The 9th Girl (3 page)

He cupped his head in his hands, his elbows resting on the table, holding him up. He was sweating like a horse. As cold as it had been at the scene, it was equally hot in the interview room. Something had gone haywire with the heating system, and no one from the maintenance staff was answering their phones on New Year’s Day.

Liska had stripped off two layers of clothing and she still felt like she was wearing her parka.

Jackson had jerked loose his bow tie and opened the collar of his tuxedo shirt. It was clear he was replaying the memory of the accident in his mind over and over. Liska tried to picture it herself—driving down the road, the trunk of the car in front flies open, and like a scene from a horror movie, out pops a body.

“What kind of car was it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said impatiently, as if he didn’t want his macabre memory interrupted. “Black.”

“Big? Small?”

“Big. Kind of. I don’t know.”

“American? Foreign?”

“I don’t know!” he said, exasperated. “I wasn’t paying attention!”

Liska gave him the hard Mom look. “You’re a limo driver. You’re paid to get your passengers from one place to another in one piece, and you weren’t paying attention?”

Jackson threw his hands up in front of him. “Hey! You don’t know what was going on behind me! I got drunks, I got fights, I got half-naked women making out with each other—”

“You were distracted.”

“Hell yeah! You would be too!”

“As much as the men in my life like to fantasize about it, half-naked women making out isn’t my thing,” Liska said. “So what
do
you remember seeing, Mr. Jackson? On the road. In front of you.”

He heaved a sigh and looked up at the ceiling, as if the scene might play out there like a movie on a screen. “There was a truck on my left.”

“What kind of a truck? A pickup truck?” She didn’t care about the truck. She wanted her witness zooming in on the details. She wanted him to see the picture as clearly as possible.

“No, like a box truck. And then this car merged into traffic in front of me.”

“Two doors? Four doors?”

Jackson shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Could you see how many people were in the car?”

“No. I didn’t look. I didn’t care. It was just a car—until the zombie came out of it.”

“Can you describe the zombie for me?” Liska asked with a straight face. If it somehow made Jamar Jackson more comfortable calling the victim a zombie instead of a woman, so be it.

He wasn’t happy with the request. “You saw it.”

“I know what I saw,” she said. “I want to know what you saw before you ran over her. The trunk popped open and . . . ?”

He squeezed his eyes shut as if it pained him to think about it, then popped them wide open to avoid what he saw on the backs of his eyelids.

“It was freaky. She just popped up, and the next thing I knew she was right in front of me. Like something out of
The Walking Dead.
” His mouth twisted with distaste at the mental image. “Man, her face was all messed up like it was rotten or melted or something. She was all bloody.”

His complexion was looking ashen beneath the sweat. He was breathing through his mouth. Liska leaned over discreetly and inched the wastebasket closer to her chair.

“Did she appear to be conscious? Were her eyes open?”

Jackson grimaced again. Sweat rolled down his temples like rain. “That one eye—it looked right at me! And there was blood coming out the mouth, and I couldn’t stop the Hummer, and then I hit her, and— Oh, man, I don’t feel so good.”

Liska handed him the wastebasket. “I’ll give you a moment alone.”

She left the interview room to the sound of retching.

“Cleanup on aisle twelve!” she called, walking into the break room.

Kovac was pouring himself a cup of coffee that resembled liquid tar. He had stripped down to his shirtsleeves—now rolled halfway up his forearms—and jerked his tie loose at his throat, revealing a peek of white T-shirt underneath. His thick hair—more gray than brown as he skidded down the downhill side of his forties—looked like he had run his hands through it half a hundred times in the last five hours.

“What did he come up with, besides puke?” he asked.

He looked as tired as she felt, the assorted stress lines and scars digging into his face. He had sort of a poor man’s Harrison Ford look: a lean face with asymmetrical features, narrow eyes, and a sardonic mouth. He had recently shaved his old-time cop mustache because she had harped at him for months that it made him look older than he was.

Liska leaned back against the counter and sighed. “Nothing much. He’s pretty hung up on the fact that he killed a zombie.”

“Technically speaking, I don’t think it’s possible to kill a zombie,” Tippen said. “They’re already dead.”

