The 9th Girl (43 page)

He stood by his window and looked out at the dark, seeing only his shadowed reflection looking back at him.

R U OK?
He typed and sent and paced some more.

He stared at his phone until his eyes burned.

No message came back.

•   •   •

S
HE DIDN’T KNOW
how long she lay unconscious. Seconds? Minutes? Longer? She came to with a sense of floating. Or maybe she was dead. No. A hand was wrapped tight around her wrist. Her arm being pulled from her shoulder. She was being dragged, dragged across the floor, down the hall.

Adrenaline burst through her like a bomb exploding. In an instant she was struggling, flailing, scrambling. She yanked her arm free of Julia Gray’s grasp and struggled to get her feet under her and get up.

Julia was on her in a heartbeat, grabbing her head, falling down on her, banging her head against the floor, over and over, shouting,
“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

Black splotches burst before Brittany’s eyes with each hard smash of her skull against the floor. She would lose consciousness again if she couldn’t get away. She gathered all her strength to roll and push and get the woman off her. Again she scrambled to gain her feet and try to run.

She was running in the wrong direction now, running toward the kitchen and away from the front door.

Julia dove onto her from behind like an animal dragging down prey, knocking her forward, knocking her down, knocking the wind from her. Brittany’s chin hit the floor with a horrible, shattering pain in her jaw and inside her mouth as teeth broke. The bright metallic taste of blood flooded her mouth.

She couldn’t move. She couldn’t struggle. She tried to suck in air and choked on her own blood as Julia Gray kicked her and struck her again and again.

Beneath her, trapped against her stomach in the pouch of her hoodie, her phone vibrated, alerting her to another incoming text. She couldn’t answer. She imagined the person on the other end waiting for her reply as she was being killed.

48

They had been sitting
at the island in her kitchen for long enough that her butt was starting to go numb, going over notes and reports and interviews until they were bleary-eyed.

Nikki had Penny Gray’s cell phone usage details in front of her, looking at the calls and text messages sent the night of her disappearance and the days following. After the night the girl had gone missing there had been only a couple of messages sent and received.

“This doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. “She went missing the night of the thirtieth. She stopped calling and texting friends. I don’t know about the other kids, but I know Kyle continued to text her right up until we ID’d her body. He never got an answer from her. He never heard from her after she left the Rock and Bowl.”

“I think she was dead that night,” Kovac said. “Dead or incapacitated.”

“But if her killer had her phone, why bother to answer the mother’s text messages and no one else’s? If the idea was to toy with her loved ones or, for whatever reason, try to make it look like she was still alive, why not answer a friend’s text? It’s not like it’s hard just to acknowledge a text.
OK. Not now. Fuck off.
Whatever. Why only answer the mother?”

Kovac pulled his reading glasses off and cleaned them with the tail of his wrinkled shirt. “I don’t know.”

Nikki paged through the records. Penny Gray’s phone use had been covered in a family plan. The service records they had gotten from the carrier included both Gray cell phones, mother and daughter. Nikki turned the page to the usage attributed to Julia Gray’s phone.

She thought back to what Sam had said about Julia Gray having left her phone in the car the morning she had made the appeal to the media downtown with Captain Kasselmann. She remembered when he’d said it thinking,
What mother of a missing child forgets their phone someplace?
She had forgotten about it after that. They’d had so much going on, had gotten pulled in so many different directions. This was the kind of investigation they could drown in. Too many details, too many people, too many possibilities. It was too easy for things to slip through the cracks as their attention was pulled one way then the other.

She sighed and twisted her neck against the stiffness setting in. She looked at Julia Gray’s phone records now, looked at the dates and times and numbers called and text messages sent, and a sick feeling began to swirl in the pit of her stomach, stirring the gallon of oily coffee she had drunk.

“What?” Kovac asked.

He could feel the change in her energy. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t said a word. He just felt it. They had been partners for that long.

“Kyle texted this girl over and over after she went missing,” she said. She looked at her partner, seeing her concern mirrored in his face. “Why didn’t her mother?”

