The 9th Girl

by Tami Hoag

  “Do you feel nauseous?”

  “No.”

  “Any double vision?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you lock your door?”

  “’Cause,” he said stubbornly, then thought better of leaving it at that. “I wanted to be alone. I didn’t want R.J. bothering me.”

  Fair enough, she thought. R.J. could be like a big golden retriever puppy—curious and lovable and annoying all at the same time. He was still too much of a little boy to understand the seriousness of being fifteen.

  “Make yourself presentable,” she said, moving toward the door. “Marysue is making eggs. I want you to eat something. Then you can have some Tylenol and spend the rest of the day brooding. All right?”

  He shrugged and looked away, and her heart ached for him. She would have taken all his hurts away and eaten them for breakfast if she could have.

  She went back to him and pressed a kiss to his forehead. “I love you,” she said softly. “Nothing is ever as bad as it seems.”

  A mother’s lie, she thought as she left his room, her memory calling up the image of a dead girl lying broken on the road.

  Some things were every bit as bad as they seemed.

  Some things were even worse.

  5

  It was midmorning before Kovac dragged his sorry ass home. He lived in a quiet, older neighborhood that had gone a bit shabby over the years. Huge old oak and maple trees lined the boulevards, their roots busting up the sidewalks. Built in the forties and fifties, the houses were square and plain, of no discernable architectural style. These blocks would never be in any danger of restoration by the upwardly mobile. Some of the bigger, uglier houses had been cut up into duplexes and apartments. Most were single-family homes. His neighbors were working-class people and working-class retirees. It was a boring place, which suited him fine.

  He trudged up the sidewalk, his eyes going, as always, to his neighbor’s yard, which was crowded with a mad mix of Christmas decorations the old fart started putting up every year around Halloween. Santa Claus figures swarmed over the property like commandoes, creeping out of the bushes, climbing on the roof and into the chimney, skulking around the Nativity scene. Giant plywood toy soldiers stood sentry on either side of the manger. All of it was lit up at night with so much juice it had to be visible from space.

  Fucking madness. Kovac particularly hated it on a day like this, when he was coming home from scraping a dead girl off the pavement. What the hell was there to be festive about in a world where young women were murdered and chucked out onto the road like garbage?

  His brain superimposed the images onto his neighbor’s lawn: Rose Ellen Reiser, aka New Year’s Doe, lying in front of Frosty the Snowman, her face beaten to a bloody pulp with a hammer; their new Jane Doe flung like a broken rag doll at the feet of the three wise men, half her face burned away by Christ knew what. Zombie Doe.

  He went into the house, toed his shoes off at the door, dumped his coat on the sofa, and went straight upstairs. He cranked the shower on as hot as he could stand it, stripped, and just stood under the water for he didn’t even know or care how long. He felt grimy and sweaty from the too-hot office, yet his feet seemed not to have thawed out from the hours at the scene in subfreezing temperatures.

  From the shower he went straight to bed, falling naked on top of the tangle of sheets. He stared up at the ceiling, willing his mind to go just as blank.

  He had been up for thirty-three hours. After Liska had left the office, he had stayed, staring at his computer screen, going through missing persons reports, hunting for any missing women who might fit with his case. He’d spent so much time in the last year looking at missing persons websites, he knew many of the cases by heart. The sad fact was a lot of those cases would never be closed. Young women went missing—many by choice, others not. There weren’t a lot of happy endings to be had.

  The National Crime Information Center reported more than eighty-five thousand active missing persons records on file. How many lives did those eighty-five-thousand-plus touch? Parents, spouses, siblings, children, friends . . . the cops who worked their cases . . .

  He had printed out pages on half a dozen missing women in a five-state area as possibilities. None were from the Twin Cities area. But then, if this case was linked to Doc Holiday, their victim wouldn’t be from here. She would have been snatched in Illinois or Missouri or Wisconsin or someplace else. She would have gone missing a couple of days ago. The last two days of her life would have been spent as his captive, being raped and tortured and finally killed.

