The 9th Girl

by Tami Hoag

  The nurse scurried back toward the exam rooms before she could finish the sentence.

  Liska glanced off to the side, to the waiting area with its mood lighting and big-screen television quietly playing a travel show depicting someplace tropical. A mix of patients sat in the leather armchairs in varying stages of misery, coughing and sniffling. Several were looking at her. Others were absorbed in their magazines and cell phones.

  The door to the exam area opened and the purple-suited nurse stuck her head out.

  “The doctor will see you now,” she said softly.

  Liska followed her down the hall and into the doctor’s private office. Iverson, a big, good-looking man in his fifties, had already taken his position behind his impressive desk. He rose from his seat and offered his hand.

  “Bob Iverson.”

  “Sergeant Liska, Homicide,” she said, holding her ID out in place of the handshake.

  “Homicide?” he said, his brow furrowing. “Are we talking about the same case? Penny Gray? I spoke with her mother, Julia, this morning. I thought this was a missing person case.”

  “It was.” Liska put the envelope with Penny Gray’s X-rays on the immaculate desktop.

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” he said. “Please have a seat, Sergeant.”

  Liska perched on the edge of a chair, back straight. The doctor lowered himself into his cushy executive’s chair, his hands on the desktop as if physically bracing himself for bad news.

  “Are you telling me Penny Gray is dead?” he asked.

  “I’m not at liberty to tell you anything, Dr. Iverson. I need you to answer some questions for me regarding your treatment of Penny back in April of last year.”

  Iverson frowned. “I’m sure you’re aware of patient privacy laws, Sergeant.”

  “As I am sure you are aware of the laws regarding physicians’ needs to report child abuse to the proper authorities.”

  “Penny isn’t abused!” he scoffed.

  “Really? Because I had the assistant chief medical examiner look at these X-rays that were taken here in your office last April, and he tells me this injury is a spiral fracture, a torsion fracture resulting from a twisting of the limb. This is a common injury in cases of physical abuse. But neither the police department nor Family Services has a report on record regarding Penelope Gray.”

  “Because Penny was not abused,” he insisted. “She took a nasty fall, twisting her arm as she came off the bike. There was no reason for me to report the incident. I’ve known Julia Gray for years. She’s a lovely woman.”

  “Are you Penny’s regular physician?” Liska asked.

  “No. She’s just at the age to switch over from her pediatrician.”

  “Do you have a pediatrician as part of this practice?”

  “Yes.”

  “And is that pediatrician Penny Gray’s doctor?”

  “You’ll have to ask her mother that question.”

  “According to the date on these X-rays, this incident happened on a Saturday. Most people have accidents on a weekend, they go to an ER,” Liska said. “They don’t call their family practitioner.”

  “This is a concierge practice,” Iverson explained. “As you may have noticed when you came in the building, we have an urgent care facility, we have our own lab facilities. We are one-stop shopping for our clients. There was no need for Julia to take Penny to an ER on a spring weekend where they would have sat for hours before being seen.”

  “And you personally dropped what you were doing on a Saturday and came in and saw the girl when presumably she could have been taken care of by the on-call doc in your urgent care clinic?”

  “Yes,” he said with a defensive edge to his voice. “As I said, I’ve known Julia for years. Of course I would come in when she called me.”

  “And you believed the story about the bicycle.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “If you’re such good friends with Mrs. Gray, then you’re probably aware she and her daughter have a difficult relationship.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with falling off a bicycle.”

  “And when you saw the nature of Penny’s injury, this didn’t raise any questions in your mind?”

  “No.”

  “Seriously? How many spiral fractures do you see in the course of your week, Dr. Iverson?” she asked. “How many fractures do you see at all? You’re not an orthopedist, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Yet you felt perfectly comfortable treating an unusual type of fracture.”

  “I worked in emergency medicine early in my career,” he said. “I’ve treated every kind of fracture there is. Penny’s break was clean enough to set and cast. It didn’t require a specialist.”

