The 9th Girl

by Tami Hoag

  Someone had been put on a stretcher that was being wheeled toward the ambulance. Kyle didn’t recognize the face. It was bloody and swollen and misshapen. A girl, he guessed by the hair—blond hair.

  “Brittany!”

  His mom wrapped her arms around him and held him in place as he tried to lunge toward the ambulance.

  “She’s going to be all right,” his mom said. She reached up and turned his face toward her and said it again. “She’s going to be all right, Kyle. She’s alive. She’s alive.”

  Kyle stared at her, not knowing what to do next. He was shaking and sweating, and there were tears in his eyes.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she said again, putting her arms around him.

  Kyle hugged his mother as tight as he could, and they stood in the middle of the street and cried.

  54

  Nikki walked beside her son through the waiting room of the Hennepin County Medical Center ER. Post–New Year’s madness, it was a slow night. Assorted drunks and junkies, people who thought the common cold was a medical emergency.

  “I can’t believe any of this happened,” Kyle said as they walked outside, where flurries had begun to fall like crystals in a snow globe. “It’s like a crazy nightmare.”

  “I wish that’s all it was,” she said, rubbing a hand slowly up and down his back—as much to comfort herself as to comfort him.

  Kovac had gone back to the office to get the paperwork started on Julia Gray and Michael Warner, letting her bring Kyle to the ER to see that Brittany would be all right.

  Fractures to her chin and jaw would require surgery, and she had a concussion and several broken fingers and fractured ribs, but she would recover physically faster than she would recover from the trauma of what had happened to her. That would be a much longer battle.

  With her mother sitting beside her in the exam room, stroking her hair, Brittany had answered what questions she could, barely able to speak, mostly using her uninjured hand to indicate yes or no. With her mother’s heart breaking for the girl, Nikki kept her questions to the bare minimum. Yes, Julia Gray had attacked her. Yes, Michael Warner had been a party to it. Yes, they had talked about Julia Gray having killed her daughter.

  When she was done asking questions of Brittany, Nikki asked Mrs. Lawler if Kyle might see her daughter for a minute. Standing beside Brittany’s bed in the exam room, Kyle had earnestly promised her he would be there for her through her recovery.

  Nikki thought she would die of pride and love for him.

  Now they stood outside the ER doors. Nikki breathed in the cold night air and wished it would cleanse them both of what had happened that night.

  “Gray’s mom killed her,” Kyle said. “How could that happen? How could she kill her own kid? Over what?”

  Nikki didn’t know what to tell him. There would be a long explanation made by psychiatric experts at Julia Gray’s trial. Explanations of Julia’s personality disorders and the stresses of raising a difficult child, of tainted family dynamics and how normal needs and desires could morph and twist into something grotesque. Some expert witness would cast the blame on Penny Gray, painting her as a seductress who had tried to usurp her mother’s dominant position by sleeping with her man. They would beg for mercy and understanding for a woman who “just snapped.”

  And all of it was just a fancy way of saying that people could be selfish and people could be evil, and even if your only real desire in the world was to be accepted, life could fuck you up in the blink of an eye for no reason that made any sense to anyone.

  All she could say to her son was “I don’t know.”

  Kyle gave her a long look. So quiet, so internal. She always had to wonder what was going on inside him, but she had never wondered that he didn’t have a good heart.

  “I love you, Mom,” he said.

  “I love you too,” Nikki said. She looked up at him and reached up and touched his cheek. “I love everything about you. Don’t you ever think I don’t. Even when you make me mad, I love you so much I can hardly stand it.”

  A radio car was waiting at the end of the ambulance bay to take them home.

  “When this is over, I’m going to take a hot bath and sleep for an entire day,” she said as they walked toward the car. “But when I finally come to, we’re going to talk about spending some serious family time together. How does that sound?”

  “Sounds good,” he said. “We miss you, you know. When you work too much. We miss you, me and R.J.”

  “I know,” she said. “I miss you guys too. We’re going to fix that. I promise.”

  But the promise would have to wait.

  Kovac stood beside the radio car with a grave expression.

  He put a hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “The officer is going to give you a lift home, sport. I need your mom.”

  Nikki didn’t ask the question until the squad car had pulled out. And then it wasn’t a question, but a statement.

  “Dana Nolan.”

  • • •

  THE SCENE WAS already awash in artificial light by the time they got there. At a glance it appeared to be a traffic accident. A nondescript panel van had run head-on into a light pole on an otherwise dark stretch of service road leading to the Loring Park sculpture garden. Police vehicles blocked off the scene. Kovac pulled in behind one, and they got out to walk the rest of the way.

  A young uniformed officer hustled toward them and filled them in as they walked.

  “He told her she was his masterpiece!” he said excitedly. “It’s fucking sick. You’ll see.”

  “She’s alive?” Kovac asked.

  “She’s messed up. In and out of consciousness. They’re loading her in the bus now. She just keeps saying ‘I’m his masterpiece’ over and over. Apparently, he decided he wanted to leave a living victim, but she was a little more alive than he realized.”

