The 9th Girl (11 page)

“A glass?”

“A glass . . . as in
bottle.
Red wine is good for you,” she added defensively.

“Yeah, you’re the freaking picture of health here. Is this still to do with Kyle?”

She pulled in a long breath and let it back out. “Yes. Speed tried to talk to him last night, but he didn’t get anywhere.”

Kovac perched a hip on the table, settling in to offer his sage wisdom. “You’re not going to know everything that goes on in a teenage boy’s life, Tinks. Trust me, you don’t want to know.”

She gave him a look. “Oh, that’s reassuring. Thanks.”

“What I mean to say is, he’s fifteen. He’s not a little boy anymore.”

“He’s not a man either.”

“He’s a
guy
now. Guys have their own shit going on that they aren’t going to share with their mothers—unless they’re weird or gay.”

“Spoken like a guy.”

“See?” he said. “I wouldn’t tell you my shit either.”

“You don’t have any shit to tell about.”

“That’s beside the point.”

“You don’t get it, Sam,” she said. “Do you know the stuff kids get into today? Drugs, guns, sex. Every day is like another chapter in
Lord of the Flies.
”

“At the pansy-ass private brainiac school,” Kovac said. “PSI is not exactly the mean streets. I mean, what are the gangs in that school? The math club versus the science club?” He sat back and held his hands up as if to fend off an attacker. “Ooooooo . . . Look out! They’re packing fountain pens and slide rules!”

Liska tried to rally up a sense of humor, but the attempted smile looked more like a result of gas pain.

“Slide rules went out with the dinosaurs, T. rex.”

“Whatever.”

“I just don’t want to see him make a hard mistake,” she admitted. A sheen of uncharacteristic tears brightened her eyes. “He’s my baby, Sam. I look at him and I see him when he was two, when he was five, when he was ten. I don’t want him to grow up. I don’t want him to get hurt.”

“But we all do, Tinks,” Kovac said gently. “That’s part of the deal. We grow up. We make mistakes and we learn from them. That’s how it works.

“Look at the two of us,” he said. “We smoked weed and drank ’til we puked, and had sex, and flunked algebra. Look how we turned out. We’re not dead. We’re not in prison. We’ve lived long enough to fuck up a million more times.

“He got in a fight,” he said. “No lives were lost. Let it go. You can’t keep him on a leash like a dog.”

“It’s so hard.” She put her elbows on the table and rubbed her hands over her face, messing up her makeup.

“Jesus Christ,” Kovac grumbled with a phony gruffness meant to cover his actual concern. He dug a clean handkerchief out of his hip pocket and offered it to her. “Now you look like the Joker. Go fix yourself, and put your cop face on. We’ve got work to do.”

Taking the handkerchief, she swept it under each eye and around her mouth, scrubbing off smeared mascara and lipstick. She looked up at the wall with the victim photos, seeing it for the first time and looking like she welcomed the distraction. “What’s all this?”

“Tip and I did this last night. We wanted to hit the ground running today.”

He moved off the table for a closer look at the photographs.

“You’ve got a kid with a black eye,” he said, tapping a finger beneath the sickening close-up of what was left of the face of Zombie Doe. “Someone out there has a daughter who looks like this. Count yourself lucky and get your head in the game, kiddo.”

Tippen stuck his homely head in the door. “Are we a go?”

“One way or another,” Kovac said.

The detective walked in, tossed a bag of bagels on the table, and arched a brow at Liska. “Did you spend the night in the drunk tank or is this a new look for you?”

She flipped him off.

“Admitting you have a problem is the first step,” he said, then turned to Kovac. “Sonya e-mailed me her first piece. It’s going up on her blog this morning as soon as we give it the thumbs-up.”

“Who’s Sonya?” Liska asked, grabbing an iced coffee from the carrier Elwood brought in with him.

“Tip’s niece,” Kovac said.

“God help her,” Liska muttered. “I always figured you for someone’s creepy uncle, Tip.”

“She’s some kind of cyberjournalist,” Kovac explained. “Our liaison to the victim pool.”

“She’s got a lot of readers,” Tippen said. “And contacts. She’s hooked in to every online page the sixteen- to twentysomethings read. Web news sites, Facebook, Twitter. And she’s reaching out to people she knows in the tattoo business.”

