The 9th Girl (20 page)

Julia Gray got a sour look, narrowing her eyes. “She did all that this summer,” she said bitterly. “The piercings, the tattoo. I can’t stand the sight of it.”

“Penny feels the need to make self-destructive statements,” Michael Warner said. “It’s a manifestation of her inner pain. She feels emotionally isolated by her father’s abandonment. It’s normal, really.”

“If it’s so normal, why doesn’t Christina have holes in her face?” Julia asked him, the hint of bitterness in her voice old and worn. They’d been over this ground before.

“I didn’t abandon Christina,” he said. “Her mother’s death brought us closer together. Your split from Tim drove a wedge between you and Penny. It’s a completely different set of circumstances.”

“It’s my fault,” Julia said.

“Tim left you. The blame lies with him.”

“Not as Penny sees it,” she said. “I drove him away. That’s what she believes. It’s all my fault her father took up with his twenty-six-year-old receptionist.”

“Does Penny have any tattoos other than this one?” Kovac asked, tapping a finger on the grainy print.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I can’t imagine that she would hide them from me. She knows how much I hate them. It shouldn’t even be legal for a girl her age to get a tattoo.”

“It’s not,” Elwood said.

“Her latest act of defiance was shaving off half of her hair,” she said.

The statement struck Kovac like an electrical shock. He glanced at Elwood from the corner of his eye.

Tinks said girls shaved their heads now. They pierced everything. They got tattoos. How many did all three and then went missing?

“She claims it’s a statement about her sexuality,” Julia Gray went on bitterly. “This is her new thing—claiming she’s bisexual. I could have strangled her. She looks like she escaped from a concentration camp!”

“I’m going to suggest you file a missing persons report, Mrs. Gray,” Kovac said calmly. “That way we can get your daughter’s information into the system immediately.”

They could get out an AMBER Alert, giving them maximum media coverage. Even if Penelope Gray turned out to be Zombie Doe, it would take time to confirm that, and they wouldn’t have to release the information immediately. In the meantime, media spotlighting the case of a missing girl would make people aware, get people talking, get them looking for Penny Gray’s car. Maybe someone would remember having seen her.

“Oh my God,” Julia Gray murmured, pressing her hand to her forehead as if feeling for a fever. She grabbed the phone again as the screen lit up and a
ping
sounded, heralding the arrival of a text. Tears filled her eyes and her face turned mottled shades of red that clashed with her Christmas sweater. “Tim hasn’t heard from her.”

“You don’t think it’s her, though,” Michael Warner said to Kovac. “Your victim. You don’t think it’s Penny. If you think we should file a missing persons report . . .”

Kovac looked at him, Dr. Sweater Around His Neck, and wondered if Michael Warner had ever seen a corpse that had fallen out of the trunk of a moving car or the face of a young woman who had been disfigured with acid. Probably not. That kind of privilege was reserved for guys like himself . . . and the parents of murdered children.

“It’s not my place to draw conclusions,” he said.

“But you’ve seen Penny’s photograph,” Warner pressed. “And you’ve seen the victim. Either it’s her or it isn’t.”

“It’s not that simple, Dr. Warner,” Kovac said. “I’m going to leave it at that. No need for all of us to have the same nightmares tonight.”

Warner frowned at the implication. “This is going to require dental X-rays?”

“X-rays,” Kovac qualified.

“Has Penny ever broken a bone?” Elwood asked.

Now the color began to drain from Julia Gray’s face as she looked from one of them to the other. “Oh my God,” she whispered as realization began to dawn that this could go the wrong way for her—and for her daughter. “She . . . she . . .”

She didn’t want to finish the sentence. If she finished the sentence, then it was out there and there was no taking it back and pretending it might not be true. They were asking her this question for a reason, for a real reason, a serious reason. And they were telling her that if her daughter was dead, she was also unrecognizable, that she had been brutalized in the most horrible way imaginable. Julia Gray didn’t want to know that.