  Kovac’s breath caught hard in his throat at his first sight of Dana Nolan. The perky morning news girl was unrecognizable, her face battered and cut and misshapen. Her tormentor had drawn a huge red smile around her mouth. She looked like a clown from a macabre nightmare. Her eyes were glassy and flat, like doll’s eyes, and she babbled incessantly.

  “I’m his masterpiece. I’m his masterpiece.”

  Kovac swore under his breath. Liska gasped and looked as shocked and shaken as he had ever seen her as the EMT drew back the sheet that covered the girl.

  She was naked except for a wide red ribbon tied around one wrist, the long trailing ends fluttering in the cold breeze. The number 9 had been carved into her chest with a knife.

  “Quinn was right,” Kovac said as they watched the crew load the girl into the ambulance. “He didn’t kill Penny Gray, and he didn’t want credit for it. There’s his ninth girl, right there.”

  “It’s fucking sick. I told you,” the uniformed officer said, leading them toward the van. “But you have to see the rest.”

  They stopped under the pool of white light washing down from the bent light pole and looked into the van from the passenger’s side.

  “License says his name is Gerald Fitzgerald,” the officer said. “The van comes back to a Gerald Fitzpatrick.”

  Kovac made a sound that was part laughter, part disbelief as he looked at the driver and said, “Frank, we hardly knew you.”

  The man they had known as Frank Fitzgerald, the man who had reported the body of Rose Reiser a year past, sat slumped over the wheel of the van, his face turned toward them, eyes open, a screwdriver buried in his temple.

  “He finally made his mistake,” Kovac said. “Happy holiday, motherfucker.”

  55

  “It only happened once,” Michael Warner said. He sat with his elbows on his thighs, his head in his hands, ashamed to look up, to see Kovac staring at him, to see his own attorney looking away in embarrassment and disgust. He had spent the last ten hours in a holding cell and looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.

  “She came to my office upset, heartbroken, sobbing. S
he’d had a terrible fight with her father. It was always the same thing with Penny. So antagonistic, a tongue like a razor. She would push and push, then be crushed by the outcome. She dared people to love her and then couldn’t understand when they didn’t.”

  “So she came to your office . . . ,” Kovac said. He sat with one arm resting on the table, looking bored, he suspected. Looking like he’d heard this story a hundred times. He had, in fact. The story of the young girl and the grown man who couldn’t help himself. It still made him want to puke. But it didn’t serve his purpose to let that show.

  The lawyer spoke up for the third time. “Michael, I’m going to advise you again not to do this.”

  “Shut up, Harold,” Warner said.

  He was trembling visibly though the room was like a sauna and he had sweat through his shirt.

  “That was both infuriating and heartbreaking,” he explained. “To see her crushed like that. I have a daughter of my own. I can’t stand to see her disappointed.”

  Did you fuck her too? Kovac wanted to ask, but he said nothing.

  “I wanted to comfort her,” Warner said. “That’s all I meant to do.”

  And now would come the part of the story where the girl started to move against him, and then they were kissing, and one thing led to another, and he just couldn’t help himself . . . with a child.

  He started to cry, then fought it back and wiped his face with his hands.

  “I told her it could never happen again,” he said.

  Because, of course, it had been her fault. Blame the victim. He couldn’t keep his dick in his pants, but it was the girl’s fault. A messed-up sixteen-year-old girl whose father rejected her and mother resented her. She was supposed to be the one in control.

  “But . . . ,” Kovac prompted.

  “I don’t mean to make it sound like I’m not taking blame,” Warner said, looking up at him. “I know it was wrong.”

  But . . .

  “Penny was a very manipulative girl. She understood power.”

  And now, the seductive-temptress part of the story. Kovac heaved a sigh.

  “What happened the day she broke her wrist?” he asked.

  “She threw a tantrum. She came to my office with the intent of us . . .” He didn’t want to say “having sex.” The idea was disgusting to him now—or so he wanted to pretend.

  The man of integrity standing up for what was right.

  “She blew up. She started hitting me. I grabbed her arm to stop her. She tried to pull away . . . I was sick about it.”

  “Did Julia know?” Kovac asked.

  He shook his head.

  “I didn’t want her ever to know. I care about her. I truly do. There was no reason for her know any of it. It was just a terrible mistake. I stopped seeing Penny as a patient . . .”

  “And started seeing her mother.”

  Warner said nothing.

  And he bought the girl a car to shut her up. And he had probably kept fucking her on the side because she had probably blackmailed him into it. And that was why she hadn’t told anyone else. Kovac could have spun the story on and on into yet another sordid quilt of human perversion.

  “What happened the night the girl died?”

  The attorney stepped forward. “Michael, please . . .”

  Warner turned away from him and looked across the table at Kovac. “You have to understand it happened in the heat of the moment. She just snapped.”

  “Julia?”

  “You have to understand what a struggle she’s had with Penny these last few years. Her whole life, really. One defiance after another. She was at the end of her rope.”

  He stood up to move around, his hands on his head, his hands on his hips, his arms crossed in front of him.

  “Why is it so hot in here?” he asked, rubbing the back of his neck. “I feel nauseous.”

  “I don’t think that’s the heat,” Kovac said. “You need to sit back down, Dr. Warner.”

