To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  The house in front of him was an expensive, showy affair, even by local standards. Everywhere Lenhardt looked, he saw expense—the triple-hung windows, the heavy door, the beige brick, the landscaping.

  The owner, so quick on the intercom, was slow to answer the door.

  “Will this take much time?” he asked, panting as if he had come from a long distance. The man presented puffy—round-cheeked, with deep creases beneath his eyes, a stocky figure not unlike Lenhardt’s, but softer, doughier. “I have to go to my office, and I want to be there by noon.”

  “On a Sunday you can get to downtown Baltimore in thirty minutes.”

  “I don’t work in Baltimore.”

  “D.C.?”

  “Harrisburg.” There was an impatient edge to the man’s voice, as if Lenhardt should have known where he worked. The name Delacorte did sound slightly familiar, but it didn’t bring up any ready associations.

  “This will take just a few minutes, I’m sure.” People started out high-handed with detectives all the time, but the law-abiding types usually settled down pretty fast.

  Delacorte led him into the living room, which looked unused, as most living rooms did these days. But this one was antiseptic in a way that Lenhardt couldn’t pinpoint, like a room in a model home.

  “I have to ask you a few questions about your gun.”

  “I don’t have a gun.”

  Lenhardt took out his notes, although he was sure he had it right. There couldn’t be another Michael Delacorte in Glendale.

  “State police records show that Michael Delacorte has a .22 registered to this address, has had for the past year.”

  The guy’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s my wife. Michael.”

  “Your wife? My mistake. You see a name like Michael, you don’t even think to glance at the gender.”

  “She’s used to it. In fact, she rather likes it.”

  “So…”

  “So?”

  “Is she here? Mrs. Delacorte.”

  “She moved out a month ago.” That explained the bare look of the house. The wife had gone through, taking all those little personal things that women strew about, photographs and candlesticks and vases.

  “And did she take her gun with her? Or say anything about it being missing in the past few weeks?”

  “Until five seconds ago, I didn’t even know my wife had a gun. I’m still trying to process that information. It’s an interesting footnote to everything that’s been going on around here.” He laughed in a self-deprecating way, as if Lenhardt should be intimate with his troubles. Yet Lenhardt still didn’t have a clue who the guy was, had yet to learn his first name, in fact. “Why do you care?”

  “A .22 registered to Michael Delacorte was recovered Friday from Glendale High School.”

  “From Glendale—oh, my fucking God, that’s all I need.”

  Could this guy be more self-involved? But then it hit Lenhardt—Delacorte. Stewart Delacorte. Another business guy under indictment, or about to be, something to do with stock manipulation in a furniture company that had been in his family for generations, gone public, then gone pretty much to hell.

  “We’re trying to figure out how the gun came to be in the girl’s possession.”

  Delacorte was in responsible-citizen mode now, keen to help. “We had a baby-sitter, a regular, came every Thursday. I think she was a Glendale girl.”

  “You know her name?”

  “I might, if I heard it.”

  Lenhardt carefully read off three names, although he didn’t need to refer to his notes to do that. He just wanted to make sure that he didn’t lead this guy in any way, that each name was repeated in the same careful, uninflected tone.

  “Katarina Hartigan. Josie Patel. Perri Kahn.”

  “Dale’s daughter? But she was the one who was killed, right? Poor guy. When I read that in the paper, it reminded me there’s always someone whose troubles are worse than your own.”

  “So Kat was your baby-sitter?”

  “Oh, no. I just know Dale from, you know, around. He’s a good guy. So I recognize Kat, but those other names—it could be either one. I’m sure it was one of those y names. Josie. Perri. Terry.”

  “But you saw the baby-sitter, would know her if you saw her again, right?” Perri’s parents had already confirmed that their daughter baby-sat for this family, but Lenhardt was keen to determine that the other girls couldn’t have procured the gun. The Kahns’ lawyer would sure as hell find out if they had access, if Kat or Josie had so much as rung the doorbell in the past three years.

  Delacorte looked a little sheepish. “I suppose so. I—I worked a lot. That’s the reason Michael left. Part of the reason. The baby-sitter was…thin. Kind of bony.”

