The 9th Girl

by Tami Hoag

  “The Holiday station,” he said. “If he’s the one who snatched Penny Gray, that location probably wasn’t a coincidence either. It was probably this sick bastard’s idea of a joke. Doc Holiday snatches his victims from the Holiday stations of Minneapolis.”

  “If he was the one who snatched Penny Gray,” Liska said. “I’m still not convinced she’s his ninth girl. And neither are you, Sam. We’ve got too many other red flags flying.”

  Kasselmann looked like he needed an antacid tablet. “That’s all we need: two homicidal sadists. Who else are you looking at, Sam?”

  “The girl had a complicated life,” Kovac admitted. “She wasn’t exactly Miss Congeniality. And she might have had a secret someone felt was worth killing her for.”

  “We can’t drop that angle just because serial killers are more exciting in the news,” Liska said. She looked to Quinn and Kasselmann. “We think she might have been sexually abused by the mother’s fiancé. There’s some pretty strong indicators if you look at the timeline and the changes in the girl’s behavior over the last eight months or so. We have to look hard at him. She also had a run-in with his daughter and her boyfriend the night she went missing.”

  “It’s a freaking shell game,” Kovac admitted. “And every time we stop and lift a shell, there’s a different killer under it.”

  Kasselmann frowned hard. “Dana Nolan has to be the priority now.”

  Liska sighed and looked away. “Great. Everybody else in Penny Gray’s life abused and abandoned her. Now we get to do it too.”

  “Penny Gray is dead, Sergeant,” Kasselmann said.

  “I understand that. I don’t have to like it. I feel an obligation to my victim, and to her mother. How am I supposed to tell Julia Gray that her daughter’s death isn’t as relevant today as it was yesterday? How would you feel if that was your child?”

  “Maybe you’re too close to the situation,” Kasselmann said with a fine edge of steel in his voice.

  “Yeah,” Tinks returned. “You’re probably right. If the department isn’t going to give a shit about these people, then it’s probably best to assign a detective who doesn’t care about them either.”

  Kovac intervened before Kasselmann could draw breath to suspend her.

  “The bulk of the manpower should go to Nolan,” he conceded. “There’s a chance we can still get to her before it’s too late. Tinks and Elwood should stay on Penny Gray. I’ll keep a hand in each.”

  The captain looked at his watch. “I have to go upstairs and explain this to the chief. Keep me up to the minute on Nolan.”

  Kasselmann left the room, taking none of the tension with him. Kovac felt like something huge had sunk its talons into his shoulders.

  “He’ll look worse to more people if we don’t drop everything and chase after the missing news girl,” Liska said bitterly.

  “Brass is brass,” Kovac returned. “Now tell me again how you want to go into management.”

  “I’d rather eat my gun than be like that.”

  “I’m glad to know it.”

  Ignoring the office politics, Quinn had gone to the wall to scrutinize the photos from the New Year’s Eve scene. Kovac watched him take in the details as if he were looking at a Picasso exhibit, trying to make sense of the lines and the details.

  “This was sloppy and careless,” he concluded. “If Doc Holiday didn’t do this, and the media has been trying to pin it on him, he might have taken Dana Nolan to prove a point.”

  “And if that’s the case?” Kovac asked, dreading the answer because the only reason the media was blaming Doc Holiday was because he had told them to.

  John Quinn looked grim. “Then God have mercy on her soul.”

  • • •

  “WE FOUND THIS video on YouTube late last night,” Elwood said, setting up his laptop.

  Kovac had gone to organize the Nolan investigation. Elwood had arrived together with Sonya Porter, who was wearing the same sweater she had had on the night before, Liska noted.

  “There are a bunch of them,” Porter said. “They all look like they were uploaded from her phone. So there could be more. Do you have her phone?”

  “We don’t,” Liska said. “We don’t have her phone or her laptop. But my son, Kyle, says Gray was always shooting video with her phone.”