The moment hung between them, a thick tension vibrating with a dark sense of something too close to excitement.

“She wasn’t looking for her, Sam,” she said, glancing down at the paperwork again. “Even after she knew Penny was missing, Julia Gray wasn’t looking for her daughter.”

“But the girl’s phone went dead or got turned off at some point,” Kovac said.

“That doesn’t stop her mother’s phone from working.”

In a flash every conversation Nikki had had with Julia Gray went through her head. She saw her expressions, heard the emotions in her voice. She thought of the mixed messages of guilt and blame and self-absorption. She relived the moment Julia Gray had struck her, hard, with a hand she had already injured somehow. She thought of how she had described Aaron Fogelman earlier in the evening: narcissistic with violent tendencies. The same could be said of Penny Gray’s mother.

“Something set this all off,” she said. “They were going along, consistently miserable. What changed?”

“The engagement,” Kovac said.

“Let’s assume the molestation,” Nikki said. “Her mother gets engaged to the man who molested her. That’s got to be the biggest fuck-you ever.”

“There’s a confrontation,” Sam speculated. “Things get out of hand.”

“If what we think is true, Penny had the capacity to ruin Michael Warner.”

“Warner is the better suspect of the two. Seriously, Tinks. You’re a mother. You think a mother could do that to her own child?”

Nikki frowned. Her head was throbbing. “I don’t know. I don’t want to think so, but people lose their minds. Her daughter was a burden, a problem, a thorn in her side. She finally gets a shot at wedded bliss with a doctor, no less, and her daughter had the capacity to ruin that for her.”

“That’s about as fucked-up as it gets,” Kovac said. “Maybe she didn’t try to reach the girl because she didn’t want her to come back. She could hate the kid and want her gone, but she didn’t want to hear you telling her her daughter was dead.”

“She was pissed off,” Nikki said. “Maybe she didn’t want to hear it because she never wanted anybody to find that body. Who knows where Penny Gray would have ended up that night if the DOT had fixed that road. Maybe Julia was one giant pothole away from committing the perfect crime.”

“Mom, can I go out?”

Nikki looked at Kyle as he came into the kitchen, her brain shifting gears awkwardly. He was in his coat and putting his watch cap on.

“No,” she said. “Of course not. It’s late.”

He gave her that look of incredulity perfected by teenagers everywhere. “But, Mo-om—”

“Where do you think you have to go all of a sudden?”

His cheeks flushed. He wanted to look away from her, but he didn’t. “I can’t get Brittany to answer my text messages. I’ve sent her a million of them. She hasn’t answered. I’m worried about her.”

“And you’re going to track her down?” Nikki said. “That’s called stalking. No. Absolutely not.”

“You don’t understand!” he said. “She said she would text me and she hasn’t.”

“Kyle—”

“She said she would text me when she got back, and she should have got back by now. But she hasn’t texted and she isn’t answering. I even
called
her,” he said, as if that was the surest sign of desperation. “She’s out alone and there’s some crazy serial killer running around loose! She shouldn’t have gone by herself. I was supposed to go with her.”

“Go where?”

“To see Gray’s mom.”

49

“We can’t let her go, Michael!”

“Oh my God, Julia. What have you done?”

“She had Penny’s computer. They were friends. She knows everything!”

The voices brought Brittany’s consciousness rising to the surface like a leaf floating up from the depths of black water. The pain in her face and her head was so terrible, she couldn’t even feel the rest of her body. Blood pooled in her mouth. She could feel chips of broken teeth against her tongue. She wanted to cry out, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t open her mouth, couldn’t seem to form sound.

“Oh my God.” The man’s voice was strained, frightened. “What are we going to do? Look what you’ve done, Julia!”

“But I had to. Don’t you see that? If Penny told her. If she wrote about it on her computer . . . I had to, Michael. To save us.”

“
Us
,” the man said, incredulous. “Oh my God.”

“You have to help me,” she said. She sounded almost childish.