  “Penny was upset about our engagement,” he said, coming back to the table. “She was at the house when we got back that night. She’d been drinking. She was belligerent.”

  He paused and looked off at the wall as if he were watching the memory play there like a movie on a screen.

  “They were in the kitchen. I was standing at the doorway to the hall . . .”

  • • •

  “SHE SAID, ‘How can you marry him when I fucked him first?’”

  Julia Gray stared at the table, her eyes vacant and glassy.

  Liska sat across from her. She glanced up at the one-way mirror, knowing a prosecutor from the county attorney’s office stood on the other side.

  “That must have been a terrible shock,” she said.

  “She had said it before. The night she left. We fought,” she said, absently rubbing her injured wrist. “I called her a liar. I told her to get out. Do you have children, Detective?”

  “I have two boys.”

  “Boys are so much easier.” She sat for a moment chewing at a thumbnail. “With girls, everything is a fight, a competition; they want to control and manipulate. It’s exhausting. She was relentless.”

  She was a child.

  “When she said it that night, Michael was behind her,” she said. “I could see his face.”

  “You realized she was telling the truth. What happened then?”

  Her eyes darted all around the room as if following the flight of some tiny frantic bird. Her attorney sat quietly, offering nothing. They would go for some kind of insanity defense, Liska imagined. Diminished capacity: the inability to know the difference between right and stabbing your own child to death because your boyfriend molested her.

  “I don’t know,” Julia said, though her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. It was like a nightmare. I still can’t believe any of it happened.”

  Liska picked up Penny Gray’s iPhone and tapped her way to the screen she wanted. The phone had been found in Julia Gray’s kitchen. Kyle and Brittany had both said Gray had made videos of everything with her phone—her performances, her poetry, her few friends . . . her own murder.

  “Maybe this will jog your memory,” she said, touching the Play icon. She put the phone on the table and pushed it toward the woman.

  Julia appeared on the screen, angry, her face contorted with rage, screaming, “Shut up! Shut up! You’re lying!”

  Her daughter’s voice behind the camera: “I fucked him first! How do you like that, Mommy? Your precious fiancé. He’s nothing but a fucking child molester!”

  “I hate you!” Julia screamed, her face nearly purple, her eyes bulging. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”

  There was no question at all what happened next. They didn’t need Julia Gray’s memory or Michael Warner’s eyewitness testimony. It was captured there on her daughter’s phone: Julia grabbing a short knife off the kitchen counter and lunging at the girl, screaming and slashing.

  The picture went topsy-turvy as the phone fell to the floor. The rest of the video was of the ceiling, but the audio went on and on and on. The screams, the pleading, the horrible sounds of a horrible crime. Michael Warner shouting in the background, “Julia! No!”

  Across the table, Julia Gray’s eyes went wider and wider. Her whole body began to shake violently, as if she were being given jolt after jolt of electricity.

  “Oh my God. Oh my God! OH MY GOD! PENNY!!”

  Scream after scream tore from her throat. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she fell to the floor, convulsing.

  • • •

  “SHE GRABBED A KNIFE and just started stabbing her,” Warner said. “It was surreal. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t believe it was happening. It was all a blur.”

  “Really?” Kovac said. “She had seventeen stab wounds. It takes a while to stab someone seventeen times.”

  He raised his fist and brought it down on the tabletop once, twice, three times, four times. Over and over and over. Michael Warner flinched with
each blow. Seventeen of them.

  Penny Gray would have ruined him. He had thought about it every day, that a bitter, angry, hurt child had but to say something to the right person and his life would unravel like a cheap sweater.

  “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  Warner rubbed a hand across his forehead and shifted on his chair, his agitation growing.

  Now came the hard part of the story. How could he explain away what they had done next? A crime of passion happened in the heat of a single moment. Nearly twenty-four hours had passed between the murder of Penny Gray and her body falling from the trunk of Julia Gray’s car.

  “It was too late,” Warner muttered. “The girl was dead. Julia was out of her mind. I had to help her. I felt responsible. What good would it have done to call the police? It happened in the heat of the moment. She just snapped. Julia doesn’t deserve to go to prison. She’s not a killer.”

  Kovac said nothing. His silence was a greater condemnation than if he had pointed out the truth. Penny Gray was dead at the hands of her mother. Julia Gray was a murderer. She was a murderer who had then attacked Brittany Lawler.

  “I had to help her,” Warner said.

  “What did you think?” Kovac asked. “That you could just get rid of the body and no one would notice the girl was gone? People would think she just ran away? No one would give a shit?”

  All of the above.

  The saddest part of that was that he was probably right. Penny Gray had a reputation of running away, of being defiant. Anything could happen to a girl like that.

  “You had to help her,” Kovac said. “You had to make the girl unrecognizable, so in the event her body was found, she would be just another Jane Doe. Probably a runaway. And take half her clothes off while you’re at it, so it would look like a sex crime. She was probably turning tricks and crossed paths with a bad, bad man.”

  Warner hung his head.

  “Turns out, she did,” Kovac said. “You know, Doctor, she wasn’t dead.”

  He waited for Warner to look up at him, his expression a mix of suspicion, confusion, and panic.