by Tami Hoag
He clicked the Play icon.
Liska watched Julia’s face as her daughter’s image came on the screen. She held herself stiffly. Tears misted her eyes, but she turned slightly away, as if it was simply too painful to see her daughter alive, knowing she was dead. Or maybe the emotion was shame. Kovac had said the first time they had come to Julia Gray to ask about her daughter, the woman had shown them a photograph years old because she couldn’t stand to look at what the girl had become.
On the computer screen, Penny Gray recited her poem “Help Me,” her voice a painful mix of monotone edged in bitterness. A disappointed girl trying to sound too adult to give a shit. Both the words and the visual image spoke to a loss of trust, a transformation from vulnerability to disillusionment.
Julia Gray didn’t want to see it. She literally turned away from it.
Nikki leaned over and turned up the volume.
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
“She seems to be talking about the betrayal of an authority figure,” Elwood said when the video was done.
Julia shifted restlessly on the chair. “She was angry with her father for leaving. There was never anything abusive between them.”
“Your ex-husband’s new wife is young, isn’t she?”
She gave him a dirty look, offended on her ex-husband’s behalf. “Brandi is young; she’s not a child, for God’s sake! Tim is a rotten philandering bastard, but he’s not a pedophile! He never laid a hand on our daughter—even when he probably should have.”
“Sometimes when girls Penny’s age lose their fathers,” Nikki began, choosing her words like footsteps through a minefield, “they’re at an age where they’re just coming into their sexuality. They’re just discovering they have a certain power with the opposite sex. They can confuse the lines between love and sex.”
“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation,” Julia muttered.
Her body language screamed that she wanted to get up and leave. She didn’t want cops in her house. She didn’t want to talk about her daughter’s problems. She probably would have been just as happy to pretend she’d never had a daughter at all.
“I know this is hard, Mrs. Gray—”
Julia Gray’s head snapped around, her eyes narrowed and hard. “You know? What do you know? What do you know, Detective? You don’t know how hard this is. You don’t know how hard it’s been to be my daughter’s mother. You’ve never lost a child. Have you?”
“No, ma’am. I haven’t,” Nikki said, without apology this time, out of patience.
“But let me tell you something, Julia,” she said, leaning forward, instantly changing the dynamic of the situation with her energy. “If someone hurt one of my boys and the police came to ask me questions about what might have been going on in their lives, I would damn well answer them. I would be in their faces every minute of every day demanding they turn over every possible rock no matter what ugly thing might crawl out from under it. I would not be sitting in my living room, whining and crying about how hard it all is on me.”
Julia Gray’s jaw dropped.
Elwood made a sound of disapproval. “Tinks—”
“No!” she snapped, standing up. “I’ve had it with this bullshit. Your daughter is dead, Julia. Somebody killed her. Horribly. Brutally. Would you like to see the pictures? Would you like to see what we had to see the night her murdered corpse fell out of the trunk of a moving vehicle?”
“No!”
“No, you wouldn’t, because that would take the attention away from you, wouldn’t it? Poor you. Poor you. What a burden your daughter was. You should be happy she’s dead.”
Julia Gray got to her feet. “That’s outrageous!”
Nikki looked her hard in the eye. “Yes, it is. Your daughter is lying dead on a slab at the morgue and you haven’t even asked to see her. You’ve just left her there—”
Elwood rose then to put space between them. Nikki walked away with her hands on her hips.
“I apologize for my partner, Mrs. Gray,” he said, taking up the mantle of Good Cop. “These cases are very stressful for us as well, especially for those of us with children and those of us who have worked on cases of child sexual abuse.”
“Penny was not abused,” Julia said staunchly.
“Dr. Warner told us she had become very manipulative toward men, that that was one of the reasons he decided he shouldn’t be treating her any longer,” Elwood said. “Was there some specific incident that prompted him to make that decision?”
“Michael has done nothing wrong.”
“We’re not suggesting that he has. We’re looking at the changes in your daughter’s behavior over the past nine months or so, and we think there might have been something that triggered those changes around the time she broke her wrist.”
“You said the accident happened on her way home from Dr. Warner’s office—” Liska started.
“What is wrong with you people?” Julia shouted, her anger bursting its seams. “My daughter was taken by some maniac! Some maniac who has already killed eight other girls. Now he’s taken another girl—that news girl—and you’re wasting time treating me like a criminal and accusing a good man—”
Even as she said it the front door opened and Michael Warner came in looking like a well-tailored superhero, his shoulders broad, his expression serious. Julia Gray went to him, dissolving into tears as she fell against his chest.
“Julia, what’s going on?” he asked. He looked to Elwood and Liska. “What do you people want from her?”
“The truth,” Nikki said. “Maybe you can help us with that, Dr. Warner.”
“We’re done dealing with you,” Warner said tightly as he put his arms around his weeping fiancée. “If you have any more questions, you can speak to my attorney.”
40
“They lawyered up,” Liska announced as they walked into the conference room.
Kovac glanced back at them. “Who?”
