The 9th Girl (38 page)

In need of food, he got in the car and drove away from the station. There was bound to be something nearby—fast food, a coffee shop, a convenience store.

A Holiday station.

He saw the sign as he cruised under the freeway. A left instead of a right at the bottom of the exit Dana Nolan would have taken every day to get to work.

The gas pumps and the store were busy with lunchtime customers. Kovac went inside and scoped the place out, looking for the security cameras. There were two clerks working the registers—a tall, bone-thin man who looked like his dour face was carved from ebony, and a short, doughy-looking kid with a shaved head and earrings that looked like miniature walrus tusks had been driven through his earlobes.

Kovac showed them Dana Nolan’s picture.

The kid with the earrings didn’t recognize her. The other man nodded.

“Oh, yes,” he said slowly, his somber expression never changing. “The lovely lady.”

“Has she been in here recently?”

“Nearly every day,” he said. His speech was heavily accented, some African dialect, but carefully enunciated. “Very early. Not today.”

“In the last few days have you noticed anyone with her, bothering her, talking to her when she was in here?”

“She is very friendly,” he said. “People know her. They speak to her always. She always has a smile.”

Kovac thanked him and stepped away from the counter to let him tend to his customers. He couldn’t imagine the place had too much traffic at three in the morning. Then again, there were enough people up at that hour of the day to warrant every TV station in town having an early news program.

God forbid we let any hour of the day go by undocumented, unrecorded, or without scrutiny,
he thought. Then again, if not for that conceit and paranoia, there would be no surveillance tapes.

Needing fuel, Kovac got himself a hot dog off the carousel and loaded it up with condiments, ready to settle in front of another bad TV in another cramped back office to look for another predator.

•   •   •

“
W
E’RE CONCERNED,
Mrs. Gray,
that Penny might have been victimized by a sexual predator at some point over the past year or so,” Nikki said carefully.

It was important to be diplomatic in the wording of these things, though she felt as if she had already used up her quota of diplomacy for the day. Dealing with Principal Rodgers had taken a good share of it. Dealing with Kyle’s situation had taken the rest.

She wasn’t angry. She understood his desire to attend the assembly. In fact, she was proud of him for going. God knew, most of the kids who had been in attendance would have cheerfully gone off and done something else with that time. She felt sad and frustrated that so few of them seemed to care about what had happened to their schoolmate in any way other than how what had happened might directly affect them.

She was frustrated with Kyle’s ongoing problems with the Fogelman kid. She didn’t know what to do about it. She didn’t know that there was anything she
could
do about it. And for the time being, she couldn’t allow herself to be distracted by it.

Now she sat in the living room of the woman who had punched her hard enough that she still had half a headache from it, trying to scrape together the last of her diplomacy reserves. The Christmas tree had dried to a fire hazard, no doubt neglected for the past few days. The festive tree skirt was littered with needles. Julia Gray gripped the arms of the chair she sat in, as if she were afraid it might eject her at any moment.

They had arrived just minutes after calling. A surprise appearance had seemed the way to go, rather than requesting Julia Gray come downtown and allowing her time to get her guard up. As cruel as that seemed, they needed a genuine response from her, whether it was shock or outrage or whatever the emotion that came instantly.

“No,” she said emphatically, shaking her head. “That can’t be. I don’t believe that.”

Nikki and Elwood exchanged a glance. They sat side by side on the sofa. Elwood had set his laptop on the coffee table. He lifted the screen and turned it on.

“She didn’t give you any indication of something being wrong?” Liska asked.

“Something was
always
wrong,” Julia said impatiently. “She was
always
unhappy. She’s been like that her entire life, always angry and difficult. Even as a baby. She cried all the time. Then came the temper tantrums. She never got along with other children. She was too shy or too sensitive. It was always something. I don’t know why, but it was nothing like
that.
No one ever abused her.”

