The 9th Girl (10 page)

A black belt in Kyokushin karate and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, GSP came, he saw, he conquered with a superior mind, superior skill, and conditioning. And when he won, he was thankful and gracious. Ultor was like that: a man who fought with honor, a man of the people and for the people. He was a man Kyle had created to fill a need in his own life.

He could hear the voices downstairs: his mother’s and his dad’s. They were talking about him, he supposed, though he couldn’t make out any of the words, just the cadence of conversation in the living room below.

He preferred to live under their radar. They didn’t understand anything about his life. They were both obsessed with the idea of drugs, which was an insult to him. Like they thought he was stupid enough to do shit like that.

He had smoked pot, but he didn’t like it. Everyone smoked pot. His dad did (Kyle had seen the evidence in his dad’s apartment, had smelled it) and he was a narc. A narc and a hypocrite. He drank, he smoked, he smoked pot, he had cheated on Mom. Kyle hadn’t exactly understood about that at the time because he was just a little kid, but he had known it wasn’t right. He had heard their arguments, listened to his mom cry after the fight, when his dad had left and she thought she was alone.

Speed Hatcher wasn’t a good father. He lied. He let them down. He showed up when it suited him and made excuses the rest of the time. He would make it if Kyle or R.J. was in a sporting event, but he had never made it to a single art show Kyle had been a part of. He had never come to see Kyle get an academic award.

He took them to see the Twins and the Vikings and the Timberwolves and the Wild because those were things he liked to do and he looked like a hero. And for sure, those were fun things to do, but Kyle saw it for what it was—part bribery and part self-indulgence. R.J. fell for all that crap because he was still a little kid and because he wanted to, but Kyle didn’t.

So it didn’t impress Kyle that his dad had come to his room, all serious and wanting to have a talk with him. It hadn’t concerned his father all that much when he had first shown up earlier in the day and saw Kyle’s face busted up. He had accepted Kyle’s excuse with an offhand comment about how he expected the other guy to look worse.

His sudden concern tonight was Mom’s doing. She hadn’t been satisfied with the story Kyle had told, and she had sent Dad in for the second interrogation. Bad cop, good cop. She thought Kyle might confess something to his father, man-to-man. But his father wasn’t the kind of man Kyle admired or wanted to be. No confession would be confidential. His father would go straight to his mother and spill everything. No confession would be forthcoming.

His parents understood nothing about the world he lived in, the pressures he was under. He lived in a world of extremes. He was smart. His teachers and his mom pressured him to perform academically. He was gifted. His art instructors pushed him to become a more commercial, traditional artist, to not “waste his time” on tattoo designs and comic book characters. He was athletic. His dad wanted him to play football, to play hockey, to play baseball, to be a part of a team, to be a guy’s guy. Kyle wanted to study Muay Thai kickboxing and Brazilian jiu-jitsu and do his own thing for his own reasons.

Because he was good-looking and talented, socially he was expected to be cool, to be popular, to act a certain way, to like certain kinds of girls—and, more important, to
not
like certain people, to
not
like the kids who were misfits. He didn’t care about being cool. He definitely didn’t run with the popular crowd. And because he didn’t care about those things, he was generally disliked by the kids who did.

He had thought it would be different when he started going to PSI. Theoretically, Performance Scholastic Institute was the biggest geek school in town. It was the place for brainiacs and kids in the arts—kids who always got picked on and beat up at public school. But it was no different. Every clique hated another clique. There were still cool kids who picked on the kids who didn’t fit in.

In fact, in some ways it was worse at PSI because the smarter the kids, the meaner they could be. At least in public school the meanest kids tended to be stupid. The cruelty was less sophisticated.

Kyle had been excited to win his scholarship. He had been excited to be challenged academically and encouraged in his art. But now he wished he could just take his GED and be done with school. He didn’t believe he needed an education to succeed as an artist. Talent was all that mattered. And he sure as hell didn’t need the rest of the high school bullshit.

