters on paper. We weren’t thinking.”
“So is the handwriting hers or not?”
“Hatcher took the note to one of her old profs at John Jay. The guy says the script in the suicide note appears to be consistent with Julia’s, but he can’t give an opinion with any confidence because we have so little to go by in terms of known samples of her writing—just a few notes in old birthday cards and from Mother’s and Father’s Days. Like we said, kids don’t write anymore.”
“So you’re fully on board with this, too?” This time it was clear Tucker’s question was aimed directly at Ellie.
“I’m doing the work, yes.”
“Wonderful. Your enthusiasm is inspiring.”
“Look, I could lie if you want me to. The only thing that matters is I agree we jumped the gun yesterday. I regret it, and I want to make it right. But, no, I don’t happen to think she was murdered, and I know for damn sure that no one would be complaining about us jumping the gun if we had the same exact facts with some poor kid dead in a tub in the projects. Regardless, I promise I’m working to get at the truth just as hard as if my instincts told me something different.”
“Given the personal histories involved here, maybe your instincts are off on this one.”
Ellie let out a frustrated laugh. “Very subtle.”
Rogan rapped his knuckles against the desktop. “Hate to cut into your heart-to-heart, but maybe it’s a good idea for us to get back to business.”
Ellie was grateful for the segue. “We need to go to the Casden School and see these kids in person,” she said, rising from her chair.
The announcement served to appease Tucker, who walked back to her office without further comment.
“You’re on your own,” Rogan said once Tucker was gone. “Testimony in the Washington case today, remember?” He snuck a glance at his TAG Heuer watch. “Shit. I got to move. Thirty minutes.”
She remembered the Washington case. First name: Thelma. The defendant was the grandson she’d raised from the second grade. Just like his mother, thirty years earlier, he’d been ransacking the house for drug money when Thelma walked in and confronted him. Unlike his mother—who had simply walked away, leaving her seven-year-old son behind—he had strangled Thelma Washington to death and then sat on the porch until the police came, after, of course, getting in one last high.
Today was the day for a pretrial motion to suppress the defendant’s confession. It was a slam dunk for the state, but in a murder case, a good defense attorney dotted all the
i
’s and crossed all the
t
’s. Either she or Rogan could give the necessary testimony for the prosecution, but there had never been any question that the Washington case—although assigned to both of them—was really Rogan’s. She suspected it had something to do with Rogan’s close relationships with his mother, grandmother, great aunt, and lord knows how many other Rogan women when they’d still been living.
Sometimes a case got into your blood and between your synapses and ignited a passion. Some cases brought out the warrior.
“You want to wait for me?” Rogan asked. “Or you want to go solo for a couple of hours?”
“I’ll go up to the school while you’re in court. Call me when you clear up.”
Julia may not have been murdered, but she was still a person whose screwed-up life had ended unnecessarily, and that ending had brought her to Ellie. The least Ellie could do was to find out what had been the girl’s last straw. She needed to start caring.