The 9th Girl

by Tami Hoag

  Julia Gray looked stricken. She pressed the hand in the brace to her chest as if to keep her heart from leaping out.

  “Oh, dear God,” the man said. “That’s terrible.”

  “Are you Penelope’s father?” Kovac asked.

  “No, no. I’m Dr. Michael Warner.”

  “Michael and I are engaged. We just got engaged,” Julia Gray announced with the nervous awkwardness people often had giving personal details to strangers—or to the police, at any rate. She absently and automatically fingered the diamond ring on her left hand. “Penny’s father and I are divorced.”

  “If we could get your daughter’s phone number,” Kovac said, “and the name and address of the person she’s staying with. That would be helpful.”

  Julia Gray smiled with a mix of nervousness and confusion. “She’s fine,” she said, more to convince herself than them. “I told you. She texted me.”

  “How do you know it was her?” Kovac asked.

  “What?”

  “The text. How do you know it was your daughter who sent the text?”

  “Who else would it be? Her name came up on my screen. It was Penny.”

  “The message came from your daughter’s phone,” Elwood pointed out. “That doesn’t necessarily mean your daughter sent the message.”

  “Do you have a photograph of your daughter, Mrs. Gray?” Kovac asked.

  “This is ridiculous,” Julia Gray muttered. “My daughter isn’t missing.”

  “Why don’t you call her?” Elwood suggested. “That would clear everything up.”

  Julia Gray heaved a sigh and turned to a hall table to dig awkwardly through her purse with her uninjured left hand. She pulled out her phone, fumbled to punch in a number, and pressed the phone to her ear while she stepped into the living room to retrieve a five-by-seven framed photo off a shelf on the wall. She handed the frame to Elwood as she spoke into the phone.

  “Penny, it’s Mom. Could you please call me back? Soon. It’s really important.”

  “It went to voice mail,” she said unnecessarily. Her breathing had quickened, belying the façade of calm she was trying to project. “My daughter is sixteen. Have you ever had a sixteen-year-old daughter in your life, Sergeant?”

  “No, ma’am,” Kovac said.

  “When girls turn sixteen they believe they know everything,” she explained, a strong thread of frustration running through her tone. She looked down at the phone as she tapped out a text message with her thumbs. “And they don’t appreciate the reminder that they still have to answer to their mothers.”

  “Penny is a difficult girl,” Michael Warner offered, as if anybody had asked him anything.

  Kovac ignored him, his attention on the school photograph Julia Gray had given Elwood. The girl in the picture looked younger than sixteen. Her hair was a nondescript shade of brown, just past shoulder length and parted down the middle. There were no crazy piercings. She didn’t look like the kind of girl who would get an illegal tattoo.

  She looked a little sad, a little lost, a little pissed off.

  She didn’t look much like Zombie Doe.

  Of course, they had yet to get the artist’s rendition of what their dead girl might have looked like if her head hadn’t been bashed in like a rotten Halloween pumpkin. The artist wasn’t as afraid of Kovac as he was of Liska, and Liska had gone off to deal with her own teenager.

  “When did you last actually speak to your daughter, Mrs. Gray?” Elwood asked.

  She sighed impatiently. “Penny hasn’t spoken to me in several days. We had a disagreement, and her way of punishing me is silence. But she usually answers her text messages, even if only to say yes or no to a direct question.”

  “She might be more inclined to answer a call from the police,” Michael Warner suggested to her.

  “This is so embarrassing,” Julia Gray muttered, staring at her silent telephone, willing something to appear on the screen.

  “If we can just get her number and the address for where she’s staying, we’ll make sure she calls you,” Elwood said. The diplomat. He took his little spiral notebook and pen out of his coat pocket and offered it to her.

  Embarrassment flushed her cheeks as she awkwardly wielded the pen with her injured hand.

  “I don’t know the exact address,” she confessed. “She’s staying with a friend from school. The last name is Lawyer—no—Lawler. They live nearby. Just a few blocks over. Washburn and Forty-Sixth? Forty-Fifth? I’m just not sure of the exact address. I’ve met the girl’s mother,” she hastened to add. “She’s a very nice woman. I think she’s an accountant. Or her husband is.”