“She says the tattoo on our vic is the Chinese symbol for acceptance,” Kovac explained to the others as he stood looking at the close-up he had taped to the wall with the rest of the autopsy photos. “She has the same thing on her arm. Apparently, it’s something the young people are doing these days to make a statement.”

“For kids the victim’s age, that’s not even legal in this state,” Tippen pointed out. “Minors can’t get tattoos, even with parental consent.”

“Thank God,” Liska said, digging a cinnamon-raisin bagel out of the bag. “Kyle wanted a tattoo for his last birthday. I said absolutely not until he runs away and joins the circus.”

“It’s an artistic form of self-expression,” Elwood said. “Tattoos are a road map of the bearer’s personal journey.”

“The kid who works the counter nights at my local convenience store has a tat of a snake wrapped around his throat,” Kovac said. “Apparently, his personal journey took a detour through hell.”

“Possibly,” Elwood said seriously.

“The girl I work out with at the gym has a leprechaun on her stomach,” Liska said. “She’s twenty-two and you could bounce quarters off her abs. She thinks it’s cute. I wonder how cute she’ll think it is after she’s had a couple of kids and the thing has morphed into Larry the Cable Guy.”

“Not everyone gives their choice as much consideration as they should,” Elwood conceded. “Each of my tattoos has a deep personal meaning.”

Kovac made a face. “Please don’t tell us where they are on your person.”

“I want to know how the artist negotiated all the body hair,” Tippen said.

Liska wrinkled her nose. “Eeeww.”

“I waxed first,” Elwood said nobly, making everyone moan in unison.

“Speed has that whole sleeve on one arm,” Liska said. “And I get what it means, what it represents for him. The struggle between good and evil; the juxtaposition of himself as the avenging angel or the devil. And, of course, he wants to look badass at the gym. But he’s allegedly a grown man, so if he wants to illustrate himself, that’s his choice. Kyle is fifteen. Should a fifteen-year-old permanently etch something into his body?”

“That depends on what it is,” Elwood said.

“He’s into comic books and samurai warriors. When he’s an adult and working as an attorney, is he going to thank me for letting him get a giant tattoo of Spider-Man?”

“What’s more disturbing is that you’d let your kid become a lawyer,” Tippen said. “And you think
I’m
sick?”

Kovac brought them back on topic. “So the question here is: If by law minors can’t get a tattoo in this state, and our victim is only fifteen or sixteen, does that mean she came from out of state? Or did she just have a good fake ID? Or are there tattoo artists around town who just don’t give a shit what the law says?”

“You’re not exactly talking about a group of straight-arrow conformists,” Tippen said.

“No,” Elwood agreed, “but the majority are very defensive of both their art form and their integrity as businesspeople. The artists I know were glad for the law restricting minors. They want their work to be respected and meaningful, not some idiotic drunk-ass whim.”

“Sonya tells us this particular tat is about acceptance and tolerance,” Tippen said. “Racial tolerance, religious tolerance, tolerance of sexual preference. It’s a statement, part of a social movement. Given the gravity of the meaning, I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine there could be an artist or two willing to bend the rules to put it on younger kids in order to further the message.”

“How many tattoo parlors are we talking about?” Kovac asked.

“About twenty close in on Minneapolis proper,” Elwood said. “Plus St. Paul, plus the outer burbs. And we’re not taking into account that artists will freelance outside the studios. There’s our likely culprit for tattooing underage kids—some young artist trying to make a few extra bucks on the side. This is a simple, straightforward design requiring minimal skill and minimal equipment.”

“Meaning this is going to be a long process,” Liska said. “Quicker if we just post a photo of the tattoo and get it to the media and ask if anyone is missing a daughter with this tattoo.”

“Assuming all parents know whether or not their kid has an illegal tattoo,” Tippen said.

Liska conceded the point. “Okay. Is anyone missing a best friend, a sister, a teammate, a girlfriend . . .”

“And this is where Sonya comes in,” Tippen said. “She’ll reach that peer group.”

“In the meantime, we have to reach out to the schools,” Kovac said. “I want lists of absentees from every school we can hit in the metro area. Girls, fourteen to eighteen, just to cover as many bases as possible.”

“What kind of manpower are we getting?” Elwood asked.

