Kovac And Liska: The 9th Girl Part 28

And he would be the one to teach it to her.

Soon.

32.

"When I told you to take up cage fighting, I was being sarcastic," Kovac said, looking at his partner.

Her left brow was a red, swollen ledge. A couple of small st.i.tches closed the cut Julia Gray had opened.

Liska made a face. "I guess I need to start joining Kyle at his kickboxing lessons."

"Muay Thai," Tippen said, striking a martial arts pose. "The deadly art of eight limbs."

"Tinks is deadly enough with four," Kovac said. "And that's not counting her tongue."

"f.u.c.k you, Kojak."

"And there it is."

They had gathered again in the conference room. Someone had picked up Chinese takeout, and the boxes littered the long table. Kovac found the beef with broccoli and helped himself. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten a real meal.

He looked at his partner. "So she just wigged out on you?"

"She was ready to snap when I got there. She saw bad news coming, and she didn't want to hear it."

"All her chickens are coming home to roost under a big media spotlight," Kovac said. "Her daughter is missing. Her daughter is an embarra.s.sment. Her daughter makes her look like a bad mother. Now her daughter is dead."

"That's not entirely fair," Liska said. "You've never given birth. You can't know what it's like. You get this perfect little being, and then life happens, and suddenly you feel like you don't have any control anymore. And you screw up and they screw up, but they're still your kid. I don't ever want to know what Julia Gray is feeling now. I'm sure she's reliving every mistake she ever made."

"No more do-overs," Kovac said, wondering how much of a mess he would have made raising his kid if he'd gotten the chance. It was probably better not knowing.

He looked to one of his borrowed uniform cops, a burly kid named Adams. "What do the neighbors have to say?"

"We canva.s.sed the neighborhood twice-first thing this morning and at the end of the day. n.o.body saw anything out of the ordinary. Even the closest neighbors don't have a clear view of the Grays' driveway because of the way the house is situated. One close neighbor has a security camera on their garage that might catch some coming and going, but they're out of town. The security company needs a release from the owners to give us access to the video. They're working on that.

"Also, one of the neighbors had a New Year's Eve party with a lot of cars parked on the street. That was the thing everyone remembered. No one could really recall the night before that."

"Elwood, what about the girl's Facebook friends?"

"I tracked down a few who live in the area. It seems they didn't really know her that well. They said she came and hung out at a couple of coffeehouses they all frequent. They liked her poetry, but she's a lot younger than most of them."

"So she was building up those relations.h.i.+ps that she didn't really have to the kids at school to make it look like she was cool somewhere, if not with them," Liska said.

Elwood nodded. "That's how it looks. A couple of them let her sleep at their places when she was on the outs with her mother. But they've got alibis for New Year's Eve."

"I would rather come back in my next life as a sewer rat than have to be a teenager again," she muttered.

Kovac set his plate aside and sighed. "And we've got no legit sightings of the girl's car?"

"Do you know how many black Toyota Camrys there are in the Twin Cities?" one of the young detectives asked. "To say nothing of other makes that resemble the Toyota Camry. The majority of people don't seem to know one car from another. We've got every agency available checking the tips. It's not a needle in a haystack. It's a needle in a pile of needles."

The lack of progress was tiring. They were expending tremendous amounts of energy and manpower with no reward. As much as Kovac had wanted the opportunity to renew efforts on the rest of the Doc Holiday cases, the effort was spreading them too thin. He had detectives reviewing the old cases with new eyes, but now he would have preferred to have more attention on the case at hand. A cold case wouldn't get any colder, but the window of opportunity on a fresh homicide was small.

The phrase be careful what you ask for kept playing through his head.

The blessing and the curse of the previous Doc Holiday cases had been in the fact that the victims were from other places, other states. Difficult to investigate, and yet without a great deal of complication from the victims' family lives-at least on his end of the investigation.

If Doc had s.n.a.t.c.hed Penny Gray, he could have done them all a favor by dumping her in Iowa.

Ka.s.selmann stepped into the room-still looking crisp and together, wanting an update.

Calling on the energy induced by sodium and MSG, Kovac roused himself to go up to the whiteboard and conduct a proper review of what they had, what they didn't have, what they wanted, and what they needed to do.

Bottom line: They had a whole lot of nothing that added up to a strong suspect.

The captain frowned and sighed. "Come see me in my office before you go, Sam."

His frown deepened as he looked at Liska. "What happened to you?"

"The victim's mother decided to kill the messenger," she said.

"The Gray woman did that to you?"

"She's stronger than she looks."

"How about that?" Kovac asked when Ka.s.selmann and most of the others had cleared out.

"How about what?" Liska busied herself clearing away the food cartons and paper plates.

"Julia Gray giving you that eye. You'll be lucky if you don't have a s.h.i.+ner tomorrow."

"I'd probably lose it too, if I was in her place."

"She hit you with her right hand?" he asked. "The one in the brace?"

"Yeah," she said. "She wasn't thinking clearly. Or maybe she wanted to feel physical pain too. You know? I'd rather hit my thumb with a hammer than feel emotional pain because of one of my kids."

"Remind me to follow you home, then, and remove all the hammers from your house."

She gave him the finger.

Kovac turned to Tippen and Elwood. "I don't buy her story about falling on the ice. It's too coincidental."

