The 9th Girl (26 page)

“In the meantime, Elwood,” he said, starting for the door, “let’s you and I go talk to the mother and see what lovely things she has to say about her ex.”

26

Julia Gray was pacing
the narrow width of the interview room, her arms crossed as if holding herself together. Her head snapped in Kovac’s direction as he walked in. Under the harsh fluorescent lights, she looked haggard and ten years older than she had the night before. The bruise on her cheek had darkened.

Michael Warner sat at the small, round white table, composed, though he had already shed his coat and pushed up the sleeves of his black sweater. His forehead glistened with a fine mist of sweat. He rose and shook hands with Kovac.

“Detective Kovac.”

“Dr. Warner. Mrs. Gray.”

“Have you heard anything?” she asked. “Captain Kasselmann said leads are coming in. People have called in to say they’ve seen Penny. Is that true?”

Elwood pulled a chair out for her. “Have a seat, Mrs. Gray. We’ll go over everything.”

She glanced at Michael Warner as if looking for his permission. Kovac sat down, perched his reading glasses on his nose, and looked down at the cell phone records he had stuck in a file folder and carried in with him. Elwood took the remaining seat, dwarfing the table like a bear at a child’s tea party, ready to jot notes on a yellow legal pad. Julia Gray fidgeted in her seat. “Why is it so warm in here?”

“Apologies for that, ma’am,” Elwood said. “There’s something going on with the heating system.”

“It’s really uncomfortable,” she complained, yet she continued to keep her arms crossed tight around her.

Michael Warner leaned over and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Try to relax, Julia. Deep breaths.”

“We’ve had a number of calls to the AMBER Alert hotline,” Elwood said. “Every potential lead will be checked out. That said, we have yet to locate your daughter’s vehicle, and the last substantiated sighting of her was at a Holiday gas station the evening of the thirtieth.”

Kovac lifted his head. “May I see your cell phone, Mrs. Gray? I’d like to just take a look at your daughter’s text messages to you, see if there might be some bit of information that could be helpful to us.”

She hefted her purse onto the table. It was half the size of a gunnysack, with designer logos stamped all over it. She held it open with her injured right hand and dug for the phone with the left.

“Are you right- or left-handed, Mrs. Gray?” Kovac asked.

She glanced up at him. “I’m right-handed. Why?”

“I broke my right hand once. I couldn’t write, couldn’t type, couldn’t turn a doorknob. What a pain in the rear.”

“Yes, it is,” she said absently, looking into the purse. “I don’t have it. My phone. I must have left it in the car.”

Kovac flicked a glance at Elwood. What mother of a missing child absentmindedly left her phone in the car? Even if it was likely the girl was dead, until they had confirmation, a mother had to hold out hope, however slim.

“You haven’t had any text messages from your daughter’s number since we spoke last night?”

“No.”

“The phone seems to have been turned off,” Elwood said. “Or the battery died. I’ve been in contact with Apple. Your daughter did install the Find My iPhone app, but in that model the app only works if the phone is turned on.”

“So you can’t locate it,” Michael Warner said.

“No,” Kovac said, looking at the phone records. “But we can narrow down the vicinity the phone was in when it was being used. For instance, on the night she went missing, calls pinged off a tower near the Rock and Bowl. Since that night the phone has been in two areas. One hits off a tower on Pleasant Avenue South, west of 35W and north of Highway 62. The other is an AT&T tower located at 3910 Stephens Avenue just east of your own neighborhood, Mrs. Gray.”

She looked confused. “I’m not sure what we’re supposed to make of that.”

Kovac moved on, letting her wonder. “When was the last time you actually saw Penny, Mrs. Gray?”

“The twenty-eighth. Dinnertime. I had just gotten home from work.”

“You said the two of you had words. What about?”

She glanced at Warner as she pulled in a breath and sighed sharply. “She was angry. She was hurt. She didn’t hear from her father on Christmas, and she’d been stewing on that for two days. She was angry with me for—for—
everything
. For losing her father, for not being who she wants me to be, for my relationship with Michael.”

“Penny doesn’t approve of your relationship?” Elwood asked.

