Kovac And Liska: The 9th Girl Part 2

"Go for it," Kovac said. "If he can give us a tag number-even a partial-on that car, we could find our whodunit before we even know who he done it to."

Liska took his coffee and washed down the last of her doughnut, shuddering at the bitterness.

"Oh my G.o.d! That's horrible!" she said. "Start a fresh pot, for Christ's sake!"

"It'll put hair on your chest, Tinks," Kovac said.

"Great. Something more for Tip to fantasize about," she said, heading for the door.

"And, Tinks?"

She looked back over her shoulder.

"Tell the guy he didn't kill anyone."

4.

The residents of Minneapolis were waking to a new year by the time Liska finally went home. Waking, or better yet, sleeping in. She had been up for twenty-four hours. Sleeping in sounded like the greatest luxury in the world. Unfortunately, she probably wasn't going to find out firsthand whether it was or not.

If she could grab a couple of hours before the boys roused themselves, she would be lucky. Kovac was pus.h.i.+ng for the autopsy on their Jane Doe to be done ASAP. If he could get an ME to give up New Year's Day and jump their dead body to the head of the line, they would all be standing around the dissection of a corpse instead of a holiday turkey before the day was out.

She pulled into her driveway, enjoying the feeling of being home that was unique to this house. She had purchased it a year and a half ago-a side-by-side duplex in an established older neighborhood near Lake Calhoun. Built in the 1940s, it was solid and substantial. Renovated in 2000, it had all the necessary creature comforts. She and her boys lived on one side. The other side she rented to the twenty-six-year-old sister of a patrol cop she knew.

Liska felt like she had been an adult for a hundred years, but the day she had bought this house, she had felt like she was just becoming a grown-up all over again. It was the first house she had ever purchased on her own. There was something very important in that.

When she and Speed Hatcher had been married, they had done what all young married couples did-bounced from a cheap apartment to a better apartment to their first real home-a bungalow in a nondescript neighborhood a few blocks off Grand Avenue in St. Paul. There had been some happy times in that house, particularly when the boys were small. There had been plenty of not-so-happy times in that house as their marriage had disintegrated, and after the divorce.

She had stayed there for too many years on a handful of sad excuses. She got the house in the divorce. It was the only home her sons knew. It was convenient for their father to visit.

Speed worked Narcotics for the St. Paul PD. His schedule was erratic at best. Nikki had reasoned it would be better if he could drop in to see his sons when he could. If she moved them closer to her job in Minneapolis, he would have to make an effort to visit. Effort was not Speed Hatcher's forte, not even where his boys were concerned.

But he had let them down so many times, Nikki had begun to think it would be better if they lived in the other of the Twin Cities. Easier for her to make excuses for him. Instead of blaming their dad for being absent from their lives, they could blame their mom for moving them away from him. h.e.l.l of a compromise.

The move had not gone over well. Uprooting a twelve-year-old and a fourteen-year-old had been nothing short of child abuse by the boys' standards. The adjustment period had been brutal. But R.J.-her youngest-had inherited his father's easy charm and made friends quickly, and Kyle-her studious one-had immersed himself in his new school. A year and a half later, they didn't entirely hate their mother anymore.

They had made this house their own, their family of three. There was no Ghost of Speed Past haunting their holidays here. There were no memories of rare happy family times or too-common arguments that ended with doors slamming.

As predicted, Speed's visits were infrequent, but better to be infrequent with the excuse of distance than infrequent with the excuse of just doesn't give a s.h.i.+t. Nikki accepted that bargain and considered her short commute to work downtown her consolation prize for the rest.

The house was quiet as she let herself in. She stopped in the powder room off the front hall, as was her habit coming home from a homicide. She wanted to see what she looked like, as if the most recent murder might have left some indelible mark on her-a line, a scar. All the years she'd been working homicides, if they had each left a visible scar she would have looked as much like a zombie as her Jane Doe by now.

She checked herself in the mirror. Purple shadows were smudged beneath blue eyes that had been bright with the promise of a night out New Year's Eve. All that remained of her eye shadow was a dark line in the crease of her eyelids. Her pixie-short silver-blond hair had been flattened by her Elmer Fudd hat, then had made a halfhearted effort to bounce back with a few swipes of her hands. She looked a little like she might have stuck her finger in a light socket at some point during the evening, or seen a ghost . . . or a zombie.

The thought took her back to the scene on the highway, to the young woman lying like a discarded bundle of rags, torn and stained and forgotten.

Probably not forgotten, she corrected herself. a.s.suming the killer had been the one driving the mystery car, he must have had a rude surprise when he realized his victim had managed to somehow get out of the trunk.

While there was probably some valid twist of the laws of physics that might have allowed that body to fall out of a moving vehicle and bounce back upright, Nikki was set on the idea that their Jane Doe had still been alive when the Hummer hit her. It was a terrible thought. It would have been less terrible to believe the victim had already been deceased, but she didn't. That the young woman had been alive when she came out of that trunk was a stubborn notion that had dug its talons in deep and wasn't about to let go.

