The 9th Girl (34 page)

He double-checked the small gear bag on the passenger’s seat. Hand tools, knife, plastic zip ties. Good to go.

The adrenaline was beginning to flow. He couldn’t rest. He couldn’t sit down. He was like a shark, moving constantly, as he visualized what would happen tonight. He could feel the cold air on his face, freezing his nose hair. He could see Dana Nolan’s face—the split second of confusion, then the spark of recognition, then the flash of fear and panic.

He could the feel the rush of power, the sexual excitement. He went through the scenario over and over in his head.

This too was different for him. He had always trolled for victims, capitalizing on opportunity. The adrenaline rush was quick and explosive. This excitement of anticipation was almost too much to stand.

He checked his watch.

Go time.

Careful to stay just under the speed limit and to obey all traffic laws, he drove to Dana Nolan’s apartment complex. He made sure not to arrive too early. He backed the van into the parking spot beside her car and settled in to wait under the harsh glow of the security light.

Every second seemed like a minute. He tried to listen to the radio. Music annoyed him. People talking annoyed him. He worked on taking slow, deep breaths, concentrating on trying to lower his heart rate. He had once read that Shaolin monks could use their minds to slow their heart rates to practically nothing.

He checked his watch.

He tried the radio again. Hits from the eighties. Hits from the nineties. Hits from today. NPR. Delilah.

He was a sucker for Delilah. He found it kind of comforting that no matter where he traveled, he could always get Delilah’s syndicated show on the radio. It was like traveling with a friend.

She had a soothing voice. There was something sweet about all her corny love talk. He didn’t believe in any of it—not for himself, at least. An argument could be made that falling for the idea of true love made people weak and ultimately miserable. Still, he listened to Delilah.

She was talking about love being an action rather than an emotion when Dana Nolan emerged from her apartment building.

Fitz took the small bottle of chloroform out of his coat pocket and poured some on a washcloth as he watched her come toward him. He stuck the washcloth in his pocket and got out of the van, keeping his head down, and opened the hood as if he was having engine trouble. As she got within earshot, he groaned: “Oh, man! Not again!”

He stepped back from the vehicle and flopped his arms helplessly at his sides.

“I can’t believe this!”

He could see her in his peripheral vision. She had slowed down but was still coming toward him. He heaved a big sigh and shook his head at his phony misfortune as he turned in her direction and began to trudge toward the buildings, hands in his coat pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold.

“Dead battery!” he said.

She was going to walk right past him; she had quickened her step, anxious about meeting someone in the parking lot at this time of night.

Fitz slowed down. “Miss, you couldn’t help me out with a jump start, could you? I’ve got cables. My wife is going to kill me.”

She glanced at him, slowed her step. She looked a little annoyed, a little uncertain. Then there it was—the spark of recognition.

“Oh, hey!” he said, feigning surprise. “What the heck? You’re Dana! Oh my God! Remember me? Fitz. From the Holiday station.”

She relaxed a little, stopped moving. “Oh, yeah.”

They were just a few steps from the van.

“What are the odds of this?” Fitz asked, chuckling. He moved back toward the van. “I hate to impose, Dana, but if you could just give me a jump—”

She hesitated. “Oh, gee, I’m really sorry,” she said. “I have to get to work.”

“It’ll just take a second,” Fitz said, opening the sliding side door of the van. He leaned inside as if to get the jumper cables.

“Hey, I saw you on the news this afternoon,” he said. “You’re covering that missing girl case. That’s something, huh? Did she turn out to be that dead girl? The zombie?”

“It looks that way,” she said, coming a little closer.

Even if she didn’t want to help him, she had to come closer to get to the driver’s side door of her car. She was only a few feet away.

“That’s terrible,” Fitz said. “Some lunatic going around abducting young women. What’s the world coming to?”

In the next second he turned and lunged at her, and that familiar panic flashed in her eyes. She tried to turn away. He grabbed her ponytail in his left hand and shoved her backward into the side of her car, pinning her there. She tried to draw breath to scream, and he shoved the chloroform washcloth over her mouth and nose.

