by Tami Hoag
Kovac had long ago acquired the skill of reading people from the things they surrounded themselves with, the things they placed importance on, the things they didn’t have, the things they kept hidden. As he poked around the bedroom of the girl her friend called Gray, he put these pieces together with what he had seen in her photograph and the things people had said about her.
Her mother called her Penny—a name that called to mind something shiny and bright. She called herself Gray—the color of gloom and ambiguity. Her bedroom was an obvious reflection of that self—a difficult, conflicted girl who seemed to work at alienating herself while preaching a message of acceptance.
The thought crept into his mind as he looked around that somewhere on the far side of the country he had a daughter. He wondered what her room might look like, what it might say about her, and he thought about how he would have to gather together the pieces of information about her by looking at her stuff because he knew absolutely nothing about who she was.
These thoughts sifted around in the lower reaches of his mind as he looked through Penny Gray’s room and formulated his thoughts about who Penny Gray was. Julia Gray and Michael Warner watched from the doorway.
“Is there something in particular you’re looking for?” Warner asked.
“Does your daughter keep a calendar or a diary, Mrs. Gray?” Elwood asked.
“I don’t know. She keeps everything in her phone and on her laptop.”
“Is her laptop here someplace?”
“I doubt it. She always has it with her. She thinks she’s going to be a writer. A poet. Who reads poetry anymore?”
“I do,” Elwood admitted.
Kovac glanced over the things on Penny Gray’s desk—schoolbooks, a dog-eared paperback novel about vampires, some completely indecipherable math homework. Not that long ago the girl’s computer would have been an immovable box, and files would have been stored on floppy disks that he could have taken and given over to a geek to figure out. Now everything was portable and files got saved to a cloud in the ether someplace.
On the upside, technology would allow them to track her telephone—provided it was turned on. They would be able to narrow down a location based on the towers the signal was pinging off. As soon as they got the missing persons report filed and the AMBER Alert up and a warrant to get the information from the phone company . . .
“Is her phone in her name?” he asked. “Or do you have a family plan?”
“We have a family plan.”
Elwood looked at him. “That makes life a little easier,” he said quietly.
They had run into walls in the past trying to get information from the cell phone service providers of missing individuals. The phone companies were more concerned about being sued over violations of privacy laws than about hindering a police investigation.
“I still want a warrant,” Kovac murmured. “Dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. I don’t want a hairsbreadth of room for some oily lawyer to slide through if it comes to that.”
He glanced at his watch. Half past exhaustion, with a long night to go.
“Is this some of your daughter’s poetry?” Elwood asked, pointing to the wall above the small cluttered desk, where printed pages and small drawings and pictures cut out of magazines had been taped into a patchwork collage of teenage angst and self-expression.
“I guess so,” Julia Gray said.
She didn’t know her daughter’s writing. She didn’t know her daughter’s friends. She didn’t know where her daughter went, didn’t know why she made the choices she made. It struck Kovac that this woman didn’t know much more about her daughter than he knew about his. Even living in the same house, they were living worlds apart.
The title of one of the poems caught his eye. He pulled his reading glasses out of his coat pocket and stepped closer, a deep sense of sadness settling inside him as he read the words.
He thought about the girl Julia Gray had portrayed through her words and her attitude this evening: defiant, disrespectful, disappointing in every way. He thought about the girl who had written this poem, the girl with the acceptance tattoo: a kid trying to express herself, trying to figure out who she was and who she wanted to be, feeling misunderstood, like every teenage kid did. He thought about the girl whose body he had knelt over on the cold and frozen road New Year’s Eve: used, abused, discarded. Taken. Lost. Gone.
It was his job as a detective to be the one person in the world who accepted her for exactly who she had been. It wasn’t his place to judge her, and in judging her close off his mind to possibilities in the investigation. It was his job to see her for who she was and to see every avenue that opened to him from that place of acceptance.
Somehow, he doubted that was what Penny Gray had had in mind when she had gotten that tattoo or when she had written this poem.
“Lost”
Looking for me
I am
Who do they see?
Not I
I want to be
Myself
They want me to be
Gone
I’m lost
21
“The Rock and Bowl?” Liska asked.
Kovac looked at her from the passenger’s side as he buckled his seat belt. “You know it?”
“I’ve been there with the boys.”
She had been there more than once—to a couple of birthday parties and to an outing with R.J.’s hockey team. It was the kind of place that drove her crazy as a mother who happened to be a cop—or a cop who happened to be a mother. The place was too big with too many different things going on, catering to too many different kinds of people. It was a bowling alley / arcade / pizza place à la Chuck E. Cheese, with a second-story dance floor that overlooked the lanes. The crowd was a mix of families, kids, teenagers, single young adults. It was the kind of place where she always worried about pedophiles and low-level drug dealers slipping shit to kids in the midst of the chaos.
“And this girl goes to PSI,” she said flatly, wondering vaguely if any of this was really happening. Maybe she was asleep and dreaming. Maybe these last couple of days had all just been part of the same long, strange nightmare. God knew she felt that tired. Maybe she was asleep and dreaming she was exhausted and that her life was a mess.