  Kovac couldn’t decide which would be worse: if their girl was a victim of Doc Holiday or if someone else had come up with the list of depraved shit that had been done to her.

  He’d been a homicide cop for a lot of years. He’d seen firsthand that people’s cruelty to one another knew no bounds. The fact that it still disturbed him five layers down under the thick hide the job had grown on him was both a blessing and a curse.

  He was still human. He could still feel pain and sadness and despair and disgust. He could still dread holidays and hate coming home to an empty house.

  It was always times like this when the darker emotions washed over him. Thirty-three hours without sleep, a brutal homicide, the knowledge that he didn’t have enough manpower or resources to devote to solving the case quickly. Christ knew how long it would be before they could get a confirmed ID on their vic, let alone develop a suspect list. Who the hell wouldn’t be depressed over that? Who wouldn’t look at that poor dead girl and think, What if that was my kid?

  He’d had too much cause to have thoughts like that in the last year.

  When asked, Sam always said he had no children. He had raised no children. He got no cards on Father’s Day. He paid no child support. The truth was more complicated than that.

  He had a daughter in Seattle—or so he’d been led to believe a couple of lifetimes ago. She had been born here in Minneapolis shortly before the divorce became final. His soon-to-be-ex had already moved on with her life plans. She was in love with someone else, wanted out, wanted to start over, wanted nothing more to do with him. He had signed away his rights and she had headed west.

  He had never seen the girl since. He had no idea what she looked like, if she favored him—God help her. He had spent a lot of time telling himself the kid had probably not been his at all, that his ex had stuck it out with him for his insurance coverage. But he had never entirely convinced himself of that. And so, during cases like this one, the thoughts came back to him—that he had a daughter, that he had lost a daughter, that she could have been dead for all he knew and for all he would ever know.

  What a fucking mess you are, Kojak.

  Twice married, twice divorced, no prospects. Lying in bed alone on New Year’s Day, with a dead girl foremost in his thoughts.

  The phone rang as if his loneliness had reached across the country and tapped his last near miss on the shoulder. Her name came up on the caller ID: Carey. He stared at it as the ringing of the phone raked over raw nerve endings. He let it go to voice mail. What would she have to say that she hadn’t said a hundred times already? That she missed him. That she had to take the job with the Department of Justice because . . . excuse, excuse, excuse.

  He didn’t want to hear it. What good did it do to talk about it? She had made her choice for her own reasons, all of them more important than he was.

  He shouldn’t have let it bother him as much as he did. She had been through a lot of rough shit. An attempt on her life over a ruling she had made as the judge on a high-profile murder case. Kidnapped by a homicidal lunatic. Kovac still believed her ex-husband had plotted to have her killed, though the attempt had never actually been made, and Kovac had never been able to make the case for conspiracy to commit. All of that, then her father had died, and suddenly there were just too many painful memories.

  She had needed a change of scenery. She’d been offered the position with the DOJ. Why wouldn’t
she take it? Why wouldn’t she take her young daughter and go? Start over, start fresh, no ties to the past.

  They hadn’t been much more than friends, really . . .

  She had been gone now nearly a year and a half. When she came back to visit, he wasn’t available. When she called, he didn’t answer.

  When he fell asleep, he still saw her in his dreams.

  6

  Assistant Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Ulf Möller had volunteered himself for the New Year’s Day autopsy of Zombie Doe. He was standing outside the back entrance to the morgue, smoking a cigarette, when Kovac pulled up and parked in the chief’s spot.

  The morgue was open for business, receiving bodies 24/7/365. An ambulance sat in the delivery bay now, having dropped off its unlucky cargo. There had been no autopsies planned for the day, however. Death never took a holiday, but MEs did. Anyone dead on New Year’s Day would be just as dead on January second. But Kovac had pressed for an exception. It was important to ID their Jane Doe as soon as possible, for the sake of any family who might have been looking for her and for the sake of the case. Ulf Möller hadn’t hesitated to say yes to Kovac’s request, giving up his holiday afternoon with his wife, Eva, and their two daughters.

