The 9th Girl

by Tami Hoag

  That theme played out through his comic book characters. His hero, Ultor, was the champion of the weak and the misfits. And Aaron Fogelman had snatched his sketchbook full of drawings of Ultor.

  Perfect storm.

  “I don’t care if they kick me out,” he said glumly, scratching his thumbnail at some imagined speck on the polished tabletop. “I hate it here anyway.”

  “You don’t hate it here,” Nikki said quietly. “You hate what you’re going through.”

  “What’s the difference? I don’t want to be here. I wish I could go back to my old school.”

  “You can’t run away from a situation because you don’t get along with someone.”

  “You did,” he said, shooting her a nasty look. “With Dad. That’s why we moved here.”

  Nikki felt as if she’d had the wind knocked out of her. She did her best to hide it, to absorb the blow. He had unerringly hit her in her most vulnerable spot.

  “Now who’s the bully?” she asked. “You said that just to hurt me. That would be the definition of a bully, wouldn’t it?”

  She saw the tears rise again in his eyes even as he tried to hide them by putting his head down on the table and covering up. It wasn’t in his nature to be cruel. It went against his grain to lash out like that. His conscience would now eat him up for it.

  “Have you told Principal Rodgers this Fogelman kid is a bully?” she asked.

  The Big Sigh, which in this case clearly translated to no.

  “Then how is he supposed to know?” she asked. “How is he supposed to do anything about it?”

  “He won’t anyway,” Kyle said.

  “The school has an antibullying policy.”

  He looked up at her and rolled his eyes at that, like he couldn’t believe she was stupid enough to think that would make a difference.

  “His dad donated all the new computers in the library,” he said.

  Voices in the hall caught their attention. Nikki stood up, ready to go to battle for her child.

  After a quick perfunctory knock on the door, Principal Rodgers came in looking appropriately grave, Kyle’s sketchbook in hand.

  “Mrs. Hatcher,” he said by way of greeting.

  “Liska,” Nikki corrected him, the chip on her shoulder coming up. “My last name is Liska. No missus.”

  Rodgers didn’t want to be bothered apologizing. A man used to dealing with wealthy, pompous parents, he had a chip of his own. He took the seat at the head of the table like a king ready to suffer through the tedious complaints of his subjects. He was a distinguished African-American man in his late forties, always meticulously groomed and wearing an impeccable suit. Nikki felt rumpled and sweaty in comparison. She resisted the urge to comb her hair with her fingers.

  “I’ve listened to Kyle’s explanation and to Mr. Fogelman’s,” he began. “I’m not satisfied that anyone is telling me the complete truth.”

  “Brittany was standing right there,” Kyle said. “She saw the whole thing. She’ll tell you.”

  “She told me she didn’t really know what started the problem,” Rodgers said.

  Kyle looked shocked and, beneath that, hurt.

  “Mr. Fogelman said it was all just a joke,” Rodgers said.

  Mr. Fogelman, Nikki thought, annoyed, like this other kid somehow deserved a title.

  Kyle said nothing. He wouldn’t argue because to make the circumstances seem more serious would then cast a worse light on his actions. Neither would he pretend to make light of what had happened, because it so went against who he was. Nikki could feel his frustration.

  “This isn’t the first time you and Mr. Fogelman have run afoul of each other, is it, Kyle?” Rodgers asked.

  Again, Kyle said nothing.

  “I know you’re well aware of our policy on violence here at PSI.”

  “It’s my understanding,” Nikki said, “that Mr. Fogelman took my son’s sketchbook and wouldn’t give it back to him.”

  She remained on her feet and took it as an insult that Rodgers had sat down. Now everything about the man was irritating her—the tidiness of his cuticles, the way he pursed his lower lip, the fussy double Windsor knot in his pretentious prep school striped tie.

  “There’s no excuse for attacking another student, Mrs. Liska.”

  “I haven’t seen any evidence of an attack,” Nikki said. “Is Mr. Fogelman claiming Kyle attacked him?”