  She looked up, unable to resist the urge to see how her lousy, fumbling explanation was being received. Kovac just looked at her, his eyes flat, his face expressionless.

  “This isn’t making me look like a very good mother,” she said, forcing a nervous smile. “If you had teenagers, you would understand.”

  Her hands were trembling as she gave the notebook back.

  “What happened to your wrist?” Elwood asked.

  “Oh,” she said, looking at her hand as if it had just sprouted from the end of her sweater sleeve. “Oh, I fell. I sprained it. I slipped on the ice and fell. It’s a hazard of my profession,” she said with a nervous laugh.

  “What do you do?” Kovac asked.

  “I’m a pharmaceutical rep. I have to negotiate a lot of nasty parking lots this time of year. Snow, ice, high heels, dragging my case behind me.”

  “You might want to rethink the high heels,” Kovac said.

  Julia Gray nodded, trying to smile.

  “I’m sure Penny is fine,” she said again, her thoughts quickly back on the daughter she hadn’t seen in several days. Suddenly, a routine mother-daughter spat was looming large in her mind. An innocent stay-over with a schoolmate was taking on sinister overtones.

  “I’m sure she is,” Elwood said kindly. “We’re just checking out all possibilities.”

  “This isn’t about that story on the news?” Michael Warner asked, frowning with concern. “The girl on the freeway?”

  “Thank you for your time,” Kovac said, deliberately not answering the question, a longtime cop habit. It was ingrained in him to give nothing away. But a part of it this time was both the compassion to keep a parent from thinking the worst, and the perverse twist of that: letting them wonder. In the case of Julia Gray, he felt she deserved a bit of both.

  “We’ll let you folks get back to your evening,” he said. “Please let us know if you hear from your daughter.”

  They left the house with Julia Gray and Michael Warner looking uncertain in the foyer.

  “If you had a sixteen-year-old daughter in this day and age,” Elwood said, “wouldn’t you be a little more insistent about knowing who her friends are and where she might be?”

  “If I had a sixteen-year-old daughter,” Kovac said as they walked back to the car, “I’d have her microchipped with GPS.”

  18

  “Mom, can Alex come over and play with the Wii?”

  Liska’s youngest placed the last of the dinner dishes on the counter above the dishwasher and looked up at her with bright, hopeful eyes, the hint of mischief playing at the corners of his mouth.

  “Are you done with your homework?”

  He nodded enthusiastically, smelling the victory. His gaze darted quickly to the clock on the microwave.

  “Did you ask Kyle if he wants to play?” Nikki asked.

  R.J. rolled his eyes. “He went upstairs to feel sorry for himself.”

  “Maybe he’ll come down later,” she said, knowing R.J. could not have cared less. It was her own futile, wishful thinking. Kyle hadn’t said ten words since they’d gotten home.

  Marysue had come to the rescue with spaghetti Bolognese and her usual sunny disposition. She and R.J. had chatted about their days, while Nikki had spent the meal twirling her pasta and watching her eldest stare at his plate.

  R.J. shrugged. “Whatever.”<
br />
  Nikki frowned. “You know, your brother is going through a rough time right now. You could be a little nicer to him.”

  “He’s a dork,” R.J. said bluntly. “He’s a dork, and he likes being a dork, and that’s why he doesn’t have any friends who aren’t dorks.”

  “He’s your brother,” Nikki said sternly. “And I don’t care if he’s a dork. You stick up for your brother. Family sticks together.”

  “He’s the one who shuts his door,” R.J. pointed out, snagging a fresh chocolate chip cookie off the plate on the island. He took a bite. “He doesn’t want to hang out with me.”

  “Why would he hang out with someone who calls him a dork?” Nikki countered. “And don’t talk with your mouth full.”

  He swallowed and glanced at the clock again. “Can Alex come over?”

  Nikki sighed. “Yes, Alex can come over if his mom says it’s okay. And he goes home at ten on the dot. It’s a school night.”