Tall, thin, and angular, he sat a little sideways to the table, like he was at a French sidewalk cafe, his long legs crossed, one arm resting casually against the tabletop. His face was long and homely, with dark eyes burning bright with intelligence and dry wit.

“That’s not true,” Elwood Knutson corrected him from the opposite end of the table. “Zombies are the
un
dead. Which is to say, they were dead but have been reanimated, usually through some kind of black magic. So, technically speaking, they’re alive.”

Elwood was the size and shape of a circus bear, with the mind of a Rhodes scholar and the sensitivity of a poet. They had all been working cases together for half a dozen years, going back to the Cremator homicides when they worked the task force to catch a serial killer.

“We should all be shocked that you know that much about zombies,” Liska said, snagging a doughnut off the tray on the counter. “But we’re not.”

“They’re always shooting zombies in the movies, but they never seem to die,” Tippen pointed out. “Which to me implies that they can’t be killed because they’re already dead.”

“You have to kill a zombie by killing its brain,” Elwood explained. “It’s not that easy.”

“You can’t shoot it through the heart with a silver bullet?”

“That’s werewolves.”

“A stake through the heart.”

“Vampires.”

“Elwood,” Kovac interrupted. “Get a fucking life. Go out. See people. Stop watching so much cable television.”

“Oh, like you should talk, Sam,” Liska scolded. “You live like a hermit.”

“We’re not talking about me.”

Kovac took a drink of the coffee and made a face like someone had just punched him in the gut. “Jesus, how long has this shit been sitting here?”

“Since last year,” Tippen said.

“Vampires and werewolves have roles in classic literature,” Elwood said.

“And zombies?”

“Are a contemporary pop culture rage. I like to stay current.”

“I like to stay on point,” Kovac said. “And I don’t want to hear any more about fucking zombies. The phones are ringing off the hook with reporters wanting to talk about zombies.”

“Zombies are news,” Elwood pointed out.

“Zombies aren’t real,” Kovac said. “We’ve got a dead girl. That’s real.
She
was real. We’re not living in a television show.” He turned his attention back to Liska. “Did you tell him he probably didn’t kill her?”

“No,” she said. “Because I think he probably did.”

“She has, like, twenty stab wounds in her chest,” he pointed out.

“That doesn’t mean she died from them. Jackson says the trunk popped open and the victim sat up.”

“That could be what he saw,” Kovac conceded. “The car hit a pothole, the trunk wasn’t latched so it popped open, the body bounced and appeared to sit up. That doesn’t mean she was alive.”

“She was upright when he hit her,” Liska said. “A dead body falls out of a trunk, it hits the ground like a sack of wet trash.”

“I think if I fell
alive
out of the trunk of a moving car, I would hit the ground like a sack of wet trash,” Elwood said. “Who gets up from that?”

“Depends on how fast the car was going,” Tippen said.

“Depends on how bad I want to stay alive,” Liska said. “If I’m alive coming out of that trunk, you can bet your ass I’m doing everything I can do to get up and get out of the road.”

“Tinks, you would kick down death’s door and beat its ass,” Kovac said. “But that’s you.”

“And maybe that’s our zombie girl too,” Liska argued. “We don’t know her. That’s for the ME to tell us.”

“It’s a moot point,” Kovac said. “I’m never gonna charge the limo driver with anything. Our vic is dead because of whoever put her in the trunk of that car and whatever that person did to her.”

“What did the limo driver say about her face?” Tippen asked.

They had all taken a look at the digital photos Liska had snapped at the scene. Kovac had called in Tip and Elwood because of the possible connection to the Doc Holiday murders. The four of them had formed their own unofficial task force on the two previous cases in their jurisdiction. That enabled them to keep the engine churning on cases that were essentially going cold.

The general rule of thumb in the Homicide division was three concentrated days working a homicide. If the case wasn’t solved in three days, it had to take a back burner to newer cases—homicides and assaults—and the detectives had to work the old cases as they could. With four of them doing follow-up, the cases kept moving. Even at a snail’s pace, it was better than nothing.

If this Jane Doe case looked enough like the other two murders, plus the one in St. Paul, they might be able to convince the brass of the need for a formal task force. In the meantime, they did what they could on their own.

