Kovac And Liska: The 9th Girl Part 3

She advanced and he yielded, stepping backward into his room. Nikki followed him in. She didn't look around to see if he had been trying to hide anything. If Kyle wanted something hidden, it was already done. The Library of Congress should have been as organized as her son's bedroom. Anything hidden was well hidden. It would have taken a team of crime scene investigators to dismantle the place in order to find it.

"Sit down," she said.

He sat on the edge of his bed, frowning, squirming, trying to twist away from his mother's hands, the same way he had done when he was five. Nikki grabbed hold of his chin with one hand, and he winced as her thumb pressed into a fresh bruise.

"Ouch!"

"Be still!"

She snapped on the nightstand lamp with her other hand and zeroed her critical gaze in on his face.

"What happened?" she asked again.

"Nothing!"

"Kyle! G.o.ddammit, I know what it looks like when someone has been punched in the face! What happened to you? The last I knew you were going to a party. Just a few friends at the McEvoys', you told me. The science club, you told me. What happened? You got into a fight over the theory of relativity? Did creationists crash the party and start a rumble? I don't understand how you went to a party of science geeks and came home with a black eye."

"It's no big deal!" he said. "Just let it go, will you?"

"I'm calling Mrs. McEvoy-"

"No!"

Nikki stepped back and jammed her hands on her hips. "Then spill it, mister. And you'd better not leave anything out. It's your bad luck your mother is a police detective."

"It sucks," he said, looking down at the floor.

"Well, it can suck for ten minutes or it can suck all day long. Your choice. I'm not leaving this spot until I have an explanation. Where were you when this happened?"

"On the lake," he said. "We went skating. We ran into some kids, that's all."

"You ran into some kids and what?"

"I crashed into a guy and he got p.i.s.sed and he hit me. That's all."

He was lying. She always knew. He had yet to acquire his father's ease with it, thank G.o.d. Hopefully, he never would. Where Speed would look right at her, wide-eyed, and spew a streaming line of bull, Kyle wouldn't make eye contact. He looked off and down to the left, as if he was staring at an imaginary teleprompter feeding him this crock of s.h.i.+t.

Nikki sighed and sat down beside him. She put an arm around him and put her head against his shoulder.

"You make life more complicated than it needs to be."

She could almost hear his thoughts: You don't know anything. You don't know anything about me. She'd had those same thoughts herself at fifteen. Life had seemed unbearably complicated and difficult, and no one had understood her, least of all her parents. They could have put bamboo shoots under her fingernails and she would never have told them anything.

She put her right hand gently over Kyle's left, which was pressed hard into his thigh. The knuckles of his right hand were swollen, the middle one split open. He had fought back. Whoever had given him that s.h.i.+ner had gotten something back in return.

"Let's see that eye," she said, getting up.

Tenderly, she pressed her thumb along the brow bone, wondering if she should take him for an X-ray. A blood vessel had burst in the inside corner of his eye, filling the white with blood. While it looked scary, she knew from personal experience it was no cause for true alarm.

"Do you have a headache?"

"I do now," he muttered.

"Don't be sarcastic. I can drag you to the ER and we can waste our day there while they ask you all the same questions in triplicate. Follow my finger with your eyes," she instructed, drawing a line in the air to the left and back to the right. His vision tracked.

"Do you feel nauseous?"

"No."

"Any double vision?"

"No."

"Why did you lock your door?"

"'Cause," he said stubbornly, then thought better of leaving it at that. "I wanted to be alone. I didn't want R.J. bothering me."

Fair enough, she thought. R.J. could be like a big golden retriever puppy-curious and lovable and annoying all at the same time. He was still too much of a little boy to understand the seriousness of being fifteen.

"Make yourself presentable," she said, moving toward the door. "Marysue is making eggs. I want you to eat something. Then you can have some Tylenol and spend the rest of the day brooding. All right?"

He shrugged and looked away, and her heart ached for him. She would have taken all his hurts away and eaten them for breakfast if she could have.

She went back to him and pressed a kiss to his forehead. "I love you," she said softly. "Nothing is ever as bad as it seems."

