The 9th Girl

by Tami Hoag

  “We haven’t had any trouble here,” he said, leading the way down a hall away from the noise of the bowling alley. “We run a clean family business. I don’t want people thinking this isn’t a safe place. We’ve never had an incident. I mean, the odd scuffle. Nothing crazy.”

  “Anything happen the night of the thirtieth?” Kovac asked.

  “I was off that night. Nobody called me. You don’t think this girl was snatched from here, do you?” he asked, throwing a worried look back over his shoulder. “I mean, somebody would have seen something, right? We can’t have people thinking something like that would happen here. That’s terrible.”

  “We’re trying to piece together what might have happened,” Liska said. “We need to establish a timeline. This was the last place she was seen by the friend she was staying with, so this is where we start. We don’t know what happened after she left here.”

  “Last seen at the Rock & Bowl,” the manager said. “That’s great. That’ll look good on the news.”

  “Do you have any cameras on the parking lot?” Kovac asked.

  They went into the cramped and cluttered office. The manager turned and faced them like he was facing a firing squad. “Ordinarily we do. I’m really sorry to say this, but that camera went down right after Christmas. It developed moisture behind the lens, which then, of course, froze. The thing is shot. The security company is supposed to come change it out, but with the holidays and all . . . it hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Well, why should this be easy?” Kovac muttered. “Have you had any cars towed out of here in the last few days? We’re looking for a black Toyota Camry.”

  The manager shook his head. “We’ve had a few dead batteries with the cold and all, but they all left under their own steam. Nothing a good jump start didn’t fix.”

  “How many cameras do you have inside?” Liska asked.

  “One in the entrance, one in the bowling alley, one in the arcade, one on the dance floor.”

  “Are they digital or do they record to tape?”

  “Tape. It’s an old system. Like I said, we run a nice business. We don’t have a lot of trouble here. There hasn’t been any need to worry about upgrading the security system.”

  “We’ll need to see everything from the night of the thirtieth,” Kovac said. “And if you don’t mind, I’d like to look at them right here, right now.”

  “Don’t you need a warrant or something?” the manager asked.

  Kovac gave him a hard look. “Are you fucking kidding me? We have a missing sixteen-year-old girl, last seen at the Rock & Bowl, and you’re gonna tell me I need to go downtown, write an affidavit, find a judge, and waste hours while this girl is being tortured or Christ knows what?”

  “No! No, no, no,” the manager said hastily, holding his hands up in front of him as if he might need to fend off an attack. “I just, um, watch too much television.”

  “It’s okay,” Liska intervened. “People coming here have no legal expectation of privacy. The tapes belong to the Rock & Bowl. You can do whatever you want with them.”

  “Good. That’s great. Have at it,” he said, going to a cupboard and pulling out VHS tape cassettes. “Make yourselves at home. Whatever you need.”

  “We need a minor miracle,” Kovac said. “But I’ll settle for a cup of coffee if you have any.”

  The manager scurried away and they settled in front of an ancient thirteen-inch television with a built-in VCR. The quality of the tapes was grainy and bad. They had probably been taped over many times. The cameras were wall mounted and stationary, giving only one view of the area they covered. The people who moved through the outer reaches of the frame were blurry and ghostlike. Those closer to the camera were washed-out and distorted.

  “This is shit,” Liska complained. Her eyes had begun to burn from staring at the small screen. When she looked away from it, she continued to see black and white pixels like a swarm of gnats on the surface of her eyes. “I wouldn’t recognize my own kid looking at this.”

  As she said it, Kovac went on point, his eyes narrowing as he looked at the screen. “Really?” he said. “Because there he is.”

  “What?”

  Liska grabbed the remote, froze the picture, backed it up, ran it forward again. She repeated the process twice, hoping against hope that the picture would change, that the angle was bad, that she wasn’t seeing what she thought she was seeing.

  The figures on the screen scurried backward, walked forward, scurried back, walked ahead. The view was a wedge of space in the entrance of the building, people coming in, going out, stopping at the front counter to purchase tokens. And there was Kyle, walking toward the door, his head slightly bent, his hands jammed in the pockets of his father’s old letterman’s jacket.

  “That’s your boy, Tinks,” Kovac said.

  She stopped the tape and ran it backward again and punched the Play button. A moment before Kyle came into the picture, another figure moved through the area, heading for the door. A white female with half a head of dark hair.

  Liska felt the bottom drop out of her stomach.

  “And that’s our girl.”

  22

  Fitz sat in his car watching the parking lot of the apartment building across the street, eating a ham sandwich and listening to a call-in radio show about alien abductions. Living in the moment, he came to two conclusions simultaneously: There is nothing quite as tasty as Miracle Whip on a ham sandwich, and the world is just chock-full of lunatics.

  The caller was going on at length about the aliens sticking a probe up his ass like they were digging for buried treasure. What the hell? If there were beings out there in the universe with the brainpower to build these elaborate spaceships, what could they possibly want from the intestinal tract of a moron?

  Well, it passed the time to listen to this craziness. He had to stay awake because there was always a very good chance that the next caller would be even crazier than the last. He didn’t want to miss anything, and he didn’t want to fall asleep. Dana Nolan would be coming out of her apartment soon.

