by Tami Hoag
She glanced at the cops, embarrassment and anger turning her cheeks red. “My husband and I were at a dinner party,” she said, almost like an apology, like the detectives would think she was a bad mom because her daughter had gone to the stupid Rock & Bowl.
She turned back to Brittany. “And you know I don’t want you riding in a car with her. She just got her license!”
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Brittany argued. “She had to pass a test to get it. She’s just as good a driver as anyone else.”
“Oh my God,” her mother muttered, looking up at the ceiling.
“What time was it when you last saw Miss Gray?” the big cop asked.
Brittany shrugged. “I don’t know. Nine thirty? Ten, maybe. Maybe ten thirty. I don’t remember.”
“Brittany . . . ,” her mother said.
“She’s not missing,” Brittany insisted. “Gray gets pissed off. Sometimes she just goes somewhere for a couple of days. She always comes back.”
“This isn’t the first time she’s gone missing?” Kovac asked.
“She’s not missing,” Brittany said stubbornly.
It seemed important to say that, to believe it.
“She gets mad. She goes and stays with whoever.”
“Can you give us names?”
“I don’t know them. She has friends outside our school. Musicians, poets, older kids. They’re not people I hang out with.”
A chill went through her suddenly as her gaze swept over her iPad lying on her bed. Sonya Porter’s article on TeenCities . . . A girl found dead on New Year’s Eve . . . Two police detectives were standing in her bedroom asking questions about Gray . . .
A sickening sense of dread swirled in her stomach.
“She hasn’t called you?” Kovac asked. “No text messages?”
“No posts on Facebook?” the big one asked. “Twitter?”
Tears rose in Brittany’s eyes. “You’re scaring me. Stop it.”
Kovac didn’t apologize. He just kept looking at her with those hard eyes. “Do you have any pictures of Gray, Brittany?”
Her hands were trembling as she picked up the iPad off the bed and touched the icon to call up her photographs. The pictures swam in the tears that welled up on the edge of her eyelashes.
She told herself nothing was wrong. It was stupid to be ready to cry. There was no reason to cry. Just because there were police detectives in her bedroom . . . Just because they didn’t know where Gray was . . . Just because some stupid reporter wrote about something bad that happened . . . It didn’t mean there was any reason for her to cry.
Three tears spilled down her cheeks as she touched one of the photos and it filled the screen. Herself and Gray posing like movie stars, lips pursed as they pretended to blow kisses at the camera.
“Nothing happened to her,” she said, sounding more afraid than defiant.
The picture was from summer, from when they were in the writer’s workshop. Gray said she wanted to speak like Dorothy Parker and write like Sylvia Plath. Side by side they looked like some kind of day-and-night comparison. Brittany with her blond hair and fresh face. Gray with her multiple piercings, her thick dark hair swept to one side. She stood facing away from the camera, looking back over her shoulder.
The police detectives stared at the photograph, giving nothing away with their stone faces and hard eyes. Kovac reached out a finger and touched the screen, touched Gray’s bare shoulder just below her tattoo and murmured the word: “Acceptance.”
Brittany knew right then, even though they didn’t say it, that something terrible had happened. And even though she was standing in her bedroom with adults all around her, she had never felt so alone in her life. For the first time she thought she understood that sense of isolation Gray had talked about in her poems.
She had never felt so lost.
20
“What do you mean, she isn’t there?”
Julia Gray looked at them with an expression Kovac had seen many, many times in his years of delivering bad news. It was a deliberate kind of confusion layered over apprehension, layered over a sickening sense of primal fear.
They stood in the small foyer of the Gray home again, the scent of Christmas tree and spice candles perfuming the air. Kovac and Elwood, sweating inside their heavy coats; Julia Gray and her gentleman friend, Michael Warner, looking vulnerable, the way civilians do when confronted by cops. Like rabbits facing wolves.