“He said she looked that way when he hit her,” Liska said. “The poor kid is going to see that face in his sleep for years to come.”

“But he isn’t seeing a license plate?” Kovac asked. “A make and model? A parking sticker? Nothing else.”

“He wasn’t paying attention. He was more interested in the two half-naked girls making out in the back of the Hummer.”

“Where are they?” Tippen asked. “I volunteer to interview them.”

Liska broke off a piece of her doughnut and threw it at his head. “You’re such a perv!”

He arched a woolly eyebrow. “This is news to you?”

“Topic, people!” Kovac barked. “It’s as hot as Dante’s fucking inferno in here. I’d like to get out of here sometime before heatstroke sets in.”

“He says there was a box truck ahead of him,” Liska said, “on his left, as the car merged into traffic in front of him.”

They all perked up at that.

“What kind of a box truck?” Kovac asked.

“I had to psychologically beat him like a rented mule to get that much out of him,” Liska said. “And how could that be relevant anyway? The truck was already to his left. The car was only just merging into traffic from the right. And the vic fell out of the car, not the truck. It’s the one thing he’s very clear on. The vic fell out of the car.”

“Would he work with a hypnotist?” Elwood asked. “He’s too traumatized now to want to consciously go after those detailed memories. A hypnotist could be the thing.”

“I’ll ask him,” Liska said. “What’s the harm?”

“Go for it,” Kovac said. “If he can give us a tag number—even a partial—on that car, we could find our whodunit before we even know who he done it to.”

Liska took his coffee and washed down the last of her doughnut, shuddering at the bitterness.

“Oh my God! That’s horrible!” she said. “Start a fresh pot, for Christ’s sake!”

“It’ll put hair on your chest, Tinks,” Kovac said.

“Great. Something more for Tip to fantasize about,” she said, heading for the door.

“And, Tinks?”

She looked back over her shoulder.

“Tell the guy he didn’t kill anyone.”

4

The residents of Minneapolis
were waking to a new year by the time Liska finally went home. Waking, or better yet, sleeping in. She had been up for twenty-four hours. Sleeping in sounded like the greatest luxury in the world. Unfortunately, she probably wasn’t going to find out firsthand whether it was or not.

If she could grab a couple of hours before the boys roused themselves, she would be lucky. Kovac was pushing for the autopsy on their Jane Doe to be done ASAP. If he could get an ME to give up New Year’s Day and jump their dead body to the head of the line, they would all be standing around the dissection of a corpse instead of a holiday turkey before the day was out.

She pulled into her driveway, enjoying the feeling of being home that was unique to this house. She had purchased it a year and a half ago—a side-by-side duplex in an established older neighborhood near Lake Calhoun. Built in the 1940s, it was solid and substantial. Renovated in 2000, it had all the necessary creature comforts. She and her boys lived on one side. The other side she rented to the twenty-six-year-old sister of a patrol cop she knew.

Liska felt like she had been an adult for a hundred years, but the day she had bought this house, she had felt like she was just becoming a grown-up all over again. It was the first house she had ever purchased on her own. There was something very important in that.

When she and Speed Hatcher had been married, they had done what all young married couples did—bounced from a cheap apartment to a better apartment to their first real home—a bungalow in a nondescript neighborhood a few blocks off Grand Avenue in St. Paul. There had been some happy times in that house, particularly when the boys were small. There had been plenty of not-so-happy times in that house as their marriage had disintegrated, and after the divorce.

She had stayed there for too many years on a handful of sad excuses. She got the house in the divorce. It was the only home her sons knew. It was convenient for their father to visit.

Speed worked Narcotics for the St. Paul PD. His schedule was erratic at best. Nikki had reasoned it would be better if he could drop in to see his sons when he could. If she moved them closer to her job in Minneapolis, he would have to make an effort to visit. Effort was not Speed Hatcher’s forte, not even where his boys were concerned.

But he had let them down so many times, Nikki had begun to think it would be better if they lived in the other of the Twin Cities. Easier for her to make excuses for him. Instead of blaming their dad for being absent from their lives, they could blame their mom for moving them away from him. Hell of a compromise.