To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  “Oh.” Mrs. Kahn looked thoughtful, as if considering whether she was at an advantage or a disadvantage, getting to tell this part of the story before anyone else. “Well, some people assumed it was the other way, that Kat and Josie had dropped Perri because she wasn’t a cheerleader who dated jocks. The thing is, Perri has very high standards for herself and her friends. Always has.”

  “Who were her friends? Besides Kat Hartigan and the Patel girl?”

  This question seemed to pain the mother, and she stammered a bit. “There wasn’t…after Kat and Josie. A lot of kids from drama class, of course. There’s this one boy—not a boyfriend. Just a friend. But very sweet.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Dannon Estes, poor thing. His mother…well, honest to God, I think she named him after a cup of yogurt. Literally.”

  “That so?” Lenhardt was making a mental note to get to know Dannon Estes.

  “His mother is a little unusual,” Eloise Kahn said, still in the vein of not meaning to be unkind, yet managing it with flying colors. “Sort of a hippie type, but married to the straightest arrow you could imagine. Her second husband, Dannon’s stepfather, and not a great fit, based on what Dannon tells me. The boy has practically lived at our house this past year.”

  “Huh.” His neutral, noncommittal noise was intended to keep her talking. Sometimes people could be helpful when they got revved up about inconsequential things.

  “It’s funny how much you can determine about someone based on the children’s names. Social class, education. I named Perri after a writer. A wonderful writer who’s also a doctor. I thought it would be a good omen, sort of like christening her left and her right brain at the same time. And she turned out to be good at both things—not writing and science per se, but she had a creative side—drawing, drama, writing. Yet she was great at math. She loved geometry. Have you ever heard of a teenage girl—a normal one, I mean—who loved geometry? Perri used to make up her own theorems for extra credit.”

  Eloise Kahn’s words, which had been coming in a great rush, halted abruptly. Lenhardt wondered if she was thinking about whether her daughter would ever again do anything for extra credit. Perri Kahn had one of those injuries that flummoxed doctors, as brain injuries sometimes do. Lenhardt had seen a case, a would-be suicide, who fired a gun straight into his temple and woke up four weeks later, functions virtually unaffected. Yet the shot from the .22 had cut a cruel path through Perri Kahn’s face and brain. What would be the best scenario for Perri’s parents? Alive and in prison? Brain-dead and here? Dead-dead? Could a parent ever wish for a child’s death, under any circumstances?

  “Sergeant?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Kahn?”

  “You believe me, right?”

  “About…?”

  “That we really didn’t see anything in Perri’s behavior? That there really wasn’t anything to observe or notice? She’s a good kid. Yes, I know every parent says that. The parents of serial killers say that every time. But Perri is truly good. Principled. All we ever asked her to do is stand up for what she thought was right, not just go along with the herd. She wasn’t up in her room playing violent computer games. She didn’t do drugs or drink. She’s a little high-strung. Passionate, sure, but that’s how she was raised to be. The fact is, we’re very proud of her.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary,” Lenhardt said, and Mrs. Kahn accepted it as the benediction she needed, although his wording had been carefully noncommittal.

  As soon as Eloise Kahn boarded the elevator to Shock Trauma, Lenhardt began making a list. “We’ll want a warrant to search her room, by tomorrow if possible. I hope the parents haven’t thought to mess with it. And we’ll want to seize the computer, check to see if the full body of the letter is on it.”

  “Wouldn’t it be great,” Infante said, “if she kept an online diary like so many kids now, one where she conveniently wrote all about this in great detail, so we’d know exactly what was going on?”

  “We never get that lucky. But there might be e-mails, or some other kinds of records.”

  “We need to check the phone.”

  “Phone records, sure.”

  “Not just the landline,” Infante said. “The cell phone, assuming she has one, and I bet she does, although it wasn’t at the scene. Probably in her car or something.”

  “Yeah, maybe the list of incoming and outgoing calls will show something.”

  “And the text messages. Those live forever, depending on the provider. These kids are crazy for text messaging.”