  “That was very lucky for Penny, considering the nature of the injury,” Liska said.

  “Yes, it was lucky. Sometimes we get lucky.”

  “She’s not lucky now.”

  “It’s inconceivable that Julia has done something to her daughter,” he said.

  “Tell me, Dr. Iverson, if you hadn’t known Julia Gray, if this had been a stranger and her daughter coming to you with that same injury . . . ?”

  Iverson shrugged and sighed impatiently. “The point is moot. I do know Julia. I assume you’ve met her. Does she strike you as the kind of woman who would be physically violent with anyone?”

  “I’ve been in this business for a long time, Doctor,” Liska said. “I learned my first week on the job not to judge a book by its cover. But let’s say for the sake of argument Julia Gray didn’t break her daughter’s arm. Let’s say Penny’s father did it, or Julia’s boyfriend—”

  “Michael? That’s absurd!”

  “Or one of Penny’s boyfriends, or one of the sketchy people she runs with, or someone she encountered that day.”

  “She in no way indicated she had been attacked,” Iverson said.

  Liska nodded and rose, picking up the envelope with the X-rays back off the table. “Victims don’t want to be victims, Doctor—especially victims of abuse. They often see it as . . . embarrassing . . . shameful . . . They blame themselves. They don’t want to admit that someone in their life values them so little or hates them so much. Or they think they won’t be believed because maybe their abuser seems above reproach. Which is why we have mandatory reporting laws. I’d be expecting a phone call about that if I were you.”

  30

  Christina Warner looked up at Kovac with big, liquid, dark eyes, her expression soft and innocent. Her long white-blond hair was like something from a mermaid fantasy—tumbling waves framing her face and falling around her shoulders and down her back. Her complexion was peaches and cream, like an airbrushed photograph, complemented by the baby pink cashmere turtleneck sweater she wore.

  “I want to do whatever I can to help find Gray,” she said.

  “Why is that, Christina?” Kovac asked bluntly. “The way I understand it, the two of you don’t get along.”

  The big eyes blinked. She had expected him to be impressed with her generosity of spirit, but she adjusted to his reaction with ease.

  “Well . . . we don’t,” she admitted. “But that doesn’t mean I want something bad to happen to her.”

  “Why don’t the two of you get along?”

  “She’s jealous,” she said simply. “I’m popular and she’s not. I have friends and she doesn’t. I get along with my dad; she and her mom fight all the time.”

  “It sucks to be her,” Kovac surmised. “How do you get along with Mrs. Gray?”

  “Great,” she said, smiling—a genuine reaction. “Julia is super-nice. We have fun together.”

  “You think maybe Penny resents that too—that you get along with her mom and she doesn’t?”

  “For sure.”

  “Right. ’Cause how’s that supposed to work when your dad and Mrs. Gray get married? Everyone gets along with everyone—except Penny, who gets along with nobody.”

  “Obviously, we have some work
to do in that area,” Michael Warner said. “But there’s no timetable. Julia and I haven’t set a date. We’re hoping Penny will come around in time.”

  He sat close beside his daughter with a hand resting reassuringly on her back.

  “She makes me angry, but I feel sorry for her, really,” Christina said.

  “It doesn’t sound to me like you were feeling sorry for her that night at the Rock and Bowl,” Kovac said. “I’ve had several people tell me you were making fun of Gray and her poetry and that you and she got into it.”

  She bowed her head and looked up at him from under impossibly long dark lashes, contrite. “Of course I feel bad about that now. I didn’t know she was going to disappear or whatever. I was just so mad at her—”

  “Over what?”

  “Some stuff she said about me in one of her stupid poems. She read it in front of half the school, practically. It was embarrassing and hurtful and mean.”

  “Penny is a talented writer,” Michael Warner intervened. “She’s very good at using words to hurt people, to anger people. Words are her weapons.”

  “Well,” Kovac said, watching him carefully, “she’s not big and strong enough to break somebody’s arm, after all.”