“Penny wouldn’t approve of any relationship her mother has,” Michael Warner said. “Unless Julia and her ex-husband got back together—and not even then. What she wants is a fantasy. She wants things to be the way her memory has painted the relationship between her parents when she was a little girl.”

“Are you treating Penny, Dr. Warner?” Kovac asked.

“Not any longer. I was her therapist for a time. That’s how Julia and I met. Of course, we didn’t become involved until after I stopped seeing Penny as a patient,” he hastened to add.

“Is that why you stopped seeing her?”

“No, no,” he said, shaking his head. “After evaluating Penny and having a number of sessions with her, I determined she would be better served by a female therapist. Because of the situation with her father, she feels a strong need to try to manipulate men. That makes the therapist’s job ten times more difficult.”

“So who does she see now?”

“No one,” Julia said. “I sent her to the woman Michael recommended, and she would go and spend the entire time not talking or making eye contact. I’m not interested in paying for that, and she wasn’t interested in going. There was no point.”

And once again Julia Gray had taken the path of least resistance where her daughter was concerned. Even when Penny Gray had been physically present in her mother’s life, she had been lost.

“So Penny picked a fight with you that night?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Did she ever get physically violent with you?”

“No! Of course not!” she said a little too emphatically. “Why would you ask me that?”

“Your ex-husband mentioned an incident where your daughter attacked his wife,” Elwood said.

She rolled her eyes. “That was blown all out of proportion.”

“You were there?”

“No, of course I wasn’t there,” she snapped. “Tim’s office manager told me about it. I’ve known her for years. She said Brandi overreacted. She’s such a drama queen. I’ve never understood how Tim doesn’t see right through her. Everyone else does.”

“So you and your daughter argued, but there was no physical fight,” Kovac said.

“No!” She went to throw her hands up in frustration and stopped midgesture, looking at the brace on her hand and wrist, realization dawning. “I
told
you. I slipped and fell on the ice.”

“Where did that happen, Mrs. Gray?” Elwood asked.

“It happened in a parking lot in St. Louis Park,” she said, clearly irritated. “I was leaving an appointment at Four Seasons Women’s Clinic.”

“At least you got quick medical attention,” he said.

“I didn’t go back into the clinic. I was embarrassed, and I didn’t think I was hurt that badly. Besides, what were a bunch of gynecologists going to do for my wrist? I had it checked out at an urgent care later.”

“What day was that?”

“That same day. The twenty-eighth.”

“That was some bad day,” Kovac commented. “And at the end of the argument that evening Penny left the house?”

“Yes,” she said. Tears rose in her eyes. She forced herself to sit up straight and hold on to her dignity. “She said she hated me, couldn’t stand to be around me, and that she would go be with people who didn’t make her want to puke.”

The poor long-suffering mother.

“And where did she go?” Kovac asked.

Frustration tightened the lines around her mouth. “I don’t know
exactly.
I didn’t hear from her until the next day. I know she ended up staying with her friend Bethany.”

“Brittany,” Elwood corrected her. “Brittany Lawler.”

She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose as if against the pain of a headache, very aware of the fact that she was once again striking out in the Mother of the Year contest.

She scowled at Kovac. “Why are we even talking about this? We know where she was last seen. What difference does it make where she was before that?”

Kovac ignored the question. “Where were you on the evening of the thirtieth, Mrs. Gray?”

“Michael and I went to a concert at the Orpheum and had a late dinner after.”

“At what restaurant?” Elwood asked, scribbling down the details.

Michael Warner leaned forward, looking grave. “I don’t like the direction this is taking, Detective. You can’t possibly think Julia had something to do with whatever happened to Penny.”

Kovac smiled blandly. “It’s important that we get as clear a picture as possible of the time leading up to Penny’s disappearance. An investigation is like a game of chess. We need to know where all the pieces were before our bad guy—whoever that may be—made his big move. We need to see not only the big picture but all the small details.”

“What time did you get home?” Elwood asked.

“I’ve seen this happen on television!” Julia Gray said, alarmed. “A child goes missing and the police waste valuable time harassing the parents. I didn’t do anything to my daughter! How could you even think such a thing?”

