Kovac And Liska: The 9th Girl Part 23

"What time did you get home?" Elwood asked.

"I've seen this happen on television!" Julia Gray said, alarmed. "A child goes missing and the police waste valuable time hara.s.sing the parents. I didn't do anything to my daughter! How could you even think such a thing?"

"We don't know you, Mrs. Gray," Elwood said reasonably. "We can't make a.s.sumptions about anyone in your daughter's life. We're not accusing you of anything, but it's essential that we remain open to all possibilities."

"Should Julia have an attorney here?" Warner asked.

"This isn't an interrogation, Dr. Warner," Kovac said. "No one is under arrest. We're just trying to get as much information as possible to help guide us in the right direction."

"I didn't see my daughter after she left the house on the twenty-eighth," Julia Gray said tersely.

"And what time did you get home on the thirtieth?" Elwood asked.

"Twelve thirty or so."

"And you, Dr. Warner?"

"Shortly after that.

"Was your daughter home by then?"

"No. Christina got home around one."

"Did she say anything about what went on at the Rock and Bowl?" Kovac asked.

"She said she spent the evening out with her friends."

"She didn't say anything about Penny Gray?"

"No."

"Even though, according to kids who were there, Christina and Penny had an argument that ended with Penny leaving."

"As you've heard, an argument that ends with Penny leaving isn't exactly newsworthy," Warner said. "Penny is an intrinsically unhappy girl, Detective. She's unhappy with her life. She's unhappy with herself. She's unhappy with her mother and about her mother's relations.h.i.+p with me. She's jealous of Christina. She's jealous of my relations.h.i.+p with my daughter because she doesn't have a relations.h.i.+p with her own father. I've tried to fill that void for her in small ways, and she resents me for it."

"I've been told the dislike between the girls runs both ways," Kovac said. "According to a witness at the Rock and Bowl, Christina was picking on Penny that night, making fun of her poetry-something that was also not an isolated incident."

Warner sighed. "I'm not going to try to paint my daughter as a perfect angel, Detective. But you can talk to Christina's teachers, to her friends. She's an excellent student. She's a leader in her cla.s.s. She mentors younger girls.

"She has tried to be friends with Penny. Penny isn't interested. That Christina occasionally fights back when Penny lashes out at her is only normal."

"Girls will be girls."

"Essentially, yes. Yet when I told Christina last night about Penny being missing, the first thing she wanted to do was help in some way."

"That's admirable," Elwood said. "Hopefully, she'll be able to help. We'll be speaking with the kids later today. Maybe they'll be able to shed some light. People don't always realize what they know. Sometimes a seemingly insignificant detail can mean everything."

"Your daughter's poetry, for example," Kovac said to Julia Gray. "Her last Facebook post was a poem. It certainly seems to be directed at someone in particular."

He pulled a printed copy of the poem ent.i.tled "Liar" out of the file folder and slid it across the table to a neutral spot between Julia Gray and Michael Warner. He sat back in his chair and watched them read it with his eyelids at half-mast, as if he might doze off.

Julia Gray looked frustrated by her inability to penetrate her daughter's work-or her world-in any way. Michael Warner read it without expression.

"Any idea who she might be talking about?" Kovac asked.

"Her father, obviously," Warner said. "She was las.h.i.+ng out at him. He has all but cut her out of his life. She was especially feeling the sting of that over the holidays."

"But what's the lie?" Kovac asked. "It's been four years since your husband left you and Penny, Mrs. Gray. It's no secret he was cheating on you, that he left you for a younger woman. Considering your daughter's penchant for public displays of drama, I can't imagine anyone didn't know how she felt about it all. So what's the lie? What's the secret? Who's the star she means to bring down?"

Michael Warner slid the sheet of paper back toward him and said, "We can only hope we get a chance to ask her."

"And for the record, Mrs. Gray," Elwood said, "where were you New Year's Eve?"