  “They are?” Lenhardt was refusing to give his kids cell phones until they were in high school and restricted their IM use on the computer, despite Jessica’s contention that this made him the cruelest, meanest father in the universe.

  Infante grinned knowingly. “That girl I brought to the departmental Christmas party? She was nineteen.”

  “That’s barely legal.”

  “Hey, same age difference as you and Marcia. Anyway, it seemed like the only time she ever put her phone down and stopped texting her friends was when we were in bed.”

  “Well, yeah,” Lenhardt said. “Everyone knows that’s nothing to call home about.”

  22

  “That was soooooooo queer,” Lila said.

  “Definitely,” Val agreed, cupping her hands around her cigarette to light it. The breeze was surprisingly stiff this afternoon, even here where it was buffered by a stand of evergreens. “He, like, wouldn’t make it past the first round on American Idol.”

  Eve kept her head down, worried that Lila and Val would see that she did not agree. She tried to think whatever they did. It seemed to her a reasonable price for their friendship, sharing their opinions. But she couldn’t believe they hadn’t been moved by Peter Lasko’s performance.

  “I mean, he was just swimming in Lake Me, he was so in love with himself,” Lila continued.

  “He is hot, though.” Shit, had she really said that out loud? “I mean, if he wasn’t singing such a stupid song, he could be hot. Don’t you think? He’s going to be in this movie and all.”

  “Yeah,” Val said. “We all heard Old Giff huff and puff about that. But I just figured he was trying to show us that getting killed wasn’t the only way to get famous at Glendale High School.”

  Lila rewarded Val with the laugh that line demanded, but Eve couldn’t quite muster one.

  “I’m not saying it’s a big deal,” she said carefully, ready to abandon the conversation if it was clear Val and Lila were united against her. “But it’s cool. And he is good-looking.”

  “Lasko’s okay-looking,” Lila admitted, a little cautiously, as if she, too, craved Val’s approval. It was funny about Val. She wasn’t pretty or attractive. In fact, she was kind of heavyset, with bad skin and mud-brown hair. She wasn’t accomplished at the things that mattered, like sports or music or classwork. Yet lots of people at school wanted to be on her good side, not just Eve and Lila. She had some kind of weird authority. “But why did he have to sing such a queer song? I mean, there have to be a million better things to sing. Even… ‘Wind Beneath My Wings.’ That would have been okay.”

  “But that would have been more about Kat,” Val pointed out. “I think they wanted him to sing something for us. Like a stupid song could make us feel better.”

  “Do you feel bad?” Eve’s question sounded odd even to her ears, so she tried rephrasing it. “I mean, of course we all feel bad, but do you feel especially bad? It’s not like we really knew her.”

  “She was a little stuck-up,” Lila said. “But not as stuck-up as she might have been, given how rich her dad was. And she didn’t cut on people. She wasn’t really a diva that way, although the divas liked to hang with her. She got along with everybody. She was, like, above the divas.”

  “Yeah, but it’s easier to be nice when you’re rich,” Val said. “Because when you’re rich, you have nice clothes and a car of your own, and you can afford to be nice, beca
use no one has anything you want. She had everything.”

  “She didn’t have a boyfriend,” Eve said. It was one of the things that amazed her about Kat, the fact that she could have any boy in school yet didn’t seem to want any of them. “I heard she told her parents she’d rather take the money they were going to give her for after-prom and donate it to a homeless shelter.”

  “That’s because Kat was scared to spend the night in a hotel,” Lila said. “A curfew is a cocktease’s best friend.”

  “Was she, had she…?” Eve was unsure how to phrase the question.

  “She was a virgin,” Lila said dismissively.