  Tall and lean, Möller had a European elegance about him right down to the way he held his smoke, pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He was wrapped in a handsome black leather trench coat, a plaid cashmere scarf wound artfully around his neck. Despite the cold, he wore no hat. The icy breeze teased the ends of his fine sandy hair, though not a strand strayed out of place. He watched Sam approach with a wry expression.

  “I appreciate this, Doc,” Kovac said.

  Möller sketched a brow ever so slightly upward, a certain kind of amusement lighting his eyes. “How could I resist? It isn’t every day I get to autopsy a zombie. Maggie is going to be jealous, I think.”

  ME humor: every bit as dark and inappropriate as cop humor. Civilians would have been offended to hear it, but it was a necessary vice for people who dealt in death and depravity on a daily basis.

  “She got the vampire on Halloween,” Kovac reminded him. “And that Santa Claus burglar who died inside that chimney.”

  “Greedy bitch,” Möller said mildly. He took a long pull on the cigarette and exhaled a jet stream of smoke.

  Head honcho Maggie Stone, who had performed the autopsy on Rose Reiser a year ago, had gone to Vegas for New Year’s with the latest of her slightly shady boyfriends. Möller, who had spent the last New Year’s holiday visiting family in Germany, had done the autopsy on the Fourth of July vic—Independence Doe.

  “What do you think, Sam? Is this the work of our serial killer?”

  Kovac shrugged. “You’ll have to tell me. I don’t like the coincidences: holiday, dumped on the road, stabbed, disfigured . . . I don’t want to think there are a lot of guys running around doing shit like that.”

  “Any prospects for an ID of the victim?”

  “No local missing persons matching her description. At least, not yet. Someone goes missing New Year’s Eve, it might take a day or two for anyone to sound the alarm,” Kovac said. “I pulled a few sheets for missing females in a five-state area. Whoever she is, I hope to God she has a record and we can ID her from her fingerprints. That face is nothing to work with. Have you had a look at her yet?”

  “And start the party without you and your lovely partner?” Möller said. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Cigarette?”

  Kovac took the offer automatically, as a matter of male bonding. He had officially quit the rotten habit about thirty-two times—had quit entirely when he had been seeing Carey Moore and spending time around her little girl, Lucy.

  Intellectually, he knew smoking was a stupid thing to do. And Liska kicked his ass for it every time she caught him doing it. Emotionally, he didn’t always care. In his darker moods, he did it deliberately, daring the universe to kill him. Who would give a shit anyway? Today was one of those days.

  Möller shared his lighter. They both lit up and stood there in the freezing cold, tarring up their lungs like a couple of fucking idiots. Kovac felt perversely pleased with himself. He reminded himself how much he liked smoking, how soothing the ritual of it was; how a cigarette was like an old friend you called up every time the world kicked you in the teeth, and you went out and got drunk together and felt like shit afterward.

  Liska pulled up to the curb then and parked her car in a loading zone. She got out wearing her don’t-fuck-with-me face and stomped up to them.

  “You’re a couple of damned fools, and when you die slow, lingering, horrible deaths, don’t come crying to me.”

  Möller arched a brow. “Lovely to see you, as well, Sergeant Liska. Happy New Year.”

  Liska gave him the stink eye.

  Kovac had the grace to feel guilty. He dropped his smoke and ground it out in the snow that had accumulated on the sidewalk overnight. He picked up the butt and discarded it properly. She could accuse him of being a fool, but at least he had some common courtesy.

  Liska shot him her mother’s look of utter disgust nevertheless and headed into the building. Kovac looked at Möller and shrugged.

  The ME’s mouth curved up on one side in amusement. “You make such a lovely couple.”

  “The hell,” Kovac grumbled as they fell in step behind his partner. “She’d eat me alive.”

  “And not in the good way,” Liska tossed back over her shoulder. Typical Tinks. Always with the smart mouth.