Warner was in shirtsleeves now, a fine blue button-down oxford with his initials monogrammed on the pocket. He had stripped off the cashmere sweater and tied it around his neck—a look that always irritated Kovac. What the fuck was up with a guy like that? What kind of message was he trying to send? To Kovac, a sweater tied around the neck said “gay.” Not that he gave a shit. It was just an observation. But then there were these metro guys—or whatever the hell the fashionable people called them now. Sweater around the neck, manicures and facials. Mixed messages. He just never quite trusted a guy who sent mixed messages. Have a girlfriend or have a boyfriend. Pick a side.
“According to your daughter’s friend, they went to a place called the Rock and Bowl. There was some kind of argument. Your daughter got mad and left,” Kovac said.
“And went where?” Julia Gray asked stupidly. She probably wasn’t a stupid woman. She just wanted him to have an easy answer. She wanted him to tell her where her daughter was—alive and well, of course, not on a slab in the Hennepin County morgue.
Kovac sighed and scratched his ear. “Mrs. Gray, it might be better if we could all sit down and talk. Do you mind if we do that?”
Of course she minded. Of course she didn’t want them making themselves at home. She didn’t want them there at all. She hugged her arms tight across her chest and looked around the foyer as if looking for permission from some unseen audience to ask them to just leave so she could go back to pretending nothing was wrong.
“Julia, they’re right,” Michael Warner said quietly. He put a hand on her shoulder as if to anchor her. “Let’s all sit down and try to figure this out.”
“Oh my God, this is—is—just so—,” she muttered, shaking her head, agitated as Warner herded her toward a seat at the dining room table. “I can’t believe she’s doing this.”
Kovac arched a brow at Elwood, who shrugged. It didn’t seem to be sinking in to Julia Gray that they were considering the possibility her daughter might be a victim of a brutal homicide or that, at best, her daughter had disappeared. This unpleasantness was something her daughter was doing to her, purposely making her look bad.
“She texted me,” she said, turning back into the foyer. She grabbed her phone off the hall table and brought up the message on the screen. “She texted me back an hour ago. She’s fine. She’s just off in one of her snits.”
She shoved the phone at Kovac. The message read: Y cant u leave me alone?
It meant nothing more than that whoever had Penelope Gray’s phone was smart enough to answer a text message.
“What kind of phone does your daughter have?” Elwood asked.
“An iPhone. The latest one. I got it for her for her birthday.” She shook her head. “It’s crazy the things these kids have to have. iPhones, iPads, iPods . . .”
“Do you know if the phone has a tracking app enabled?”
“I don’t know what that is. I’m not very good with technology.”
“If the software is enabled and the phone is turned on, we would be able to locate the device,” Elwood explained. “We’d need to access her Apple ID account, which means jumping through some legal hoops—unless you have her password.”
She laughed without humor. “No. I don’t have access to much of anything in my daughter’s life.”
The immediate implications of that truth pressed down on her, and tears flooded her eyes. She pressed a hand across her mouth.
Michael Warner corralled her with a long arm and steered her back into the dining room. “Julia, let’s sit. We’ll think
out loud. We’ll figure this out.”
“Have you called any of your daughter’s friends?” Elwood asked.
She closed her eyes for a moment as she sank down onto a chair at the dining room table, as if against the pain of a monumental headache. “My daughter doesn’t share her friends with me.”
“Girls this age are asserting their independence,” Michael Warner said. “Particularly where their mothers are concerned.”
Kovac gave him a who-asked-you look.
“I’m a psychiatrist,” Warner said by way of explanation. “I work with a lot of girls Penny’s age. And I have a daughter myself. Between the flux of hormones and the changing brain chemistry, girls this age are volatile in the best of cases.”
“And this isn’t the best of cases?” Kovac asked.
“Her father and I divorced when Penny was twelve,” Julia Gray said, her attention on her phone again as she searched her contacts for a number. “The four years since have been . . . difficult, to put it mildly.”
She put the phone to her ear and listened to it ring on the other end.