  Grinning, R.J. backed toward the hallway. His thank-you came a split second before the doorbell rang, and he bolted.

  “And that would be Alex,” Nikki said.

  She turned with a sigh toward Marysue. “I hope being with my family won’t make you sterile.”

  Marysue smiled kindly, seeming much too wise for twenty-six. “I love your boys. You know that. They’re good boys, Nikki. You’ve got a lot on your plate right now, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve had a lot on my plate for fifteen years. That doesn’t seem to be getting any better. And their lives are only getting more complicated too.”

  She went to the coffeemaker, popped a pod in, and hit the button to start the thing hissing and spitting into the lopsided Christmas mug R.J. had made for her—with Marysue’s help—at a local pottery store. She would pour a generous shot of Irish cream liqueur into the coffee and have it with one of the cookies Marysue had made that afternoon.

  There was a painful truth: Marysue was a better mother, and she had yet to give birth to anyone.

  “I feel like suddenly I don’t know anything about Kyle’s life,” Nikki admitted, and with the admission she recognized a small knot of cold fear in her chest. How had this happened? How could she not know her own child?

  “He was my little boy, climbing trees and scraping his knees and building a cardboard dinosaur for the science fair,” she said. “Suddenly, he’s a teenager, and everything about his life is a secret. He had a girlfriend over the summer. I didn’t have any idea! Now he’s getting picked on at school. He’s getting into fights. And I just realized I don’t even know who his friends are anymore, let alone his enemies.”

  She poured the Baileys into her coffee and climbed onto a stool at the island. Marysue slid the plate of cookies toward her and took the other seat.

  “How did this happen?” Nikki asked. “Have I just not been paying attention? He’s always been such an easy kid, self-sufficient, never in trouble. Did I really just forget about him? I don’t get it.

  “I grew up thinking how great it would be when I had my own family,” she said, catching a glimpse of her younger self in her mind’s eye—innocent and full of romantic notions of love and of having a life untainted by her parents’ mistakes and disappointments.

  “All the wonderful things we’d do together,” she went on. “All the time I’d spend with my kids—hours and hours of playing games and reading stories and going places and watching the wonder in their little faces as they learned the new things that I’d teach them.”

  She saw it all play through her head like a silly dream sequence in some stupid, sappy movie. How incredibly naïve.

  “The reality is I spend most of my time trying to earn a living to keep a roof over their heads, to keep clothes on their backs and shoes on their feet,” she said, the weight of that reality pressing down on her shoulders. “I feel lucky when we get to grab a meal together. Our conversations are five minutes here and ten minutes there, usually in the car on the way to some activity I won’t get to see all the way through because I’ll get a callout to a crime scene. We live our lives like hamsters running in wheels.”

  She took a sip of her coffee and stared at the mug R.J. had made, her heart aching with love as she took in all the lumps and bumps and imperfections, the childish printing: TO MOM R.J.

  “Sometimes I think, what if I had a different profession?” she said. “What if I had some normal kind of a job? But would it be any different? Is it really any different for anyone—for any single mom?

  “So . . . what? I should find the perfect husband, right?” she said. “And when am I supposed to do that? Where am I supposed to find him? A fender bender in a parking lot? He bumps his cart into mine at the supermarket? That never happens. My life is not a Lifetime movie or a Harlequin romance. Statistically, I probably have a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting remarried. I don’t even want to get remarried.

  “And what are the odds the boys would like anyone I brought home, anyway?” she asked. “Pretty much zip. They’re loyal to their father—even Kyle, who thinks he hates his dad, doesn’t really hate him. He’s disappointed by him. That’s not hate. Once you cross the line to hate, disappointment is irrelevant; it’s a given. If you hate someone, you’re only too happy to have them disappoint you. It just proves your point.

  “He wouldn’t bond with another man at this late date, anyway,” she went on. “He’s fifteen. He’s already looking at the light at the end of the tunnel. Three more years and he’s off to college and leading his own life. And that’s it. I had my shot, and it was over in the blink of an eye.”