“When she was in therapy with him, Dr. Warner never gave you any indication—”

“No.” She put her hands in her lap and turned her engagement ring around and around on her finger.

“And you said she never really spoke to the therapist she saw after him.”

“It was a complete waste of money,” she said. “Don’t you think if she had been abused she would have told one of them? She didn’t.”

Elwood turned the computer on the table so she could see it. “We found an online video account where your daughter posted videos of herself reciting some of her poetry. This poem in particular caught our attention. She posted this in April.”

He clicked the Play icon.

Liska watched Julia’s face as her daughter’s image came on the screen. She held herself stiffly. Tears misted her eyes, but she turned slightly away, as if it was simply too painful to see her daughter alive, knowing she was dead. Or maybe the emotion was shame. Kovac had said the first time they had come to Julia Gray to ask about her daughter, the woman had shown them a photograph years old because she couldn’t stand to look at what the girl had become.

On the computer screen, Penny Gray recited her poem “Help Me,” her voice a painful mix of monotone edged in bitterness. A disappointed girl trying to sound too adult to give a shit. Both the words and the visual image spoke to a loss of trust, a transformation from vulnerability to disillusionment.

Julia Gray didn’t want to see it. She literally turned away from it.

Nikki leaned over and turned up the volume.

Refuge

Asylum

Safest place to be

Secrets

Hard truths

Soul laid bare to see

Comfort

Guidance

Shoulder. Lean on me

Seduction

Destruction

Help not meant to be

Silence

Shameful

Not to be believed

Don’t tell

Go to hell

There’s no one here for me

“She seems to be talking about the betrayal of an authority figure,” Elwood said when the video was done.

Julia shifted restlessly on the chair. “She was angry with her father for leaving. There was never anything abusive between them.”

“Your ex-husband’s new wife is young, isn’t she?”

She gave him a dirty look, offended on her ex-husband’s behalf. “Brandi is young; she’s not a child, for God’s sake! Tim is a rotten philandering bastard, but he’s not a pedophile! He never laid a hand on our daughter—even when he probably should have.”

“Sometimes when girls Penny’s age lose their fathers,” Nikki began, choosing her words like footsteps through a minefield, “they’re at an age where they’re just coming into their sexuality. They’re just discovering they have a certain power with the opposite sex. They can confuse the lines between love and sex.”

“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation,” Julia muttered.

Her body language screamed that she wanted to get up and leave. She didn’t want cops in her house. She didn’t want to talk about her daughter’s problems. She probably would have been just as happy to pretend she’d never had a daughter at all.

“I know this is hard, Mrs. Gray—”

Julia Gray’s head snapped around, her eyes narrowed and hard. “You
know
? What do you
know
? What do you
know,
Detective? You don’t know how hard this is. You don’t know how hard it’s been to be my daughter’s mother. You’ve never lost a child. Have you?”

“No, ma’am. I haven’t,” Nikki said, without apology this time, out of patience.

“But let me tell you something, Julia,” she said, leaning forward, instantly changing the dynamic of the situation with her energy. “If someone hurt one of my boys and the police came to ask me questions about what might have been going on in their lives, I would damn well answer them. I would be in their faces every minute of every day demanding they turn over every possible rock no matter what ugly thing might crawl out from under it. I would not be sitting in my living room, whining and crying about how hard it all is on
me.
”

Julia Gray’s jaw dropped.

Elwood made a sound of disapproval. “Tinks—”

“No!” she snapped, standing up. “I’ve had it with this bullshit. Your daughter is dead, Julia. Somebody killed her. Horribly. Brutally. Would you like to see the pictures? Would you like to see what we had to see the night her murdered corpse fell out of the trunk of a moving vehicle?”

“No!”

“No, you wouldn’t, because that would take the attention away from you, wouldn’t it? Poor you. Poor you. What a burden your daughter was. You should be happy she’s dead.”

Julia Gray got to her feet. “That’s outrageous!”