  “Her mother told us she keeps everything on her laptop and she keeps her laptop with her,” Elwood said. “We found some notebooks with her writing in her room, but those were all a few years old. It’s safe to assume the laptop is either in her car, wherever that is, or the killer took it for his or her own reasons.”

  He clicked the Play icon.

  Penny Gray had chosen to shoot herself in profile as she looked down. She shot from the side where her hair was long and hung down like a curtain, hiding half her face. She moved the camera slowly as she spoke, bringing it around from one side of her head to the other, to the side where the hair had been shaved to the scalp and piercings rimmed the shell of her ear with wires and spikes.

  The poem was entitled “Help Me.”

  Refuge

  Asylum

  Safest place to be

  Secrets

  Hard truths

  Soul laid bare to see

  Comfort

  Guidance

  Shoulder. Lean on me

  Seduction

  Destruction

  Help not meant to be

  Silence

  Shameful

  Not to be believed

  Don’t tell

  Go to hell

  There’s no one here for me

  “That certainly sounds like abuse to me,” Sonya declared. “I say you go arrest the son of a bitch and string him up in public by his balls.”

  “I told you why we can’t just do that,” Elwood said gently. “She doesn’t spell out what happened to her, let alone name names. And even if she did, we would need some corroborating evidence.”

  “You should at least be able to drag him in here and scare a confession out of him,” she said stubbornly.

  “Miss Journalistic Integrity,” Elwood said. “Would you write a story about it and present facts not in evidence?”

  “No, but there’s no law against you lying to him in an interview, right? Tell him you have video of him molesting her.”

  “I like your style,” Liska said. “But if we do that and he calls our bluff, we’re screwed. We have to be cagier than that. I want to go to Julia Gray first and plant some doubt. If we attack Michael Warner head-on, he’s going to call a lawyer, and he’s going to tell her to call one too.”

  “Do you think she knows he abused her daughter?” Porter asked. “How could a mother know something like that and not do anything about it? And not only not do anything about it but also get engaged to the creep. That’s fucked-up!”

  Her outrage pushed her out of her chair to pace back and forth with her arms crossed tight beneath her breasts.

  “I’m betting the daughter never told her—or if she told her, she wasn’t believed,” Liska said. “Look what the girl wrote in that other poem—that she’s a burden, a liar, no one believes her.”

  “What’s the matter with women like that?” Sonya asked. “It’s not the 1950s anymore. Women need to believe each other and stand up for each other in the face of sexist oppression. Men suck! Present company excluded, of course,” she added, smiling sweetly at Elwood.

  “I understand your sentiment,” Elwood said. “Most violence committed against women is perpetrated by men. I once read a quote that the thing a man fears most from a woman is that she’ll laugh at him, and the thing a woman most fears from a man is that he’ll kill her.”

  “I think Dr. Warner has more to fear than being laughed at,” Sonya said. “His whole existence is based on people trusting him with their kids. And if he molested her, his fiancée’s daughter had the ability to destroy him.”

  “The day the girl’s wrist got broken, she was supposedly on her way home from an appointment wi
th him,” Liska said. “He made out like he didn’t have much knowledge of the event, but Julia Gray gave the impression she included him in the decision making about a doctor.

  “So what was Michael Gray doing the evening of the thirtieth?” she asked.

  Elwood flipped back through his little notebook. “He and Mrs. Gray went to see the Joffrey Ballet company at the Orpheum, followed by dinner at Solera. He dropped Julia Gray off at her house between twelve and twelve thirty and says he was home when his daughter got in around one.”

  “And the last we can account for Penny Gray is leaving the Holiday station between nine thirty and ten,” Liska said. “She doesn’t show up again until she falls out of the trunk of a car on New Year’s Eve. That’s a big chunk of time to account for. We need to know what Michael Warner, Christina Warner, and Julia Gray were doing all that time.”

  “I’ve already spoken to Dr. Warner a few times,” Elwood said. “I can reach out to him again on the excuse of tying up loose ends.”

