by Tami Hoag
“Have you heard from her?” Kovac asked. “A phone call? A text? Anything?”
“No.”
“What were you doing at the Rock and Bowl?” his mother asked in her cop voice. Kyle drew a breath to answer and she held up a finger in warning. “Don’t even think about lying to me. I saw you on the security video. This is a serious situation, Kyle. I don’t recall you asking my permission to go there. I would remember that. You know why? Because there is no way in hell I would have said yes.”
“I didn’t ask,” Kyle said defensively. “Because you weren’t here. You’re never here.”
His mother jumped to her feet looking like he had slapped her and knocked her off the bed.
“You have a cell phone,” she said, her voice trembling a little. “You know to call me before you go somewhere. I expect you to be responsible, Kyle. How did you get there?”
“What difference does it make?” he asked belligerently. He was busted and now he had to listen to his mother berate him like he was a little kid. He was almost sixteen. He wanted to be treated with some adult respect, but at the same time he knew breaking the rules didn’t earn him that respect.
“I asked you a question.”
“I got a ride with a friend.”
“What friend?”
“What does it matter?!” he shouted.
“You told me you were going to a movie that night.”
“So we changed plans. So what?”
“What’s going on?” R.J. asked, wandering into the room in his pajamas. His hair stuck up all around his head like he’d stuck his finger in a light socket.
“Nothing,” Mom said, steering him by the shoulders back into the hall.
“Then why is everybody yelling?”
Kovac leaned forward in the desk chair, resting his forearms on his thighs. “Kyle,” he said quietly. “Your mom’s upset because she worries about you. She’s seen a lot of shit go down. She knows the kind of bad things that happen off of one bad decision.
“We’re investigating a homicide right now, and I can guarantee you that victim didn’t start her evening out thinking that she would end up murdered. You know what I’m saying? Nobody thinks that’s gonna happen to them, but it does. We see it all the time. So don’t be too hard on your mom, okay?”
Kyle looked down and scratched at the leg of his sweatpants just to avoid Kovac’s eyes. Now he felt guilty. He loved his mom. He knew she had it tough, working and trying to raise him and R.J. more or less on her own. Most of the time he tried not to make her life harder.
“So,” Kovac said, moving on. “I don’t give a shit how you came to be at the Rock and Bowl. I need to know, did you see Gray there? Did you speak to her?”
“Yeah, I saw her.”
“Did you notice if anyone was bothering her, following her?”
“No.”
“The friend she was staying with said Gray got pissed off and left. Do you know anything about that?”
Kyle shrugged. “She doesn’t get along with a lot of people.”
“Why is that?”
“’Cause she’s not into phony bullshit jerks.”
His mother came back into the room, closing the door behind her. “What kind of girl is she?”
“I don’t know. She’s . . . different.”
What was he supposed to say? That she was wild? That she was a slut? He didn’t think either one of those things was true. He didn’t believe in putting labels on people, except dickheads like Aaron Fogelman.
“Is she into drugs?” Kovac asked.
“No,” Kyle said, frustration rising inside him. “I don’t know! Maybe she smokes a little. Why do you guys always think kids are into drugs? Not everybody is into drugs!”
“Did she have an argument with somebody that night?” Kovac asked calmly.
“I guess.”
“With who? What about?”
“Christina Warner,” he said. “They got into it.”
“Over what?” Kovac asked.
“Gray writes poetry. Christina was making fun of one of her poems, making fun of Gray. People were laughing. Gray got pissed off and she left.”
“Did you follow her outside?” Kovac asked.
“Yeah, but she was already driving out.”
“You didn’t speak to her.”
“No.”
“Did you see which way she went?”
“Toward the gas station.”
“Did anybody follow her?”
“Not that I saw,” Kyle said.
He watched them exchange a look, speaking without speaking. Kovac had said they were investigating a homicide. The victim was a female. Gray was missing.
“You don’t think she’s dead, do you?” he asked. “Gray gets pissed off, she goes and stays with one of her weird friends. She does that all the time.”
“Do you know any of those friends?” his mom asked.
Kyle shook his head. “They’re like musicians and poets and coffeehouse people. I don’t know them. They’re older. Gray’s not dead, is she?”
“We don’t know,” his mom said. “Right now, we don’t know.”
“You think she is,” Kyle said. He felt the bottom drop out of his stomach like he’d just gone over a big hill on his bike. He’d never known anyone who was killed. That just seemed crazy, impossible. Kids his age didn’t get killed except in car crashes and stuff like that, or kids who were in gangs. He didn’t know anybody like that.
“Kyle, are you friends with Gray on Facebook?” Kovac asked.
“Yeah.”
“Can we go on the computer and have a look?”
They went downstairs to the family room and Kyle sat down at the desk and brought the computer to life. He logged on to his Facebook page. He felt self-conscious having his mom and Kovac looking at it. His profile picture was a photograph of the door to his bedroom, the Samurai warrior he had painted. What came up in his news feed were posts from pages he followed, pages about mixed martial arts and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, tattoos and comic books. He clicked on the search line and typed in GrayMatter.