Nikki looked her hard in the eye. “Yes, it is. Your daughter is lying dead on a slab at the morgue and you haven’t even asked to see her. You’ve just left her there—”

Elwood rose then to put space between them. Nikki walked away with her hands on her hips.

“I apologize for my partner, Mrs. Gray,” he said, taking up the mantle of Good Cop. “These cases are very stressful for us as well, especially for those of us with children and those of us who have worked on cases of child sexual abuse.”

“Penny was not abused,” Julia said staunchly.

“Dr. Warner told us she had become very manipulative toward men, that that was one of the reasons he decided he shouldn’t be treating her any longer,” Elwood said. “Was there some specific incident that prompted him to make that decision?”

“Michael has done nothing wrong.”

“We’re not suggesting that he has. We’re looking at the changes in your daughter’s behavior over the past nine months or so, and we think there might have been something that triggered those changes around the time she broke her wrist.”

“You said the accident happened on her way home from Dr. Warner’s office—” Liska started.

“What is wrong with you people?” Julia shouted, her anger bursting its seams. “My daughter was taken by some maniac! Some maniac who has already killed eight other girls. Now he’s taken another girl—that news girl—and you’re wasting time treating me like a criminal and accusing a good man—”

Even as she said it the front door opened and Michael Warner came in looking like a well-tailored superhero, his shoulders broad, his expression serious. Julia Gray went to him, dissolving into tears as she fell against his chest.

“Julia, what’s going on?” he asked. He looked to Elwood and Liska. “What do you people want from her?”

“The truth,” Nikki said. “Maybe you can help us with that, Dr. Warner.”

“We’re done dealing with you,” Warner said tightly as he put his arms around his weeping fiancée. “If you have any more questions, you can speak to my attorney.”

40

“They lawyered up,”
Liska announced as they walked into the conference room.

Kovac glanced back at them. “Who?”

“Julia Gray and Michael Warner. We tried to broach the subject of Penny possibly having been sexually abused, and they lawyered up.”

“She’s leaving out the shouting, threats, and accusations,” Elwood said, going to the coffeepot.

“They were upset?”

“
I
was upset,” Liska admitted. “I can’t decide if I should feel badly for Julia Gray or snatch her by the hair and slap the snot out of her.”

“If you go for the second option, there should be mud wrestling and bikinis involved,” Tippen said. “We can bill it as a grudge match.”

She gave him the finger.

Kovac let the banter float past him. He had been staring at the television screen for too long again. He had borrowed a second television and VCR and wedged them side by side on the stand so he could play them at the same time. His vision was beginning to blur around the edges.

“Tinks, come look at this,” he said, fussing with the remotes, getting everything set up the way he needed it.

“Is it porn?” Tippen asked hopefully. “It’s been a long day.”

“We’re not at your house, Tip,” Liska shot back. She pulled out the chair next to Kovac and sat.

“The screen on the left is the footage from the Holiday station the night Penny Gray went missing. It’s a few minutes before she comes into the store. Tell me if anyone looks familiar.”

No one said anything as the tape played.

Kovac stopped it as Penny Gray walked out of the shot, backed the tape up, and played it again, freezing it when his person of interest appeared. “This guy,” he said, tapping the screen with his finger. “Does he look familiar at all?”

Liska squinted and shrugged. “My uncle Leo on my mother’s side?”

“No! Look harder.”

“Sam, I’m so tired, I can’t see straight as it is. If I look any harder, I’m going to burn my retinas.”

Kovac grumbled under his breath and hit Play on the second remote.

“This one is footage from the Holiday station down the road from where Dana Nolan works. This is from yesterday. She stops there regularly on her way in to work.

“That’s her,” he said, pointing to the girl.

Dana Nolan entered the store, waved to the guy behind the counter, went to the coffee station. A big guy in a parka said something to her. She tipped her head back and appeared to laugh. A minute later another man walked into the store—short, squat, bearded.