The 9th Girl

by Tami Hoag

  “That doesn’t mean it’s our fault,” Christina argued. “It’s not our fault there’s some maniac running around killing people. All I wanted was to pay her back for what she did to me. I didn’t wish for her to be kidnapped and tortured by some sicko! God, Britt, is that what you think?”

  “No!” Brittany said. “But if that’s what happened to her, I’m going to feel guilty, aren’t you?”

  “I’m going to feel terrible,” Christina said, “but I’m not going to feel responsible. I didn’t kill her.”

  Emily chewed at a fingernail, looking worried. “What do you think the cops will ask us?”

  “What did they ask you, Britt?” Christina asked.

  She squirmed on her chair. “They just wanted to know where Gray went. Had I heard from her. Did she leave with anyone. That’s all.”

  “You told them she got mad and left,” Christina said, leaning closer, lowering her voice. “Did you tell them why she flipped out?”

  “No.”

  “They didn’t ask?”

  “No.”

  She leaned a little closer and swept a big curtain of gorgeous blond waves back over her shoulder. “You didn’t tell them what she said to me, did you?”

  “No!” Brittany whispered. “Why would I do that? I wouldn’t do that.”

  “You were the only one who heard her say it,” Christina whispered back. “And it’s a lie, anyway, but you know how mean people can be.”

  She said it with a straight face, as if she had never been mean to anybody, her big brown eyes blinking with innocence.

  “You won’t say anything, will you?”

  Brittany shook her head. “No.”

  Like the police would give a rip about the petty sniping of teenage girls.

  Christina reached over and gave her hand a quick squeeze. “You’re such a good friend, Britt.”

  Gray probably didn’t think so, Brittany thought.

  “You know,” Aaron said, “Hatcher left right after Gray did that night. He’s the one the cops should be talking to.”

  • • •

  “I WANT TO smack this little prick upside the head.”

  “That would be wrong,” Tippen said with a bored sigh. “Satisfying, but wrong.”

  They stood in the room adjacent to the one the kids sat in, watching them, listening to their discussion via closed-circuit TV. Kids had no expectation of privacy in school. They were literally spied on all day long, in classrooms, in the halls, in the cafeteria, in this conference room waiting to be interviewed by the police.

  Kovac studied one kid and then the next, taking in their body language, their facial expressions. Brittany Lawler looked the least happy of the group. She wanted to get up and leave. She squirmed in her seat, leaning away from the girl next to her—Christina Warner.

  Christina leaned toward her with a look of concern, put a hand on her shoulder, and murmured something the microphone didn’t pick up. Reassurance. Comfort. Something like that.

  Christina was clearly the leader of the pack. Pretty, stylish, aware of her sexuality, bossy. The others looked to her. She was well aware of her position and her power.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine there would be tensions between her and a girl like Penny Gray, the perennial outsider. They were opposites, light and dark, manipulative and reactive. Because of the relationship between their parents, they were essentially being pitted against each other for the favor of Julia Gray. Julia Gray, who seemed to have nothing but disapproval and disappointment for her only child. Kovac could easily imagine her saying, Why can’t you be more like Christina?

  He turned to Tippen. “Let’s do this. The two stooges first,” he said, pointing to Aaron Fogelman’s wingmen. “Then those two girls. We’ll make the Fogelman kid wait a while after his pals, see if we can’t drum up a little more paranoia in that one. Then we’ll take the Warner girl, then Brittany Lawler again. We’ll leave her ’til last. Let the others wonder why.”

  “Dr. Warner is already getting impatient,” Tippen said.

  “Good. Let him stew.”

  The parents had been assembled by Principal Rodgers in his office, Michael Warner among them. They would be allowed to sit in on the interviews with their individual children. At least none of them had brought an attorney along.

  Thankful for small blessings, Kovac took one of the Fogelman kid’s buddies and Tippen took the other. Neither had much of anything to say. They claimed not to really know Penelope Gray. They claimed to be playing skee ball in the arcade when the argument between Gray and Christina Warner went down. The parents were predictably defensive, doing what parents do: getting between trouble and their kids.

