The 9th Girl (9 page)

“You’d know if he was using,” Speed said quietly. His kind of reassurance.

“Would I? I don’t know, Speed. I don’t know the world these kids live in. It changes every day. Used to be they smoked pot or they did speed. Kids with money could afford cocaine. These days it’s synthetic grass and bath salts—whatever the hell that is. They mainline heroine, and they make their own meth out of cold medicine. They know more about prescription drugs than most doctors. It scares the hell out of me.”

In that moment it was only worse that she was a cop and that she knew things and had seen things other parents only read about in the newspaper, unless they were unlucky enough to have a child mixed up in it.

“I spent the afternoon at the autopsy of a girl Kyle’s age,” she said. “Someone stabbed her seventeen times and poured acid on her face while she was still alive. How did that happen? How did a girl Kyle’s age come to be in a situation like that? What did her mother not know about her life?”

To her horror, tears filled her eyes. She was one tough cookie in every other respect, but not when it came to her boys. In that she was as vulnerable as any mother, fearful of what the world was capable of doing to her children.

“We know how that happens, Nikki,” Speed said softly. He put one hand on her shoulder and stroked the other one over the back of her head. “She was a junkie or a hooker or a runaway. Her life put her in harm’s way, and some predator took advantage. You’ve seen it a hundred times. So have I.”

Too tired to tell herself not to, she slipped her arms around Speed’s waist and pressed her face into his shoulder. He folded his arms around her and held her.

She
had
seen it. She
did
know how it happened. Sometimes. Not all the time. And the question still remained. Even if their ninth girl had been a junkie or a hooker or a runaway, the question still remained: What did her mother not know about her life that might have prevented her death?

“My Life”

by Gray

Me

One

Lone

Alone

Longing

Belonging

Acceptance

Ac
cept

Ex
cept

Exception

Exclusion

Conclusion

Alone

One

Me

9

Sonya Porter was one
angry young woman. She came into Patrick’s bar with narrowed eyes homed in on Tippen like a pair of dark lasers. She came across the room to their booth with all the purpose of a heat-seeking missile and clipped him upside the head with the back of a hand.

Tippen winced. “Ouch! What was that for?”

“I don’t remember,” she said, clearly annoyed he would ask. “I was pissed off the second I heard the sound of your voice on the phone.”

“You were annoyed because you were hungover,” Tippen said. “That wasn’t my fault.”

“Yes, it was,” she snapped, then softened a bit. “Well, maybe not this time. But it was your fault that other time, and I never hit you for that.”

“So we’re even.”

She gave him a look of disgust. “Oh, hardly.”

Kovac looked from one to the other and back and forth. The girl—he put her around twenty-two—was a stylized character from a postmodern noir film. Jet-black hair cut in a sleek bob that played up the angles of her face. Dark purple lipstick on Kewpie-doll lips contrasted sharply with the perfect milk white of her skin.

She shrugged out of her heavy trench coat and hung it on a hook at the end of the booth. Bright-colored tattoos peeked out of the V-neck of her sweater. A green-inked vine with a purple morning glory flower crept up one side of her neck. A tiny steel barbell pierced the severe arch of one eyebrow. A matching steel ring went like a fish hook through her plump lower lip.

There was a part of Kovac that wanted to get up and leave this circus sideshow now. He was exhausted and out of what little patience he ever had. He had already dealt with two reporters over the phone, carefully doling out the information he wanted to let go of. Just enough detail, just enough insinuation that their Jane Doe’s murder might be tied to others. No, they couldn’t quote him. No, he didn’t have a name for the victim. And now he had to hope they didn’t fuck it up or fuck him over.

Now
this
: a Tippen family reunion.

“Oh, well,” Tippen said. “I have something to look forward to.”

“Maiming, for instance,” the girl said.

Tippen was unconcerned with the threat. “Sonya, this is my colleague Sergeant Sam Kovac. Sam, my niece, Sonya Porter, activist, feminist, anarchist, and freelance journalist.”

The girl narrowed her eyes at Kovac as she slid into the booth. “Do you have a problem with any of that?”

“I don’t like journalists,” he said. “The rest of it is none of my business.”

“That’s fair enough,” she said. “I don’t like cops.”

“Wow, this is gonna work out for everyone,” Kovac said sarcastically.

A waitress pissed off to be working New Year’s came over and asked if they wanted anything. The girl ordered a shot and a beer. Kovac ordered his usual burger and fries, a heart attack on a plate. Liska usually ate half of his fries, which he figured took the damage down to a minor stroke.

They had chosen Patrick’s for the meeting—and for the greasy food. An Irish-named bar owned by Swedes that catered to cops. Strategically located halfway between the police department and the sheriff’s office, the pub was open 365 days a year from lunch ’til the last possible moment allowed by the city—and sometimes later, depending on circumstance.

It was a place for meals, camaraderie, and the drowning of sorrows and stress for people not understood by civilian society. Even on a holiday the place was busy with cops coming off their shift, dogwatch uniforms grabbing dinner before heading out, and the retired and otherwise disenfranchised hanging out because they had nowhere else to go. College football was playing on the big-screen TVs above the bar and pool tables.

“Who do you freelance for?” Kovac asked.

“Whoever. That would be the definition of ‘freelance,’ wouldn’t it?”

“I can do without the attitude.”

She shrugged. “I can do without being here. You need me. I don’t need you.”

Kovac looked at Tippen. “And I figured you for the least charming member of your family.”

“Oh, I’m a peach,” Tippen said.

“This is about the zombie, right?” the girl said.

Kovac gave her a hard look. “This is about a Jane Doe murder victim. There is no fucking zombie. There’s a teenage girl lying dead on a steel table in the morgue with half her face dissolved by acid. She has a name, but we don’t know what it is. We can assume she has a family somewhere, but we don’t know who they are. How about that?”

