Every Secret Thing

by Laura Lippman

  Part II

  The Dogs of Pompeii

  Saturday,

  July 4

  16.

  The elevators in the Baltimore County Public Safety Building were famously slow, so all but the laziest workers had an informal rule known as “one floor up and two floors down.” Nancy, however, always checked the elevator bays before ducking into the stairwells. You never knew when the commissioner or a major might be waiting there, or a detective with whom she needed to compare notes. This was the kind of thing she had learned from her uncle Stan, who had been known as the thirty-three–thirty-three lieutenant, for he had attained that rank at the age of thirty-three and advanced no higher until his retirement thirty-three years later.

  But there was zero expectation of a useful chance encounter on a Saturday morning, especially over a holiday weekend, so Nancy went straight for the stairs, almost running the steps from the tenth floor, home of Homicide, to the eleventh, which housed the crime lab. The eleventh was the top floor, and the lab was there for a practical reason: the placement reduced the building’s exposure to damage if the lab’s contents ever exploded. Nancy had found this possibility ludicrous when she first joined the department, but it no longer seemed so. Everything was possible now.

  “I didn’t know you were working this case,” said the lab tech, Holly Varitek. “Isn’t it awfully fast for you to be up again?”

  Nancy shrugged, determined not to bitch. Infante had thrown a tantrum when Lenhardt changed the rotation on them last night, following the sergeant into the men’s room to plead his case. Infante had planned to drive out to Deep Creek Lake with the redheaded barmaid, Charlotte something. He had slammed out, and been curt to Nancy the rest of the night. Guys could get away with being bratty. Nancy had to be stoic. She even had to be stoic about being stoic.

  “Well, at least your snatcher was considerate,” said Holly, a chatty type inclined to fill silences. Brisk and wide-eyed, with shiny dark hair and vivid coloring, Holly was one of those people who seemed to be put together with higher quality parts than everyone else. Even her metabolism was better than the average person’s, for she could eat anything she wanted and not get fat. Nancy couldn’t help noticing that.

  “Considerate how?”

  “Well, first of all he—you’re assuming a he, right, given that the stuff was found in the men’s room—left the girl’s hair with the jumper. It’s like he wanted to make it easy for us to compare the DNA if the blood didn’t match. Of course, we still needed the mother’s sample, for control, because you wouldn’t want to assume the pile of hair is the girl’s hair. You see—”

  “I know,” Nancy said, trying not to let her impatience show. The people with technical expertise—the lab techs, the M.E.’s, even those who conducted ballistic analysis—were all a little in love with their knowledge, like eleven-year-old boys who had just learned some basic fact of science or math and had to bore the rest of the world with it. “Do we have a match on the blood or not?”

  Holly’s easygoing temperament made her impossible to offend. “The spots on the jumper are definitely blood, but it’s not the missing girl’s, or the mother’s. No match. It does, however, match this man’s T-shirt, which was balled up in the same trash can and had a lot more blood on it.”

  “Huh.” Nancy slumped against the counter, thinking. It struck her as a backward break, the kind of information that widened the investigation for now, but could narrow it later, with luck. The blood on the jumper was probably the kidnapper’s, although it wasn’t 100 percent. If they made an arrest, they’d have a key piece of physical evidence.

  The only problem was how were they going to make an arrest? The biggest break in the case would be the saddest one as well—the discovery of a body, which might yield more clues than the men’s room at Westview Mall. Nancy had barely slept last night, wondering if the girl might still be alive. She so wanted her to be alive. The case had been given to Homicide because of the large amount of blood on the T-shirt, but now they knew it wasn’t the girl’s blood, so it was a not unreasonable hope.

  “Does it seem weird to you,” Nancy asked the lab tech, “that the blood is on the front of the jumper?”

  Holly shrugged. “Not particularly. Someone was bleeding heavily. A head wound could have dripped. Then again, the bloody T-shirt could have nothing to do with the jumper, could have stained it when someone tossed it in the trash.”