  Kovac had to admit, the two of them had been partners longer than he had stayed married to either of his wives. He doubted there was much one of them didn’t know about the other. Liska delighted in embarrassing him with the details of her dating life. He weighed in routinely on her ex-husband and had learned to read and assess her moods with sharp accuracy.

  She was pissed now, but his smoking a cigarette had little to do with it. Quick and tense, her every movement was reminiscent of an angry cat snapping its tail.

  “Speed?” he guessed as they hung up their coats and grabbed yellow gowns.

  “Isn’t answering his phone,” she said curtly.

  “How is that a problem? It’s not as much fun to call him a lazy-ass selfish dick on his voice mail?”

  She stood still and looked up at him with grave meaning. “Kyle got into a fight last night.”

  “Kyle?”

  “I know. Right? Kyle doesn’t get into fights.”

  “Does he have an explanation?”

  “Sure. It’s bullshit. He claims he and his friends went skating on the lake last night, that he crashed into some kid and got into a fight with him.”

  “You don’t believe him.”

  “It was seventeen below zero last night,” she reminded him. “Nobody was skating on Lake Calhoun. The knuckles of his right hand are scraped. He wasn’t wearing gloves when he hit whoever he hit. They weren’t outside,” she concluded. “He’s lying to me.”

  “And you think he’ll tell Speed the truth?” Kovac asked. “Speed is more apt to give him pointers. How to Sell a Lie 101 by Speed Hatcher. The asshole ought to do a video series. Maybe he could pay his back child support with the proceeds.”

  “I don’t know what good he would do,” she admitted. “I just know I want him to suffer through this too.”

  Kovac held his tongue and bent over to pull on the yellow paper booties over his shoes. Suffering was not on the Speed Hatcher agenda any more than shouldering his share of the responsibility for parenting two teenage boys.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Liska said.

  “Well, that’s going to save on conversation, then.”

  “I’m worried,” she admitted.

  “I know.”

  He put a hand on her shoulder and gave a little squeeze at the rock-hard tension there. “Kyle’s a great kid, Tinks. You’re doing a great job raising him and R.J. But they’re boys. Boys do stupid things. Boys get into scrapes. It’s a wonder half of the male population even make
s it to maturity.”

  “That’s a fact.” She tried without much success to muster her usual smartass smirk.

  “Hey, it could be worse,” Kovac pointed out. “He could be a zombie.”

  • • •

  WATCHING ULF MÖLLER conduct an autopsy was like watching performance art. Classical music played softly in the background, with bone saws and oscillating saws and the clank of surgical instruments against stainless steel overlaying the orchestral score. The white background of the room was like the white of a blank canvas, clean and austere. Möller and his assistant glided around the table like a pair of ballroom dancers in blue surgical gowns, elegant and smooth and perfectly in step with each other.

  The autopsy of Zombie Doe would have been a mesmerizing thing to watch if not for the utter horror embodied by the decedent. Or maybe she was the jarring focal point that put the entire picture into perspective. She was a thing from another dimension, all harsh angles and strong colors, dirty and bloody and broken in too many places. Her face was a mask of raw meat and white bone. The dark hair was shaved to the scalp on one side of the skull and a Medusa’s mane of twisted, matted snarls on the other.

  “I see what you mean,” Möller said, glancing from the young woman’s face to Kovac. “You’ll have your work cut out for you to get an ID.”

  “Right?” Kovac said. “What are we supposed to do with that? We can’t put out a photograph. And what’s a sketch artist going to make of it? Can you tell what she must have looked like? Any artist’s rendition is going to be pure guesswork.”

  “A bad sketch is worse than no sketch at all,” Liska said.

  People cruising the missing and unidentified persons websites looking for loved ones rode a double-edged sword, both wanting and not wanting to find the person they were looking for. Staring at sketches, they would fixate not only on similarities to their missing daughter, sister, friend but also on the differences. Maybe this one was . . . but the nose was too narrow or the mouth was too wide. They remembered their lover’s, mother’s, brother’s crooked smile, but no one died smiling, and sketches were rendered with little emotion on the victim’s face so as not to distort the features.