"We went out for drinks," she said, tearing up. Michael Warner put an arm around her shoulders to offer comfort while she covered her mouth with her injured hand.

Kovac imagined her remembering the revelry of the evening, dressed to the nines, ringing in the New Year while her daughter was lying dead in the road, a spectacle under the harsh portable lights, TV news cameras angling to get a shot of the carnage.

Every mother's nightmare.

He hoped.

27.

"You are not to leave this house. Do you understand me?" Nikki said. "I don't care if it's on fire. You are not to leave this house."

Kyle didn't look at her. He hung his head and said yes in a barely audible voice.

They had ridden home in absolute, oppressive silence. She couldn't trust herself to speak. She couldn't stand to have music on the radio or DJs trying to fill everyone with phony hilarity. The sound of the blinker was intolerable. Kyle slouched down in the pa.s.senger's seat, trying to make himself invisible.

The house was equally silent save for the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen. The quiet seemed to press in on her eardrums. Every small sound-her purse touching the dining table as she set it down, Kyle unzipping his hoodie-seemed magnified ten times.

He sat down at the table looking despondent. She refused to feel badly for him.

"I can't talk to you about this now," she said. "I am so angry and so disappointed in you, I can't talk about it."

He hung his head. "Are you going to tell Dad?"

"Why would I bother to involve your father?" she snapped. "He's as juvenile as you seem to be. He'll probably think it's funny. It's not funny. It is so not funny.

"You could lose your scholars.h.i.+p over this. You could be expelled. You can sit here all day and think about that, and what that means. No television. No Internet. And if I find out you've been on Facebook or tweeting on your secret account, I will take your phone and smash it with a hammer right before your eyes.

"I have to go now," she said, "because I have to have a job so I can provide for you and your brother, and feed you, and clothe you, and buy you things-all of which you seem to have no appreciation for whatsoever."

He was trying to hide the fact that he was crying. She had to fight like a tigress against the urge to go to him and put her arms around him. She loved him so much it hurt like being stabbed in the heart with an ice pick.

She felt like she was going to explode into a million gla.s.s shards as she went back out into the cold and got in the piece-of-c.r.a.p car from the department pool. It smelled of cold Mexican takeout food. She left the windows cracked as she drove.

Alone, she couldn't help but let some of her own tears fall. She was exhausted, both from the case and from all the drama with Kyle. At times like this she found that terrible, insidious worn-out wish sneaking in the back door. The one where she imagined someone stronger than she felt offering to take some of the burden away and let her rest in a safe place. It was a cruel dream, one she never expected to be fulfilled. But it crept in the back door just the same.

She drove to the medical plaza where Penny Gray had been treated for her broken wrist and picked up the X-rays that were waiting at the front desk, then headed downtown to the ME's offices.

She was informed at the front desk that Moller was in the middle of an autopsy.

"Which suite is he in?" she asked.

The receptionist blinked at her. "You can wait in his office. He's in the middle of an autopsy."

"Yeah, I got that the first time you said it." She held up the large manila envelope with Penelope Gray's name on it. "I need him to look at these X-rays now. I don't care if he's knee-deep in decomposing corpses. Which room is he in?"

The young woman looked alarmed, torn between fear and duty.

"Look, sweetheart," Nikki said brusquely. "You can call Dr. Moller and interrupt him or you can tell me which room he's in and I'll interrupt him myself. I need to know if his Jane Doe is my missing child case. I have a mother hanging in limbo."

Still uncertain, the young woman swallowed and said, "He's in two."

She was already picking up the phone to call the suite and cover her a.s.s as Nikki turned and headed down the hall.

The smell hit her in the face like a baseball bat as she went into the autopsy suite.

"Holy Mother of G.o.d!" she exclaimed, reeling. Her stomach flipped over like a beached fish, and her head swam.

Moller looked up at her, his eyes sparkling above his mask. "Ah, welcome, Sergeant Liska! You don't like our ambience today? So sorry. The piquant bouquet of our latest customer isn't for the more delicate nose, I'm afraid."