He wanted to work on his drawing without anyone pushing their opinions on him. He wanted not to be forced into a mold that didn’t fit him. He wanted to be with the people he wanted to know, and not have others judge him or his friends. He dreamed about having his own place to live where he never had to explain himself to anybody, where he could be who he was and live how he wanted.

But he couldn’t tell his parents any of that . . . or anything else about his life.

He dug his cell phone out from under his pillow, went to his contacts, and touched a name.

The phone on the other end rang and rang and went to voice mail. Again. Kyle ended the call without leaving a message and went to his text messages instead. The message he had first sent late two nights before, then again and again and again, remained unanswered.

Where r u? R u ok?

He sent it again, just in case.

No answer returned.

The voices downstairs were droning on. Kyle got up and stuck his head out in the hall. R.J.’s door was closed, his television mumbling on the other side. With the coast clear, he went down the hall to the bathroom, locked himself inside, and turned on the shower as hot as he could stand it.

The water stung the abrasions on his face and his knuckles but soothed some of the aches in his body. He examined himself as he dried off. The bruises were starting to come to the surface. At least that was all he had—bruises. No broken bones. No open wounds to try to explain away. The worst of the damage was invisible. The damage done to his heart, to his spirit. The thousand cuts of cruel words.

Why did people have to be so full of hate and ignorance? Why couldn’t they just let everyone be who they were?

He glanced over his shoulder at his reflection in the mirror and the two small symbols tattooed on his shoulder. This was what he believed so strongly that he had saved up his own money and had the ideal etched into his flesh with ink:
acceptance.

11

“Which one of you
is the ‘source close to the investigation’?”

Captain Ullrich Kasselmann sat behind his desk looking like a banker: well-tailored charcoal suit, crisp white shirt, stylish orange tie knotted just so, every silver hair in place. Only the faintest sheen of perspiration on his forehead suggested he even noticed that the office was as hot as Florida in August.

Kasselmann was a man with a solid build and an immovable, brick-wall quality about him that was a physical manifestation of his character. He’d been the head of the Criminal Investigative Division long enough to have substantiated his initial paranoia regarding his employees.

“Don’t look at me,” Tinks said irritably. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

Kovac gave her a sideways glance. She looked like maybe she had tried to catch an hour’s sleep on a bench at a bus stop—hair more disheveled than usual, dark smudges under bloodshot eyes, pasty complexion.

“The lead story on the early morning news, channels five and eleven,” Kasselmann said. “‘Zombie Possible Victim of Serial Killer.’ You don’t know anything about that?”

He turned his laser gaze on Kovac.

“Yeah, right,” Kovac said sarcastically. “I have such a close personal relationship with the media.”

Kasselmann was poker-faced. “Then who?”

“How should I know?” Kovac asked. “Call Culbertson,” he said, readily throwing the ME’s investigator under the bus. Culbertson didn’t answer to Kasselmann. Nothing would come of it. And frankly, Steve Culbertson loved to play the role of subversive. This could work out for everyone.

“Is it true?” the captain asked.

“Could be. Yes. Definitely could be,” Kovac said, resisting the urge to glance again at his partner. Liska had argued against the possibility of Zombie Doe being one of Doc Holiday’s victims. She said nothing now.

“New Year’s Eve, stabbed repeatedly, sexual overtones, facial disfigurement,” he said. “More pieces fit than don’t.”

“She came out of the trunk of a car,” Kasselmann said. “In traffic.”

“Looks like the car hit a pothole, the trunk popped open, and the body bounced out,” Kovac said. “Then again, Möller says there’s a slim chance she might have still been alive at the time. Maybe she escaped. It certainly wasn’t anybody’s plan for her to get out of that trunk when she did.”

“We don’t have a plate on the car?”

“The limo driver was distracted. He’s coming in today to get hypnotized.” He shrugged. “Maybe he’ll come up with something.”

“But you’re not hopeful.”

“He had two hot half-naked babes making out with each other in his backseat. What do you think he was looking at?”

