The 9th Girl (19 page)

When the knock came on her bedroom door, she jumped, startled.

“Britt?” her mother asked. “Can I come in?”

Brittany set her iPad aside and went to the door, expecting her mother to ask her to turn her music down. But when she opened the door her mother was not alone. Two men in suits and heavy coats stood behind her.

“Honey, these men are police detectives,” her mom said, looking worried. “They’re looking for Gray.”

“Gray?” Brittany looked from one man to the other. Police? One was older; one was bigger. They both scared her with their serious expressions. “Why? Is she in trouble?”

The older cop showed her his ID and badge. He was lean and hard-looking, with a lot of gray shot through his thick hair. His eyes seemed to burn right into her.

“Brittany, I’m Sergeant Kovac. This is Sergeant Knutson. Penny Gray’s mom told us she was staying with you,” he said.

“She was here for a couple of days,” she said. “Then she left.”

“Where did she go?”

Brittany shook her head. “I don’t know. I thought she went home.”

Police. In her bedroom. Asking about Gray. A chill ran down her back.

“When did you last see her?”

“Um, the night before New Year’s Eve.”

“Have you heard from her in the last day or so?” the cop Kovac asked.

Her heart beat faster. The way he stared at her made her feel like she was some kind of criminal. It was unnerving. She hadn’t done anything wrong, but she was still afraid. Her palms were sweating.

“No,” she said.

“Do you have any idea where she might be?”

“No.”

“She didn’t tell you where she was going?”

“No.”

He looked at his partner and gave a sharp sigh.

“Britt,” her mother said, “if you know where Gray is, you have to tell these men.”

“I don’t know where she is!” Brittany snapped. “We went to a party and she got mad and left; that’s all. I don’t know where she went. I thought she went home.”

“Where was the party?” Kovac asked.

Brittany bit her lip and tried not to look at her mom. She was going to be in such trouble.

“Brittany . . . ,” her mother said in that tone of voice that warned of worse to come.

“This is important, Brittany,” Kovac said. “I can’t speak for your mom, but personally, I’d cut you some slack on the party if you had something to share about your friend Gray. She’s missing. She could be in some serious trouble. We need to locate her.”

This is so weird. This can’t be happening,
she thought. Police in her bedroom asking about Gray. Gray missing? Gray wasn’t missing. She was just being Gray.

“Brittany Anne Lawler,” her mom said, enunciating every syllable.

“We went to the Rock & Bowl,” Brittany confessed.

Her mom gasped. “Brittany! You told me you were going to Christina’s house!”

“We were! But then everybody went to the Rock & Bowl first—”

“You know I don’t like you going to that place!”

Brittany rolled her eyes and huffed a sigh. “Mom. Everybody goes there!”

“It’s in a terrible neighborhood!”

“No, it isn’t! It’s practically right by the Mall of America.”

“The mall has to have its own police force for a reason,” her mother said.

“How did she leave?” Kovac asked.

Brittany looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“How did Gray leave? Did she call a cab? Did she take a bus? Did she leave with someone?”

“She has a car,” Brittany said. “She just left.”

Her mother looked as though she wanted to strangle her. Her eyes were practically bulging from her head. “You told me Aaron’s father was picking you up.”

She glanced at the cops, embarrassment and anger turning her cheeks red. “My husband and I were at a dinner party,” she said, almost like an apology, like the detectives would think she was a bad mom because her daughter had gone to the stupid Rock & Bowl.

She turned back to Brittany. “And you know I don’t want you riding in a car with her. She just got her license!”

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Brittany argued. “She had to pass a test to get it. She’s just as good a driver as anyone else.”

“Oh my God,” her mother muttered, looking up at the ceiling.

“What time was it when you last saw Miss Gray?” the big cop asked.

Brittany shrugged. “I don’t know. Nine thirty? Ten, maybe. Maybe ten thirty. I don’t remember.”

“Brittany . . . ,” her mother said.

“She’s not missing,” Brittany insisted. “Gray gets pissed off. Sometimes she just goes somewhere for a couple of days. She always comes back.”

“This isn’t the first time she’s gone missing?” Kovac asked.

“She’s not missing,” Brittany said stubbornly.