“Remains to be seen,” Kovac said. “Kasselmann is meeting with the brass assholes as we speak. He’s not happy, but he’ll get over it. Or not. Whatever.

“For now, we’re it,” he said. “My gut feeling is we won’t get a full-on task force, which is fine with me. I don’t want to lose time with all the front-end bullshit and red tape of a multi-agency thing. I’m hoping we keep it in-house but pull in a couple of detectives from Sex Crimes or somewhere else.

“In the meantime, we just have to get on it. Hopefully, we’ll end up with enough manpower to revisit the first two Doc Holiday cases, but our priority for now is to get an ID on our new girl.”

All eyes went to the horror-movie still of Zombie Doe’s face taped to the wall as the centerpiece of a macabre montage.

“God help us,” Tinks muttered.

“He’d better,” Kovac said. “He already missed his chance with her.”

12

Gerald Fitzgerald never missed
the news if he could help it. It was a Minnesota thing. Minnesotans, from childhood, watch the news daily. He had not realized there was anything unusual in that until he heard Garrison Keillor make jokes about it on
A Prairie Home Companion.
He still didn’t get why people thought that was funny.

Some of his earliest memories were of sitting on the living room floor watching Walter Cronkite while his mother banged pots and pans together in the kitchen, making supper. As an adult, the first thing he did upon waking up was turn on the TV to catch the news. Lunch and dinner happened in front of the television, watching the local news. The day officially ended with the ten o’clock news.

The news was the scale of the day, the place to find out if society was in balance or out of whack. People trusted the news, and they trusted the people who delivered the news. News was truth. At least it had been in Cronkite’s day.

Nowadays, you couldn’t trust the news. Used to be you went to the news to get the facts. Now you had to fact-check everything that came over the airwaves yourself. News personalities seemed to have no compunction lying outright to slant things in the favor of whomever they worked for. Cronkite had to be rolling over in his grave. It was disgraceful.

The headline on the screen caught his attention first.

ZOMBIE MURDER.

He grabbed the remote off the nightstand and jacked up the volume. The perky blonde seemed to look right at him as she spoke.

“Sources close to the investigation of a New Year’s Eve homicide in Minneapolis say this murder may be the work of a serial killer law enforcement agencies have dubbed ‘Doc Holiday.’

“The partially nude body of an unidentified female fell from the trunk of a vehicle New Year’s Eve in the Loring Park area. The gruesome condition of the disfigured corpse led one witness to describe the deceased woman as a
zombie
!”

Film footage showed the New Year’s Eve scene. A giant white Hummer sitting crosswise in the road. Emergency vehicles with strobe lights rolling. Uniformed officers walking around.

“No official statement has been made by the Minneapolis Police Department regarding the victim or the possibility of a serial killer in the metro area. The detective in charge of this most recent case would neither confirm nor deny any possible connection to several similar crimes committed over the course of the last year with the bodies of victims being discovered on holidays.”

He spotted the detective. Kovac. He knew him. He had met him, had spoken with him. Decent guy, Kovac. A straight shooter, an old-school cop. Appropriately suspicious, thorough. But, like all cops, he was not an original thinker. He put one foot in front of the other and plodded along.

And there was his partner, the little blonde. Liska. She was a pistol. He liked the look of her, but she was too old for his tastes, and he had no doubt that messing with her would be like grabbing a wildcat by the tail. Way too much trouble. He didn’t mind a little sporting fight in his girls, but one that could seriously mess him up? No, thanks. Maybe when she was eighteen or nineteen . . .

The blonde giving the news was more his speed—wide-eyed, young, idealistic. He could easily picture her in his control. He could see those wide eyes even wider and filled with terror. He could feel the blood start to heat in his veins. She could be one for Doc Holiday.

Doc Holiday. He liked the name, the play on words.

Growing up, he had been a big fan of Westerns—
Gunsmoke
and
Bonanza
on television, and all the old Western movies.
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
had always been a favorite when he was a kid. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. He owned the DVDs of the two movies made in the nineties—
Wyatt Earp
and
Tombstone.
He preferred
Tombstone
’s Kurt Russell over Kevin Costner as Wyatt Earp, but he thought Dennis Quaid should have won the freaking Oscar as Doc Holliday in the Costner film. Val Kilmer’s portrayal of the dentist/gunslinger had been way too gay for his taste.