  “Not in so many words. He said your son can’t take a joke.”

  “Oh? This is joke to him?” she asked, moving forward, pointing at the sketch pad on the table. “Kyle is in this school on a scholarship due in large part to his talent as an artist. That book is not a joke to him.”

  “Nevertheless, Mrs. Liska, violence is not tolerated here.”

  “I believe it’s been established there was no violence done here,” she said, advancing another step. “No one was attacked. It was just a joke. You said so yourself. Just boys being boys. And apparently stealing isn’t an issue with you—”

  “No one stole anything—” Rodgers started defensively.

  “And no one was attacked,” Nikki countered, staring him down. She was close enough to him now that he had to raise his chin to look up at her. He didn’t like it, but neither would he give up his seat.

  Instead, he backed off the subject, turning his attention to the sketchbook. “Then there’s the rather disturbing business of the subject matter of your son’s art.”

  He opened the cover to three poses of Ultor with huge, badly drawn penises connecting one Ultor to the next, to the next.

  “Your son was showing this around,” the principal said.

  “I was not!” Kyle protested.

  “And when Mr. Fogelman took it from him, the trouble started.”

  “That’s a lie!” Kyle said, his voice cracking.

  “I don’t know about you, Mrs. Liska, but I find this extremely offensive.”

  Like he thought she probably sat around looking at gay porn as a matter of course and found it perfectly acceptable if her son wanted to draw pictures of overly muscular men having anal sex.

  Kyle turned to her. “I didn’t do that, Mom! You know I wouldn’t do that!”

  “I know,” she reassured him.

  Rodgers gave her a patronizing look. “Mrs. Liska, I’m sure no mother wants to think her son would draw something like this—”

  “My son did not draw that,” she said firmly.

  “Mrs.—”

  “Principal Rodgers,” she said, biting the words off, her temper fraying. “If you’re going to insist on everyone having a title, you may call me Sergeant Liska, but you will definitely stop calling me Mrs. And please stop talking to me like I’m some meek little housewife.

  “I’m a homicide detective,” she said. “I know exactly what people are capable of. And I know my son. I also know my son’s dedication to his art.

  “Look closely at this,” she said, leaning over the table, tapping a finger on the drawing. “If you think for a minute an artist who would put that much painstaking detail into every line of his drawing would then ruin his work with badly rendered penises, you don’t know anything about artists. If my son was going to draw pornographic images of men having sex, I assure you, the penises would be anatomically correct and proportional.”

  Rodgers was looking at her like she had just walked out of his worst nightmare. He had no idea what to say.

  “That means someone else defaced Kyle’s work,” she said. “I don’t find that funny. I find it aggressive and offensive behavior in a school that makes so much of its high standards. If other kids took my son’s sketchbook, defaced his work, and wouldn’t give it back to him, tormenting him to the point he felt the need to take drastic action, Mr. Rodgers, I think you need to look more deeply into the real root of the problem.”

  He didn’t like being chastised. His expression was as tight and pinched as a sphincter. He closed the cover of the sketchbook and slid it away from him.

 
“Because the facts of this incident aren’t entirely clear,” he said, “I’m giving you a warning this time, Kyle. But a notation will be made in your file, and I will not be lenient if there’s a next time.”

  “And Aaron Fogelman will receive the same note in his file,” Nikki said. Not a question. A statement.

  Rodgers didn’t quite make eye contact. He took a beat too long to answer. “Yes. A notation will be made.”

  They were dismissed like a pair of servants. Nikki thought the top of her head might blow off from the pressure of the anger steaming inside her. She tried not to let it show as they walked out of the school and across the parking lot. She had a momma bear’s ferocity when it came to defending her offspring. At the same time, she didn’t want Kyle to think she condoned how he had handled the situation with the Fogelman boy—even though she wanted to track the bigger kid down and beat the shit out of him herself.