The struggle was over in seconds. He had only to turn with her in his arms and shove her inside the van. He went in after her and slid the door shut behind him.

Duct tape across the mouth.

Zip tie the hands together.

Tie her up. Tie her down.

Cover her over with the blanket.

He got out and closed the hood of the van, then squatted down beside Dana Nolan’s car to glance over the things she had dropped during the struggle: purse, makeup bag, tote bag with papers spilling out of it. He pulled one of the papers out and smiled to himself. It was a flier with a photograph of a young woman.
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?
A missing persons flier for Penelope Gray.

Struck by inspiration, Fitz fished a fat marker out of a side pocket on the tote bag, wrote a note on the flier, and tucked the page beneath a windshield wiper on the Mini Cooper. Then he got behind the wheel of his van and calmly drove slowly out of the parking lot. In his rearview mirror he could see other fliers from Dana Nolan’s tote bag taking flight as the cold wind kicked up a gust.

He smiled and turned up the radio and sang along.

36

Three hours of sleep.
A shower. A shave. A small bucket of coffee from 7-Eleven. A couple of doughnuts to perpetuate the stereotype. Back to the job.

Kovac stood in front of the whiteboard, taking in the timeline and the notes. He played the possibilities through his head. Doc Holiday. Michael Warner. A friend. An enemy. A stranger. The kids who didn’t like her. The mother she rebelled against. Who would have thought a sixteen-year-old girl could have so many people in her life who might want her dead?

He made additional notations on the board: Kyle’s version of events at the Rock & Bowl, the fact that Christina had started the physical altercation with Gray, that Aaron Fogelman had struck the girl, and the fact that both Christina and Aaron Fogelman had blamed Gray for starting it. Kovac knew which version he believed.

It probably didn’t matter. Two living kids putting the blame on a dead kid to make themselves look better. So what? But it bothered him, just the same.

Christina Warner and Penny Gray were enemies. Whatever the Gray girl had said to Christina had provoked a violent reaction. Now Penny Gray was dead, and Christina Warner and her boyfriend were both lying to the cops. Not a big lie. A lie of perspective. A reinterpretation of history. It wouldn’t have mattered except that after Penny Gray left that place she disappeared. She had an altercation with a known enemy, and then she disappeared.

Not like Kovac wasn’t used to getting lied to. Everyone lied to the cops—not just guilty people. Innocent people who didn’t want to get involved lied to the cops. People afraid of getting other people in trouble lied to the cops. People afraid of retaliation lied to the cops. Kids and adults and blue-haired old ladies lied to the cops about all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons. Bald-faced lies and white lies, twisted truths and sins of omission.

Videotape, however, always told the truth. He put a cassette in the VCR and watched Penny Gray leave the Rock & Bowl over and over—with Kyle leaving shortly after her. He never saw the other kids leave. He played the tape backward and forward, and he never saw them leave. Which meant they had to have gone out the side exit, which meant he couldn’t pinpoint the time they left.

The Lawler girl was the weak link in the chain of students. She wasn’t very happy with her so-called friends and the circumstances in which they found themselves. She had been vague and evasive at different points in his interview with her that afternoon. She didn’t remember who started what. She was looking the other way when the scuffle broke out.

She had turned her head and looked away from him when she said it.

“You’re a poor liar, Brittany,” he’d said calmly.

Big tears had flooded her blue eyes, but she hadn’t changed her tale.

Brittany had ridden to the Rock & Bowl with Gray. Gray had been staying with her. They were friends enough that Brittany’s house was where Penny Gray had sought sanctuary after the fight with her mother. And yet Brittany had convinced Gray to drive them to the Rock & Bowl, where Christina Warner and her minions lay in wait.

None of that was sitting well with Brittany now, which meant she had a conscience. A conscience Kovac could exploit.

