The 9th Girl (44 page)

She was more alive than he knew. In giving up, she had reserved strength. She had stopped him short of rendering her completely incapacitated. She could still move. She could still think.

The cold floor beneath her was numbing the pain. The blanket thrown over her offered a cocoon, a place to be invisible. Her wrists were only loosely bound together in front of her with a red ribbon, her elbows bent, her hands tucked beneath her chin as if in prayer.

Prayer. She had prayed and prayed and prayed.

No one had come to save her. And yet, she should have been dead, but she wasn’t.

He was singing in the front seat, happy, elated, proud.

She was his masterpiece.

She was alive.

She moved her hands and felt the ribbon loosen.

Where there is life there is hope. Where there is life there is hope. . . .

The van hit a pothole, jolting her world, rocking her violently side to side. And next to her the collection of tools he had brought bounced and rattled in their open tote.

Where there is life there is hope. . . .

•   •   •

F
ITZ WAS EUPHORIC.
High
as a frigging kite. He didn’t even bother to curse this wretched pockmarked stretch of road that was going to ruin his wheel alignment by the time they arrived at their destination. It didn’t matter. Nothing could spoil his mood. He turned the radio up and sang along.

He had chosen his perfect spot , the perfect stage for his show. Fucking genius, that’s what it was. Every major news outlet in the country would be flocking to Minneapolis to cover the story. He would be the subject of a
Dateline NBC
special.

He had chosen the Loring Park sculpture garden for the setting of what would be his most famous tableau. Amid the huge and whimsical works of art he would present his masterpiece, wrapped in a beautiful bow no less.

He smiled and laughed and glanced in his rearview mirror to check on her.

His smile died. His laughter caught in his throat.

His eyes met the eyes of a zombie.

52

Michael Warner picked Brittany
up off the floor like she was a rolled-up rug or a corpse already. Better if he thought she was, if he thought she was dead he wouldn’t have to kill her.

The pain in her head was like an explosion. Every muscle in her body tightened against it. She pressed her hand hard against her stomach, holding her phone tight against her. If it wasn’t broken, if she could see to use it, she could call 911 from the trunk of the car.

She had never imagined being so terrified in her life. She had never imagined what that felt like, what that did to the body. She was trembling all over. She had wet herself. Nausea choked her like a ball in her throat. Dizziness swam her head in circles.

Michael Warner swore as he carried her. Julia Gray kept telling him to hurry.
Who might know the girl had come here?
she said. Someone could come looking for her. They had to hurry. They had to get rid of her quickly. They would say they had been out for the evening, that they had never seen her. She must have been snatched off the street.

Dr. Warner swung sideways and Brittany’s feet hit the frame of the door as he carried her into the garage. Julia Gray stood beside the car.
Hurry, hurry, hurry!
He dumped Brittany like a bag of trash into the trunk of the car, threw a blanket over her, and shut the lid.

They were going to kill her. These people who seemed so ordinary. Parents of kids she went to school with. Michael Warner was a doctor. Brittany had come to this house to give Julia Gray her sympathies. It was all so crazy, she wanted to think it wasn’t real. She must have been dreaming, having a nightmare. And yet it was all too real.

Her heart was racing wildly. She could hardly see the illuminated screen of her phone through her tears. Her hands were shaking so badly, she couldn’t work the keyboard. Fingers on her left hand were broken and useless; only her thumb was functional. Over and over she tried to get the numbers keyboard to come up. Nine-one-one. That was all she needed, but she couldn’t do it.

The car dipped as someone got into it and started the engine.

They were going to take her someplace, put her in Gray’s car, and run the car into a lake.

Brittany managed to hit the phone icon. Contacts came up. The letters were a blur. She tried to hit a name. Whoever answered could call 911. If she could speak. If they could understand her. She touched the screen again and again, but nothing happened.

Nausea swept over her like a crashing wave, and she had to turn her head and vomit. The pain in her broken jaw was like being hit with a hammer over and over. She cried and retched and choked on her own blood and vomit. Her ribs hurt so badly from being kicked, she could hardly draw breath. Panic followed the nausea, another wave to drown her. She had to fight to keep from dropping the phone. Her hands were shaking so violently she thought she might fling the thing away.