Gray’s page came up. Her profile picture was a drawing Kyle had done for her: herself as a comic book character. He had drawn her as angry and sharp featured with bold, dark lines and large, snapping black eyes. She had only seventeen friends. She liked twenty-two pages. Her last post was four days past—the last day Kyle had seen her. It was a poem.
“Liar”
Two-faced liar
Pants on fire
You fool everyone
But not me.
I know what you are
You’re nobody’s star
I’m gonna rat you out
Wait and see.
Fine and upstanding
You’re very demanding
Your standard is high
I know.
But wait ’til they see you
The liar, the real you
You’re gonna fall down
So low.
I’m gonna take you down
You know.
24
Three hours of sleep. A shower. A shave. A cup of bad coffee from 7-Eleven. Days like this, cases like this, a voice in the back of his head grumbled, You’re getting too goddamn old for this.
Kovac ignored it because at the same time that voice was grumbling, his adrenal glands were pumping out a rush of intoxicating fuel to keep him focused and moving forward. This was his purpose in life. This was his calling: a case with a sense of urgency attached. In that he was like a hound on a scent. Tunnel vision shut out the extraneous world. The wheels in his head spun like the workings of a Swiss watch.
He loved what he did. He didn’t love why he had to do it, but he couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
He thought about Tinks and what she had said about changing jobs. He couldn’t imagine doing that. Over his career he had put in time in different departments, but nothing suited him like Homicide.
Eventually he would have to retire, but the idea of that
secretly struck fear in him. Like every cop he knew, he bitched about the job and joked around about retiring. He knew to the day how long before he got his thirty years in. But the reality of it was something he didn’t want to face. Most cops he knew took their twenty years and got out. He had already passed that milestone. What would he do with himself when his career was over? He couldn’t see it. He didn’t want to.
He went through his checklist in his head as he parked his car in the structure that had been named for a murdered cop a couple of decades past. He had already sent a young detective to Liska’s house to gather as much information as possible from Penelope Gray’s Facebook page. It made more sense to him to do it there, where they already had access to the page, than to waste time going through the process of setting everything up from scratch in the office.
He wanted as much information as possible about the girl’s Facebook friends—names, contact info, what connected them to Gray. He wanted their posts looked at with an eye for anything angry, violent, disturbing. Had any of them threatened Gray? Were they into anything that might have led to the girl’s death?
He wanted to know who was the liar she had written about in her last Facebook post. The obvious assumption was another kid her own age, a schoolmate, someone in her social circle. But he knew better than to assume. She could have been talking about an adult, a teacher, someone in a position of authority, someone who would have been ruined by a revelation. Had her threat to expose that person been enough to motivate a killer? Possibly.
They needed to talk to the other kids who had been in that group at the Rock & Bowl, find out what exactly had set the girl off that night. They had to get Penelope Gray’s cell phone records ASAP. They had to get her medical records, get the films of her once-broken wrist to Möller at the morgue to see if they would match up with their victim. They would do a DNA test for absolute proof, but DNA tests took time, and time was a luxury they didn’t have.
The CID office was already bustling with the extra detectives Kasselmann had assigned to the case, answering phones, taking down tips, tracking down leads.
Kasselmann appeared in the door of his office, looking like a Wall Street executive in a crisp navy-blue suit, every silver hair on his head perfectly in place. He hailed Kovac like he was taxicab.
“You think this Gray girl is your victim?” he asked, taking his seat behind the desk.
Kovac slouched into a chair. “I think so. There’s too much that matches up. We have to get her old X-rays from her doctor this morning and get them to Möller to compare a healed fracture, but I’d put money on it.”
“Why wasn’t she reported missing?”
“The mother thought she was staying with a friend, and the friend assumed she had gone home. And apparently the girl will up and take off for days at a time, so no one was really alarmed not to hear from her. Then the mother got a couple of text messages supposedly from the girl. She didn’t think she had a reason to be concerned. We’re tracking down the girl’s friends off her Facebook page. And we’ll get her cell phone records this morning.”
“What’s the family situation?”
“Strained. It’s pretty clear the mother finds the daughter a major problem and a disappointment. The girl resents the mom. There was some serious rebellion going on. The father is out of the picture for the most part. Mom is dating a shrink, and the shrink’s daughter and this girl don’t get along. They had an argument at the Rock & Bowl on the night in question. Our girl left the club in a huff and was never seen again.”
“You’re getting a lot of media attention with the AMBER Alert for a girl you think is in cold storage at the morgue.”
Kovac shrugged. “I don’t know for a fact. In the meantime, maybe we stir up someone who saw something. Maybe we locate the girl’s car.”
“I’ll make a statement for the press later this morning,” Kasselmann said. “I’d like the mother to be there. She can make an appeal.”
“I’ll put Elwood on that,” Kovac said. “I want her to come in anyway. We need a more detailed timeline about who was where, when.”
“An added bonus to the AMBER Alert: I think I’ll get the green light from upstairs to add a couple more warm bodies to your team,” Kasselmann said.
“Great. I’ll take them.”