“We don’t know you, Mrs. Gray,” Elwood said reasonably. “We can’t make assumptions about anyone in your daughter’s life. We’re not accusing you of anything, but it’s essential that we remain open to all possibilities.”

“Should Julia have an attorney here?” Warner asked.

“This isn’t an interrogation, Dr. Warner,” Kovac said. “No one is under arrest. We’re just trying to get as much information as possible to help guide us in the right direction.”

“I didn’t see my daughter after she left the house on the twenty-eighth,” Julia Gray said tersely.

“And what time did you get home on the thirtieth?” Elwood asked.

“Twelve thirty or so.”

“And you, Dr. Warner?”

“Shortly after that.

“Was your daughter home by then?”

“No. Christina got home around one.”

“Did she say anything about what went on at the Rock and Bowl?” Kovac asked.

“She said she spent the evening out with her friends.”

“She didn’t say anything about Penny Gray?”

“No.”

“Even though, according to kids who were there, Christina and Penny had an argument that ended with Penny leaving.”

“As you’ve heard, an argument that ends with Penny leaving isn’t exactly newsworthy,” Warner said. “Penny is an intrinsically unhappy girl, Detective. She’s unhappy with her life. She’s unhappy with herself. She’s unhappy with her mother and about her mother’s relationship with me. She’s jealous of Christina. She’s jealous of my relationship with my daughter because she doesn’t have a relationship with her own father. I’ve tried to fill that void for her in small ways, and she resents me for it.”

“I’ve been told the dislike between the girls runs both ways,” Kovac said. “According to a witness at the Rock and Bowl, Christina was picking on Penny that night, making fun of her poetry—something that was also not an isolated incident.”

Warner sighed. “I’m not going to try to paint my daughter as a perfect angel, Detective. But you can talk to Christina’s teachers, to her friends. She’s an excellent student. She’s a leader in her class. She mentors younger girls.

“She has tried to be friends with Penny. Penny isn’t interested. That Christina occasionally fights back when Penny lashes out at her is only normal.”

“Girls will be girls.”

“Essentially, yes. Yet when I told Christina last night about Penny being missing, the first thing she wanted to do was help in some way.”

“That’s admirable,” Elwood said. “Hopefully, she’ll be able to help. We’ll be speaking with the kids later today. Maybe they’ll be able to shed some light. People don’t always realize what they know. Sometimes a seemingly insignificant detail can mean everything.”

“Your daughter’s poetry, for example,” Kovac said to Julia Gray. “Her last Facebook post was a poem. It certainly seems to be directed at someone in particular.”

He pulled a printed copy of the poem entitled “Liar” out of the file folder and slid it across the table to a neutral spot between Julia Gray and Michael Warner. He sat back in his chair and watched them read it with his eyelids at half-mast, as if he might doze off.

Julia Gray looked frustrated by her inability to penetrate her daughter’s work—or her world—in any way. Michael Warner read it without expression.

“Any idea who she might be talking about?” Kovac asked.

“Her father, obviously,” Warner said. “She was lashing out at him. He has all but cut her out of his life. She was especially feeling the sting of that over the holidays.”

“But what’s the lie?” Kovac asked. “It’s been four years since your husband left you and Penny, Mrs. Gray. It’s no secret he was cheating on you, that he left you for a younger woman. Considering your daughter’s penchant for public displays of drama, I can’t imagine anyone didn’t know how she felt about it all. So what’s the lie? What’s the secret? Who’s the star she means to bring down?”

Michael Warner slid the sheet of paper back toward him and said, “We can only hope we get a chance to ask her.”

“And for the record, Mrs. Gray,” Elwood said, “where were you New Year’s Eve?”

“We went out for drinks,” she said, tearing up. Michael Warner put an arm around her shoulders to offer comfort while she covered her mouth with her injured hand.

Kovac imagined her remembering the revelry of the evening, dressed to the nines, ringing in the New Year while her daughter was lying dead in the road, a spectacle under the harsh portable lights, TV news cameras angling to get a shot of the carnage.

Every mother’s nightmare.

He hoped.

27

“You are not to leave this house.
Do you understand me?” Nikki said. “I don’t care if it’s on fire. You are
not
to leave this house.”