The 9th Girl

by Tami Hoag

  “Videos?”

  She pulled the duffel bag around and unzipped it and dug around inside to pull out Gray’s MacBook.

  “Everything is on here,” she said enthusiastically as she opened the laptop and turned it on. “Gray recorded everything. She was always shooting videos and taking pictures and recording stuff on her phone. I used to give her a hard time about it, but now . . . I guess it was a good thing after all.”

  The computer came to life with a musical ta-dah! and a screen full of purple flowers.

  “You’re familiar with her computer?” Julia asked.

  “Yeah. I have the same one, but I mostly use my iPad now,” she said. “I can show you how to get to everything on it. It’s not hard.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not very good with technology.”

  “This is easy,” Brittany said, typing in Gray’s password.

  “You know her password?”

  “We made them up for each other last summer.”

  And she hadn’t changed it, Brittany noted, despite the fact that Brittany hadn’t been a very good friend to her in recent months. Guilt sharpened its claws on her a little bit for that.

  “Did she share that with a lot of people?” Julia asked. “That doesn’t seem like very good security.”

  “I don’t think she shared it with anybody else,” Brittany said, refraining from saying that Gray had no one else to share her password with, unless it was with one of her coffeehouse friends. Britt didn’t know any of them.

  She swept the cursor around the screen, pointing and clicking until she came to the page she wanted.

  “These are all the poems she posted to YouTube,” she said, scrolling through the list of videos. She clicked on one at random and turned the sound up.

  Suddenly, Gray was looking at them both, and her voice came out of the computer’s small speakers like a ghost.

  I’m not who you see

  I’m me

  Face is a mask, a shell

  You think you know me

  You don’t

  Ink and steel is a suit of armor

  A test to sort the worthy

  You don’t like me?

  Good

  Close the store, lock the door

  I’m saved.

  Saved the trouble, saved the pain.

  The poem said a lot about who Gray had been, and why. It only occurred to Brittany belatedly the impact the words might have on Gray’s mother, who had never been able to get past her daughter’s defenses—and maybe had never really tried. Gray had said her mother hated everything she had ever done to express herself—her hair, her piercings, her tattoo, the way she dressed.

  Julia Gray brushed stray tears from her cheeks, her hands trembling.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Gray. I didn’t mean to upset you,” Brittany said. “I just thought that you’d be able to see her again and hear her voice.”

  And be reminded of every fight they’d ever had and every reason they hadn’t gotten along.

  “It’s okay, Brittany,” she said. “It’s not your fault my daughter shut me out of her life—especially lately. I don’t know what made her so angry, do you? I wish I understood. Did she share things with you? Her feelings, her life. Did she tell you things?”

  Brittany shook her head. Gray had never been one to confide. She was too guarded. She best expressed herself through her poetry, and even in that she cloaked her pain and experience in verse. She had always spoken in riddles, alluding to experiences and ideas Brittany knew nothing about. She had always put it off to Gray being Gray, an artist.

  But even as she thought that, Gray’s words to Christina came back to her from that night at the Rock & Bowl. The thing Christina had made her promise not to tell. It wasn’t true, Christina had said. Just a cruel lie from an angry Gray, striking out with her best weapon: her words. Brittany wondered now if that was the truth or if Gray’s words had been the truth.

  “Brittany?” Julia Gray asked.

  How could she say it? It probably wasn’t true. Julia Gray wouldn’t want to hear it. What purpose would be served in repeating something said in anger, designed just to cut the other person as deeply as possible?

  She could see it in her mind’s eye, though, like a scene from a movie: Gray almost nose to nose with Christina, her expression as vicious as her words. Christina’s eyes going wide in shock, then narrowing to slits like the eyes of a snake.

  I fucked your precious father.

  Christina’s father. Julia Gray’s fiancé.

  “No,” Brittany said, pushing to her feet. She couldn’t look at Julia Gray now. “She didn’t tell me anything. I should probably go,” she said. “I need to get home.”

  Julia stood and went with her to the foyer.

  “Thank you again for coming, Brittany. You’re a kind, sweet girl,” she said. “I’m glad to know Penny had a friend like you.”

  She embraced Brittany tightly, with more emotion than seemed appropriate, and a strange chill went through Brittany just before Julia Gray said, “I’m so sorry. I really can’t let you go.”

  46

  “I’m sorry I don’t have a trunk for you to fall out of,” Fitz said as he put Dana Nolan in the back of the van.

  She had finally given up and succumbed to the relief of unconsciousness. He went on speaking to her anyway. She was like a doll now, a thing he could play with. She couldn’t answer him. She wouldn’t scream, didn’t move, didn’t react, didn’t resist. She was more inanimate object than human.

  “Then again,” he said, “that was really sloppy. That was what really pissed me off—that they would think I would be that careless and that sloppy. That was offensive to me.

  “I’ve been doing this a long time,” he told her. “And with great success, I might add. But here’s the thing with being that good: No one knows. Genius wants recognition.”

  He covered her with a blanket, just in case. Couldn’t have someone looking in the window while they sat at a stoplight. Those were the kinds of stupid, sloppy mistakes that ended with incarceration.