  The interviews with the two girls, Emily Peters and Jessica Cook, went much the same.

  Kovac took the Cook girl, whose mother was big and square and looked like she might fight for the WWE when she wasn’t masquerading as a bank vice president in a sweater and pearls. Momma Bear sat with her meaty arms crossed over her chest and a sour look on her face. The girl had that slightly pinched quality to her expression that spelled a potential for belligerence.

  Kovac sat down at the table across from them and began the verbal dance.

  “So, Jessica, did you see Gray that night at the Rock and Bowl?”

  She rolled her eyes. “You know I did. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, would I?”

  “Let’s cut to the chase, then. What went down between Gray and Christina?”

  “Gray got pissed off and called Christina a”—she glanced at her mother—“bad name, and she left.”

  “Did anybody follow her out?”

  “Yeah. Kyle Hatcher.”

  “Anybody else?”

  She huffed a sigh. “I really wasn’t watching. I don’t like Gray. I don’t care what she does.”

  “She’s missing,” Kovac said bluntly. “She might be dead.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say,” she said with just enough whine to set his teeth on edge. “I didn’t see anything!”

  Momma Bear reared her ugly head. “What does any of this have to do with my daughter? Jessica isn’t responsible for what that Gray girl does. Apparently, no one is.”

  “We’re just trying to put together a complete picture here, Mrs. Cook. Any detail, no matter how insignificant it may seem, could be helpful to the investigation.” He turned his attention back to the girl.

  She tipped her head to one side, bored, scratching idly at the arm of her chair with a shiny red fingernail. “I didn’t see anything.”

  “That’s great, Jessica,” Kovac said sarcastically. He put his elbows on the table and leaned toward her. “Tell me something. If it was you missing instead of Gray, how would you feel about your friends not trying to help out?”

  She gave him a cold look. “She’s not my friend. This is stupid, anyway. Gray left. None of us killed her.”

  Momma Bear sat forward. “Are you trying to intimidate my daughter?”

  “No,” Kovac said. “I’m trying to make her have a conscience.”

  Mrs. Cook got to her feet with all the menace of an animal about to charge. “If Jessica says she didn’t see anything, she didn’t see anything. We’re done here. If you have anything more, Detective, you can speak to our attorney.”

  Kovac followed them into the hall and watched the mother herd the daughter toward the office doors. Tippen came out of the room where they had been watching the video monitor.

  “That went well.”

  Kovac rolled his eyes. “I’m just happy Momma didn’t knock me down and hurt me. How did yours go?”

  “She wasn’t right there when the fight happened. She was in the bathroom or getting a drink or looking the other way. But it was probably Gray’s fault because she’s just like that.”

  “Nice.”

  “Contemporary teenagers. It’s Lord of the Flies in designer labels.”

  “How are the other three holding up?” Kovac asked.

  They went back into their viewing r
oom. Brittany still looked unhappy, staring down at her phone in her lap. Aaron Fogelman had gotten up to pace, his hands jammed at his waist.

  “Why is it taking so fucking long?” the boy asked. “What could they possibly be talking about that’s taking so long?”

  Christina got up and went to him, stopping in front of him and slipping her arms around his waist. Young love.

  “Will you relax?” she said.

  “What if this goes in our records?” he whined. “Questioned by the police because of that bitch? My dad’s gonna have my ass over this! He wants me to get into Northwestern!”

  “Oh my God,” Christina said, letting go of him so he could pace some more. “You’re such a drama king!”

  “Oh, it’s fine for you,” he said. “Daddy’s girl. Your father thinks you shit gold.”

  “I can see why all the girls go for him,” Kovac said. “Silver-tongued charmer.”

  “Angry white boy,” Tippen said. “Raging against the oppression of the bourgeois life in the mean streets of suburbia.”

  “He needs his ass kicked,” Kovac declared.