  “We need to feel him out on the general issue of whether or not Penny Gray may have suffered abuse without him playing the patient confidentiality card. Maybe we can ask him if he thought she might have had someone else she would confide in.”

  “You’d think the girl would have confided in somebody,” Elwood said. “A girlfriend, a counselor.”

  “I don’t think she trusted anyone,” Liska said. “Kyle knew her. He said she didn’t have friends like most girls have friends. She pretended with one group of acquaintances that she had friends elsewhere, and vice versa.”

  “She internalized everything,” Sonya concluded, looking at the pages of poetry Elwood had taped to the wall. “I get that. Her poetry was her outlet. That’s how creative people are. We bottle the feelings up inside until the feelings turn into words or images that have to come out onto a page or a canvas or a—”

  “Tattoo,” Elwood said.

  The two of them exchanged a look.

  “If you put out raw emotion, people can reject you directly, personally,” Sonya said. “If you form that emotion into something else, then the thing you create can be rejected, but at least it’s once removed from you.”

  “Everyone in this girl’s life found her to be an irritation, a problem, something they didn’t want to be bothered to deal with,” Liska said. “But something happened that night. She pushed somebody’s button one time too many.”

  “Or Dr. Warner bought her silence with that car he gave her for her birthday,” Elwood pointed out. “Or she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Sam is working the wrong place / wrong time angle. We get to take a harder look at the people she knew. The last people we know who interacted with her were the kids at the Rock and Bowl. She said something to Christina Warner that made the Warner girl angry enough to lunge at her. I want to know what it was.”

  “The Warner girl said Penny Gray attacked her,” Elwood said.

  “She lied. Kyle was there. He saw it go down. I want to know why.” She looked at her watch. “PSI is having an assembly today for Penny Gray’s classmates and any other students who feel the need to attend. It might be our only chance to talk to any of these kids without a parent or attorney looking over their shoulders.”

  She pointed a finger at Sonya. “You didn’t hear me say that.”

  “Say what?”

  “I’m not looking for anything to use in court. I’m looking for loose threads to pull to unravel the story these kids have woven together. Somebody knows exactly what went down. We have to find a way to make one kid want to tell us.”

  “What about me?” Sonya asked. “Can I come?”

  “Absolutely,” Liska said. “You’re known to these kids through social media. I want them to feel like they can contact you somehow if they have something to say but don’t want to say it to us. Can we make that work?”

  “I’m in if the school will have me.”

  Nikki smiled a nasty smile, thinking how happy Principal Rodgers would be to have Sonya Porter with her tattoos and multiple facial piercings address his students.

  “Oh, they’ll have you,” she said. “I will take great joy in making that happen.”

  38

  “I can’t believe they’re making us go to this,” Jessie Cook said as they walked down the hall toward the assembly theater, Jessie shoulder to shoulder on Christina’s left, Brittany on Christina’s right. “Like any of us are traumatized because of Gray.” She rolled her eyes dramatically. “Please.”

  Brittany said nothing. She hadn’t wanted to come to school at all. Ironically, her mother had made her come because of the assembly. She thought it was important for Brittany to be at school among her friends instead of home alone, brooding, and for them all to listen to the counselors and talk about what had happened and how they should try to deal with their emotions.

  “Are you traumatized, XT?” Jessie asked Christina. They shared a knowing look, like it was the funniest joke in the world that they didn’t have any human feelings toward a girl they had known for years, a girl who had been killed and dumped in the road like a sack of garbage.

  “How about you, Britt?” Jessie asked, leaning forward and looking at her past Christina. “Are you traumatized? You and Gray were such good friends.”

  Brittany wanted to call her a bitch and tell her to go to hell, but none of those words came out of her mouth. The best she could manage was to say, “Yeah, Jessie, I happen to think being murdered by a serial killer is a traumatic event no matter who it happens to.”

  “Britt’s right,” Christina said. “What happened to Gray is terrible. If you don’t think that’s terrible, Jessie, what kind of fucked-up person are you?”