She was too young to die.

She touched the screen again and a list came up. She couldn’t read it.

Her fingers shuddered against the glass.

Oh, please, God, please, God, please!

She could hear the garage door opening. The car lurched backward.

She could hear a phone somewhere ringing at the other end of her desperation.

Please answer, please answer, someone, anyone.

The voice that answered was familiar.

“Britt! Where are you?”

Kyle.

She managed the only words she could.

“Help me.”

53

The words of Kyle’s
te
xt message seemed to leap off the screen of Nikki’s phone:
MOM HURRY!!!

Kovac drove. Pedal to the metal, careening around corners, running red lights. They were in his own personal vehicle. They had no dash light. They had no siren. They had no radio.

Nikki used her cell phone to call for backup and braced a hand against the dashboard as they hurtled through the streets. For once, she didn’t complain about Kovac’s driving. She egged him on.

It wasn’t that far to Julia Gray’s house as the crow flew. Driving was another matter. One-way streets, stoplights, pedestrians, cars double parked. It would have been faster to fucking run. A child was in danger.

“If she’s hurt that girl, I’m gonna fucking shoot her!” she said.

“I’ll get rid of the body,” Kovac growled as they made a hard left onto Julia Gray’s street.

They were going too fast. The car skidded sideways on the rutted, icy pavement and the rear passenger quarter panel pounded hard into the front end of a BMW SUV parked at the curb. It was like hitting a tank.

“Fuck!” Kovac shouted as they came to a hard stop.

Headlights were coming at them from the end of the street.

He gunned the engine and spun his wheels, the cars locked together where wheel met wheel.

Nikki scrambled out the door and ran toward the oncoming vehicle.

Weapon in hand, Kovac planted himself in the middle of the street beside her.

Both of them were shouting at the tops of their lungs.

“Police! Police! Stop the fucking car!”

The car kept coming.

•   •   •

K
YLE HAD NEVER
run
so hard or so fast in his life.

He stayed in the street when he could, avoiding snow banks, cut through yards when he had to, jumped fences when he had no choice.

The cold air burned his throat and lungs. He was freezing cold and sweating all at once. His legs felt huge and heavy with the buildup of lactic acid, but he kept running. He kept running and thinking of Brittany.

He was never going to forgive himself if something bad happened to her. He never should have let her go to Gray’s house alone. He didn’t know what could have happened to her there. All she had been able to say over the phone was
Help me,
and that was muddled and garbled. If not for her name showing up on the screen, he never would known the caller was her.

What could have happened to her? What was happening to her right that minute as he was running? He couldn’t even really know where she was, he realized. He only knew where she had been. If she had been taken, she could be anywhere. In his imagination he saw her getting grabbed off the street by the serial killer they called Doc Holiday.

How crazy would that be? She would be kidnapped by the maniac who had killed Gray, the maniac his mom was trying to catch. And she would be in the clutches of this madman because Kyle hadn’t gone with her to and give her condolences to Gray’s mother.

It wasn’t that far to Gray’s house. A mile, maybe. The longest mile he had ever run. If he got there too late, he was never going to forgive himself.

•   •   •

T
HE DRIVER JERKED
the
wheel at the last second, trying to shoot between them and the tangle of crashed cars on the side of the street. The Lexus slid sideways on the icy ruts created by the herd of news vans that had clogged the street just the day before.

Metal crashed on metal as Julia Gray’s car plowed into Kovac’s.

The car alarms were screaming. A horn was blaring. Nikki ran toward the mangle, gun outstretched in front of her.

The passenger’s door opened and Julia Gray flung herself from the vehicle looking dazed.

Nikki shouted at her: “Up against the car! Get up against the car, you fucking bitch!”

The woman looked at her with wide, blank eyes. “What’s happening?”

“I’ll tell you what’s happening,” Nikki barked. She grabbed Julia Gray by one shoulder and spun her around, shoving her roughly up against the Lexus. “You’re under arrest. Where’s the girl? Where’s Brittany? Answer me!”