  He went to the room the students were in, opened the door, and nodded to Aaron Fogelman, his face a stony mask. The kid tried to put on a tough front, but the bravado was short-sheeted over the insecurity and his fear of a blemish on his permanent record. The last thing he did before leaving the room was glance back at Christina Warner.

  His father, Wynn Fogelman, joined them in the conference room. Kovac took in the immaculate expensive suit, the power tie, the slicked-back hair, the way he carried himself, and thought, Wealthy self-important asshole, an assessment proven true the instant Fogelman opened his mouth.

  “I hope you realize, Detective, my son’s future is something I do not take lightly. I won’t have the Fogelman name—mine or Aaron’s—tied in any way to this missing girl.”

  Kovac motioned the two of them to sit on one side of the table. “I’m not interested in your name, Mr. Fogelman. I don’t know who you are. I don’t care who you are. I’m here because one of your son’s classmates has gone missing, and I know that he was among the last people to see her before whatever happened to her happened to her. If he can shed some light on what happened that night, great. If he can’t, he can’t.”

  “He doesn’t know anything about what happened to this girl,” his father said. “From what I understand, she’s a behavior problem, and it isn’t all that unusual for her to disappear.”

  Kovac just looked at him for a moment, chewing a little with his back teeth. He wanted to tell Wynn Fogelman that Penelope Gray was a sixteen-year-old girl, not a nuisance to be defined by a label. But even her own mother didn’t seem to quite get that.

  He was just as guilty of it, truth to tell. He had a moment to assess the people he met in the course of his work. He had to read them, rank them, and label them instantly. Everyone did it. He took umbrage only with regard to the victims he adopted in his role of defender/avenger. No different from these parents trying to protect their kids, he supposed.

  He looked at the boy, sullen and slouched in his seat with his arms crossed over his chest. “Who busted that lip for you?”

  The kid reached up and touched the swollen spot, as if he’d forgotten he had it. “No one. I tripped and fell.”

  “Into a pile of knuckles,” Kovac said. “Nice.

  “Aaron, how well do you know Penny Gray?” he asked.

  The boy lifted a shoulder but looked down at the tabletop. “Not very.”

  He mumbled when he talked. He didn’t make eye contact with Kovac, but beyond that, he didn’t look at his father. He knew he was in trouble. The old man didn’t appreciate being taken out of his Very Important Job to come to school and talk with the police. Junior was supposed to be a chip off the old block, successful at everything, yet here he was . . .

  “You have classes with her,” Kovac said. He slipped his reading glasses on and opened a file folder on the table in front of him. “Drama, English, something called Visual Media. You’re spending a lot of your day with her, you have mutual acquaintances—you must know her a little.”

  “She’s weird. She’s a weird, angry bitc—person,” he said, shooting his father a glance from the corner of his eye. “Nobody likes her.”

  “Your friend Brittany likes her,” Kovac pointed out.

  “That’s Brittany,” he grumbled. “She likes everybody.”

  “What a poor quality that is,” Kovac said sarcastically. “And Gray and Christina are halfway to being sisters, right? With Christina’s dad and Gray’s mom getting together. And you’re tight with Christina. . . .”

  “Is there a point to this?” Wynn Fogelman asked sharply.

  Kovac ignored him. “What went down between those two at the Rock and Bowl? I’m hearing Christina started something, making fun of one of Gray’s poems.”

  The one-shoulder shrug. “I don’t know.”

  “You were right there, Aaron. I have a witness who puts you right in the middle of it,” Kovac lied.

  The boy jumped up in his chair, all shock and righteous indignation. “Fucking Hatcher!”

  “Aaron!” the father barked.

  “And we have security tape,” Kovac went on.

  Of course, he didn’t. The video was of terrible quality and showed only part of the room from an angle that made it virtually impossible to tell what the hell was going on, and completely impossible to pick out individuals who weren’t in the camera’s direct path. But Aaron Fogelman didn’t know that.

  “I didn’t do anything!” the boy protested. “She went after Christina! I just got between them! I didn’t hit her! Did Hatcher say I hit her? I didn’t! It maybe just looked that way. I didn’t!”