  The female callers always talked about the aliens strapping them down on examination tables and experimenting on them sexually. That he could get into. He cast himself in the role of the Alien in those fantasies. He knew what it felt like to stand over a helpless woman. The sense of omnipotence that filled him was intoxicating. To look into the terrified eyes of a victim, knowing that everything about her life—and death—was his choice to make was like no other power in the world.

  A woman in that position—naked, immobilized, helpless, exposed—was completely at his mercy. A woman in that position realized his power. A woman in that position never mocked him, never scorned him. In that scenario he was God and the devil all in one—which made him more powerful than either entity individually.

  A woman in that position didn’t care that he was short or that he had a potbelly. She didn’t care that he was losing his hair or that he looked more like a cartoon hobo than a matinee idol.

  A woman in that position cared only that he had the power to give pain or take it away, to give life or take it away.

  A woman in that position had to accept him. In every sense of the word.

  Fitz knew exactly what he was, and he knew exactly why, and he was good with it. He had arranged his life to suit his hobbies. He traveled the highways and back roads of America, buying and reselling antiques and junk. His trails were his hunting grounds. He was a lucky man. He would never be the kind of loser who called a radio show in the middle of the night to make up shit about aliens sticking a probe up his ass.

  Dana Nolan came out of her apartment building at 3:07 A.M. The people who worked the early news programs on local television had terrible hours—and terrible pay, he imagined. The apartment building she lived in was as basic and unimaginative as possible—a square, blond brick box in a row of square, blond brick boxes built in the seventies. There was no kind of doorman or security.

  Fitz had followed
her home from the TV station earlier in the day and scoped it all out. He then had gone home, done some work on a couple of antique motorcycles he had found on a pick in Illinois, then took a nap. Around two A.M. he stuck hand warmers in his boots and coat pockets and drove here in his nondescript panel van to watch and wait.

  This wasn’t his usual MO. He preferred to hunt on the road, snatch a victim of opportunity, and keep moving. He had his routine down to a smooth science. But he had a point to prove now. He had decided to up his game, to show people exactly who they were dealing with.

  The parking lot for the apartment buildings was not well lit. There was no one around at this time of night. This was a quiet middle-income neighborhood. People here worked hard and went to bed early. They got up early and watched their cute neighbor girl on the news.

  Dana Nolan was twenty-four (according to the station’s website and her own Facebook page), still with a breath of that fresh-from-college scent on her. Pretty and petite, no doubt preoccupied with her first big job at a television station, she walked out of her building in the middle of every night and crossed this lonely parking lot by herself.

  Tonight she had her arms full—a purse that kept slipping off her shoulder, a suit bag, a tote bag. She juggled the stuff as she fumbled with her car keys. She was paying no attention to her surroundings.

  Fitz watched her get into her cute little green Mini Cooper. He waited for her to get the car started and negotiate her way out of her parking spot and into the street. When she was about a block away, he started the van and drove out after her.

  The Alien was on the prowl tonight.

  He hung back, running with no lights. The streetlights were bright enough. He didn’t want her to notice headlights coming behind her, didn’t want her looking over her shoulder.

  He followed her out of her neighborhood and onto 494, where he popped his lights on and felt free to run a little closer up behind her. He dropped back a few lengths again when she signaled for her exit and left the freeway. The television station was only a couple of blocks away now. But at the bottom of the off ramp, Dana Nolan signaled to go left instead of right.

  Fitz couldn’t help but smile to himself as he let her drive on ahead of him. She turned into the parking lot of a Holiday gas station / convenience store. The name made him laugh out loud. Holiday—just like the news people liked to call him. Doc Holiday. Perfect.

  He drove past, then doubled back around.

  The place was well lit and busier than anyone might have expected at that hour. A big bearded guy in a snowmobile suit was pumping gas into a four-by-four truck with a snowplow on the front. Two cars other than Dana Nolan’s Mini were parked near the building.

  Fitz pulled in two spaces down from the girl and went inside. The clerk, a tall, gaunt African guy, gave him a cautious look. Somali, Fitz figured. His skin was absolutely black, making the whites of his eyes stand out shockingly bright in his long, narrow face.

  Fitz smiled broadly and banged his gloved hands together a couple of times.

  “Holy smokes, it’s cold out there!” he said. “Why do we live here, right?”

  The Somali guy didn’t feel compelled to answer, though he had probably asked himself the same question a thousand times every winter since his arrival in Minnesota. A lot of the local Lutheran churches were keen to rescue people from whatever shithole God had originally thrown them into—the Hmongs from Cambodia in the eighties; the Somalis in the nineties. The irony was laughable—plucking people out of some of the hottest fucking hellholes on earth and plunking them down in Minnesota, where they had to be freezing their asses off six months out of the year.

  Dana Nolan was busy getting her coffee and doctoring it with artificial creamer and chemical sweeteners.

  “That stuff’ll kill you!” Fitz said cheerfully, grabbing a cup and pouring himself some French roast from one of the pots on the counter.