“Julia Gray and Michael Warner. We tried to broach the subject of Penny possibly having been sexually abused, and they lawyered up.”
“She’s leaving out the shouting, threats, and accusations,” Elwood said, going to the coffeepot.
“They were upset?”
“I was upset,” Liska admitted. “I can’t decide if I should feel badly for Julia Gray or snatch her by the hair and slap the snot out of her.”
“If you go for the second option, there should be mud wrestling and bikinis involved,” Tippen said. “We can bill it as a grudge match.”
She gave him the finger.
Kovac let the banter float past him. He had been staring at the television screen for too long again. He had borrowed a second television and VCR and wedged them side by side on the stand so he could play them at the same time. His vision was beginning to blur around the edges.
“Tinks, come look at this,” he said, fussing with the remotes, getting everything set up the way he needed it.
“Is it porn?” Tippen asked hopefully. “It’s been a long day.”
“We’re not at your house, Tip,” Liska shot back. She pulled out the chair next to Kovac and sat.
“The screen on the left is the footage from the Holiday station the night Penny Gray went missing. It’s a few minutes before she comes into the store. Tell me if anyone looks familiar.”
No one said anything as the tape played.
Kovac stopped it as Penny Gray walked out of the shot, backed the tape up, and played it again, freezing it when his person of inter
est appeared. “This guy,” he said, tapping the screen with his finger. “Does he look familiar at all?”
Liska squinted and shrugged. “My uncle Leo on my mother’s side?”
“No! Look harder.”
“Sam, I’m so tired, I can’t see straight as it is. If I look any harder, I’m going to burn my retinas.”
Kovac grumbled under his breath and hit Play on the second remote.
“This one is footage from the Holiday station down the road from where Dana Nolan works. This is from yesterday. She stops there regularly on her way in to work.
“That’s her,” he said, pointing to the girl.
Dana Nolan entered the store, waved to the guy behind the counter, went to the coffee station. A big guy in a parka said something to her. She tipped her head back and appeared to laugh. A minute later another man walked into the store—short, squat, bearded.
“That guy,” he said, freezing the frame and tapping the screen. “I think it’s the same guy. Don’t you think it’s the same guy?”
Liska shrugged, looking from one screen to the other. The images were distant and blurry. “Maybe. I don’t know. They’re both short and have beards and parkas.”
“They’re both short and have beards and parkas, and they’re in Holiday stations with girls who went missing,” he said.
“Doc Holiday trolling the Holiday stations?” Tippen said. “His idea of a joke?”
“Dana Nolan picked the store,” Kovac said. “If our bad guy was stalking her, then he just followed her there. But I’m sure the irony wasn’t lost on him.”
“I don’t know, Sam,” Liska said. “If Doc Holiday took Penny Gray, she was a victim of opportunity, like all his other victims. He had to just happen to be there when she was. But the girl had other people in her life who might have wanted her dead. What are the odds she got nabbed by a serial killer?”
“What are the odds anyway?” Kovac challenged. “And just because people in your personal life hate you doesn’t mean you can’t become a victim of a random crime.
“That’s not even my point,” he said. “I looked at this first tape this morning and I thought I should know the guy, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. Then I see him on the footage of Dana Nolan.”
Liska shook her head. “I’m not convinced it’s the same guy.”
Kovac ignored her protest. “Think back. A year ago.”
“Oh my God,” she groaned. “I can’t remember last night!”
“Stop being a wiseass,” he snapped, irritated no one else seemed to be catching on. “Think back a year ago to Rose Reiser.”
“Rose . . . ?”
He watched his partner’s face as she processed the thoughts and dug up the memory. He saw the second the seed took hold.
“Oh my God,” she murmured. She took the remotes away from him and pointed them at the televisions like a pair of laser guns. She backed the tapes up and played them simultaneously.
“It can’t be that guy,” she said. “We checked him out six ways to Sunday.”
“What guy?” Elwood asked.
“The guy that reported finding Rose Reiser’s body last year,” she said. “New Year’s Doe was called in by a guy driving a box truck full of antiques and junk. But he was completely cooperative. He didn’t even complain when we went through his truck with a fine-toothed comb.”
“Frank Fitzgerald,” Kovac said. “He’s from Iowa.”
“Drives a box truck,” Tippen said. “Travels as part of his business.”
“But we checked him out,” Liska insisted. “There was nothing. Zip. Nada.”
“But there he is,” Kovac said, pointing at the screen.
“Or a guy who looks vaguely like him,” she argued. “As a single woman, I hate to say it, but there are a lot more guys running around looking like that guy than any Hollywood heartthrob.”
“Well, I don’t like it,” Kovac said stubbornly. “That’s three too many coincidences.”
“You think a serial killer would just happily hand over his vehicle to crime scene investigators?” Liska asked.
“If he knew he’d cleaned it up well enough.”
“Those are some cojones.”
“Yeah, Tinks,” Tippen said. “You might want to reconsider lowering your standards on the rest of the package if the guy has a set like that.”
Liska rolled her eyes. “That’s just wishful thinking on your part.”
