The 9th Girl (16 page)

The contradictory emotions buzzed around inside her mind like angry bees and gave her an instant headache. At times like this she cursed Speed more than usual. They were supposed to both shoulder the burden of difficult parenting moments. As usual, she got to do all the heavy lifting. When he finally cruised into the picture days from now, he would probably give Kyle an
attaboy
for getting the better of Aaron Fogelman.

She looked at her son walking beside her with his hands stuffed into his coat pockets and his shoulders hunched up to his ears against the biting cold, his backpack hanging heavy over one shoulder. Now was when she was supposed to come up with something profound and motherly to say, but she couldn’t think of what that might be. And if she was conflicted, how must he feel?

They got in the car in silence and she started the engine and cranked up the heater. She looked over at her son and sighed.

“I hated being fifteen,” she confessed. “I didn’t feel like I fit in anywhere. Every day I felt like I was holding my breath, waiting for someone to see through me and then everyone would turn on me. Then I finally figured out the best thing about high school: It doesn’t last forever. And when it’s over, none of what seemed so important about it matters at all.”

Kyle said nothing, but she knew what he was thinking. He was thinking he was just a sophomore and graduation was a tiny light at the end of a long tunnel full of the daily horrors of being a kid who was a little too sensitive and cared a little too much.

She thought of their Jane Doe, the same age as Kyle, with her piercings and her half-shaved head and her tattoo declaring acceptance of all people, and wondered if she had been that kid too—on the outside, trying to figure out who she wanted to be. She hadn’t lived long enough to find out.

“I love you,” Nikki said softly as she put the car in gear and headed it toward the gate. “And I promise you, you won’t die of high school.”

17

“What would you be
doing tonight if we weren’t doing this?” Elwood asked.

Elwood had commandeered the car keys, citing a desire to survive the night. Kovac hadn’t put up much of a protest. He sat in the passenger seat feeling drained as they cruised the rutted, frozen streets of one neighborhood and then another, knocking on doors in search of teenage girls who had been absent from school that day. If he were home, he would probably be falling asleep on the couch, drooling on the cushions while the Travel Channel played in the background, showing all the exotic places he had never been and would probably never see.

“Oh, I’d be working out for a couple of hours, bench-pressing Buicks before a gourmet dinner and an evening of competitive ballroom dancing and crazy hot sex with my supermodel girlfriend,” he said. “You?”

“Bikram yoga.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Kovac said, cringing. “I could have lived my whole life without that image in my head.”

Now it was there in vivid color: Elwood looking like a Sasquatch in a Speedo, contorting his massive body into unnatural positions.

“It’s very therapeutic,” Elwood said. “The heat opens the pores and allows the body to eliminate toxins through sweat.”

“Oh, Christ. Thanks for the Smell-O-Vision. Pull over. I’m gonna puke now.”

“You should try it, Sam. Yoga would do you a world of good.”

“Yoga would put me in the hospital,” he returned. “I’ll settle for a lead on this case and a decent night’s sleep.”

Tippen had gone off with his niece to look through whatever the hell young people were doing and commenting about on the Internet, looking to see if Sonya had gotten any interesting responses to the story she had posted. Kovac had taken his place on the KOD patrol with Elwood, knocking on doors of families whose teenage daughters had been absent from school. A needle-in-the-haystack exercise that came with a side order of twisted emotions.

They wanted to find their victim’s identity, which meant going up to the homes of families and hoping they were missing a child, and being weirdly disappointed if they weren’t able to shatter some parent’s life.

It always sucked when the victim was a kid. There were never any winners in a murder investigation, but it especially sucked when the victim was young. And if they didn’t find the unlucky relatives tonight, Kovac would go home, nuke some horrible plastic plate of frozen whatever, and eat it in front of the computer while he trolled the websites that featured thousands of people gone missing from around the country. Misery everywhere. Despair from one side of the country to the other.

They were in a nice old neighborhood on the west side of Lake Harriet. Large, sturdy homes in the styles popular in the 1940s and 1950s interspersed with more modern McMansion replacements. Big trees that shaded the yards and boulevards half the year stood as naked, bony sentinels for the long winter months. Now, with the sun long gone, their black trunks stood out against the backdrop of snow; their limbs disappeared into the night sky like desperate fingers clawing for the stars.