  The key to success was riding that fine edge of the ego.

  He had been the tactical master for a long time. Tonight he would take it to the next level: art.

  Euphoria filled him as he got behind the wheel of the van and started the engine. Tonight the world would be his stage, Minneapolis would be his canvas, Dana Nolan would be his masterpiece—a living piece of art.

  They wanted to credit him with a zombie.

  He would give them a zombie.

  47

  Brittany tried to pull away, but Gray’s mother held her, saying over and over, “I’m so sorry. I can’t let you go. I’m so sorry.”

  “Stop it!” Brittany said, struggling. “You’re scaring me!”

  She tried again to pull away. Julia Gray grabbed her hair in each fist, fingernails digging into her scalp, and gave her a rough shake.

  “Be still! I can’t let you go!”

  “Oh my God.”

  Brittany started to cry, huge tears slipping from her eyes, but she made no sound. She should have been screaming, she thought, but there was a part of her that couldn’t believe what was happening. This couldn’t be real. She had to be imagining it or misinterpreting it.

  Her brain struggled and scrambled to make some kind of sense of it. Julia didn’t want her to go because she was lonely, because she was missing her daughter. I’m the only one who’s come to say they’re sorry. I’m the only friend her daughter had. She was just overreacting to the stress of losing her child.

  I’m just overreacting, Brittany thought. She’s not really trying to stop me from leaving.

  She tried to turn toward the door. Julia kept hold of her hair in her left hand and began striking her with the right, despite the fact that she had already injured that hand and wore a brace.

  “You can’t go!” she snapped. “Stop trying!”

  The scent of liquor soured her breath.

  “Let me go!” Brittany
said. Shouted. Screamed. “Let me go! Oh my God! Stop it! Let me go!”

  Frantic, she tried to scramble backward, her feet slipping and sliding on the floor. She kicked at her attacker. She slapped at her. She felt like a kitten pawing at a lion.

  “Don’t fight me!” Julia screamed. “Stop fighting me!”

  Brittany twisted and tried to lunge for the door. Julia came with her, suddenly rushing forward instead of pulling back. Their legs tangled and then they were falling, the back of Brittany’s head striking the heavy wooden door like a hammer.

  Black spiderwebs flashed across her vision; then everything went dark as her phone silently vibrated against her belly in the pouch of her hoodie sweater.

  • • •

  R U HOME YET?

  Kyle typed the words and sent the message and waited impatiently. He didn’t like the idea of Brittany walking to Gray’s house and back by herself. It wasn’t far, and it wasn’t a bad neighborhood or anything. He just thought a girl shouldn’t go walking around by herself at night, especially with all the talk about serial killers in the news and everything like that.

  He would have felt better being there with her. Even if he had just walked her over and back without ever going in to see Mrs. Gray. He wished he had thought of that sooner.

  He walked around his room feeling like a tiger in a cage, watched by the life-size cutout of Georges St-Pierre mounted to the back of his bedroom door. St. Pierre in fight shorts, bare-chested, muscles bulging, a serious expression on his face, his hands resting on his hips. A stack of Japanese characters were inked on his left chest, expressing the nature of his character—saying that he has a good side and a dark side but that respect is the most important thing. Respect for self. Respect for others.

  Kyle imagined he felt his hero’s disapproval. GSP wouldn’t have let a woman walk alone in the dark of night. Ultor, the hero Kyle had created, would never have neglected his duty to protect. What had he been thinking letting Brittany go alone?

  Gray was dead. Murdered.

  His mom and Sam were downstairs talking about a serial killer.

  Kyle flashed back to the scene from the morning—the nasty look on Christina’s face as she glared at Brittany from the passenger’s seat of Aaron Fogelman’s car, Fogelman’s rage as he had come at Kyle swinging his fists with bad intentions. Christina was angry with Britt. What if she and her henchman decided to do something to her? He could still see Christina lunging at Gray that night at the Rock & Bowl.

  His hands were shaking as sent another text.

  Where R U? Pls answer!

  But she didn’t answer.

  She was probably still talking with Gray’s mom, he reasoned. Kyle wouldn’t have had that much to say beyond I’m sorry for your loss, but he was a guy. Women liked to go on and on.

  He stood by his window and looked out at the dark, seeing only his shadowed reflection looking back at him.

  R U OK? He typed and sent and paced some more.

  He stared at his phone until his eyes burned.

  No message came back.

  • • •

  SHE DIDN’T KNOW how long she lay unconscious. Seconds? Minutes? Longer? She came to with a sense of floating. Or maybe she was dead. No. A hand was wrapped tight around her wrist. Her arm being pulled from her shoulder. She was being dragged, dragged across the floor, down the hall.

  Adrenaline burst through her like a bomb exploding. In an instant she was struggling, flailing, scrambling. She yanked her arm free of Julia Gray’s grasp and struggled to get her feet under her and get up.

  Julia was on her in a heartbeat, grabbing her head, falling down on her, banging her head against the floor, over and over, shouting, “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

  Black splotches burst before Brittany’s eyes with each hard smash of her skull against the floor. She would lose consciousness again if she couldn’t get away. She gathered all her strength to roll and push and get the woman off her. Again she scrambled to gain her feet and try to run.