  “But if you were standing behind a child, cutting hair—” Nancy mimed the motion more for herself than Holly, and finished the thought in her head. It would be hard to cut oneself that severely with a pair of scissors, harder still to drip just a few drops of blood on the girl’s jumper while leaking blood all over a T-shirt. But if the kidnapper were standing in front—she acted out that scenario, too. No, it didn’t make sense. Perhaps the blood had fallen on the jumper after it was removed. Or, worse luck, maybe Holly was right, and the blood-soaked T-shirt had landed in the trash after the jumper, staining it by accident. Nancy could imagine some homeless man reaching into the garbage can to find a rag to stanch a wound.

  Had the child reached out and scratched the person who was cutting her hair? Children didn’t like haircuts, or so Nancy had heard from her cousins with kids. But you could hardly call this a haircut. Based on the thick coil of hair found in the trash can, the kidnapper had sliced the hair just below the elastic band that held Brittany Little’s ponytail. The act had been swift, with little attempt to shape or style the hair left on the girl’s head.

  Nancy carried the news, such as it was, back downstairs to Infante, who was cursing his luck at being the primary on this case. Not only was the disappearance of Brittany Little not a dunker or a gimme, it was going to attract press attention once the details began to shake loose. The department had managed to stall the press on Friday with the usual wink-wink, nudge-nudge signals. A few years back, there had been a rash of what Lenhardt called six-hour kidnappings. Teen girls in the city, girls who were apparently too impatient to take the nine months necessary to have their own babies, had started grabbing other people’s children as if they were dolls left untended. But it’s hard to steal a baby without drawing attention to yourself if you’re a teenage girl living with your own family, so those cases were always wrapped up in a matter of hours. “Easier to hide a pregnancy than a child,” Lenhardt sometimes said, usually when they were trying to track down a girl who had left her own baby in a Dumpster.

  The rash of six-hour kidnappings had been during the spring, seven years ago. The city cops had thought Olivia Barnes was one of those cases, Nancy recalled, at least in the beginning. There had been a baby-sitter, a heavyset, dimwitted girl whose story hadn’t tracked. Another seventy-two hours passed before they asked the academy class to search Leakin Park. Even then, they had thought it was more of a field exercise for the cadets than a mission that would yield results.

  “Stranger blood, huh?” Infante echoed when Nancy told him what she had learned on the eleventh floor. “Now, if I were a lucky guy, it would match the boyfriend.”

  “I thought they both came up pretty clean. No Social Services file, no neighbor complaints, no record of 911 calls to the address.” When a parent—or a parent’s partner—killed a child, there were usually a few practice runs.

  “Yeah, other than an assault charge on her and a weapons charge on him, they’re the nicest young couple since Mary and Joseph. But it’s the only thing that makes sense. Boyfriend goes too far administering discipline, he and panicky girlfriend concoct a cover-up. Who grabs a little girl from Value City? That’s not exactly the best place to find the next Lindbergh baby. You just know it ain’t going to be a big payday.”

  “Yeah, for that you gotta go to Ethan Allen, maybe Crate & Barrel.”

  Infante laughed. “You’re such a secret smart-ass. If Lenhardt knew half the shit you said—”

  “Did you check for sex perverts in that part of the county? Could be a Peeping Tom or a groper who’s worked his
way up to the next level.”

  “No one jumped out of the computer. The most likely ones are locked up.”

  “Biological father?”

  “He’s also locked up, in Worcester, Massachusetts.”

  Nancy picked up the photo of the girl off Infante’s desk. Such beautiful, beautiful hair, thick and shiny even under the cheap studio lights. It had been slicked back for the photo, but those baby ears could barely hold that cascading mane. Her ears were pierced, Nancy noticed, which she thought barbaric on children. “What about the scissors?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You saw the hair. It was shorn, not hacked off with a pen knife. Do you carry scissors on you? Real scissors, not Swiss Army knife ones? Because that’s what it’s going to take to go through a hank of hair like that.”