The house they were looking for was a Tudor-style with a steeply pitched roof and multicolored Christmas lights in the shrubbery. The Christmas tree was lit up and on display in the front window.

Happy holidays. Is your daughter missing? We may have found her murdered corpse. . . .

The house was the last on a block that dead-ended onto parkland, situated on the lot in a way that gave an enviable sense of privacy. Elwood pulled in the narrow driveway behind a black Lexus sedan.

“Which school is this one from?” Kovac asked.

“Performance Scholastic Institute.”

“Tinks’s kid goes there.”

“Academic and artistic excellence,” Elwood said. “Their motto.”

They left the relative warmth of the car and trudged up the sidewalk to ring the doorbell.

The woman who answered the door had the stereotypical suburban soccer mom look—blond bob, big brown eyes, a pleasant smile, a holiday-themed sweater over a white turtleneck. She opened the door as if it had never occurred to her not to let strangers into her home, though she seemed to think better of it as soon as she looked at them and didn’t recognize them.

“Mrs. Gray?” Kovac asked, holding up his ID. “I’m Sergeant Kovac. This is Sergeant Knutson. Sorry to disturb your evening, ma’am.”

She looked worried now. “What’s this about?”

“Do you have a daughter named Penelope?”

“Yes,” she said, guarded, a little defensive. “What’s she done?”

Not: Is she all right? “What’s she done?”

“Is she home tonight?” Kovac asked. “She was reported absent from school today.”

“They send the police out for that now?” Julia Gray asked with a nervous laugh.

Kovac smiled a little, sharing the joke with her. “Is your daughter home this evening?”

“No. No, she’s not. What is this about?”

“Do you know where she is?”

“You’re making me very nervous, Sergeant.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. We don’t want to alarm you—”

“Well, you
are
alarming me,” she said. “Penny is staying with a friend.”

“Have you spoken to her today?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Could we step inside?” Kovac asked. “I don’t know about you, ma’am, but I know my heating bill is big enough without me leaving the door wide open when it’s fifteen below.”

She didn’t seem happy about it, but she stepped back from the door nonetheless. Kovac and Elwood stepped into a lovely small foyer. The house smelled of cleaning products, pine trees, cinnamon, and coffee. The staircase to their left curved up and around to the second floor. To the right was the living room where the Christmas tree stood—a formal room with tidy furniture and bookcases flanking a small brick fireplace. The hall they stood in led to the back of the house. Lights from other rooms spilled into the dark passageway. Faint voices might have been company or a television somewhere in the back.

“Have you heard from your daughter in the last day or so?” Kovac asked. The chandelier overhead washed out Julia Gray’s face, making her look tired. She had a bruise emerging on her left cheekbone, wearing its way through the makeup she had probably put on that morning. An elastic brace wrapped her right hand and wrist like a fingerless glove.

“Of course,” she said. “She sent me a text today.”

“But you haven’t spoken to her?” Elwood asked.

“Julia?” a man’s voice called. “Is everything all right?”

The owner of the voice came into the hall, walking toward them, drying his hands on a red kitchen towel. He was tall and soap opera handsome, with sandy hair shot through with a distinguished touch of gray. He wore charcoal slacks and a camel-tan cashmere sweater over a button-down shirt. He looked like he had stepped out of an ad for an upscale menswear store.

Julia Gray turned toward him. “These men are from the police department. They’re asking about Penny.”

His brow furrowed. “What’s she done?”

“Nothing that we know of, sir,” Elwood said. “We don’t want to alarm you, but we’re trying to identify a young lady whose body was discovered New Year’s Eve.”

Julia Gray looked stricken. She pressed the hand in the brace to her chest as if to keep her heart from leaping out.

“Oh, dear God,” the man said. “That’s terrible.”

“Are you Penelope’s father?” Kovac asked.

“No, no. I’m Dr. Michael Warner.”

“Michael and I are engaged. We just got engaged,” Julia Gray announced with the nervous awkwardness people often had giving personal details to strangers—or to the police, at any rate. She absently and automatically fingered the diamond ring on her left hand. “Penny’s father and I are divorced.”