Liska dumped the last of the trash in the garbage can. "I don't buy the story about the girl falling off the bike, and the whole thing about the mom calling her doctor friend on a Sat.u.r.day. Dr. Concierge setting a weird fracture instead of sending the kid to a specialist. That's a malpractice suit waiting to happen. Why would he risk that?"

"What was the mother's explanation?" Tippen asked.

"That the girl was on her way home from her therapy session with Michael Warner. She cut through some park, had an accident."

"No witnesses," Elwood said.

Liska shrugged.

Kovac scowled. "That's funny. I asked Michael Warner about it. He didn't say anything about having seen the girl the day that happened."

"Julia made it sound like taking the girl to the doctor she used was a joint decision," Liska said.

"That was back in the spring, right?" Elwood said. "She also told us a lot of her daughter's rebellion developed over the summer."

"If the girl didn't fall off a bike, then what happened?" Tippen asked. "Some kind of precipitating stressor that set off the rebellion?

"I spoke with Penny Gray's adviser at school," he said. "She told me the girl's writing had taken an angrier tone this school year. She said the girl had always been an outsider, had trouble relating to other kids, but she used to be more shy than aggressive."

Kovac got up and went to the board, looking at the timeline they had started. He picked up a marker and extended the line far to the left, then added the date of the alleged bike accident. He made a notation about the changes in the girl's appearance over the summer, and the date of the violent incident with the father's new wife at the open house. He made note of Julia Gray's alleged fall that had injured her wrist.

He stood back and looked at what he'd written. A suspicious injury. A dramatic change in appearance. Escalating violent outbursts. He thought about the comment Christina Warner had made regarding Penny Gray's change in s.e.xual preference-that she said she was through with men . . . a girl who hadn't had a significant boyfriend as far as anyone knew.

"You know what this looks like," he said.

"That our precipitating stressor could be s.e.xual abuse," Tippen offered.

"What do we know about Dr. Feel Good?"

"That he is a man above reproach," Elwood said.

"That makes him a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, for sure," Kovac muttered.

"He's got nothing but accolades in the press. Awards out the wazoo for community service and so on."

"That makes him a man with a lot to lose," Kovac said. "Big reputation. Big ego. Big ambition. Dig deeper on him. And I want another talk with him-preferably with Julia Gray present. We'll twist those screws good and hard."

A knock sounded on the door, and Sonya Porter stuck her head in, small oval rhinestone-crusted gla.s.ses framing her eyes.

"Welcome to the nuthouse, Sonya," Kovac said, waving her in. "Come have a seat. I don't think you've met Elwood. Elwood Knutson, this is Sonya Porter-Tip's niece."

Elwood got up and made a little bow. "I'm so sorry."

Tippen made a disgruntled face. "Why is no one sorry for me? She's mean!"

Sonya batted her eyelashes at Elwood as she shrugged out of her coat. She wore a peac.o.c.k-blue sweater with a keyhole cutout in the chest, exposing a tantalizing glimpse of her tattoo.

"Do you have anything for us, Sonya?" Kovac asked. "Anything coming in from the blogosphere or the Twitterverse or whatever the h.e.l.l it is? A confession would be nice, but I'd settle for an eyewitness."

"I can't make your job that easy," she said, taking the empty seat next to Elwood. He held the chair out for her. "A lot of sensational rumors about the zombie. Some unpleasant comments about your victim."

"Such as?"

"She was a wh.o.r.e. She was a lesbian. She was a lesbian wh.o.r.e," she said dispa.s.sionately. "Everybody hated her, and n.o.body cares if she's dead."

"Charming generation you've got there," Kovac mumbled.

"Kids have opinions," she said. "They're not shy about sharing them on social media."

"No," Tippen said. "It's more like a shark feeding frenzy. Rapacious animosity hidden behind the faceless mask of anonymity. Cyberbullying is rampant. The physical disconnect from the victim gives the bully the false sense of freedom to say whatever they want."

"Their computer isn't going to punch them in the face for typing something hateful," Liska said.

"Just because people have the right to freely express themselves doesn't guarantee they'll have something nice to say," Sonya said. "Ultimately, a lot of people just suck. With social media we get to see instantly who those people are."

"That's my niece," Tippen said. "Always looking for the silver lining."

"There is no silver lining," she returned. "Just the reflection of abject disappointment."

"I prefer to s.h.i.+ne a light in the darkness," Elwood said n.o.bly. Sonya looked up at him with her head c.o.c.ked to one side like a curious little bird.

"I'm with Sonya," Kovac said. "People suck. s.h.i.+ne your light on that, Elwood. Get with Sonya and figure out who the cyberbullies are."

"I was also thinking we might be able to put together a clearer picture about what was going on in Penny Gray's emotional life by looking more closely at her poetry," Elwood suggested. "Poetry is a fingerprint of the soul."

Tippen picked up a file folder off the table. "The girl's adviser gave me access to all the work Penny Gray has turned in this school year. She sent me the whole file electronically. I printed out the poems. There are also some video pieces of her performing."

"If she's into visual media, she'll be on YouTube and Vimeo," Sonya said.

Elwood took the folder from Tippen and opened it. Kovac watched him frown as he looked over the first of the poems of Penny Gray.

"Share with the cla.s.s, please, Elwood."

The big man cleared his throat and read the poem aloud, the words of a girl who believed no one wanted to hear her. She could never have imagined that she would find her audience among the people trying to solve her murder.

"Silence"

Silence is golden, I hear people say