She started to cry. First just a few tears in a slow trickle; then a dam burst somewhere inside her, and the emotion came in a flash flood of tears and snot and spittle and panic, like something inside of her head had exploded.

“Sh-sh-she b-b-b-ro-ke h-h-her wrist! Oh my God!”

Dr. Sweater Around His Neck looked at her with the same horror with which any man first regarded a sobbing woman.

Kovac got to his feet and sighed, weary to the bone. “We’ll need to see those X-rays.”

The sound that came from Julia Gray was terrible and primal, like a wounded animal. That’s what they all were, in truth, anyway, Kovac thought. Strip away the Christmas lights and the nice house, the stylish clothes and the trappings of society, they were all just animals trying to survive in a cruel world.

Julia Gray was just a mother now, frightened for the offspring she had given life and been charged to keep safe. Before the cops had shown up on her doorstep, she had been struggling but still in possession of the hope that she could turn things around with her child. If her child was dead, then failure was a done deal. There would be no second chances.

Kovac and Elwood moved off to one side of the room while Michael Warner tried to comfort and calm Julia Gray. Kovac pulled his phone out and texted Liska with the address of the Gray house and
pick me up asap.
Elwood would go back to the office and get the paperwork rolling.

“Mrs. Gray,” he said after the worst of her hysteria had passed. “We’ll need to have a look in your daughter’s bedroom.”

Michael Warner helped her up from her chair and held on to her as they went slowly up the stairs, as if she had suddenly become physically frail beneath the weight of the stress.

In contrast to Brittany Lawler’s sunny yellow bedroom, Penny Gray’s bedroom was somber and dark, the walls and ceiling a charcoal blue-gray that absorbed the light instead of reflecting it back into the room. The posters on the walls were of grim and angry young people. Singers and actors, Kovac supposed, though he’d never heard of any of them. They all looked like their moods could be greatly improved by a decent meal and a smack upside the head.

Someone had painted the acceptance tattoo on the wall above the bed in silver paint with the words
Be Who You Are
beneath it. The bed itself was a tangle of sheets and pillows. There was a chair nearby stacked with clothes, and a dresser cluttered with all the stuff girls found essential—jewelry and makeup, hairbrushes and perfume bottles. A bookcase was filled to overflowing with books and magazines and notebooks. Old stuffed toys and odd keepsakes—the things girls collected.

The thing he didn’t see in Penny Gray’s bedroom that had been in abundance in Brittany Lawler’s room: photographs of her with her friends. There were none—not in the bookcase or on the dresser or on the walls.

Kovac had long ago acquired the skill of reading people from the things they surrounded themselves with, the things they placed importance on, the things they
didn’t
have, the things they kept hidden. As he poked around the bedroom of the girl her friend called Gray, he put these pieces together with what he had seen in her photograph and the things people had said about her.

Her mother called her Penny—a name that called to mind something shiny and bright. She called herself Gray—the color of gloom and ambiguity. Her bedroom was an obvious reflection of that self—a difficult, conflicted girl who seemed to work at alienating herself while preaching a message of acceptance.

The thought crept into his mind as he looked around that somewhere on the far side of the country he had a daughter. He wondered what her room might look like, what it might say about her, and he thought about how he would have to gather together the pieces of information about her by looking at her stuff because he knew absolutely nothing about who she was.

These thoughts sifted around in the lower reaches of his mind as he looked through Penny Gray’s room and formulated his thoughts about who Penny Gray was. Julia Gray and Michael Warner watched from the doorway.

“Is there something in particular you’re looking for?” Warner asked.

“Does your daughter keep a calendar or a diary, Mrs. Gray?” Elwood asked.

“I don’t know. She keeps everything in her phone and on her laptop.”

“Is her laptop here someplace?”

“I doubt it. She always has it with her. She thinks she’s going to be a writer. A poet. Who reads poetry anymore?”

“I do,” Elwood admitted.