  The contradictory emotions buzzed around inside her mind like angry bees and gave her an instant headache. At times like this she cursed Speed more than usual. They were supposed to both shoulder the burden of difficult parenting moments. As usual, she got to do all the heavy lifting. When he finally cruised into the picture days from now, he would probably give Kyle an attaboy for getting the better of Aaron Fogelman.

  She looked at her son walking beside her with his hands stuffed into his coat pockets and his shoulders hunched up to his ears against the biting cold, his backpack hanging heavy over one shoulder. Now was when she was supposed to come up with something profound and motherly to say, but she couldn’t think of what that might be. And if she was conflicted, how must he feel?

  They got in the car in silence and she started the engine and cranked up the heater. She looked over at her son and sighed.

  “I hated being fifteen,” she confessed. “I didn’t feel like I fit in anywhere. Every day I felt like I was holding my breath, waiting for someone to see through me and then everyone would turn on me. Then I finally figured out the best thing about high school: It doesn’t last forever. And when it’s over, none of what seemed so important about it matters at all.”

  Kyle said nothing, but she knew what he was thinking. He was thinking he was just a sophomore and graduation was a tiny light at the end of a long tunnel full of the daily horrors of being a kid who was a little too sensitive and cared a little too much.

  She thought of their Jane Doe, the same age as Kyle, with her piercings and her half-shaved head and her tattoo declaring acceptance of all people, and wondered if she had been that kid too—on the outside, trying to figure out who she wanted to be. She hadn’t lived long enough to find out.

  “I love you,” Nikki said softly as she put the car in gear and headed it toward the gate. “And I promise you, you won’t die of high school.”

  17

  “What would you be doing tonight if we weren’t doing this?” Elwood asked.

  Elwood had commandeered the car keys, citing a desire to survive the night. Kovac hadn’t put up much of a protest. He sat in the passenger seat feeling drained as they cruised the rutted, frozen streets of one neighborhood and then another, knocking on doors in search of teenage girls who had been absent from school that day. If he were home, he would probably be falling asleep on the couch, drooling on the cushions while the Travel Channel played in the background, showing all the exotic places he had never been and would probably never see.

  “Oh, I’d be working out for a couple of hours, bench-pressing Buicks before a gourmet dinner and an evening of competitive ballroom dancing and crazy hot sex with my supermodel girlfriend,” he said. “You?”

  “Bikram yoga.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Kovac said, cringing. “I could have lived my whole life without that image in my head.”

  Now it was there in vivid color: Elwood looking like a Sasquatch in a Speedo, contorting his massive body into unnatural positions.

  “It’s very therapeutic,” Elwood said. “The heat opens the pores and allows the body to eliminate toxins through sweat.”

  “Oh, Christ. Thanks for the Smell-O-Vision. Pull over. I’m gonna puke now.”

  “You should try it, Sam. Yoga would do you a world of good.”

  “Yoga would put me in the hospital,” he returned. “I’ll settle for a lead on this case and a decent night’s sleep.”

  Tippen had gone off with his niece to look through whatever the hell young people were doing and commenting about on the Internet, looking to see if Sonya had gotten any interesting responses to the story she had posted. Kovac had taken his place on the KOD patrol with Elwood, knocking on doors of families whose teenage daughters had been absent from school. A needle-in-the-haystack exercise that came with a side order of twisted emotions.

  They wanted to find their victim’s identity, which meant going up to the homes of families and hoping they were missing a child, and being weirdly disappointed if they weren’t able to shatter some parent’s life.

  It always sucked when the victim was a kid. There were never any winners in a murder investigation, but it especially sucked when the victim was young. And if they didn’t find the unlucky relatives tonight, Kovac would go home, nuke some horrible plastic plate of frozen whatever, and eat it in front of the computer while he trolled the websites that featured thousands of people gone missing from around the country. Misery everywhere. Despair from one side of the country to the other.