Porter stared at him. “The zombie is the angle. You want people to get to the rest of what you just said? Embrace the zombie. We live in a society of self-absorbed, unaware drones desensitized to the suffering of others. You have to hit them in the fucking face to get their attention.”

Kovac thought about it. He had to grudgingly admit he liked that she wasn’t intimidated by him. “You have a poor outlook on humanity.”

“Don’t you?”

“I’ve lived longer than you have. I’ve earned the right to be bitter. You’re not old enough to be bitter.”

“Oh, I’m bitter,” she assured him. “Bitter and outraged.”

“Outraged by what?”

“Pretty much everything except puppies and kittens. The economy, ecology, foreign policy, social policy, women’s rights, gay rights. The list goes on. There’s a lot to be outraged about, including the lack of outrage exhibited by the average American.”

“Well, good for you,” Kovac said. “Hang on to that. But tell me, what good are you to me, Miss Outrage? I always think ‘freelance’ is just another word for unemployed. I need information disseminated.”

“Why don’t you call a press conference, then?”

“It’s delicate.”

The brow with the barbell sketched upward. “Ah. ‘Sources close to the investigation’ delicate?”

“Yeah, like that,” he said. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“That depends. Is what you’re going to tell me true?”

Kovac sat back, pretending confusion. “You’re a reporter, right? What’s truth got to do with it?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “I live to compromise my journalistic integrity the same way you live to beat confessions out of innocent people.”

“I’ve never beaten a confession out of an innocent person.”

“And I don’t knowingly lie to my readers.”

The sulky waitress returned with a tray of drinks and Kovac’s dinner. He shook the ketchup bottle as Sonya Porter tossed back her shot. They never took their eyes off each other.

“What readers?” Kovac asked. “Tip tells me you do stuff on the Internet. What does that mean?”

“Online news sources. Twitter. Facebook. My blog.”

“And people actually read this stuff?”

She looked at her uncle with an expression that clearly said,
Are you kidding me with this guy?
Tippen shrugged.

“No one under the age of thirty reads an actual newspaper,” she said. “Seriously. How old are you?”

Kovac felt like a dinosaur. In the technological revolution, he usually felt like he had chosen the wrong side. He could make a computer do what he needed it to do—which wasn’t much—but in the last couple of years, with the meteoric rise of online social media, he felt like he had been run over on the information superhighway and left in the dust. Tinks stayed more current because of her boys, but as far as Kovac was concerned, tweeting came from birds, and a post was something that held up a fence.

“It doesn’t matter how old I am,” he said. “It matters that my victim is a teenager. And the other victims have been in their teens or early twenties.”

She sat up at that. “Other victims? What other victims?”

“We could be dealing with a serial killer,” Tippen said. “But the department is going to want to downplay that angle. From a public relations standpoint, a serial killer is a bad way to set the tone for the New Year.”

That was a good angle, Kovac thought. Play to her desire to be outraged. She could rage against the establishment, rage against his generation. Whatever would put words on the page—or the screen—worked for him.

“This is the third victim dumped in Minneapolis,” he said. “And there was one in St. Paul. None of them were from here. They were abducted in other states and dumped here when their killer was through with them.

“He’s dumped bodies in other states too,” he said. “This new one makes nine. You want to be outraged about something, be outraged about this: young women being abducted, raped, tortured, disfigured, murdered, and chucked out along the road like a sack of garbage. This girl’s face is so destroyed it’s anybody’s guess what she looked like before this asshole got hold of her.”

He paused to take a bite of his dinner while he let Sonya Porter digest the information he’d fed her. Sonya Porter, twenty-young, with her lip ring and her anger; the illustrated girl from a generation that could have been from another planet as far as he was concerned.

“What do you need from me?” she asked.

“I need to reach the people who might have known this girl. Kids she went to school with, hung out with. Siblings, maybe. Anyone. Anyone who might know anything,” he said. “And I need this information to go out as far and as wide as possible, because I don’t have any idea in hell where this girl came from.”

“What have you got to go on?”

“A tattoo.” Kovac picked his phone up off the tabletop and brought up the photograph Tinks had taken at the autopsy and texted to him. “Any idea what it means?”

Sonya Porter’s expression changed as she spread her thumb and forefinger across the screen to enlarge the picture of the Chinese characters. From interest to confusion to recognition to sadness.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I know what it means.”

She put the phone down on the tabletop and pushed up the sleeve of her sweater to reveal the same set of Chinese characters inked into the delicate skin on the inside of her forearm.

“It means acceptance.”

10

Kyle sat on his
bed with his back against the headboard and his knees pulled up. The light on his nightstand glowed amber, holding at bay the cold black night beyond his window.

The artwork on his walls took on a sinister feel in the dim light. His own renditions of characters from his favorite comic books and graphic novels,
300
and
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns,
loomed large. Leonidas, the Spartan king, fierce and bearded. Xerxes I of Persia, beautiful and evil, with his elaborate body piercings and glowing eyes. Batman and the Joker.

Characters of Kyle’s own creation looked down on him as well. Most notably, Ultor, defender and avenger of the downtrodden and the disenfranchised. Ultor, a man of chiseled muscle with an iron jaw and narrowed eyes, was loosely fashioned after Kyle’s favorite mixed martial arts fighter, Georges St-Pierre.

With GSP, a man of few words, with swift and terrible punishment in his hands, there was no bullshit, no trash talk, no preening or posing. He was a gentleman, a man of honor. He wasn’t the biggest fighter. At five feet ten inches, 170 pounds, he had a compact body cut with lean muscle. He had been a small kid, bullied mercilessly by older schoolmates. Now, as a world champion fighter with millions of fans, he spoke out against bullying, which made Kyle admire him all the more.