  Eve was, too. A virgin, that is. Val and Lila never pressed her directly on that subject, but she suspected they knew she had never gone further than she did that day on the bus—had never gone that far again, truth be told. A lot of boys had come around at first, of course, but when Eve showed no inclination to repeat her performance, they gave up on her. Ms. Cunningham had given her a book, a slender but odd story about a school in Scotland, called The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. “Nothing changes,” she had told Eve. “The girls in this book could be smoking with you out in the woods.” (That was Ms. Cunningham’s style, letting the students know she was privy to all their secrets but didn’t care. She thought she was so cool, so hip.) The thing is, Eve didn’t see how these girls in the book were anything like her. There was one girl who was described as being famous for sex, although she wasn’t actually having sex. She was just very pretty and posed naked for a painter. Eve supposed that was her and was flattered, but she didn’t really know what else to do with the book, other than write an extra-credit report for English, which pulled her up to a C-plus.

  “If one of us was shot, do you think it would be as big a deal? Like, would they let everybody out of school to go to our memorial service?”

  Val and Lila shook their heads in unison. “Definitely not,” Val said. “Although I think what’s really freaking them out is that it was Perri Kahn who shot her. If you had brought a gun to school, Muhly”—Val always used their surnames—“they wouldn’t have been shocked at all. Or any of us. Because we’re skeezers. If you ask me, the real surprise is that it doesn’t happen every day. I can think of at least a dozen girls I’d like to kill.”

  “Including Kat?” Eve asked.

  Val exhaled noisily. “No. Not her. She was okay. She wouldn’t even make my top twenty.”

  Eve thought about her secret. Val and Lila could definitely be trusted. But she had promised. She must tell no one. No one. If only Val and Lila had been here Friday morning, if they had not been late—but they were, there was no undoing it.

  Instead she asked, “Are you going to talk to Ms. Cunningham? One-on-one, I mean, like she encouraged us to?”

  “Of course not,” Val said, as if insulted by the very suggestion.

  Eve fingered the paper slip in her pocket, the one given to her at homeroom that morning, the one that she was trying to ignore. “Ms. Cunningham keeps bugging me to talk to her.”

  “That’s what you get,” Lila said, “for yakking to her on Friday like a little brown-noser. What were you thinking?”

  “I dunno. I was bored. Besides, she’s okay, Ms. Cunningham.”

  “Never trust a guidance counselor,” Val said. “They live to get inside your head. Her more than most of them. She thinks she’s, like, decoded us. Guidance counselors are supposed to help us get into college, not play shrink. I don’t need Ms. Cunningham to explain to me how girls are mean to each other because they’re competing for boys. I need her to tell me how I can get my SATs over 1250.”

  “What’s your reach school?” Lila asked.

  “McDaniels, can you believe it? If I’m lucky, I’ll get to spend four years in beautiful downtown Westminster, Maryland.”

  “Dickinson,” Lila said. They looked expectantly at Eve.

  “My parents say I have to live at home, wherever I get in.”

  “Wow.”

  Val’s sincere and sorrowful shock proved to Eve just how dire her situation was. It was one thing to joke about community college as one’s only option, another for it to be true. Theoretically, Eve’s parents had told her she could go anywhere in the metropolitan Baltimore area, and that included Johns Hopkins and Goucher. But even Towson University or Villa Julie were not sure things for Eve, with her middling grades and test scores. She thought she might be able to do an end run, get into Maryland College Institute of Art on the basis of her work in jewelry making and ceramics. But her father might decree that an art school didn’t count as a real college, even though it had regular classes, like English and math. Or he might say she hadn’t banked enough in her college fund. Eve’s chest felt a little tight. She was seventeen, only a junior. She hadn’t even gotten her driver’s license yet, because her parents kept putting off the mandated forty hours of supervised practice, and she was expected to make this decision that was going to rule the rest of her life. How weird was that?

  They heard the bell ring, announcing the change for the last period of the day. Eve had to be all the way back at the south wing for history, an impossible distance even when she actually showed up for her PE class, instead of crouching and smoking in the woods. But the teachers were being extra lenient today. Between the end of school and the shooting, tardiness and cuts weren’t going to draw too much attention.