He watched the security video from the Holiday station again. Penny Gray buying beer and walking out, hesitating as she started out of the building, almost turning and going back into the light and safety of the busy store. Who had she seen standing just out of reach of the camera? A stranger? An enemy? Doc Holiday? The kids she had just fought with?

He rewound the tape to five minutes before Penny Gray came into the store. People came in, bought things, left. Women, kids, men. Ordinary people. Odd people. A couple of rough-looking customers.

One man caught his eye, not for being suspicious in his behavior, but for seeming vaguely familiar—a short guy, stocky, thinning dark hair, a close-cropped beard and mustache. He got something from the automotive supply aisle, chatted up the customer ahead of him in line, walked out. Kovac couldn’t place him. He encountered so many people on a daily basis, everybody started looking familiar.

Several minutes later on the video, Penny Gray walked into the store. Kovac let the tape run on past her leaving. People came, people went. Five minutes after the Gray girl left the picture, Aaron Fogelman walked into the station with his buddy Tweedle Dumb. Fogelman bought cigarettes. The cohort shoplifted a bunch of candy bars. They walked back out of the store, carefree.

Where was Penny Gray at that point in time? Gone? Snatched by Doc Holiday? In the trunk of Aaron Fogelman’s car?

Kovac got up from his chair, went to the timeline, made a note. He stood back, ran his tongue over his teeth, and tried to rub the grit out of his eyes with the heels of his hands. It was nearly five
A.M.

In need of a break to reboot his brain, he turned the VCR off and changed the channel on the TV. He would run through the local stations and see what was being said about the case. In the back of his mind he considered what might happen if Dr. Michael Warner’s name “somehow” got attached to the case in the media.

A lawsuit and the loss of his job and his pension, probably.

The guy had never had a criminal complaint made against him. Elwood would call any organizations and ethics boards Warner had to answer to in his professional life, but he’d found nothing against the man yet.

Warner had said the reason he had stopped seeing Penny Gray as a patient had been her issues with men and her constant attempts to manipulate him. He had dumped her, not the other way around. If he had been abusing the girl, it seemed that she would have been the one to quit the situation and raise hell.

Then again, just who was she supposed to raise hell to? Her mother? The mother who found her irritating and aggravating? The mother who was now engaged to Michael Warner?

Elwood had taped copies of Penny Gray’s poems to the wall at the far end of the room. Kovac browsed over them now, his eye catching on one titled “Unloved.”

I’m a bother

I’m a burden

I’m a liar

Close the curtain

Don’t wanna see it

Don’t believe it

Shut your mouth

She can’t conceive it

I’m not the dream

I’m just a nightmare

I’m in the way

Life’s just so unfair

I should come first

But I’m called
worst

Just a problem

She can’t solve

Unloved

Just who was Penny Gray supposed to turn to if her therapist abused her and her mother didn’t want to hear it? People didn’t like her. Warner had said so himself, the girl drew people in only so she could alienate them. How much of that did anyone tolerate before they just stopped listening?

Or had Warner bought the girl’s silence with a car? People sold out for less. It seemed pretty damned generous to buy your girlfriend’s daughter a car for her birthday. Then again, a mobile teenager was out of the way. Warner’s decision might have been strategic to getting more alone time with Julia.

Kovac turned back to the TV and changed the channel again. So far, he’d heard virtually identical reports on the case from three of the local stations. On the fourth he expected to see perky little Dana Nolan—the girl he crabbed at every morning when he woke up and turned on his television.

As much as the news media irritated him, he had never been able to shake the habit of beginning and ending his day with the news. He usually chose Dana Nolan in the morning just because she was so fucking chipper and optimistic. Her happy mood antagonized him into setting his personal dial at “curmudgeon” before he even got out of bed.

But it wasn’t Dana Nolan’s angelic face that greeted him as he changed to her station. A slightly older woman with thick maroon hair and a worried expression had taken Dana’s seat at the desk. She seemed flustered and distracted.

Even as Kovac began to form the thought that something wasn’t right, a photograph of Dana Nolan filled one corner of the television screen. He turned up the sound.