  She sighed, exhausted, and looked at Marysue—young and fresh-faced with her big brown eyes and her rosebud mouth. Just looking at her made Nikki feel old. She forced a wry smile.

  “So you’ve got that to look forward to, Marysue,” she said. “What do you think?”

  “I think you drink too much caffeine,” Marysue said without hesitation.

  Their laughter broke the tension, at least for a moment.

  “Well, you’ve probably got that right,” Nikki said. She took another long drink of her coffee anyway, savoring the smoky sweetness of the liqueur laced through it. “Thanks for letting me dump all that on you.”

  “It’s okay,” Marysue said with a soft smile.

  “I’ve got a victim,” Nikki said quietly. “A girl around Kyle’s age. We don’t know who she is. We haven’t found her family. No one has come looking for her. And I want to be outraged by that. I want to say, how can someone be missing a daughter and not even know she’s gone? Then I look at my own son. I have him right here with me, and I don’t even know who he is.”

  A sense of deep, quiet desperation closed around her and squeezed. The air hissed out of her lungs, and she put her face in her hands and pressed her fingers against her closed eyes in an effort to keep the tears at bay.

  Marysue Zaytoun put an arm around her shoulders.

  • • •

  KYLE HAD ESCAPED to his room at the first opportunity after supper. His mom had been relentless in trying to dig details out of him about his problems at school and his problems with Aaron Fogelman. That was one of the things that sucked about having a mom who was a police detective. She interrogated people for a living. But he was used to it. He had grown up learning how not to give anything away. Like a counterpuncher in a fight or a jiu-jitsu player rolling with a skillful opponent, his best offense was his defense.

  His greatest fear was that his mother would pull the ultra-trump card and call Aaron Fogelman’s parents in an attempt to get to the bottom of things. He couldn’t think of anything worse or more embarrassing. He would rather have taken a beating by Fogelman and his goon friends every day for a month. Of course, that was exactly what would happen if his mother called Fogelman’s mother.

  He could only imagine the things his enemies would say about him then, the names they would call him, the rumors they would spread.

  He dug his phone out of the pocket
of his hoodie and brought up his secret Twitter account.

  He had a Facebook page and a Twitter account that were readily accessible on the computer in the family room. But they were basically dummy accounts. His “friends” were the pages of mixed martial arts fighters he followed and bands he liked, not kids from school.

  There was no such thing as absolute privacy in this house. The rule was that he and R.J. had to share time on the computer, and Mom had access to anything and everything on it. She policed their pages regularly. R.J. was constantly getting in trouble for friending people he didn’t know and liking pages Mom disapproved of. She never said anything about Kyle’s stuff.

  He had set up separate accounts on his phone using an alias. Nobody on Twitter knew @PSIArtGeek was really him. There were a million art geeks at PSI. They all followed one another automatically. The profile photo he used was the PSI mascot, an angry-looking comic owl. The stuff he tweeted was generic—mostly re-tweets of stupid memes and cartoons and art. He used the account mainly to lurk, to see what other kids were talking about. The tweets he followed were full of vicious shit from the likes of Aaron Fogelman and Christina Warner and their minions.

  Beneath all the unintelligent commentary about pop culture and what everyone had for dinner, the Twitterverse was a turbulent sea of vicious accusation, unsubstantiated rumor, and outright lies. The false facelessness of it gave people the freedom to strike out in ways they might never have dared in person. Even the meek became assassins on Twitter, drunk on the counterfeit confidence of imagined anonymity.

  Fogelman and his toadies were all over it tonight with their usual unimaginative cracks about Kyle being a queer, being a faggot, deserving a beat-down, and promising to give him one. Christina Warner was in the mix too, supporting her lackey’s take on what had gone down in the hall, while at the same time riding Brittany about being seen with him.

  @XtinaW: Watch out @lilBritt people will think ur in luv w/psycho stalker boy! Don’t wanna b Mrs Loser

  Kyle didn’t care what Christina thought about him. It was the tweet that followed hers that hurt.