  She was running in the wrong direction now, running toward the kitchen and away from the front door.

  Julia dove onto her from behind like an animal dragging down prey, knocking her forward, knocking her down, knocking the wind from her. Brittany’s chin hit the floor with a horrible, shattering pain in her jaw and inside her mouth as teeth broke. The bright metallic taste of blood flooded her mouth.

  She couldn’t move. She couldn’t struggle. She tried to suck in air and choked on her own blood as Julia Gray kicked her and struck her again and again.

  Beneath her, trapped against her stomach in the pouch of her hoodie, her phone vibrated, alerting her to another incoming text. She couldn’t answer. She imagined the person on the other end waiting for her reply as she was being killed.

  48

  They had been sitting at the island in her kitchen for long enough that her butt was starting to go numb, going over notes and reports and interviews until they were bleary-eyed.

  Nikki had Penny Gray’s cell phone usage details in front of her, looking at the calls and text messages sent the night of her disappearance and the days following. After the night the girl had gone missing there had been only a couple of messages sent and received.

  “This doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. “She went missing the night of the thirtieth. She stopped calling and texting friends. I don’t know about the other kids, but I know Kyle continued to text her right up until we ID’d her body. He never got an answer from her. He never heard from her after she left the Rock and Bowl.”

  “I think she was dead that night,” Kovac said. “Dead or incapacitated.”

  “But if her killer had her phone, why bother to answer the mother’s text messages and no one else’s? If the idea was to toy with her loved ones or, for whatever reason, try to make it look like she was still alive, why not answer a friend’s text? It’s not like it’s hard just to acknowledge a text. OK. Not now. Fuck off. Whatever. Why only answer the mother?”

  Kovac pulled his reading glasses off and cleaned them with the tail of his wrinkled shirt. “I don’t know.”

  Nikki paged through the records. Penny Gray’s phone use had been covered in a family plan. The service records they had gotten from the carrier included both Gray cell phones, mother and daughter. Nikki turned the page to the usage attributed to Julia Gray’s phone.

  She thought back to what Sam had said about Julia Gray having left her phone in the car the morning she had made the appeal to the media downtown with Captain Kasselmann. She remembered when he’d said it thinking, What mother of a missing child forgets their phone someplace? She had forgotten about it after that. They’d had so much going on, had gotten pulled in so many different directions. This was the kind of investigation they could drown in. Too many details, too many people, too many possibilities. It was too easy for things to slip through the cracks as their attention was pulled one way then the other.

  She sighed and twisted her neck against the stiffness setting in. She looked at Julia Gray’s phone records now, looked at the dates and times and numbers called and text messages sent, and a sick feeling began to swirl in the pit of her stomach, stirring the gallon of oily coffee she had drunk.

  “What?” Kovac asked.

  He could feel the change in her energy. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t said a word. He just felt it. They had been partners for that long.

  “Kyle texted this girl over and over after she went missing,” she said. She looked at her partner, seeing her concern mirrored in his face. “Why didn’t her mother?”

  The moment hung between them, a thick tension vibrating with a dark sense of something too close to excitement.

  “She wasn’t looking for her, Sam,” she said, glancing down at the paperwork again. “Even after she knew Penny was missing, Julia Gray wasn’t looking for her daughter.”

  “But the girl’s phone went dead or got turned off at some point,” Kovac said.

  “That doesn’t stop her m
other’s phone from working.”

  In a flash every conversation Nikki had had with Julia Gray went through her head. She saw her expressions, heard the emotions in her voice. She thought of the mixed messages of guilt and blame and self-absorption. She relived the moment Julia Gray had struck her, hard, with a hand she had already injured somehow. She thought of how she had described Aaron Fogelman earlier in the evening: narcissistic with violent tendencies. The same could be said of Penny Gray’s mother.

  “Something set this all off,” she said. “They were going along, consistently miserable. What changed?”

  “The engagement,” Kovac said.

  “Let’s assume the molestation,” Nikki said. “Her mother gets engaged to the man who molested her. That’s got to be the biggest fuck-you ever.”

  “There’s a confrontation,” Sam speculated. “Things get out of hand.”

  “If what we think is true, Penny had the capacity to ruin Michael Warner.”

  “Warner is the better suspect of the two. Seriously, Tinks. You’re a mother. You think a mother could do that to her own child?”

  Nikki frowned. Her head was throbbing. “I don’t know. I don’t want to think so, but people lose their minds. Her daughter was a burden, a problem, a thorn in her side. She finally gets a shot at wedded bliss with a doctor, no less, and her daughter had the capacity to ruin that for her.”

  “That’s about as fucked-up as it gets,” Kovac said. “Maybe she didn’t try to reach the girl because she didn’t want her to come back. She could hate the kid and want her gone, but she didn’t want to hear you telling her her daughter was dead.”

  “She was pissed off,” Nikki said. “Maybe she didn’t want to hear it because she never wanted anybody to find that body. Who knows where Penny Gray would have ended up that night if the DOT had fixed that road. Maybe Julia was one giant pothole away from committing the perfect crime.”

  “Mom, can I go out?”