“We can’t do this, Julia,” he said. “I helped you with Penny. I had to. I know you didn’t mean for that to happen. That was— That was a—a tragedy. She was your daughter. She pushed you to it. You snapped. I understand that. I understand why. But this? This is murder.”

“And it’s your fault,” Julia said bitterly. “You know it’s your fault. You slept with my daughter!”

“One time! It happened one time!” he said. “I made a mistake. I told her it could never happen again.”

“She would have ruined you! She would have ruined
us
! You thought you could buy her off with a car? She would have held that over our heads for the rest of our lives!”

Brittany tried to move—just her fingertips, just her toes. She lay on the floor. She opened her eyes to the narrowest of slits. She could see tile, a piece of a rug, the tip of a shoe.

As she slowly became aware of her body, she became aware of lying on something, something pressing into her stomach. It vibrated against her. Her phone.

She lay with one arm outstretched, the other half beneath her. If she could get to the phone . . .

“Penny was an accident,” Michael Warner said. “You acted in the heat of the moment. This is murder, Julia! I can’t help you kill an innocent girl!”

“Then what are we supposed to do, Michael? She’ll ruin our lives! We can’t let her go now!”

There was a long silence. He moved, walked away. Brittany could hear him pacing.

She tried to lift her belly from the floor, to slip her hand into the pouch on her sweater.

“If we take her to the lake house,” Dr. Warner said quietly. “We can put her in Penny’s car . . . and run the car into the lake. Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m saying this! This is insane!”

“We don’t have a choice!” Julia whined.

“No,” he murmured, “we don’t. God help us.”

50

“We were going to go together,”
Kyle said. “To give Mrs. Gray our condolences, you know, tell her we’re sorry about what happened to Gray. Then you asked me not to,” he said, looking at his mother. “But I should have gone with her anyway. I could have just walked her over there. She had some stuff of Gray’s. She wanted to take it back. Clothes and stuff Gray left at her house.”

“Clothes and what stuff?” Sam Kovac asked.

Kyle shrugged. “I don’t know. Makeup. Her laptop. Stuff.”

Kovac swore under his breath and rubbed his hands over his face. “Brittany has had Gray’s computer all this time?”

“I guess.”

Kovac looked at Kyle’s mom. “That first night we talked to her, Brittany told us Gray had stayed a couple of days and then left. We just assumed she took her stuff with her. Her mother said she carried her computer with her everywhere. If she left Brittany’s house, why wouldn’t she take her stuff with her? We assumed the laptop was with her, in her car or that whoever killed her took it. It never occurred to me—”

“It doesn’t matter now,” Nikki said.

She was punching a number into her cell phone. Her hands were trembling. Watching her, Kyle felt more nervous and more nervous. She pressed the phone to her ear, avoiding eye contact with him and turning toward Sam.

“She’s not answering,” she said.

Kovac got off his stool.

“What’s wrong?” Kyle asked. “Who’s not answering? Britt?”

“Sam and I will drive over and make sure Brittany gets home.”

“I’ll come with you,” Kyle said.

“No. You stay here with R.J.”

“He can stay with Marysue. I want to come—”

“I said no,” his mother said in a tone of voice that meant he shouldn’t ask again.

Kyle followed them into the hall. Sam was shrugging into his coat.

“But, Mom—”

“Stay here with you brother,” she said, grabbing her coat from the hall closet. “I’ll call you.”

51

She should have been dead.
After everything he had put her through, she should have died hours before. He had done things to her she could never have imagined, would never have wanted to know one human being could be capable of doing to another. She had tried to resist the overwhelming desire to break down mentally but had learned resistance was rewarded only with pain. The pain had been like nothing in her most terrible nightmares. It had surpassed adjectives and gone into a realm of blinding white light and high-pitched sound. There were no words. She had ceased to fight and had found that in seemingly giving up her life, she was able to keep her life.

Where there is life there is hope.

She couldn’t remember where she had heard that. Somewhere long ago. Childhood.

Where there is life there is hope.

Those words had played through her head over and over. They played through her head now as she lay there on the floor of the van.
Where there is life there is hope.