  Warner narrowed his eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Everybody feels a need to strike out at some point in their life,” Kovac said. “We get angry, we feel helpless, we feel bullied. It’s a basic instinct to lash out at the one who hurt us. Right, Doc?”

  “Figuratively speaking, I suppose, yes. But—”

  “Were you around last spring when Penny broke her arm?”

  “She took a bad fall off her bike,” Warner said. “Yes, I do remember it. She was my patient at the time.”

  Kovac sighed and rubbed a hand across his jaw. “I know about the whole patient confidentiality thing and all, but did she ever indicate to you that maybe that really isn’t what happened?”

  “No. Why?”

  “How about to you, Christina? Did you ever hear her say anything about that? Was there any gossip about that? Was Gray maybe hanging out with a rough crowd? A bad boyfriend? Anything like that?”

  He watched the girl process the question. “She hangs out with some sketchy people outside of school—or so she says. I’ve never actually seen her with a boyfriend.”

  “Do you think someone attacked her?” Michael Warner asked.

  “What about a girlfriend?” Kovac asked. “I’m hearing she had decided she was bisexual.”

  Christina rolled her eyes. “That’s her latest thing. She’s through with men. Now she’s a lesbian or whatever. Be who you are. She’s always saying that.”

  “You don’t believe that’s who she is? Or you don’t like what that means?”

  “If that’s who she is, then why doesn’t she just go hang out with the gay and lesbian kids?” she asked. “Why does she have to throw it in our faces all the time? One minute she’s coming on to guys, the next minute she likes girls—”

  “What guys was she coming on to? Eric? Jacob? Your guy, Aaron?”

  “He’s not interested in her,” she said firmly. “He can’t stand her, actually.”

  “I don’t know,” Kovac said. “I was sixteen once. If a girl is coming on to them, sixteen-year-old boys will overlook a lot.”

  She forced a little laugh and tried to look confident. “Believe me, Aaron isn’t interested in Gray, and Gray isn’t interested in Aaron.”

  “Was she interested in you, Christina?”

  Michael Warner took exception. “Is this really an appropriate line of questioning?”

  “What’s appropriate?” Kovac asked, lifting his hands. “Anything that has the potential to help the investigation. No one has to like it. Gray claims to be bisexual, then I have to pursue that angle.”

  He turned back to Christina. She tried to look offended.

  “No!”

  “Jessica? Emily? Brittany?”

  “No!” she said. She was getting flustered, cheeks blushing beneath the perfect makeup. “I don’t even know if she really is into girls. She’s probably just saying it to get a reaction. She just likes to mess with people. She’s just so, so—”

  “Antagonistic.” Her father supplied the word. “And manipulative. That’s a good point, Christina.” He looked to Kovac again. “Penny feels a need to draw attention to herself. She gets the attention, then antagonizes the people giving it to her until they push her away. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. She believes she is unlovable, so she goes around continually trying to prove that point by alienating people.”

  “So you wouldn’t be surprised if someone broke her wrist,” Kovac said.

  “That’s not what happened,” Warner insisted.

  “Were you there? Did you see her fall off the bike?”

  “No, but I’m sure it was an accident. Julia said—”

  “It might have been,” Kovac conceded. “Stuff happens in the heat of the moment, right, Christina? Gray lashed out at you, you lashed out at her—all in the heat of the moment. That’s what people do. They react. Sometimes it gets out of hand.”

  “I didn’t break her wrist!” she said, alarmed that he might be accusing her. “I didn’t do anything to her!”

  “No, sweetheart,” Kovac said, smiling like a kind distant uncle. “I don’t think you broke her wrist, but I have reason to believe somebody did. And I mean to find out who. You say you want to help, so if you hear anything, if you think you might know someone who knows someone who knows something about it, you need to call me.”

  He held out one of his business cards for her. She took it and looked at it. Her fingernails were perfectly lacquered with glittering rose-pink polish.