A mother's lie, she thought as she left his room, her memory calling up the image of a dead girl lying broken on the road.

Some things were every bit as bad as they seemed.

Some things were even worse.

5.

It was midmorning before Kovac dragged his sorry a.s.s home. He lived in a quiet, older neighborhood that had gone a bit shabby over the years. Huge old oak and maple trees lined the boulevards, their roots busting up the sidewalks. Built in the forties and fifties, the houses were square and plain, of no discernable architectural style. These blocks would never be in any danger of restoration by the upwardly mobile. Some of the bigger, uglier houses had been cut up into duplexes and apartments. Most were single-family homes. His neighbors were working-cla.s.s people and working-cla.s.s retirees. It was a boring place, which suited him fine.

He trudged up the sidewalk, his eyes going, as always, to his neighbor's yard, which was crowded with a mad mix of Christmas decorations the old fart started putting up every year around Halloween. Santa Claus figures swarmed over the property like commandoes, creeping out of the bushes, climbing on the roof and into the chimney, skulking around the Nativity scene. Giant plywood toy soldiers stood sentry on either side of the manger. All of it was lit up at night with so much juice it had to be visible from s.p.a.ce.

f.u.c.king madness. Kovac particularly hated it on a day like this, when he was coming home from sc.r.a.ping a dead girl off the pavement. What the h.e.l.l was there to be festive about in a world where young women were murdered and chucked out onto the road like garbage?

His brain superimposed the images onto his neighbor's lawn: Rose Ellen Reiser, aka New Year's Doe, lying in front of Frosty the Snowman, her face beaten to a b.l.o.o.d.y pulp with a hammer; their new Jane Doe flung like a broken rag doll at the feet of the three wise men, half her face burned away by Christ knew what. Zombie Doe.

He went into the house, toed his shoes off at the door, dumped his coat on the sofa, and went straight upstairs. He cranked the shower on as hot as he could stand it, stripped, and just stood under the water for he didn't even know or care how long. He felt grimy and sweaty from the too-hot office, yet his feet seemed not to have thawed out from the hours at the scene in subfreezing temperatures.

From the shower he went straight to bed, falling naked on top of the tangle of sheets. He stared up at the ceiling, willing his mind to go just as blank.

He had been up for thirty-three hours. After Liska had left the office, he had stayed, staring at his computer screen, going through missing persons reports, hunting for any missing women who might fit with his case. He'd spent so much time in the last year looking at missing persons websites, he knew many of the cases by heart. The sad fact was a lot of those cases would never be closed. Young women went missing-many by choice, others not. There weren't a lot of happy endings to be had.

The National Crime Information Center reported more than eighty-five thousand active missing persons records on file. How many lives did those eighty-five-thousand-plus touch? Parents, spouses, siblings, children, friends . . . the cops who worked their cases . . .

He had printed out pages on half a dozen missing women in a five-state area as possibilities. None were from the Twin Cities area. But then, if this case was linked to Doc Holiday, their victim wouldn't be from here. She would have been s.n.a.t.c.hed in Illinois or Missouri or Wisconsin or someplace else. She would have gone missing a couple of days ago. The last two days of her life would have been spent as his captive, being raped and tortured and finally killed.

Kovac couldn't decide which would be worse: if their girl was a victim of Doc Holiday or if someone else had come up with the list of depraved s.h.i.+t that had been done to her.

He'd been a homicide cop for a lot of years. He'd seen firsthand that people's cruelty to one another knew no bounds. The fact that it still disturbed him five layers down under the thick hide the job had grown on him was both a blessing and a curse.

He was still human. He could still feel pain and sadness and despair and disgust. He could still dread holidays and hate coming home to an empty house.

It was always times like this when the darker emotions washed over him. Thirty-three hours without sleep, a brutal homicide, the knowledge that he didn't have enough manpower or resources to devote to solving the case quickly. Christ knew how long it would be before they could get a confirmed ID on their vic, let alone develop a suspect list. Who the h.e.l.l wouldn't be depressed over that? Who wouldn't look at that poor dead girl and think, What if that was my kid?