It seemed important to say that, to believe it.

“She gets mad. She goes and stays with whoever.”

“Can you give us names?”

“I don’t know them. She has friends outside our school. Musicians, poets, older kids. They’re not people I hang out with.”

A chill went through her suddenly as her gaze swept over her iPad lying on her bed. Sonya Porter’s article on
TeenCities
 . . . A girl found dead on New Year’s Eve . . . Two police detectives were standing in her bedroom asking questions about Gray . . .

A sickening sense of dread swirled in her stomach.

“She hasn’t called you?” Kovac asked. “No text messages?”

“No posts on Facebook?” the big one asked. “Twitter?”

Tears rose in Brittany’s eyes. “You’re scaring me. Stop it.”

Kovac didn’t apologize. He just kept looking at her with those hard eyes. “Do you have any pictures of Gray, Brittany?”

Her hands were trembling as she picked up the iPad off the bed and touched the icon to call up her photographs. The pictures swam in the tears that welled up on the edge of her eyelashes.

She told herself nothing was wrong. It was stupid to be ready to cry. There was no reason to cry. Just because there were police detectives in her bedroom . . . Just because they didn’t know where Gray was . . . Just because some stupid reporter wrote about something bad that happened . . . It didn’t mean there was any reason for her to cry.

Three tears spilled down her cheeks as she touched one of the photos and it filled the screen. Herself and Gray posing like movie stars, lips pursed as they pretended to blow kisses at the camera.

“Nothing happened to her,” she said, sounding more afraid than defiant.

The picture was from summer, from when they were in the writer’s workshop. Gray said she wanted to speak like Dorothy Parker and write like Sylvia Plath. Side by side they looked like some kind of day-and-night comparison. Brittany with her blond hair and fresh face. Gray with her multiple piercings, her thick dark hair swept to one side. She stood facing away from the camera, looking back over her shoulder.

The police detectives stared at the photograph, giving nothing away with their stone faces and hard eyes. Kovac reached out a finger and touched the screen, touched Gray’s bare shoulder just below her tattoo and murmured the word: “Acceptance.”

Brittany knew right then, even though they didn’t say it, that something terrible had happened. And even though she was standing in her bedroom with adults all around her, she had never felt so alone in her life. For the first time she thought she understood that sense of isolation Gray had talked about in her poems.

She had never felt so lost.

20

“What do you mean,
she i
sn’t there?”

Julia Gray looked at them with an expression Kovac had seen many, many times in his years of delivering bad news. It was a deliberate kind of confusion layered over apprehension, layered over a sickening sense of primal fear.

They stood in the small foyer of the Gray home again, the scent of Christmas tree and spice candles perfuming the air. Kovac and Elwood, sweating inside their heavy coats; Julia Gray and her gentleman friend, Michael Warner, looking vulnerable, the way civilians do when confronted by cops. Like rabbits facing wolves.

Warner was in shirtsleeves now, a fine blue button-down oxford with his initials monogrammed on the pocket. He had stripped off the cashmere sweater and tied it around his neck—a look that always irritated Kovac. What the fuck was up with a guy like that? What kind of message was he trying to send? To Kovac, a sweater tied around the neck said “gay.” Not that he gave a shit. It was just an observation. But then there were these metro guys—or whatever the hell the fashionable people called them now. Sweater around the neck, manicures and facials. Mixed messages. He just never quite trusted a guy who sent mixed messages. Have a girlfriend or have a boyfriend. Pick a side.

“According to your daughter’s friend, they went to a place called the Rock and Bowl. There was some kind of argument. Your daughter got mad and left,” Kovac said.

“And went where?” Julia Gray asked stupidly. She probably wasn’t a stupid woman. She just wanted him to have an easy answer. She wanted him to tell her where her daughter was—alive and well, of course, not on a slab in the Hennepin County morgue.

Kovac sighed and scratched his ear. “Mrs. Gray, it might be better if we could all sit down and talk. Do you mind if we do that?”

Of course she minded. Of course she didn’t want them making themselves at home. She didn’t want them there at all. She hugged her arms tight across her chest and looked around the foyer as if looking for permission from some unseen audience to ask them to just leave so she could go back to pretending nothing was wrong.