“If we could get your daughter’s phone number,” Kovac said, “and the name and address of the person she’s staying with. That would be helpful.”

Julia Gray smiled with a mix of nervousness and confusion. “She’s fine,” she said, more to convince herself than them. “I told you. She texted me.”

“How do you know it was her?” Kovac asked.

“What?”

“The text. How do you know it was your daughter who sent the text?”

“Who else would it be? Her name came up on my screen. It was Penny.”

“The message came from your daughter’s phone,” Elwood pointed out. “That doesn’t necessarily mean your daughter sent the message.”

“Do you have a photograph of your daughter, Mrs. Gray?” Kovac asked.

“This is ridiculous,” Julia Gray muttered. “My daughter isn’t missing.”

“Why don’t you call her?” Elwood suggested. “That would clear everything up.”

Julia Gray heaved a sigh and turned to a hall table to dig awkwardly through her purse with her uninjured left hand. She pulled out her phone, fumbled to punch in a number, and pressed the phone to her ear while she stepped into the living room to retrieve a five-by-seven framed photo off a shelf on the wall. She handed the frame to Elwood as she spoke into the phone.

“Penny, it’s Mom. Could you please call me back? Soon. It’s really important.”

“It went to voice mail,” she said unnecessarily. Her breathing had quickened, belying the façade of calm she was trying to project. “My daughter is sixteen. Have you ever had a sixteen-year-old daughter in your life, Sergeant?”

“No, ma’am,” Kovac said.

“When girls turn sixteen they believe they know everything,” she explained, a strong thread of frustration running through her tone. She looked down at the phone as she tapped out a text message with her thumbs. “And they don’t appreciate the reminder that they still have to answer to their mothers.”

“Penny is a difficult girl,” Michael Warner offered, as if anybody had asked him anything.

Kovac ignored him, his attention on the school photograph Julia Gray had given Elwood. The girl in the picture looked younger than sixteen. Her hair was a nondescript shade of brown, just past shoulder length and parted down the middle. There were no crazy piercings. She didn’t look like the kind of girl who would get an illegal tattoo.

She looked a little sad, a little lost, a little pissed off.

She didn’t look much like Zombie Doe.

Of course, they had yet to get the artist’s rendition of what their dead girl might have looked like if her head hadn’t been bashed in like a rotten Halloween pumpkin. The artist wasn’t as afraid of Kovac as he was of Liska, and Liska had gone off to deal with her own teenager.

“When did you last actually speak to your daughter, Mrs. Gray?” Elwood asked.

She sighed impatiently. “Penny hasn’t spoken to me in several days. We had a disagreement, and her way of punishing me is silence. But she usually answers her text messages, even if only to say yes or no to a direct question.”

“She might be more inclined to answer a call from the police,” Michael Warner suggested to her.

“This is so embarrassing,” Julia Gray muttered, staring at her silent telephone, willing something to appear on the screen.

“If we can just get her number and the address for where she’s staying, we’ll make sure she calls you,” Elwood said. The diplomat. He took his little spiral notebook and pen out of his coat pocket and offered it to her.

Embarrassment flushed her cheeks as she awkwardly wielded the pen with her injured hand.

“I don’t know the exact address,” she confessed. “She’s staying with a friend from school. The last name is Lawyer—no—Lawler. They live nearby. Just a few blocks over. Washburn and Forty-Sixth? Forty-Fifth? I’m just not sure of the exact address. I’ve met the girl’s mother,” she hastened to add. “She’s a very nice woman. I think she’s an accountant. Or her husband is.”

She looked up, unable to resist the urge to see how her lousy, fumbling explanation was being received. Kovac just looked at her, his eyes flat, his face expressionless.

“This isn’t making me look like a very good mother,” she said, forcing a nervous smile. “If you had teenagers, you would understand.”

Her hands were trembling as she gave the notebook back.

“What happened to your wrist?” Elwood asked.

“Oh,” she said, looking at her hand as if it had just sprouted from the end of her sweater sleeve. “Oh, I fell. I sprained it. I slipped on the ice and fell. It’s a hazard of my profession,” she said with a nervous laugh.