  The girl glanced at him with a sweet smile and a laugh. She squinted like that actress, Renée Zellweger, her eyes all but disappearing into slits above her cold-rouged cheeks.

  “Oh, I know,” she said. “It’s so bad for us, but I can’t start my day without it.”

  “I hear you,” he said, tearing open a pink packet and dumping the contents into the nasty, oily blackness of the convenience store coffee. “Some mornings I think I should just get coffee injected straight into my veins.”

  “Me too! I say that all the time!”

  “Hey . . . ,” he said, giving her the perfect friendly, quizzical look—a little surprise, a little uncertainty, a little smile. He raised a finger. “You look like— You’re not—”

  She was pleased with the prospect that he might recognize her. This was part of why she had gone into broadcast news—to get that rush of self-importance at being recognized in public places.

  “You’re that girl from the news!” he exclaimed with delight. “I’m right! Am I right?”

  She beamed, eyes disappearing again. “That’s me!”

  “Dana. Right? Wait ’til I tell the missus!” he said. “We watch you every morning! You know, I work nights for the DOT. I’m just getting home and my wife is just getting up. She teaches third grade at St. Ann’s. We have some breakfast together and watch the news.”

  “That’s so nice to hear!” she said. “We start so early, sometimes I wonder if there’s anyone out there awake to see us.”

  “Oh, believe me, we’re watching.”

  “I’d better get going, then,” she said, moving a step toward the counter. “I don’t want to be late.”

  “It was great meeting you, Dana,” Fitz said, grinning. “Just wait ’til I tell the missus!”

  She laughed and beamed, the picture of sweet, innocent youth. “Nice meeting you too!”

  He stuck out a gloved hand. “Frank Fitzpatrick,” he said. “Call me Fitz.”

  She shook his hand, her grip a little hesitant, meek. She would be easy to dominate.

  “Nice meeting you, Fitz,” she said. She gave a little wave as she moved toward the counter. He waved back, smiling widely.

  And that is how it’s done, he thought, watching her pay the Somali guy for her coffee, then hurry back out into the cold. Identify the potential victim. Engage the potential victim in a nonthreatening manner on neutral ground. Establish a cordial connection, thereby causing the potential victim to lower her defenses.

  The next time he encountered Dana Nolan, she would recognize him as that nice man from the Holiday station, the friendly guy who watched her on the news while having breakfast with his wife. He wasn’t anyone she needed to be afraid of.

  And that assumption would be the worst mistake she would ever make in her young life.

  He picked a couple of doughnuts out of the bakery case and took them and his coffee up to the counter to pay. The Somali guy rang him up and took his money without joy.

  “You have a nice day, sir,” Fitz said enthusiastically. “Stay warm!”

  And he went back out into the frigid early morning, got in his van, and drove home to eat his doughnuts and watch Dana Nolan on the news . . . and fantasize about how he was going to kill her.

  23

  He was sound asleep and dreaming. In the dream he was fighting. Left, right, front kick, spinning back fist. He was breathing hard, sweating, his muscles straining. He couldn’t see his opponent, just a black shape that was bigger than he was, stronger than he was, and seemed to be all around him at once. He spun and kicked and threw his fists.

  Then something had hold of his wrists and he couldn’t pull away. He came awake with a start and a gasp.

  “Kyle!” His mom’s voice. “Kyle, wake up! You’re having a dream.”

  Kyle sat up, pulling back from her, pulling his hands free. The anxiety of the dream was still on him. He felt like he was drowning in it.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded, focusing on her face. She sat on the edge of the bed. The light on the nightstand was on. Her expression frightened him. Too seri
ous. Worried. It was the middle of the night.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, a chill running over him. “Did something happen to Dad?”

  His father worked undercover narcotics. It was a dangerous job. He’d been hurt before. Kyle had always secretly feared that his dad could be killed and he would die thinking Kyle hated him. Panic and guilt rose inside him.

  “No, no,” his mother said. “Your dad is fine.”

  “What are you doing? You scared the shit out of me!” he said, his voice cracking.

  “Kyle, I need to ask you some questions,” she said.

  For the first time, he became aware of another person in his room, by the door. His mother’s partner, Sam Kovac, looking grave. Kyle looked from one of them to the other and back.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Kyle, do you know a girl named Penelope Gray?” his mother asked.

  “Penelope?” He said the name like he had never heard it before. Who the hell named their kid Penelope? He didn’t know anyone named Penelope.

  “Gray,” Sam Kovac said, coming farther into the room. “Her friends call her Gray.”

  “Gray?” None of this was making any sense. Maybe he was still asleep and dreaming a dream within a dream.

  “She goes to your school,” his mother said. “Dark hair—half-shaved, lots of piercings.”

  “Gray,” he said. “Yeah. I know her. Why? Why would you wake me up to ask me that? What’s going on?”

  Sam pulled the chair away from the desk and sat down.

  “Kyle,” Kovac said. “Gray is missing.”

  “Missing?” He felt stupid parroting everything back at them like he was some kind of retard. But none of this made any sense to him. They were questioning him like he was a suspect or something.

  “No one has seen her since the night before New Year’s Eve,” his mom said.

  “I haven’t seen her.”