“She’s a bright, talented girl,” Warner said. “But she doesn’t apply herself, she doesn’t try to fit in, she’s defiant—”
“Tim? It’s—” She checked herself, her brows knitting with frustration. She sighed, waiting for the voice mail message to play through. “It’s me. Is Penny with you? Have you seen or heard from her? Please call me back as soon as you get this.”
She clicked the call off and put the phone down on the table with a little more force than was necessary.
“Has your daughter ever been in trouble with the law?” Kovac asked, thinking if the girl’s prints were on file they could eliminate her as a possible victim. Their Jane Doe’s prints had not been in the system.
Even as he thought it, he could see Brittany Lawler’s photograph in his mind’s eye and the tattoo on Penelope Gray’s shoulder.
Pooch Halvorsen said a lot of kids had that tattoo. . . .
“No, thank God.”
“Does she have a boyfriend?”
“Not that I know of.”
Elwood got out his little spiral notebook and pen. “What kind of car does your daughter drive, Mrs. Gray?”
“It’s a black Toyota something—”
“Camry,” Michael Warner supplied. “An oh-four.”
“Is it registered in her name?”
“No. In mine,” Julia said. “Michael bought it for Penny’s sixteenth birthday, but it made more sense to register it to me—for the insurance, you know.”
Kovac reached inside his coat and pulled out the photograph Brittany Lawler had printed out for him from her iPad and put it on the table.
“This seems to be a more recent photograph than the one you showed us earlier,” he said.
Julia Gray got a sour look, narrowing her eyes. “She did all that this summer,” she said bitterly. “The piercings, the tattoo. I can’t stand the sight of it.”
“Penny feels the need to make self-destructive statements,” Michael Warner said. “It’s a manifestation of her inner pain. She feels emotionally isolated by her father’s abandonment. It’s normal, really.”
“If it’s so normal, why doesn’t Christina have holes in her face?” Julia asked him, the hint of bitterness in her voice old and worn. They’d been over this ground before.
“I didn’t abandon Christina,” he said. “Her mother’s death brought us closer together. Your split from Tim drove a wedge between you and Penny. It’s a completely different set of circumstances.”
“It’s my fault,” Julia said.
“Tim left you. The blame lies with him.”
“Not as Penny sees it,” she said. “I drove him away. That’s what she believes. It’s all my fault her father took up with his twenty-six-year-old receptionist.”
“Does Penny have any tattoos other than this one?” Kovac asked, tapping a finger on the grainy print.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I can’t imagine that she would hide them from me. She knows how much I hate them. It shouldn’t even be legal for a girl her age to get a tattoo.”
“It’s not,” Elwood said.
“Her latest act of defiance was shaving off half of her hair,” she said.
The statement struck Kovac like an electrical shock. He glanced at Elwood from the corner of his eye.
Tinks said girls shaved their heads now. They pierced everything. They got tattoos. How many did all three and then went missing?
“She claims it’s a statement about her sexuality,” Julia Gray went on bitterly. “This is her new thing—claiming she’s bisexual. I could have strangled her. She looks like she escaped from a concentration camp!”
“I’m going to suggest you file a missing persons report, Mrs. Gray,” Kovac said calmly. “That way we can get your daughter’s information into the system immediately.”
They could get out an AMBER Alert, giving them maximum media coverage. Even if Penelope Gray turned out to be Zombie Doe, it would take time to confirm that, and they wouldn’t have to release the information immediately. In the meantime, media spotlighting the case of a missing girl would make people aware, get people talking, get them looking for Penny Gray’s car. Maybe someone would remember having seen her.
“Oh my God,” Julia Gray murmured, pressing her hand to her forehead as if feeling for a fever. She grabbed the phone again as the screen lit up and a ping sounded, heralding the arrival of a text. Tears filled her eyes and her face turned mottled shades of red that clashed with her Christmas sweater. “Tim hasn’t heard from her.”