  Jessie frowned. “Well, I mean, of course it’s terrible, but it’s not like it happened to one of us.”

  Brittany rolled her eyes and heaved a sigh.

  Aaron opened the door to the theater and held it for them like he was a gentleman or something. They all went in and were herded down the stairs by a teacher to the lower third of the auditorium. A group of adults had gathered on the stage. Principal Rodgers looked fussy and unhappy as he discussed something with a petite woman with short-cropped blond hair—Kyle’s mom, who had come to school a few times for the antidrug program. With her was the big, burly detective who had come to Brittany’s room that first night anyone had realized Gray was missing. A younger woman with a sleek dark bob and tattoos peeking out of her sweater stood to one side of the big detective—Sonya Porter.

  Emily leaned ahead in her seat on the far side of Jessie, looking down the row at all of them, and said, “That’s Sonya Porter from TeenCities.”

  Behind them, Aaron leaned forward and put his hands on Christina’s shoulders and whispered something in her ear. Christina laughed.

  Brittany squeezed herself to the far side of her seat, away from them, wanting to slink out and disappear. Christina leaned toward her, all loving concern, and put a hand on her knee. “Are you all right, Britt?”

  “I’m fine,” Brittany said, avoiding eye contact. “I’ve got a headache, that’s all.”

  “Do you want something for it?” Christina whispered as Principal Rodgers took the podium and the room began to quiet. “Aaron can get you something.”

  “No, thanks,” she said, thinking there was no drug to help what was bothering her.

  Principal Rodgers started droning on in his self-important, condescending way, telling them all what a tragedy had befallen their school and how their school would be here for them in their time of need. He didn’t have a clue what went on in his school. He didn’t have any idea who his students were. How much help could he possibly be? He had hated Gray, was always angry with her for the way she dressed, for the way she did her hair. Brittany had once seen him stop Gray in the hall and make her take out all but two of her earrings and give them to him right there.

  Kyle’s mom took the podium next. Brittany had never actually met her, but she had seen her at sc
hool a couple of times and had been fascinated with the idea that she was a homicide detective. Kyle didn’t like to talk about it. To him, his mom was just his mom, who happened to be a cop, who happened to investigate murders.

  “My colleague and I are here today to talk to you about what happened to Penny Gray,” she began. “I’m sure you’ve all seen the reports on the news. I know there are a lot of rumors going around. We’re going to be very honest and straightforward with you.

  “Penny Gray was murdered. That’s upsetting. It’s disturbing. I know people would rather not have to hear about things like this, but it’s important that you know the truth. This isn’t a story about a stranger in some other place. This happened to a girl many of you knew, a girl who walked the halls of this school. Maybe you liked her, maybe you didn’t. That doesn’t matter. It’s important that you know what happened to her. This is real. This is as real as it gets. We want you to know the truth and we need you to tell the truth.

  “If any of you have any information at all about Penny Gray, we need you to share it with us. Anything she might have said to you, rumors that you heard about her, anything at all—even if it doesn’t seem like it could be important. It’s impossible to know what impact even a small, seemingly insignificant detail might have.

  “At this point we don’t know if Penny was abducted by a stranger or was victimized by someone she knew. We know she was at the Rock and Bowl on the evening of the thirtieth. We know she left that place and made a stop at a nearby convenience store. So far as we know, she was not seen again—except by her killer—until her body was found New Year’s Eve.

  “We don’t know why Penny was killed,” she said. “We don’t know if she was a random victim or if she provoked someone. We don’t know if someone was angry with her or hated her for some reason, or if she knew something that was a threat to someone. This is why we’re asking you guys to help.

  “I want you all to look around this auditorium this morning. You’re all individuals who are part of a community. Look at your friends. Look at the kids you don’t know or don’t like. Realize that other people are looking at you and thinking the same things. And I want you to imagine, what if you were Penny Gray? What if you found yourself in a terrible situation? You would hope the people who knew you would help. You would hope if someone could do something, they would.”