  That description could apply to Perri Kahn or Josie Patel.

  “Tall? Short?”

  Delacorte shrugged.

  “Um, ethnic?”

  “Ethnic?”

  “Like, Asian or Indian. Not American Indian but the other kind.”

  “Oh, no. I don’t recall ever seeing anyone like that in the house.”

  “And there was only the one baby-sitter?”

  “On Thursdays. She came in on the nanny’s day off, because, you know, God forbid Michael would have to spend an entire day alone with Malcolm.”

  “Why did your wife have a gun?”

  Delacorte gave Lenhardt what he obviously thought of as a man-to-man smile. “I don’t know, but believe me, I’m thinking about it.”

  “How do I get in touch with her?”

  “Beats me. She won’t tell me where she’s living and hasn’t let me see my son since she moved out. Is that even legal?”

  “Not exactly. But you need a family lawyer—”

  He held up a hand. “I know. The question was largely rhetorical.”

  “You got a number for your wife?”

  “A cell. She won’t answer when I call, though. She always makes me talk to voice mail.”

  “I thought I could call it.”

  “Oh. Oh, of course.” Delacorte began to wander the room, pulling open drawers in various end tables and chests, looking for paper and pencil. Lenhardt felt a stab of pity, watching a man roam his own home, incapable of finding so much as scrap of paper.

  He handed him his own pad and pen, asking, “Who’s Maurice?”

  “My driver. It’s about an hour to Harrisburg. I can’t afford that much downtime, so he drives, I work. I moved here because I thought I could commute by helicopter, but the neighbors went berserk on my ass. That’s how I got to know Dale. He tried to broker a compromise, but there was no dealing with these nuts. I could have fought them in court, but it wasn’t worth it, not with everything else going on.”

  “Why are you going in on a Sunday, though?”

  “The usual things,” he said. “Papers to go through. Some things to box up and put into storage.”

  His tone had the vague, innocent air of a lying kid, and he was no longer making eye contact.

  “It’s illegal, you know. Getting rid of stuff once an investigation is under way.”

  “Thanks for the free legal advice, Sergeant. Helps defray the cost of the official advice that costs me six hundred dollars an hour. Got any other pearls of wisdom for me?”

  Lenhardt knew he was being put down, but he pretended to take the guy’s words at face value. “Okay, one more tip: Everything you steal, your wife is entitled to half of, under Maryland law. So if she knows where you hid all your assets before you gutted your company, you’ll have to cut her in.”

  He left in a good mood, even though he hadn’t established anything other than the probability that Perri Kahn was the only girl who could have taken the gun from this house. It would be interesting to pin down the when, which would suggest just how long she had been planning her morning of havoc. And Delacorte hadn’t been able to place Josie in his home, a complication that Lenhardt had been happy to sidestep, even if he did think the girl was lying her head off.


  What if she stalled on purpose? The thought hit him with a happy shock as soon as he was back on the highway, another possible resolution to the inconsistencies that were nagging at him. What if she hoped that refusing to open the door, pretending to be incapacitated, would be more likely to lead to the other girl’s death?

  He filed it away and continued to the office, where he and Infante were going to write up the paperwork necessary to get permission for a medical examiner to eyeball the girl’s wound. According to the X-rays, the trajectory had been remarkably straight, as if someone had held the gun directly over the girl’s foot and fired. As if she had stood still, polite and proper, the best-behaved kid lining up for a flu shot.

  15

  Alexa had her Sunday routine down pat—the gym, then the farmers’ market under the expressway, shopping for whatever new recipe she had picked out for that night’s supper, usually something from Gourmet, or Food & Wine, or Nigella’s column in the New York Times, but not Martha, never Martha, even before her legal problems. Martha Stewart was cold, while Nigella Lawson had an earthy sensuality that Alexa believed was not unlike her own nature. Warm, giving. And although Alexa sometimes invited Washington friends to her Sunday-night suppers, entertaining was not the point of her ritual. In fact, she prepared meals just as elaborate when alone—single portions of pot-au-feu, soufflés, paella. She refused to be one of those women who were stingy with themselves, postponing pleasure until the proper husband or boyfriend showed up.