“You don’t think it’s her, though,” Michael Warner said to Kovac. “Your victim. You don’t think it’s Penny. If you think we should file a missing persons report . . .”
Kovac looked at him, Dr. Sweater Around His Neck, and wondered if Michael Warner had ever seen a corpse that had fallen out of the trunk of a moving car or the face of a young woman who had been disfigured with acid. Probably not. That kind of privilege was reserved for guys like himself . . . and the parents of murdered children.
“It’s not my place to draw conclusions,” he said.
“But you’ve seen Penny’s photograph,” Warner pressed. “And you’ve seen the victim. Either it’s her or it isn’t.”
“It’s not that simple, Dr. Warner,” Kovac said. “I’m going to leave it at that. No need for all of us to have the same nightmares tonight.”
Warner frowned at the implication. “This is going to require dental X-rays?”
“X-rays,” Kovac qualified.
“Has Penny ever broken a bone?” Elwood asked.
Now the color began to drain from Julia Gray’s face as she looked from one of them to the other. “Oh my God,” she whispered as realization began to dawn that this could go the wrong way for her—and for her daughter. “She . . . she . . .”
She didn’t want to finish the sentence. If she finished the sentence, then it was out there and there was no taking it back and pretending it might not be true. They were asking her this question for a reason, for a real reason, a serious reason. And they were telling her that if her daughter was dead, she was also unrecognizable, that she had been brutalized in the most horrible way imaginable. Julia Gray didn’t want to know that.
She started to cry. First just a few tears in a slow trickle; then a dam burst somewhere inside her, and the emotion came in a flash flood of tears and snot and spittle and panic, like something inside of her head had exploded.
“Sh-sh-she b-b-b-ro-ke h-h-her wrist! Oh my God!”
Dr. Sweater Around His Neck looked at her with the same horror with which any man first regarded a sobbing woman.
Kovac got to his feet and sighed, weary to the bone. “We’ll need to see those X-rays.”
The sound that came from Julia Gray was terrible and primal, like a wounded animal. That’s what they all were, in truth, anyway, Kovac thought. Strip away the Christmas lights and the nice house, the stylish
clothes and the trappings of society, they were all just animals trying to survive in a cruel world.
Julia Gray was just a mother now, frightened for the offspring she had given life and been charged to keep safe. Before the cops had shown up on her doorstep, she had been struggling but still in possession of the hope that she could turn things around with her child. If her child was dead, then failure was a done deal. There would be no second chances.
Kovac and Elwood moved off to one side of the room while Michael Warner tried to comfort and calm Julia Gray. Kovac pulled his phone out and texted Liska with the address of the Gray house and pick me up asap. Elwood would go back to the office and get the paperwork rolling.
“Mrs. Gray,” he said after the worst of her hysteria had passed. “We’ll need to have a look in your daughter’s bedroom.”
Michael Warner helped her up from her chair and held on to her as they went slowly up the stairs, as if she had suddenly become physically frail beneath the weight of the stress.
In contrast to Brittany Lawler’s sunny yellow bedroom, Penny Gray’s bedroom was somber and dark, the walls and ceiling a charcoal blue-gray that absorbed the light instead of reflecting it back into the room. The posters on the walls were of grim and angry young people. Singers and actors, Kovac supposed, though he’d never heard of any of them. They all looked like their moods could be greatly improved by a decent meal and a smack upside the head.
Someone had painted the acceptance tattoo on the wall above the bed in silver paint with the words Be Who You Are beneath it. The bed itself was a tangle of sheets and pillows. There was a chair nearby stacked with clothes, and a dresser cluttered with all the stuff girls found essential—jewelry and makeup, hairbrushes and perfume bottles. A bookcase was filled to overflowing with books and magazines and notebooks. Old stuffed toys and odd keepsakes—the things girls collected.
The thing he didn’t see in Penny Gray’s bedroom that had been in abundance in Brittany Lawler’s room: photographs of her with her friends. There were none—not in the bookcase or on the dresser or on the walls.