  Kovac sat back and digested that. He looked at Wynn Fogelman, who was glaring at his son.

  “No,” Kovac said. “I’m sure your father taught you better than to hit a girl.”

  The elder Fogelman turned on him. “You can’t use any of this against my son.”

  “Not in a court of law,” Kovac qualified. “Your son isn’t under arrest. He isn’t even under suspicion of anything, Mr. Fogelman. Luckily for our overcrowded prison system, being a dick isn’t against the law.”

  Fogelman bristled. “You can change your tone with me, Detective.”

  “Why would I?” Kovac asked. “I don’t care what you think about me. You will probably find this hard to believe, but this situation isn’t about you.”

  “What is it about, then?” Fogelman asked, his face stone-cold with suppressed fury.

  “The truth,” Kovac said calmly. “That’s all. I want to know every possible reason a sixteen-year-old girl came to be in a position where a predator might have taken advantage of her.”

  “You don’t even know that she’s missing,” Mr. Fogelman said.

  “Oh, I know she’s missing,” Kovac said. “And by the end of the day I’m probably going to be sure that she’s dead and lying on a steel table in the morgue.”

  “Aaron certainly had no part in any of that!”

  “He was part of the little ambush that prompted Penny Gray to leave the Rock and Bowl on her own that night, Mr. Fogelman. And then she disappeared. So see? You can’t say Junior here didn’t have anything to do with that. You throw a rock in a pond, you don’t have control of where the ripples go.”

  Wynn Fogelman stood up, trying not to look flustered. “I think we should go now, Aaron.”

  “Kyle Hatcher followed her out,” Aaron said, happy to throw the blame on someone else.

  “Kyle Hatcher doesn’t have a vehicle,” Kovac returned.

  “He came with her,” the boy threw back. “Why wouldn’t he leave with her too?”

  Kovac refused to react. “What time did you leave the Rock and Bowl that night, Aaron?”

  Fogelman Sr. put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Aaron. We’re leaving. Now.”

  The boy looked from his father to Kovac, not sure which authority figure to obey. “Later.
After them.”

  “And where did you go?”

  “Home,” his father said firmly. “He came home.”

  “Well, then,” Kovac said to the elder Fogelman. “You’re a hell of a lot luckier than Penny Gray’s mother, aren’t you?”

  He watched the Fogelmans exit the room—father, ramrod straight, chin up; son, looking at the ground, shoulders slouched, hands in the pockets of his hoodie. He followed them to the hall and watched them walk out as Tippen joined him.

  “Which do you think would be worse?” Tippen asked. “Knowing you’re a son of a bitch or knowing you fathered one?”

  “Toss-up,” Kovac said as his phone vibrated in his pocket. He pulled it out and looked at the screen. Liska.

  “Do I need to help you bury the body?” he asked by way of greeting.

  “No. But I’m touched to know that you would.”

  “Well, in the last hour I’ve come to a greater understanding of why tigers eat their young.”

  “That insight might come in handier than you think,” she said. “Penny Gray is dead.”

  29

  Liska marched into the lovely offices of Dr. Bob Iverson, her heart thumping with purpose. The receptionist behind the elegant cherrywood counter looked up at her, recognizing her from before, but uncertain about the expression Liska knew she wore now. The bland, polite smile she had given the woman when she picked up the X-rays had been replaced by something harder and darker.

  “Did we forget something?” the woman asked quietly.

  “I would say so. I need to speak with Dr. Iverson.”

  “He’s seeing patients all afternoon. I’m afraid he won’t be available to speak to you until after four P.M.,” she said with a practiced look of apology.

  Liska pulled her ID out and thrust her badge at the woman. “This is police business in relation to an urgent missing persons situation. Dr. Iverson will see me now.”

  The staff on the other side of the counter all turned and looked at Liska with wide eyes, like a small herd of gazelles suddenly aware of a lioness in their midst.

  The receptionist turned to a nurse in purple scrubs. “Angie, would you please tell Dr. Iverson—”