“I’d say what are the odds,” Kovac said, “but the odds are no different she’d go to that school than any other. Everybody comes from somewhere.”
“You really think this is our girl?” Liska asked, pulling away from the curb, leaving behind the pretty Tudor-style house with its cheery Christmas tree in the front window.
“Too many pieces match up,” he said. “The tattoo, the piercings, the hair, the fact that she’s missing. This girl broke her wrist last April. The mother will get us a release for the X-rays for comparison.”
He looked hard at her. “Do you know these people?”
“No,” she admitted, hating the way that answer made her feel.
She should have known every kid who went to school with her son. She should have known their parents too. She should have served on committees with this girl’s mother. They should have been in a book club together. Never mind that there were more than a hundred kids in Kyle’s class, and probably no one’s mother knew all of them. Never mind that she did her part working with PSI’s drug awareness program. None of that seemed like enough now.
“This girl is sixteen,” Kovac said. “Her friends call her Gray. She’s artsy, writes poetry. Sounds like someone Kyle might know.”
Liska huffed a sigh as she turned the corner, heading toward 35W. “Maybe she is. Maybe she’s his girlfriend. I obviously know nothing about what goes on in his life. I just occasionally show up to drive him someplace and feed him the odd meal.”
“You’re not the only mother that has a job, Tinks.”
“No,” she said. “But I’m the only mother my sons have.”
“Even if you were June fucking Cleaver, you wouldn’t know everything that goes on
in their lives.”
“That’s not the point.”
“The point is you’re a control freak.”
“And you’re not?”
“We’re not talking about me,” he said. “Did Kyle get kicked out of school today?”
“No.”
“Is anyone pressing charges against him?”
“No.”
“Were lives lost today?”
“No.”
“Then get your head where it belongs,” he said. “Here. Now. Unless you win the lottery or land yourself a millionaire husband, you’re going to be a working mother.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I need to rethink what that means,” she said, merging onto the freeway, heading south. It sounded ominous. It scared her a little to have said it out loud. She felt like Pandora cracking open the box. She was afraid to even steal a glance at her partner. She could feel his reaction from across the car.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked. It was more of a dare, really. His tone was almost intimidating, as if maybe he could bully her into taking back what she was thinking.
She took a deep breath. “It means there’s a big difference between being a mom who works nine to five at a desk and a mom who gets called out at all hours of the night and pulls—how many hours have we been on this? I’ve had half a night’s sleep in three days. Marysue spends more time with my kids than I do.”
“You’re a cop,” Kovac said, bemused by this whole strange turn her brain seemed to be taking. Being a cop was the absolute fabric of his being. He didn’t know anything else—didn’t want to know anything else. “That’s how it is. You’re a homicide detective.”
“That’s what I’m saying. I choose to work Homicide. That’s my choice. There are other options. I could go to Forgery/Fraud. I could go to Internal Affairs—”
“IA,” he said. “You. Right. Why don’t you aim for the stars,” he said sarcastically. “Join the graffiti squad. Better yet, become a department chaplain.”
“Don’t be such an ass,” she snapped. “I’m serious, Sam. I choose to work a job with crazy hours.”
“You’re damn good at it.”
“I love it,” she confessed. “I love my job. But I love my kids more. If I have to pick one over the other, that shouldn’t be a hard choice.”
And yet, she had never made it in all these years.
“You don’t have to pick,” he said stubbornly. “Every once in awhile we get a case like this one, and yes, the hours suck, but—”
“Every once in a while?” she said, incredulous. “What’s our caseload right now? How many active open cases do we have going? Murders and assaults.”
He didn’t answer, conceding defeat on the point. They seemed always overworked and understaffed. He complained about it all the time, constantly lobbying Kasselmann to fight with the brass for more detectives.
“Maybe you should apply for Kasselmann’s job,” he said, only half-sarcastic.
“The brass would never let me go straight from investigation to running Homicide,” she said. “That’s too big a plum. Every wannabe chief is champing at the bit to cycle through Homicide. They’d stick me somewhere else first, somewhere boring and awful. I’d be an underling to some dickhead in the pencil-counting division.”
“You’re serious,” Kovac said. “You’re seriously thinking about this.”
She signaled a lane change, checked the rearview, refrained from looking over at him. She didn’t answer him.
“Jesus, Tinks.”
This wasn’t the first time in her career she’d thought about making a change. She had thought about it, but only vaguely. There had always been a good argument to stay put when she had first made her way into the division. She’d been on a good track, increasing her pay grade, building seniority. Homicide was the place to get noticed. Theoretically, it made a good launching pad to bigger things.
But she had never really wanted to launch. She liked what she did. She liked the people she worked with. They were a unit, a family. She couldn’t imagine going to work and not having Kovac right there, her anchor, her foil. They had been partners for years. He had practically raised her as a detective. They had gone from student and teacher to colleagues and equals. Their relationship was a marriage without the sex. The thought of leaving that brought on a whole wave of unpleasant emotions.