  “That night at the Rock and Bowl,” Kovac said. “I heard things got a little physical, that Aaron got a little rough with Gray. Is that something he does? Smack girls around?”

  “No! He was only protecting me!” she said dramatically. “Gray attacked me! She hit me and she scratched me!”

  She pulled down the high neck of her sweater to reveal a trio of red marks on her skin.

  “Aaron was in trouble here the other day for getting physical with another student,” Kovac said.

  “That wasn’t his fault!”

  “That’s not how I heard it.”

  “Kyle Hatcher knocked him down,” she said. “And kicked him too. And Kyle punched Aaron in the mouth that night at the Rock and Bowl too. He’s the violent one.”

  Michael Warner leaned forward. “You can’t seriously be considering any of these kids had something to do with what’s happened to Gray? There’s a serial killer running around loose! You should be out trying to find him, not accusing children, not accusing Julia!”

  Kovac gave him a benign smile. “I’m paid to be suspicious of everyone, Dr. Warner. Don’t take it personally.”

  “And in the meantime, there’s a maniac running around the city abducting young women.”

  “We’re on that.”

  “Really?” Warner asked. “How many unsolved homicides are being attributed to this man? Eight? Nine? Isn’t that what I read? Penny could be the ninth girl this animal has hurt, and you’re here questioning kids? You’re questioning her mother? This is absurd!”

  “If the tables were turned and your daughter was the one missing, would you want us to leave stones unturned?” Kovac asked.

  “I would want you not to waste precious time,” Michael Warner said, standing up. “And I’m not letting you waste any more of mine. Come on, Christina. We’re going home.”

  • • •

  “ALL THIS ANIMOSITY and rejection is going to fuck with my self-esteem,” Kovac said as he watched them go. He rolled his shoulders back to loosen the knots and twisted his head to one side against the kink developing in his neck.

  “I checked in with Elwood,” Tippen said. “Still no luck finding the girl’s car. He’s tracking down her Facebook friends. Nothing is panning out so far. He’s spoken to a couple
of them. They claim they barely knew the girl.”

  “Why should we be surprised? The people who knew her her whole life don’t seem to have a clue who she really was.”

  “Sometimes those are the people who know us the least,” Tippen observed. “They have all that time to build us into who they want us to be in their heads so we can disappoint them over and over. Just ask my mother.”

  “Or any woman you’ve ever dated,” Kovac said. “So far, this girl was nothing but an irritation and a disappointment to everyone she knew. Miss Acceptance.”

  “Life is full of little ironies.”

  “Yeah. I hate that,” he said with a sigh. “Go talk to the girl’s teachers. I’ll see what more I can squeeze out of Brittany Lawler. We can both be thankful we’re not Tinks. She’s on her way to tell Julia Gray her daughter is dead.”

  • • •

  LISKA PULLED ONTO Julia Gray’s block to the too-familiar sight of TV news vans with satellite antennae raised and video cameramen roaming the street, looking for interesting angles and shots of curious neighbors. She had to slow the car to a crawl and open the window to hold up her ID—her pass to the end of the block and the Gray house.

  The way the house was situated on the lot gave it a privacy that was a blessing and a curse. A blessing to Julia Gray, holed up inside, a curse to investigators. It was almost impossible to see the driveway or garage door from any other house in the neighborhood. Potential witnesses would probably have little to tell them about any vehicles parked at the Gray home on the night in question.

  She pulled in the driveway beside a patrol car and behind Julia Gray’s black Lexus and sat for a moment, recalling Jamar Jackson’s scant description of the vehicle Penny Gray’s body had fallen from New Year’s Eve. A dark sedan. No make. No model.

  Julia Gray drove a dark sedan. Penny Gray drove a dark sedan. Probably more than half of Minnesotans drove darker-colored vehicles. They were easier to see against the white backdrop of winter. White cars—popular everywhere south of the Northland—were undesirable here and were involved in a higher percentage of accidents during the winter.