Kovac glanced over the things on Penny Gray’s desk—schoolbooks, a dog-eared paperback novel about vampires, some completely indecipherable math homework. Not that long ago the girl’s computer would have been an immovable box, and files would have been stored on floppy disks that he could have taken and given over to a geek to figure out. Now everything was portable and files got saved to a cloud in the ether someplace.

On the upside, technology would allow them to track her telephone—provided it was turned on. They would be able to narrow down a location based on the towers the signal was pinging off. As soon as they got the missing persons report filed and the AMBER Alert up and a warrant to get the information from the phone company . . .

“Is her phone in her name?” he asked. “Or do you have a family plan?”

“We have a family plan.”

Elwood looked at him. “That makes life a little easier,” he said quietly.

They had run into walls in the past trying to get information from the cell phone service providers of missing individuals. The phone companies were more concerned about being sued over violations of privacy laws than about hindering a police investigation.

“I still want a warrant,” Kovac murmured. “Dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. I don’t want a hairsbreadth of room for some oily lawyer to slide through if it comes to that.”

He glanced at his watch. Half past exhaustion, with a long night to go.

“Is this some of your daughter’s poetry?” Elwood asked, pointing to the wall above the small cluttered desk, where printed pages and small drawings and pictures cut out of magazines had been taped into a patchwork collage of teenage angst and self-expression.

“I guess so,” Julia Gray said.

She didn’t know her daughter’s writing. She didn’t know her daughter’s friends. She didn’t know where her daughter went, didn’t know why she made the choices she made. It struck Kovac that this woman didn’t know much more about her daughter than he knew about his. Even living in the same house, they were living worlds apart.

The title of one of the poems caught his eye. He pulled his reading glasses out of his coat pocket and stepped closer, a deep sense of sadness settling inside him as he read the words.

He thought about the girl Julia Gray had portrayed through her words and her attitude this evening: defiant, disrespectful, disappointing in every way. He thought about the girl who had written this poem, the girl with the acceptance tattoo: a kid trying to express herself, trying to figure out who she was and who she wanted to be, feeling misunderstood, like every teenage kid did. He thought about the girl whose body he had knelt over on the cold and frozen road New Year’s Eve: used, abused, discarded. Taken. Lost. Gone.

It was his job as a detective to be the one person in the world who accepted her for exactly who she had been. It wasn’t his place to judge her, and in judging her close off his mind to possibilities in the investigation. It was his job to see her for who she was and to see every avenue that opened to him from that place of acceptance.

Somehow, he doubted that was what Penny Gray had had in mind when she had gotten that tattoo or when she had written this poem.

“Lost”

Looking for me

I am

Who do they see?

Not I

I want to be

Myself

They want me to be

Gone

I’m lost

21

“The Rock and Bowl?”
Liska asked.

Kovac looked at her from the passenger’s side as he buckled his seat belt. “You know it?”

“I’ve been there with the boys.”

She had been there more than once—to a couple of birthday parties and to an outing with R.J.’s hockey team. It was the kind of place that drove her crazy as a mother who happened to be a cop—or a cop who happened to be a mother. The place was too big with too many different things going on, catering to too many different kinds of people. It was a bowling alley / arcade / pizza place à la Chuck E. Cheese, with a second-story dance floor that overlooked the lanes. The crowd was a mix of families, kids, teenagers, single young adults. It was the kind of place where she always worried about pedophiles and low-level drug dealers slipping shit to kids in the midst of the chaos.

“And this girl goes to PSI,” she said flatly, wondering vaguely if any of this was really happening. Maybe she was asleep and dreaming. Maybe these last couple of days had all just been part of the same long, strange nightmare. God knew she felt that tired. Maybe she was asleep and dreaming she was exhausted and that her life was a mess.

“I’d say what are the odds,” Kovac said, “but the odds are no different she’d go to that school than any other. Everybody comes from somewhere.”

“You really think this is our girl?” Liska asked, pulling away from the curb, leaving behind the pretty Tudor-style house with its cheery Christmas tree in the front window.