Liska clamped her nose shut with thumb and forefinger and tried to breathe through her mouth. Her eyes watered as if she had just sliced open an onion. "What the h.e.l.l is that?"

"A dissatisfied client from a funeral home in north Minneapolis. One of several. Apparently, they ran out of storage while waiting for the weather to cooperate for burials," he explained. "And ran out of embalming fluid, it would seem, as well. Seven corpses stacked in a closet like cordwood."

"I'm gonna puke," she said, then promptly turned toward the nearest receptacle and unloaded her breakfast into a laundry bin.

Unfazed, Moller went on about his business, waiting for her to recover.

"Okay," she said, still breathing hard through her mouth. "That guy isn't going to get any deader. I've got the X-rays to match to our Jane Doe. Can we go somewhere with a lower gag factor and have a look?"

"Of course," Moller said pleasantly, stepping back from the table. "If you had allowed the girl at the desk to call ahead, I would have met you in the hallway."

He stripped off his gloves, mask, and gown and threw them in the laundry bin, then washed his hands in one of the big stainless steel sinks.

Liska didn't wait for him, bursting out of the room and sucking in fresh air by the lungful. Moller stepped into the hall and offered her a wrapped peppermint, which she took in exchange for the X-rays.

They went into his office and he clipped the pictures of Penny Gray's broken wrist to a light box. He had already mounted the matching X-rays from the Jane Doe autopsy. He stood looking at the images, frowning and silent.

"What do you think?" she asked. "Are our pictures the healed version of that?"

"Yes," Moller said. "How did this allegedly happen?" he asked, pointing to Gray's known X-rays.

"The mother said the girl fell off a bike. Why?"

"No," he said. "You fall from a bicycle, you reach out to break your fall like so," he said, stretching out one arm, his hand flexed back. "Your hand strikes the ground, the break happens here." He cut his other hand across the wrist. This is not what happened to this girl."

Liska looked at the fracture, the steep angle of it.

"This," Moller said, "is a spiral fracture. A spiral fracture is caused by a twisting motion."

He turned toward her, grabbed hold of her wrist, and slowly twisted.

"That, my friend-," he began.

Liska finished the sentence for him. "Is abuse."

28.

Have u heard about Gray?

Brittany looked at her phone. Kyle. Why couldn't he just leave her alone? That was her first thought. Her second thought was that in her heart of hearts she actually kind of wished she could see him and talk to him. He was always so sure of what to do, of what was right. She didn't always agree with him, but she wished she had some of his strength right now.

She glanced around to see if anyone was watching her, then texted him back. She's missing. Cops here now. Where r u?

They sat at a big, glossy wood table in a room in the princ.i.p.al's offices. Christina and Aaron and the other kids who had been at the Rock & Bowl that night-Jessie and Emily, Eric and Michael; the core of the clique. The police wanted to talk to them.

"How did they even know we were there?" Aaron asked.

Brittany was silent, dreading having everyone's attention on her. Would they be angry? Would they hate her? She hadn't asked for the police to come to her house.

She felt Christina's dark eyes on her with extra intensity. She had to tell them. They would find out anyway.

"They came to my house last night," she said. "Gray's mom told them she was staying with me."

Emily's eyes got big. "The police came to your house? Oh my G.o.d."

"This is what happens," Christina said with firm disapproval. "This is what you get for letting her come to your house, Britt. She's always in trouble. She is trouble. I've told you that a hundred times!"

"I know, I know," Brittany said. "But her mom kicked her out. She needed a place to stay-"

"Let her go stay with one of her weird poet friends. She's not your responsibility, Britt. You don't owe her anything."

Brittany said nothing. Everything with Christina was cut-and-dried and bent to fit, but Brittany never seemed to see things so clearly. She had been friends with Gray before she was friends with Christina. Even though she didn't really get Gray, she felt like she did owe her a certain amount of, if not loyalty, then kindness, at least.