  “So either the guy is walking around with a pair of scissors—”

  “Or bought a pair after identifying his target. We should check the CVS, Jo-Ann’s Fabrics, every store in the mall that sells scissors. Everybody’s got computerized inventory, right? So we should know who sold scissors yesterday at what time. We also might want to see who bought clothes for a toddler at Westview yesterday. Because he didn’t take her out of there naked, or just in a pair of pull-ups.”

  Infante wagged an approving finger. “I like you, Porter.”

  “That can be our secret.”

  Infante opened a crisscross directory and began compiling a list of stores in Westview Mall. He didn’t have to tell Nancy that they would visit the stores in person. They did their job face-to-face, showing badge and ID. No one worth talking to ever volunteered anything over the telephone.

  Nancy kept staring at the photo, the original they had used to make the dupes for the television stations and the newspaper. It was a Kmart special, or one of those mall photo studios, the girl backed by a field of fake flowers. Nancy should stick it in an envelope now, make sure it got back to the mother as soon as possible. How horrible it would be if the photo arrived after the fact—assuming the fact turned out to be the worst possible fact of all. That was the assumption, despite the hair and the discarded clothes. There was no getting past the blood on the T-shirt, even if it wasn’t the girl’s. Something had happened in that rest room.

  It was funny about the photo, how it had been played in the media. As usual, the Beacon-Light had demanded the most from the department and given the least. They had even tried to persuade Nancy to drive the photo to the downtown office last night, arguing that it would mean overtime if a reporter had to act as the courier. As if Nancy cared about their overtime. The paper had ended up sending a young reporter from the county bureau. But because the department was noncommittal about the nature of the girl’s disappearance, the paper hadn’t used the photo at all. Clearly, some Beacon-Light editor had run the available information through his formula for news and decided it didn’t qualify. Because the girl’s parents were poor? Because the girl was biracial? It was hard to understand how newspapers thought. Television was better for this stuff, anyway. Played it high, got results. People watched television.

  Plus, television kept the missing girl in play all day long, while the newspaper was a one-shot deal at best. Every local station had shown the photo on the ten and eleven o’clock newscasts and were now using it on their Saturday morning news shows every half hour. Nancy could tell how often the morning television shows were cycling by the pattern of the phone calls. The girl’s picture would pop up on Channel 2 or 11 or 13—just the picture, and an explanation that she had been missing since she “wandered off” in Westview Friday evening—and a few minutes later the phone would ring the double staccato chime that indicated it was being forwarded from the 911 communications center. The public didn’t realize it, but the department gave out a seven-digit exchange for the com center in such cases, which meant that everyone who called ended up on the Caller ID log. So far, every tipster had been a lunatic. But it only took one, as Lenhardt liked to say. It only took one.

  The phone rang just then, almost as if Nancy had willed it.

  “Nancy Porter?”

  “Yes?” This was odd. Her name wasn’t out there in connection with the case. Only Bonnie, the corporal, had gone on camera.

  The woman on the line quickly answered the unspoken question. “I just spoke to your sergeant and he said I should speak to you. I have…information.”

  Nancy sat at her desk, working her notepad from her purse, digging out a pen. “Can I ask your name?”

  The caller ignored that question, racing ahead, eager to say her piece. “There is something I think you should know about the missing girl, Detective Porter. Something you would not be expected to know, but something I cannot help knowing. When you have this piece of information, I think it will change the way you are pursuing this matter.”

  Jesus, Nancy thought, has this tight-ass woman ever heard of contractions?

  “This is information that might not be meaningful to you, but it is meaningful to me, and it should be meaningful to you. It will be meaningful to you if you pay careful attention—”

  Holy Christ. How had this one gotten past Lenhardt? She was clearly a well-intentioned wacko, some shut-in who yearned to find her place in the world by pretending to knowledge she didn’t have. Was Lenhardt playing a joke on Nancy or testing her?