She sank down on one end of her couch and closed her eyes as her body relaxed. She tried to imagine what that would have been like: stuffed in the trunk of a car, surely thinking her life was over, then seeing light as the trunk latch let go. Hope would have surged, would have urged her to do something to save herself no matter how impossible it seemed. Adrenaline would have given her the strength to sit up. What would have pushed her out of that rolling coffin? Bravery? Fear? In Nikki's experience, those were two halves of the same emotion. You couldn't be brave without knowing fear.

And that moment-when bravery tipped the scale-was what brought tears to her eyes. That was the moment an ordinary human became a hero. She had no idea who that young woman was or what she had done that had somehow, some way, led her to become a victim of a violent crime. The guys in the squad had already started calling her Zombie Doe. But in this it didn't matter who she was. That emotion was universally human: the overriding need to fight for life. And when that fight ended in triumph, it brought the highest high. And when it ended in defeat . . . it brings me, Liska thought.

It would be her job, and Kovac's, to put a real name to Zombie Doe, to find her family, to devastate them with the news of what had happened to their daughter, their sister, their niece, their grandchild.

Liska had learned the lesson long ago-that no one dies in a vacuum. Everyone's life touches someone for good or for ill. Almost everyone. The few left over who died unknown and unclaimed were buried by the city and mourned in only the most abstract way by the people who had dealt with their bodies.

The person sleeping on the other two-thirds of her couch began to stir beneath the thick burgundy chenille throw. A leg moved, an arm stretched, a head emerged, big brown eyes blinking.

Marysue Zaytoun sat up with a smile on her lovely face, looking fresh and well rested. "Hi, Nikki. Happy New Year."

"I hope so," Liska said. "It's not off to a good start."

Marysue frowned. "It was a bad date?"

"Murder. I mean an actual murder," Liska said. "Half an hour before 'Auld Lang Syne' I got called to a scene. So much for my big date."

At least she had driven herself to the party, knowing she was on call, knowing there was a better-than-even chance her phone would ring. She kept a change of clothes in the car for just that reason.

"And here I thought you must have gotten lucky," Marysue said.

All Liska had texted her was a cryptic Going 2 b late. Can U stay?

"I don't know what I'd do without you, Marysue. Thanks so much for staying with the boys. I owe you. Again."

Marysue touched her fingertips to her dark hair and it fell perfectly in place. There were no red creases on her face from pressing into the pillow. There was no mascara smudged beneath her eyes. She was perfect. And on top of being perfect, she was sweet and kind and generous. An angel in the guise of Officer Bobby Zaytoun's little sister. Liska couldn't have conjured up a more perfect renter unless she could have gotten all of Marysue's fine qualities in the body of George Clooney.

"I'm glad to help. With Kevin out of town, my idea of the perfect New Year's Eve is curling up with a good book anyway. I have no interest in being out on the roads with a bunch of drunken fools."

There was the soft sound of the South in her voice. The Zaytouns hailed from North Carolina. Marysue had followed her brother north. She worked from home as a website designer and manager to pay the bills, and worked in her spare time on designing her own line of clothing. Fas.h.i.+on was her pa.s.sion. But her personal style transcended what she wore. Marysue could have put on the proverbial burlap sack with the perfect accessory and be hailed as a chic sensation all over town. Her fiance, Kevin Boyle, was a lucky man.

"So how was your evening?" Liska asked. "What did you guys do?"

"Ate pizza, played video games, watched a movie about aliens invading the planet. Darn near everything blew up by the end of it."

"An R.J. cla.s.sic."

Guns, bombs, Transformers, aliens, shoot-outs, explosions-that was her youngest. He was a boy bursting at the seams with life. With R.J. everything was on the surface. He wore his heart on his sleeve and his emotions on his face. Thirteen now, he was looking more and more like his father-blue eyes full of mischief, blond hair full of cowlicks, and a crooked grin that could stop a girl's heart. Unlike Speed, he was loyal to a fault.

"What about Kyle? What time did he get home from his party?"

Marysue frowned. "A little after ten. I don't think he had a very good time. He came in and went straight up to his room."

Liska sighed. Kyle was fifteen, quiet, too sensitive, internalizing everything and giving nothing away. He had broken up with his first girlfriend before Nikki had even known he had one. And she might never have known if she hadn't had to dig through the trash for a permission slip R.J. had accidentally thrown away. Only then had she found the torn photograph of Kyle with a pretty, smiling blond-haired girl. When she had tried to broach the subject with him, he had gone within himself and slammed the door shut.

She worried about him in a way she didn't worry about her youngest. When R.J. got in trouble, it was right out there for all the world to see. In fact, he was usually the first one to tell her about it. And R.J.'s trouble was the obvious kind. He threw a baseball and accidentally busted a car window. He got sent to the princ.i.p.al's office for making farting noises with his armpit during cla.s.s. A bully picked on a friend after school, and he kicked the bully's a.s.s.