  That was one reason it had been so important to buy her own house, rather than settling into some sterile rental. The house needed quite a bit of work, but Alexa was patiently renovating one room at a time, which meant living in a perpetual cloud of dust. Only the kitchen had been done before she moved in, because the kitchen is the heart of any home. She had a hunch that granite was over, and she couldn’t afford it anyway, so she had gone with an almost retro look, all white wood and milk glass. In the eighteen months since then, she had completed the downstairs half bath and the dining room—refinishing the floor, installing her own moldings, even finding an old chandelier at a flea market and rewiring it herself. It was a beautiful, sensuous room with cranberry red walls and a mahogany dining room set that Alexa had unearthed at an antique store not far from Glendale.

  The antique stores and flea markets in north county had been her primary solace after being assigned to Glendale by the nonprofit that was underwriting her pilot program. A certified teacher and guidance counselor—Alexa preferred to think of herself as an ethnographer—she had designed a curriculum intended to tap into current concerns over girls’ self-esteem. Unlike others in the field, who concentrated on psychology and sociology, Alexa had designed her program around language, the girls’ weapon of choice. She had assumed she would find a berth in Montgomery County, which would make it possible to keep her apartment in D.C.’s Adams-Morgan, close to her friends from graduate school. When she found out she was being sent to the distant reaches of north Baltimore County, she had insisted on living in the city, a curious choice in the mind of her new colleagues, who couldn’t see why anyone would choose the city over the suburban apartments and condos, especially with so many move-in specials available. “I suppose you get a lot more house for your money in Baltimore,” Barbara Paulson, the principal, had said, in a tone that suggested she didn’t understand at all. “And the reverse commute isn’t so bad.”

  The truth was, Alexa had gotten very little house for her money, a tiny bungalow, Craftsman era but definitely not a Craftsman, on an unusually large lot in Beverly Hills, a neighborhood ripe for a yuppie influx that would send prices soaring. If she just sat on her investment for a year or two, doing nothing, the house’s value would probably triple from the land alone. But Alexa could not live that way. She needed a home, for emotional reasons so psychologically naked that they made Alexa, with her double degrees in rhetoric and psychology, a little sheepish.

  She had done well by the house, but she was ill suited to harnessing its greatest asset, the wild and overgrown lawn. A neighborhood man had helped her with the basics—clearing out the weeds, cutting back on the overly rambunctious border plants—but the yard would have to wait for someone with a greener thumb to realize its true potential. Alexa’s primary grudge against gardening was that it was never done. A room might take three months to renovate, especially if one were doing it in piecemeal fashion, but once finished, it was finished for years. A kitchen might take three hours to clean after a particularly ambitious day of cooking, but it would still be tidy the next morning. One could work in a garden every day, from first to last light, and a half-dozen tasks would remain, while another dozen would spring up overnight. Gardens were just so ceaselessly needy.

  Teenage girls were, too, of course, but Alexa did not find them as exasperating—quite the opposite. When she stood in front of a group of girls, she felt an almost spiritual thrill. Not holy per se, but as if she were the holder of simple but essential truths that could free them. They needed only to understand the power of words and stop using them to harm and harass. That was Alexa’s gospel, and she had been making progress at Glendale, in the same way she was making progress on her house—one room at a time, one project at a time, and, right now, on her hands and knees in the living room, one strip of Pergo at a time. It was much harder than the guy at Home Depot had suggested, however, and Alexa was trying not to cry at the seeming impossibility of fitting the floor into her slightly off-kilter living room.

  Secretly, selfishly, she wondered how her pilot program would be affected by Perri Kahn’s—But Alexa did not know how to describe the actions of her star pupil. “Act”? Far too weak. “Crime”? Not if she were mentally ill, which she must be. But how could Alexa have missed the warning signs of such a profound psychosis? She had approved of Perri’s break with Kat, seeing it as an important stage in the girl’s development. True, Perri had been gloomy this year, emotional and secretive, and her papers had been increasingly fixated on violence, but in a cool, analytical way. She had written a particularly smart piece on the role of minorities as sacrificial totems in horror films, showing how even those movies that seemed to subvert this trope ended up serving it. For proof she had offered some B-movie about a snake, in which Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube emerge heroic, yet all their efforts center on helping the injured blond hero, just as Sigourney Weaver had battled aliens to save a similarly comatose white male. Perri had been an absolute delight to teach, but Alexa knew that this was not information anyone wanted just now.