  “If you could get to the point, ma’am,” Nancy said as gently as possible.

  “This is the way I get to the point,” the caller snapped. “My name is Cynthia Poole Barnes. And you will listen to me. You will absolutely listen to me, and everything I have to say.”

  17.

  Cynthia had awakened that morning to the sound of a familiar song, one she heard almost every day now, at least twice a day. “I know you….” Rosalind was watching Sleeping Beauty again. She had watched it every day this summer until Cynthia had been forced to put her on a schedule—once in the morning, once in the afternoon, with no other television at all. She had thought that once Rosalind understood it was a choice between Sleeping Beauty and the rest of the television-video universe, she would choose to watch other things. But Rosalind was a monotheist straight from the womb. She wanted one toy, a stuffed bear, and one book, Grimm’s Fairy Tales. She also needed only one parent, but given that it was Mommy, Cynthia didn’t mind that so much.

  And now Rosalind wanted this white-blond princess waltzing in the forest over and over again. The end of the film, which scared Cynthia to this day, did not intimidate Rosalind at all. The thorns grew over the castle, the dragon’s shadow filled the screen, yet Rosalind’s gaze remained locked on the set, unflinching and unwavering. She could watch without fear because she knew how it ended. She was equally blasé about the terrors in Grimm, whether it was Cinderella’s stepsisters mutilating their feet, or Rumpelstiltskin tearing himself in half from fury when the Queen guessed his name.

  Cynthia looked at the clock—it was seven-thirty. Warren would be up and dressed, anxious to go to his golf game, but determined not to disturb Cynthia while she slept. She slipped on her robe and went downstairs, giving him permission to escape into the summer morning. There was something about her husband in golf clothes that made her want to cry, a combination of pride and irrelevance she could never explain. It had mattered so much, once upon a time, to get into Caves Valley. Then it mattered not at all.

  Warren knew it, too, felt the loss as deeply as she did. She never doubted his grief, never claimed hers was any larger than his. But only one of them could withdraw from the world, and he had granted Cynthia that privilege. Warren still worked, and part of his work meant playing golf on Saturday mornings, putting on his spikes and his cheerful-lawyer face, heading out to oil the relationships that brought a steady stream of work into the firm. Cynthia would be the first to tell anyone who dared to ask that Warren, in some ways, had it harder than she did.

  The thing was, no one ever dared to ask.

  Yet he always felt guilty about leaving her on Saturday mornings, always lo
oked abashed. Which was good, for it kept him from realizing on this particular Saturday how much she wanted to be alone. Cynthia didn’t want Warren around when she called the police.

  But she wouldn’t call for several hours. To call so early would seem hysterical, suspect. She would wait until the local news stations had shown the photo again and again. And then she would call, feigning ignorance, pretending not to know or care who was assigned to the investigation under way.

  It had taken Cynthia’s father less than an hour last night to put her in touch with Sergeant Lenhardt, who was still in the office at midnight, although he had sent his detectives home to prepare for the long day ahead, a day of interviews and field work, even if it was the Fourth of July. He had treated Cynthia with respect and kindness—she was the daughter of Judge Poole—and encouraged her to call the detectives directly.

  “Nancy Porter,” he said. “Or Kevin Infante, who’s the primary on the case. But if you’d rather deal with Nancy—well, that’s okay.”

  “And why would I rather deal with Nancy?” She knew, of course. Some things are never forgotten. But she was curious whether this sergeant knew as well. Cynthia had a weakness for wanting to know how much others knew about her, the strange attraction-repulsion that gossips, even reformed ones, often feel toward gossip. She dreaded the idea that people might be talking about her. She dreaded the idea that they weren’t.

  “I don’t know,” the cautious sergeant said, leaving a space for her to fill, if she so chose. When Cynthia volunteered nothing, he added: “Women like talking to women sometimes, in my experience. They’re both good detectives, they’ll hear you out. They’ll want to know what you know.”