“The state patrol has a chopper in the air. BCA has offered assistance.”
“And I’d like to bring in John Quinn to have a look at the case. See if he thinks this is Doc Holiday’s handiwork.”
Quinn had been one of the FBI’s top profilers, brought in by money and political influence to assess the Cremator murders several years past. He had since retired from the bureau and settled in the Minneapolis suburbs to work in the private sector and raise a family.
“I’ll see what I can do about that,” Kasselmann said.
Kovac pushed to his feet. “You’d better. He’ll be here at nine.”
Ignoring his captain’s mutterings, Kovac left the office and went to the room they had set up as command central for the case. The new photograph of Penelope Gray had been added to the montage on the wall, along with the sketch artist’s rendering. It wasn’t an exact match, but it wasn’t bad considering what he’d had to work from.
Kovac stared at the picture he’d gotten from Brittany Lawler. He had enlarged the photo and cropped the Lawler girl out. The girl her friends called Gray looked at him coyly from over her shoulder. She had been portrayed by people who knew her as an angry girl, but she wasn’t angry in the photo. She looked bright and mischievous. Her dark eyes had a spark in them.
Kovac wondered if she meant to make a statement with the half-shaved head and the piercings. Or was all that a disguise, intended to distract the eye from the essence of her—the sensitive, misunderstood poet? Probably a bit of both.
In the best scenarios, kids that age were a bundle of insecurities. They were children who thought they wanted to be adults but at the same time were afraid to let go of teddy bears and dolls. They thought they wanted to be individuals, yet they clung to their peer group, desperate for acceptance. Penelope Gray looked like the poster girl for contradictions.
Liska and Tippen came into the room, Tippen with a venti iced coffee, wearing a silk necktie with a palm tree painted on it. Liska clutched a cup of coffee to her chest as if hoping to will the caffeine directly into her veins.
“Jesus Christ,” she grumbled, “when are they going to get this fucking furnace situation under control? It’s like the ninth circle of hell in here.”
“I’m starting to like it,” Tippen said. “It’s kind of like visiting my parents in Boca Raton. They set their thermostat at ninth circle of hell.”
Kovac studied his partner as he rolled up his shirtsleeves. “Jeeze, Tinks, you look like a heroine addict.”
She narrowed her bloodshot eyes. “Thanks. That makes me feel so much better about myself. You need to make a motivational video and sell it on the Internet.”
“Did you get any sleep?”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
“Yeah, well, you’re looking like that could be sooner rather than later.”
“Shut up,” she snapped. “What’s next?”
“We need to talk to the kids who were at the Rock and Bowl. Maybe that can happen right at the school,” he suggested. “Faster and easier than trying to drag them down here.”
Tippen raised his eyebrows. “Privileged darlings at a fancy private school? Parents with lawyers on retainer? I don’t think any part of that is going to be easy.”
“Let’s get on it right away, then,” Kovac said. “Tinks, you must have an in with the principal at PSI.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right. He’s a pompous ass who can never get my name straight and believes my son is a violent thug who draws gay pornography. I’ll have him wrapped around my little finger.”
“Just be your usual charming self, then,” Tippen suggested. “Put his balls on the table and smash them with your tactical baton.
”
“If only . . .”
“I’ll go with you,” Kovac said. “Make sure you don’t get called up on brutality charges.”
“You spoil all my fun,” she said, pouting.
“Later I’ll let you roll a junkie, just for kicks.”
“There’s no sport in that.”
“If you want a sport, take up cage fighting,” he said. “You can beat the shit out of people and get paid for it.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“In the meantime, I’ll get Quinn set up to look over what we have with an eye toward Doc Holiday; then you and I can hit the bricks. Tip, I want you to go have a chat with Penelope Gray’s father. See what he’s all about.”
He turned and looked at the horrific autopsy photos.
“Somebody in this girl’s life hated her enough to do this. Let’s find out if it was personal.”
• • •
“IT’S ABSOLUTELY OUT OF THE QUESTION,” Principal Rodgers stated. His tone had the ring of finality, like a steel door slamming shut. “I won’t have my students interrogated.”
They stood in his office, where everything was perfectly in place, perfectly polished—including Rodgers himself. The blotter on the desk was pristine white. Papers were stacked in perfect alignment, books on the bookshelves arranged by size. All this tidiness made Liska wonder if the man actually did any real work.
She glanced at her partner. Kovac had on his poker face, but she could feel his irritation. She raised her eyebrows at him as if to say, See what a dick this guy is?
“We’re not looking to interrogate anyone,” Kovac said. He picked up a paperweight off the desk, a solid glass ball with some trite motivational phrase etched on it, and tossed it back and forth from one hand to the other. Rodgers snatched it away from him and put it back exactly where it had been. “We just need to talk to them about what they might have seen, noticed, heard that night and the days leading up to that night. We’re trying to put together a picture of the events that led up to Penelope Gray’s disappearance.”
“We need to establish a timeline, Mr. Rodgers,” Liska said. “We know these kids were all at the Rock and Bowl the night Penny Gray went missing. It’s essential that we speak to them.”