Kasselmann heaved a sigh, disapproval set in the chiseled lines of his face. “I’ve had phone calls from three deputy chiefs already this morning. And I’ve been called to the chief’s office for an urgent meeting in twenty minutes. He’s not going to be in a good mood.”

“Yeah?” Liska piped up aggressively. “Well, imagine what a good mood he’d be in if this was his daughter lying on a slab in the morgue with her face burned off from the acid her killer tried to force down her throat. He should think about
that,
shouldn’t he?”

Kasselmann’s silver brows climbed his forehead.

“This is somebody’s daughter,” she went on emphatically. “Just like Rose Reiser was someone’s daughter, and the victim from Iowa—who was not only someone’s daughter but someone’s
mother.
The chief should maybe think about those things, shouldn’t he?”

“You seem to have an ax to grind, Sergeant,” Kasselmann said.

“I’m a mother. I’m a woman. Do I need something more than a vagina to be outraged that we’re letting a serial killer run around loose destroying the lives of young women because the mayor doesn’t want his constituents to think we live in a dangerous place?”

The captain looked pointedly at Kovac.

Kovac spread his hands. “What? You think
I
have some control over her? She’s gonna go fifty shades of whoop-ass all over the both of us.”

“Rein it in,” Kasselmann warned, turning his attention to the offender.

Tinks looked like she might just hurl herself across his desk and bite an ear off him. Kovac stepped a little in front of her, cutting off her direct route.

“I’m not saying we don’t want this case solved—or the other two, for that matter,” Kasselmann said. “But there are considerations to be made in how we go about doing it and how it gets presented to the public. There are protocols to be considered. There are proper channels to go through. The two of you have been at this long enough to know better than to end-around the brass on a high-profile case.”

No one pointed out that it hadn’t been a high-profile case until now, until the sensational headline.

“Look, boss, the horse is out of the barn,” Kovac said. “We’ve just got to deal with this and go forward. I need manpower. We’ve got to identify this vic. All I’ve got to go on at this point is a tattoo. I need people canvassing the local ink shops. I need eyes going over the other cases, looking for some kind of thread.”

“You want a task force.”

“I don’t care what you call it.”

“Our hand is being forced now,” Kasselmann said. “The public is going to expect a task force. The media is going to be crawling up our asses like cheap underwear. You know how this goes. You went through this with the Cremator cases. You want to do that again?”

“Like I want a colonoscopy,” Kovac admitted. “I just want to run my investigation. I want the time and the warm bodies to do it right. Why should anybody be against that?”

Kasselmann pushed to his feet. “Because it costs money. Because a multi-agency task force is a logistical nightmare. Because it draws the wrong kind of attention—”

Liska stepped back into the fray. “And a dead girl with no face doesn’t? With all due respect, sir, that is
fucked-up.
”

The captain gave her a hard-eyed stare. Liska pushed it right back at him. Kovac held his breath, feeling like he was caught between a she-wolf and an angry bull.

Kasselmann blinked first. He looked at Kovac. “Set up a room. You get Tippen and Elwood for starters. The rest remains to be seen. I have a meeting to get to.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I don’t want anybody talking to the press about anything. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Redistribute whatever other cases you’ve got going on that aren’t a priority.”

“Yes, sir,” Kovac said, wondering just which murder on his caseload
wasn’t
a priority and how he would explain that to the families involved. Maybe he would foist off some of his assaults on a couple of the younger guys.

He put the matter to the back of his mind and herded Liska out of the captain’s office and past the cubicles, steering her into the conference room he and Tippen had set up the night before.

“Do I need to inject coffee into you intravenously?” he asked, shrugging out of his sport coat. “Or would you prefer the hair of the dog? In which case we should leave the building because, despite all evidence to the contrary, I would prefer not to be fired and lose my pension.”

“I’m not hungover.”

Kovac raised an eyebrow as he rolled up his shirtsleeves. “How long have we known each other?”

“All right,” she admitted grudgingly as she slipped out of her wool blazer and hung it on the back of a chair. “I’m a little hungover. And I haven’t slept in two days,” she confessed, melting into a chair at the long table. “I thought a glass of wine might help.”