“Frank Fitzgerald. I talked to that guy on the phone yesterday,” Elwood said, bringing them back on point. “His name was on the call list for reviewing the old cases. He was sorry to hear we had a new one.”
“Where was he?” Liska asked.
“Iowa number.”
“Doesn’t mean he’s in Iowa,” Kovac said.
“Doesn’t mean he’s not,” Liska returned. She glanced up at the television sets, her eyes going wide. “What the fuck?!”
She grabbed the remote and hit Pause, freezing the frame on Aaron Fogelman walking away from the counter at the Holiday station near the Rock & Bowl the night of Penny Gray’s disappearance. Kovac could feel her shock and braced himself for what would follow it. She turned and punched him hard on the arm.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she asked, glaring at him. “You watched this all the way through, and you didn’t mention this to me?”
“I just watched it this far through this morning. This is like ten minutes after the Gray girl leaves the store.”
“And gets in the trunk of that sociopath’s car! Goddamnit, Kojak! How could you not bring this to my attention?”
“You know, I got a little distracted by a kidnapping,” he said. “Do you think this kid was up at three in the morning snatching Dana Nolan off the street?”
“Don’t be stupid!”
“I’ve got the other guy in two videos related to two victims, and reporting the dead body of a victim a year ago,” Kovac said.
“You’ve got a hunch based on a vague resemblance, and you want to bet it like a trifecta at the racetrack!” Liska argued. “Are you out of your freaking mind?
“Aaron Fogelman hit Penny Gray not twenty minutes before this video,” she said. “He punched her. The kid has a violent temper. He’s a liar. Here he is in this store within minutes of our victim. And you’re going off about some poor schmuck from Iowa who probably isn’t even in the state? Have you gone senile?”
“I’m not saying we exclude the Fogelman kid as a person of interest on the Gray homicide,” Kovac said. “I’m saying there’s a bigger possibility here.”
“Well, say it to someone else,” Liska said, getting up to move away from him. “We’ve got people in Penny Gray’s life who are lying out their asses every time they open their mouths, and that kid is one of them,” she said, pointing to the screen. “For Christ’s sake, the girl’s own mother just lawyered up. I’ve already got a call in to Aaron Fogelman’s father. I’m betting he does the same. I know where my focus is staying.”
Kovac spread his hands in surrender. “That’s fine,” he said. “Stay on it. I hope you’re right, Tinks. Because if you’re not, we’ve got a bigger monster on our hands than I want to think about.”
41
On the upside of kidnapping a news reporter was the fact that he didn’t have to wonder about the investigation. There were no long lapses in coverage of the case, particularly on the station she worked for.
Fitz kept the TV tuned in for all the breaking news—of which there was none, of course. They kept showing the parking lot of Dana Nolan’s apartment building, blocked off with fluttering ribbons of yellow crime scene tape and crawling with cops and crime scene investigators swarming around her car like ants on a scrap of food.
He recognized Kovac moving around the scene with his hands jammed in his pockets and his shoulders hunched against the wind. There was no sign of his partner, Liska. That was a bit of a disappointment.
The NewsWatch people kept putting up photographs of their missing news girl and m
aking pleas for information. The level of desperation was very high. He liked that. The adrenaline rush he got from hearing that was something new and intoxicating and probably addicting. He had always been happy with his way of doing things. The balance of risk to reward he maintained had always been just right for him. But this, he admitted, was heady stuff. He had to be careful not to get drunk on it and make a mistake. He had to keep his objective in mind.
He had a point to make.
He couldn’t get too excited that the homicide captain, Kasselmann, made a personal appearance not only at the official press conference but in the studio on the NewsWatch set, to say the police department was taking very seriously the idea that they were dealing with a very dangerous predator in Doc Holiday. Giving credit where credit was due.
That was all he really wanted at the heart of it, he thought with a smile as he turned to his latest victim, who was still alive and crying, waiting for him to kill her. He was an artist, and he wanted recognition for his work.
He chose a knife with a fine sharp point and leaned over the terrified girl. She was naked, tied down spread-eagle to the work table. He had removed the duct tape from her mouth and replaced it with a red ball gag. He could smell her fear. The scent was an aphrodisiac like no other. Her eyes widened with panic as he touched the tip of the blade to the center of her chest. Blood bloomed rose red against her pale white skin.
“And you, my love,” he said as the excitement stirred within him, “will be my masterpiece.”
42
“The address on his DL is one of those mailbox places,” Kovac said, pouring another cup of coffee. He figured he had to be on his second gallon of the day. Dinner was pizza someone had left over from lunch. Dessert would be a handful of whatever antacids he could find in his desk drawer. Tinks had gone home to feed her kids. He wished he was one of them.
“We’ve got a phone number, right?” Kasselmann said, taking a seat at the table, which was littered with paperwork and file folders, coffee cups and food wrappers. He cast a dubious glance at the lone remaining piece of pizza drying out like a piece of roadkill on the abandoned greasy cardboard box. He had spent most of his day dealing with the media. The knot in his tie was still square. His only concession to exhaustion was the removal of his suit jacket.