  They were in a nice old neighborhood on the west side of Lake Harriet. Large, sturdy homes in the styles popular in the 1940s and 1950s interspersed with more modern McMansion replacements. Big trees that shaded the yards and boulevards half the year stood as naked, bony sentinels for the long winter months. Now, with the sun long gone, their black trunks stood out against the backdrop of snow; their limbs disappeared into the night sky like desperate fingers clawing for the stars.

  The house they were looking for was a Tudor-style with a steeply pitched roof and multicolored Christmas lights in the shrubbery. The Christmas tree was lit up and on display in the front window.

  Happy holidays. Is your daughter missing? We may have found her murdered corpse. . . .

  The house was the last on a block that dead-ended onto parkland, situated on the lot in a way that gave an enviable sense of privacy. Elwood pulled in the narrow driveway behind a black Lexus sedan.

  “Which school is this one from?” Kovac asked.

  “Performance Scholastic Institute.”

  “Tinks’s kid goes there.”

  “Academic and artistic excellence,” Elwood said. “Their motto.”

  They left the relative warmth of the car and trudged up the sidewalk to ring the doorbell.

  The woman who answered the door had the stereotypical suburban soccer mom look—blond bob, big brown eyes, a pleasant smile, a holiday-themed sweater over a white turtleneck. She opened the door as if it had never occurred to her not to let strangers into her home, though she seemed to think better of it as soon as she looked at them and didn’t recognize them.

  “Mrs. Gray?” Kovac asked, holding up his ID. “I’m Sergeant Kovac. This is Sergeant Knutson. Sorry to disturb your evening, ma’am.”

  She looked worried now. “What’s this about?”

  “Do you have a daughter named Penelope?”

  “Yes,” she said, guarded, a little defensive. “What’s she done?”

  Not: Is she all right? “What’s she done?”

  “Is she home tonight?” Kovac asked. “She was reported absent from school today.”

  “They send the police out for that now?” Julia Gray asked with a nervous laugh.

  Kovac smiled a little, sharing the joke with her. “Is your daughter home this evening?”

  “No. No, she’s not. What is this about?”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “You’re making me very nervous, Sergeant.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. We don’t want to alarm you—”

  “Well, you are alarming me,” she said.
“Penny is staying with a friend.”

  “Have you spoken to her today?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Could we step inside?” Kovac asked. “I don’t know about you, ma’am, but I know my heating bill is big enough without me leaving the door wide open when it’s fifteen below.”

  She didn’t seem happy about it, but she stepped back from the door nonetheless. Kovac and Elwood stepped into a lovely small foyer. The house smelled of cleaning products, pine trees, cinnamon, and coffee. The staircase to their left curved up and around to the second floor. To the right was the living room where the Christmas tree stood—a formal room with tidy furniture and bookcases flanking a small brick fireplace. The hall they stood in led to the back of the house. Lights from other rooms spilled into the dark passageway. Faint voices might have been company or a television somewhere in the back.

  “Have you heard from your daughter in the last day or so?” Kovac asked. The chandelier overhead washed out Julia Gray’s face, making her look tired. She had a bruise emerging on her left cheekbone, wearing its way through the makeup she had probably put on that morning. An elastic brace wrapped her right hand and wrist like a fingerless glove.

  “Of course,” she said. “She sent me a text today.”

  “But you haven’t spoken to her?” Elwood asked.

  “Julia?” a man’s voice called. “Is everything all right?”

  The owner of the voice came into the hall, walking toward them, drying his hands on a red kitchen towel. He was tall and soap opera handsome, with sandy hair shot through with a distinguished touch of gray. He wore charcoal slacks and a camel-tan cashmere sweater over a button-down shirt. He looked like he had stepped out of an ad for an upscale menswear store.

  Julia Gray turned toward him. “These men are from the police department. They’re asking about Penny.”

  His brow furrowed. “What’s she done?”

  “Nothing that we know of, sir,” Elwood said. “We don’t want to alarm you, but we’re trying to identify a young lady whose body was discovered New Year’s Eve.”