  She stood up, brushing the dirt from her jeans. What would it be like, she wondered, to cut class and meet a boy, instead of just smoking cigarettes with Val and Lila? She didn’t want to give them up, but it would be nice to have their companionship and a boyfriend. A boy who really liked her, a boy who wouldn’t think of her as the girl on the bus, who might not even know about that. Someone who looked like Peter Lasko, with his dark hair and green eyes. She hoped he was doing okay. He would probably go to the funeral, being Kat’s former boyfriend and all. She wondered if he would sing again.

  “Are either of you going to the memorial service?” she asked her friends.

  “Sure,” Val said. “It means missing the last three periods.”

  “We could say we’re going, then just cut,” Lila said.

  Eve waited to see what Val would decide. The thing was, she wanted to go to the funeral, although she couldn’t say why. It just seemed like one of the few all-school events where everyone was truly welcome, where everyone belonged. Unlike pep rallies, for example.

  “That would be in bad taste,” Val decreed. “If we say we’re going to go, we should go. I’ll get permission to drive us there, though, instead of going on the buses. Then we can hang out in Baltimore after. Who’s going to complain?”

  Eve thought of her dour father, who objected if she was even a minute late for supper, which they ate at six o’clock sharp. But it was Kat Hartigan’s funeral. Her mother would explain to him that such a circumstance merited an exception.

  tuesday

  23

  Back when Lenhardt was coming up, he had a sergeant, Steve Waters, who was about as good a murder police as anyone he had ever known. Waters was unflappable, nothing got to him. Except for one suspect, who was brilliant in his stupidity. Although the guy’s story was implausible, it wasn’t impossible, and he stuck to it with unwavering conviction, refusing every opportunity to change it even a bit. Waters finally lost it, just lost it, screaming into the guy’s face, then running out of the interrogation room and punching a Coke machine, accomplishing nothing but a broken hand.

  It was a funny story—when it was happening to someone else.

  Not so funny when the stubborn subject with the monotone voice was key to one’s own case. Less funny when one considered she was a teenage girl. Josie Patel wasn’t a genius. She wasn’t even a particularly skilled liar. But two hours into his second interview with her, Lenhardt was more than ready to assault a vending machine. Whenever challenged on her inconsistencies, she simply said, “Well, that’s the way I remember it. But it happened so fast.”

  “Tell me
again. Tell me what you do remember.”

  And she did. She told it again and again and again, and she always told it the same way. Perri Kahn came into the bathroom where Josie and Kat were primping. “Why there?” Don’t know, Kat said she wanted to go there. “Why?” She didn’t say. Perri Kahn came in, shot Kat, shot Josie in the foot during a brief struggle, shot herself in the head.

  “Was—is—Perri right-handed or left-handed?”

  “Right-handed.”

  “Yet the injury is to your right foot.”

  She didn’t jump in, the way some subjects might. Where an adult man or woman might feel obligated to explain or account, she offered nothing. She didn’t have the nervous citizen’s tendency to be helpful or the too-smart perp’s compulsion to explain. She was, in fact, like a kid stuck on a teacher’s question, a kid who just stared back, waiting for the teacher to provide the answer out of frustration.

  “See, Perri Kahn was right-handed. She’d be more apt to shoot you in your left foot. And she’s tall, which should have affected the trajectory. But your X-rays show a pretty straight entry, before the bullet glanced off this one bone here.”

  He held up the X-ray, and not for the first time. Josie inspected it with interest but said nothing.

  Gloria Bustamante, never particularly patient, was beginning to boil over. “Are you suggesting my client shot herself in the foot? That’s ridiculous. She has an athletic scholarship to the University of Maryland, College Park, which such an injury could void.”

  Lenhardt chose not to respond to Gloria’s challenge, keeping his focus on Josie. Gloria had to be in the room, but nothing required him to acknowledge her.

  “As you know, Josie, we took your blood today. We’ve also taken your fingerprints. Are those going to match any of the prints we found on the gun?”

  “But I told you,” Josie said, “I tried to grab the gun. I almost got it, too. So of course my fingerprints are on it.”