Eyes on the neon Rock & Bowl sign, she exited the freeway.
“Well, you’re not leaving me tonight,” Kovac grumbled. “And you’re not leaving me tomorrow or the next day.”
“No.”
“So get your head in the game. We’ve got a girl missing. We’ve got a girl dead. We’ve got a killer running around loose. If this is Doc Holiday, he could be out trolling while you’re sitting there mulling over your career choices. He’s already made his career. His career is torturing and killing young women. In the big scheme of badness, he’s way ahead of you.”
That was Kovac—crankiness as a defense mechanism. He was right, anyway.
“Thanks for the pep talk,” she said as she pulled into a loading zone in front of the sprawling building.
“You know I’m always here to kick you in the ass when you need it.”
She turned the car off and looked across at him. “Sometimes I would prefer a hug, you know.”
The corner of his mouth lifted in his trademark sardonic smile. “I don’t trust you not to pop me in the kisser afterward,” he admitted. “Sucker punch me for all the shit I give you.”
“That could happen. I’d like to hit somebody for something.”
He sighed and unbuckled his seat belt. “Oh, for the days when you could club the shit out of a suspect for looking at you the wrong way.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re so full of it. You never did any such thing.”
“No,” he confessed. “But I saw it in a movie once. It looked like fun.”
They got out of the car, and Liska looked around, seeing the place as if she’d never been there before. She looked at the proximity to the freeway and the big gas plaza just down the frontage road.
The consensus was that Doc Holiday traveled the highways of the Midwest, possibly as a trucker. His victims had all disappeared from locations along major roadways. Rose Reiser, New Year’s Doe, had disappeared literally from the doorstep of a convenience store along a major highway in Columbia, Missouri. Her car had been found parked nearby—moved and hidden by her killer.
Kovac read her mind. “I’ve already got every unit in the vicinity looking for her car. We’ll hit the gas station after we leave here, and get the security tapes.”
They walked the length of the Rock & Bowl’s poorly lit parking area, their eyes scanning the cars, looking for Penny Gray’s Toyota, hoping against hope to catch an easy break. The parking lot ran down the side of the building going away from the frontage road and possible witnesses there. It was bordered by a chain-link fence with a parking lot of huge, heavy road equipment on the other side. Giant, hulking machines that stood like abandoned dinosaur carcasses with snow blown up around them.
A small knot of the Rock & Bowl patrons stood near a side exit toward the back of the building, braving the cold to have a smoke. Their voices rose and fell. The sound of music went from muffled to clear and back as the door opened and closed.
The place was busy despite its being a weeknight. The colleges were still on break even if most of the high schools had gone back to business already. No one paid any real attention to Kovac and Liska as they walked past and kept going, all the way to the dark, narrow street that ran behind the Rock & Bowl property. The businesses on that street were places that closed early—a body shop, a glass shop, a tire store. There would be no one lingering on the sidewalk back there, no one glancing out a window this time of night.
“No witnesses handy back here,” Kovac said. “A good escape route.”
“So where’s her car?” Liska asked. “If someone grabbed her out here and took her, where’s her car?”
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“He could have followed her away from here. Or she might have stopped for gas or had car trouble or went to a Starbucks and he nabbed her there.”
Liska looked down the dark, deserted street, unease drawing a bony finger along the back of her neck at the thought of being a woman alone, unsuspecting, unaware that a predator was following her away from the safety of a busy place.
That was something her male counterparts would never truly get—that sense of absolute vulnerability when a woman realizes the potential for danger from a man with bad intentions. She always harbored the secret hope that victims like their ninth girl never saw it coming, that it was over before they could know what terrible thing fate held for them. Of course she knew that was almost never the case.
For an animal like Doc Holiday, the kill itself was almost secondary to what preceded it. For a sexual sadist, inflicting pain and instilling terror were like foreplay. He relished the chase, the cat-and-mouse game, the rush of holding the switch on life or death. His highest high was seeing that look of abject horror in the eyes of his victim as she fully grasped the sure knowledge that he had all the power to do with her whatever his sick heart desired—and the sure knowledge that what he desired was her pain . . . and her life.
The idea of a sixteen-year-old girl being put in that position made Liska feel physically ill.
The idea that she could be instrumental in bringing down the animal that perpetrated that kind of crime was what kept her on the job. What they did mattered. They’d come to the party too late for the victim at hand, but if they did their job well, they took a killer off the street before he could claim another life, and another, and another.
“Let’s go see if there’s a camera on this parking lot,” Kovac said, starting back toward the building. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
Liska forced a laugh. “Well, that would be something. The last time I got lucky, gas was a buck fifty.”
• • •
THE MANAGER OF the Rock & Bowl was a small, nervous guy in his early thirties with thinning hair and round brown eyes. He took the news of having detectives in his business like a mouse facing a pair of hungry cats.