“I don’t know! I don’t know what you’re talking about!” she cried.

Michael Warner was sobbing as Kovac hauled him out from behind the wheel of the car. “She’s in the trunk! Oh my God! I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!”

“Not as sorry as I’d make you if I could,” Kovac said. He dragged the doctor by his coat collar away from the car, shouting, “Get down on the ground!”

Sirens were wailing as radio cars sped toward them.

A man came running from one of the houses shouting, “I’m a doctor! Is anyone hurt?”

Nikki had hold of Julia Gray by a handful of blond hair. She leaned in close and spoke directly into her ear. “If you killed that girl, I will personally see you in hell.”

•   •   •

I
T LOOKED LIKE
a
scene from a
Die Hard
movie, Kyle thought as he turned onto Gray’s block—a chaos of flashing strobe lights and uniformed officers, sirens and voices, and cars clogging the street at odd angles. Crashed cars and an ambulance.

“Britt!” he shouted, wide-eyed with terror. “Brittany!”

A uniformed cop tried to stop him from running into the middle of the madness. Kyle feinted right, then ducked left and ran past him.

“Kyle!” his mother called. She caught him by one arm and hung on.

Someone had been put on a stretcher that was being wheeled toward the ambulance. Kyle didn’t recognize the face. It was bloody and swollen and misshapen. A girl, he guessed by the hair—blond hair.

“Brittany!”

His mom wrapped her arms around him and held him in place as he tried to lunge toward the ambulance.

“She’s going to be all right,” his mom said. She reached up and turned his face toward her and said it again. “She’s going to be all right, Kyle. She’s alive. She’s alive.”

Kyle stared at her, not knowing what to do next. He was shaking and sweating, and there were tears in his eyes.

“It’s going to be all right,” she said again, putting her arms around him.

Kyle hugged his mother as tight as he could, and they stood in the middle of the street and cried.

54

Nikki walked beside her
son through the waiting room of the Hennepin County Medical Center ER. Post–New Year’s madness, it was a slow night. Assorted drunks and junkies, people who thought the common cold was a medical emergency.

“I can’t believe any of this happened,” Kyle said as they walked outside, where flurries had begun to fall like crystals in a snow globe. “It’s like a crazy nightmare.”

“I wish that’s all it was,” she said, rubbing a hand slowly up and down his back—as much to comfort herself as to comfort him.

Kovac had gone back to the office to get the paperwork started on Julia Gray and Michael Warner, letting her bring Kyle to the ER to see that Brittany would be all right.

Fractures to her chin and jaw would require surgery, and she had a concussion and several broken fingers and fractured ribs, but she would recover physically faster than she would recover from the trauma of what had happened to her. That would be a much longer battle.

With her mother sitting beside her in the exam room, stroking her hair, Brittany had answered what questions she could, barely able to speak, mostly using her uninjured hand to indicate yes or no. With her mother’s heart breaking for the girl, Nikki kept her questions to the bare minimum. Yes, Julia Gray had attacked her. Yes, Michael Warner had been a party to it. Yes, they had talked about Julia Gray having killed her daughter.

When she was done asking questions of Brittany, Nikki asked Mrs. Lawler if Kyle might see her daughter for a minute. Standing beside Brittany’s bed in the exam room, Kyle had earnestly promised her he would be there for her through her recovery.

Nikki thought she would die of pride and love for him.

Now they stood outside the ER doors. Nikki breathed in the cold night air and wished it would cleanse them both of what had happened that night.

“Gray’s mom killed her,” Kyle said. “How could that happen? How could she kill her own kid? Over what?”

Nikki didn’t know what to tell him. There would be a long explanation made by psychiatric experts at Julia Gray’s trial. Explanations of Julia’s personality disorders and the stresses of raising a difficult child, of tainted family dynamics and how normal needs and desires could morph and twist into something grotesque. Some expert witness would cast the blame on Penny Gray, painting her as a seductress who had tried to usurp her mother’s dominant position by sleeping with her man. They would beg for mercy and understanding for a woman who “just snapped.”