  If Perri Kahn had shot, say, Thalia Cooper, then Alexa might have understood. Thalia was the stereotype, the mean girl who hid her cruelty beneath her bland, blond good looks, sending the pinch-faced Beverly Wilson to do her handiwork. If a boy was heard to remark approvingly on any facet of a girl that Thalia did not deem respectable, then Thalia tried to destroy that girl. That had been the whole motive behind her attempt to humiliate Eve Muhly. Eve had been getting too much attention for her ridiculously lovely body, a scale model of voluptuousness, not that Eve had a clue what to do with it. Of course, now that Eve hung with the skeezer girls, she dressed in such baggy clothes that one could say Thalia had won, after a fashion. No, if someone had shot Thalia, it would have made perfect sense.

  But Kat Hartigan was almost as nice as everyone said she was. As a new arrival to Glendale, Alexa wasn’t quite so inclined to be gaga over Kat. And as a guidance counselor with unrestricted access to student records, she knew that Kat’s admission to Stanford had rested heavily on the status of her father’s girlfriend, an alum who’d gone to bat for her big-time, recruiting other area alums to write her letters of reference. Her grades were impressive, straight A’s across the board, but her SATs were average by Glendale standards. Kat simply could not crack 1400 despite the money her father lavished on coaches and tutoring programs, making Stanford a reach for her. Strangely, reading comprehension was her downfall. She soared through the vocabulary on verbal only to hit a mental block when asked
to interpret words in context. But Kat—well, Kat’s father—was nothing if not sly about the process. By the time the girl applied for early admission, she had found multiple ways to sweeten her application and compensate for her board scores.

  For all this—the money, the connections, the doting father, the grandfather who had helped to build the town where all her friends lived—Kat was genuinely sweet-tempered. A little dull, perhaps, because of the very earnestness that made her so nice, a perfectionist who panicked at the smallest error. Sometimes she was almost too solicitous of others’ feelings, as if her parents’ divorce had left her with a profound fear of even mildly disagreeable discussions. She was a nodder par excellence, someone who gave her wholehearted approval to the tiniest projects and pronouncements, to the point where she risked being patronizing. Yet Kat was nothing if not achingly sincere. While Thalia and Beverly stalked the halls of Glendale, looking for new victims to terrorize, Kat had reigned from a base of niceness.

  At a standoff with the Pergo, Alexa decided to take a break, pour herself some iced tea—homemade, with mint leaves, which still grew wild in a corner of her barely cultivated yard—and carried the glass to her back steps, along with her cordless phone.

  She eyed the phone, trying to think of someone to call. She had checked in with her mother Friday night, of course, and the conversation had been almost as gratifying as it should be, her mother properly awed and frightened by her daughter’s brush with danger. Alexa had hung up with a rare feeling of satisfaction. Stories that one looked forward to telling so often fell flat. Yet this one became better with each telling, even as she called her best friend from graduate school, then took a call from an old high-school classmate who had heard the news all the way in San Diego.

  But she had not called her older brother, assuming he would call her. Given their age difference, he had always been protective of her, especially after their father “decamped.” That was her mother’s preferred term, for it was at once literal and cruel, a reference to the fact that Mitchell Cunningham’s last act had been to pack the family’s camping gear in the trunk of his station wagon. He had been trying to find a place to fit the grill when his wife and daughter returned from church. Oona Cunningham told this story on herself to this day, as if being blunt about her own fate could keep anyone else from hurting her. But she had been better when Evan was home, before he went away to college. The ensuing eight years that Alexa spent with her mother felt forlorn and temporary—too much takeout, too many meals eaten in front of the television. It was as if a woman and a girl, living alone in a house where a father and a son used to be, did not count for anything.