Kyle was another matter. Bright and artistic, he had won a scholars.h.i.+p to the Performance Scholastic Inst.i.tute, a prestigious private school for academically and artistically gifted students Nikki would never have been able to afford to send him to otherwise. His acceptance to PSI had helped prompt her to make the move from St. Paul.

The school had seemed a perfect fit for him the first year. He had welcomed the academic challenge and thrived in his art cla.s.ses. The girlfriend had happened over the summer. Things had begun to slide ever so slightly downhill from there. His guidance counselor had felt a need to express concern at the fall parent-teacher conference. Kyle's grades had slipped a bit. He had become uncommunicative with school staff and was having trouble getting along with some of the other students. He didn't seem to have many close friends. He hadn't done anything wrong, the counselor stressed. He wasn't in any kind of trouble, and yet . . .

Nikki's worry was that, like the secret girlfriend, she would find out about Kyle's trouble only after the disaster, when the only thing left to do was to sweep up the pieces and put them in the trash.

Marysue pushed the throw aside and got up from the couch. There was barely a wrinkle in her chocolate brown velour tracksuit.

"I'm going to make breakfast," she announced. "How would you like your eggs?"

"I think I'm out of eggs."

"I'm not. Come over and eat something before you crash. You'll worry better with a little protein in you."

"Give me twenty minutes."

As Marysue went out the front door, Nikki trudged up the stairs to the second floor, fantasizing about a hot shower. R.J.'s bedroom door was ajar. He was sprawled sideways across his bed as if he had fallen there, dead, one arm hanging over the side. She slipped into the room and covered him with the Vikings blanket he had gotten for Christmas. She brushed her fingers over the back of his head and smiled. He didn't move, didn't flinch. He slept the sleep of the innocent and unworried. She envied him.

Across the hall, the door to Kyle's room was shut. The door was an amazing original work of art created by her son, a surreal, shadowed landscape in red, black, and white, with an elaborate, life-size Samurai warrior in the foreground, guarding the portal with a wicked sword raised above his head.

Nikki tried to turn the k.n.o.b. Locked. She stood there for a moment, not sure what to do or think. There were only two reasons to lock a door: to keep one's self in and protected, and to keep one's family out and excluded. Either way, she didn't like it.

She pressed her ear to the door and held her breath, hoping to hear him moving around or snoring. Silence.

She knocked tentatively. "Kyle?"

Nothing.

Her instincts began to stir the pot of motherly emotions. He had been withdrawn lately, too quiet. He had gone to a New Year's Eve pizza party two blocks away and had come home too early and in a bad mood.

She knocked a little harder, spoke a little louder. "Kyle? Are you awake?"

No response.

Now her heart was beginning to beat faster. Recent stories of teen suicides rose in her mind. She berated herself for working too much, not being with the boys 24/7. She cursed their father for his neglect. All in a span of three seconds. She rattled the doork.n.o.b again and raised her voice. "Kyle Hatcher, open this door. Now!"

She let anger rise to the surface. It was easier to deal with than the fear that her son might have done something to harm himself. She began to think about kicking in the f.u.c.king door.

Kyle called back in a groggy voice. "I'm sleeping!"

Nikki let out a breath of relief. "If you were sleeping, you wouldn't have answered me."

"I'd be sleeping if you weren't pounding on the door."

"Open the door."

"I'm not dressed."

"Then put some pants on and open the door."

"Why can't you just leave me alone?"

"Kyle, open the door, or I'll kick it in. I mean it. And guess whose allowance will pay for the repairs?"

She could hear him stirring then, muttering curse words.

"No swearing!" she snapped.

"You do it!"

"Not when I think you can hear me."

"You're such a hypocrite."

"I'm an adult. Double Standard is my middle name. Open the door."

The door opened a foot and the profile of her firstborn filled the s.p.a.ce, blocking her view of the room behind him. She had to look up at him, which seemed completely wrong. He was only five feet seven, which made him small for fifteen, but he was still taller than she was. In plaid pajama bottoms, a T-s.h.i.+rt, and tousled blond hair, he was still more of her little boy than he was the man he was too quickly trying to grow into, but he was on his way.

"Are you okay?" she asked. "Marysue said you came home early last night."

"I'm fine," he muttered.

"What happened to the party?"

"It was boring."

He had yet to make eye contact with her. Suspicion rose inside her.

"Look at me," she said.

He looked at her sideways with his right eye.

"Turn and face me," she ordered. "Now."

Frowning hard, he turned and squinted down at her, his left eye swollen, an unmistakable knuckle abrasion skidding across the crest of the cheekbone beneath it.

The bottom dropped out of Nikki's stomach. "What happened to you?"

"Nothing."

"Kyle-"

"I tripped and fell."

"Into a fist?"