“Julia, they’re right,” Michael Warner said quietly. He put a hand on her shoulder as if to anchor her. “Let’s all sit down and try to figure this out.”

“Oh my God, this is—is—just so—,” she muttered, shaking her head, agitated as Warner herded her toward a seat at the dining room table. “I can’t believe she’s doing this.”

Kovac arched a brow at Elwood, who shrugged. It didn’t seem to be sinking in to Julia Gray that they were considering the possibility her daughter might be a victim of a brutal homicide or that, at best, her daughter had disappeared. This unpleasantness was something her daughter was doing to her, purposely making her look bad.

“She texted me,” she said, turning back into the foyer. She grabbed her phone off the hall table and brought up the message on the screen. “She texted me back an hour ago. She’s fine. She’s just off in one of her snits.”

She shoved the phone at Kovac. The message read:
Y cant u leave me alone?

It meant nothing more than that whoever had Penelope Gray’s phone was smart enough to answer a text message.

“What kind of phone does your daughter have?” Elwood asked.

“An iPhone. The latest one. I got it for her for her birthday.” She shook her head. “It’s crazy the things these kids have to have. iPhones, iPads, iPods . . .”

“Do you know if the phone has a tracking app enabled?”

“I don’t know what that is. I’m not very good with technology.”

“If the software is enabled and the phone is turned on, we would be able to locate the device,” Elwood explained. “We’d need to access her Apple ID account, which means jumping through some legal hoops—unless you have her password.”

She laughed without humor. “No. I don’t have access to much of anything in my daughter’s life.”

The immediate implications of that truth pressed down on her, and tears flooded her eyes. She pressed a hand across her mouth.

Michael Warner corralled her with a long arm and steered her back into the dining room. “Julia, let’s sit. We’ll think out loud. We’ll figure this out.”

“Have you called any of your daughter’s friends?” Elwood asked.

She closed her eyes for a moment as she sank down onto a chair at the dining room table, as if against the pain of a monumental headache. “My daughter doesn’t share her friends with me.”

“Girls this age are asserting their independence,” Michael Warner said. “Particularly where their mothers are concerned.”

Kovac gave him a who-asked-you look.

“I’m a psychiatrist,” Warner said by way of explanation. “I work with a lot of girls Penny’s age. And I have a daughter myself. Between the flux of hormones and the changing brain chemistry, girls this age are volatile in the best of cases.”

“And this isn’t the best of cases?” Kovac asked.

“Her father and I divorced when Penny was twelve,” Julia Gray said, her attention on her phone again as she searched her contacts for a number. “The four years since have been . . . difficult, to put it mildly.”

She put the phone to her ear and listened to it ring on the other end.

“She’s a bright, talented girl,” Warner said. “But she doesn’t apply herself, she doesn’t try to fit in, she’s defiant—”

“Tim? It’s—” She checked herself, her brows knitting with frustration. She sighed, waiting for the voice mail message to play through. “It’s me. Is Penny with you? Have you seen or heard from her? Please call me back as soon as you get this.”

She clicked the call off and put the phone down on the table with a little more force than was necessary.

“Has your daughter ever been in trouble with the law?” Kovac asked, thinking if the girl’s prints were on file they could eliminate her as a possible victim. Their Jane Doe’s prints had not been in the system.

Even as he thought it, he could see Brittany Lawler’s photograph in his mind’s eye and the tattoo on Penelope Gray’s shoulder.

Pooch Halvorsen said a lot of kids had that tattoo. . . .

“No, thank God.”

“Does she have a boyfriend?”

“Not that I know of.”

Elwood got out his little spiral notebook and pen. “What kind of car does your daughter drive, Mrs. Gray?”

“It’s a black Toyota something—”

“Camry,” Michael Warner supplied. “An oh-four.”

“Is it registered in her name?”

“No. In mine,” Julia said. “Michael bought it for Penny’s sixteenth birthday, but it made more sense to register it to me—for the insurance, you know.”

Kovac reached inside his coat and pulled out the photograph Brittany Lawler had printed out for him from her iPad and put it on the table.

“This seems to be a more recent photograph than the one you showed us earlier,” he said.