He'd had too much cause to have thoughts like that in the last year.

When asked, Sam always said he had no children. He had raised no children. He got no cards on Father's Day. He paid no child support. The truth was more complicated than that.

He had a daughter in Seattle-or so he'd been led to believe a couple of lifetimes ago. She had been born here in Minneapolis shortly before the divorce became final. His soon-to-be-ex had already moved on with her life plans. She was in love with someone else, wanted out, wanted to start over, wanted nothing more to do with him. He had signed away his rights and she had headed west.

He had never seen the girl since. He had no idea what she looked like, if she favored him-G.o.d help her. He had spent a lot of time telling himself the kid had probably not been his at all, that his ex had stuck it out with him for his insurance coverage. But he had never entirely convinced himself of that. And so, during cases like this one, the thoughts came back to him-that he had a daughter, that he had lost a daughter, that she could have been dead for all he knew and for all he would ever know.

What a f.u.c.king mess you are, Kojak.

Twice married, twice divorced, no prospects. Lying in bed alone on New Year's Day, with a dead girl foremost in his thoughts.

The phone rang as if his loneliness had reached across the country and tapped his last near miss on the shoulder. Her name came up on the caller ID: Carey. He stared at it as the ringing of the phone raked over raw nerve endings. He let it go to voice mail. What would she have to say that she hadn't said a hundred times already? That she missed him. That she had to take the job with the Department of Justice because . . . excuse, excuse, excuse.

He didn't want to hear it. What good did it do to talk about it? She had made her choice for her own reasons, all of them more important than he was.

He shouldn't have let it bother him as much as he did. She had been through a lot of rough s.h.i.+t. An attempt on her life over a ruling she had made as the judge on a high-profile murder case. Kidnapped by a homicidal lunatic. Kovac still believed her ex-husband had plotted to have her killed, though the attempt had never actually been made, and Kovac had never been able to make the case for conspiracy to commit. All of that, then her father had died, and suddenly there were just too many painful memories.

She had needed a change of scenery. She'd been offered the position with the DOJ. Why wouldn't she take it? Why wouldn't she take her young daughter and go? Start over, start fresh, no ties to the past.

They hadn't been much more than friends, really . . .

She had been gone now nearly a year and a half. When she came back to visit, he wasn't available. When she called, he didn't answer.

When he fell asleep, he still saw her in his dreams.

6.

a.s.sistant Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Ulf Moller had volunteered himself for the New Year's Day autopsy of Zombie Doe. He was standing outside the back entrance to the morgue, smoking a cigarette, when Kovac pulled up and parked in the chief's spot.

The morgue was open for business, receiving bodies 24/7/365. An ambulance sat in the delivery bay now, having dropped off its unlucky cargo. There had been no autopsies planned for the day, however. Death never took a holiday, but MEs did. Anyone dead on New Year's Day would be just as dead on January second. But Kovac had pressed for an exception. It was important to ID their Jane Doe as soon as possible, for the sake of any family who might have been looking for her and for the sake of the case. Ulf Moller hadn't hesitated to say yes to Kovac's request, giving up his holiday afternoon with his wife, Eva, and their two daughters.

Tall and lean, Moller had a European elegance about him right down to the way he held his smoke, pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He was wrapped in a handsome black leather trench coat, a plaid cashmere scarf wound artfully around his neck. Despite the cold, he wore no hat. The icy breeze teased the ends of his fine sandy hair, though not a strand strayed out of place. He watched Sam approach with a wry expression.

"I appreciate this, Doc," Kovac said.

Moller sketched a brow ever so slightly upward, a certain kind of amus.e.m.e.nt lighting his eyes. "How could I resist? It isn't every day I get to autopsy a zombie. Maggie is going to be jealous, I think."

ME humor: every bit as dark and inappropriate as cop humor. Civilians would have been offended to hear it, but it was a necessary vice for people who dealt in death and depravity on a daily basis.

"She got the vampire on Halloween," Kovac reminded him. "And that Santa Claus burglar who died inside that chimney."

"Greedy b.i.t.c.h," Moller said mildly. He took a long pull on the cigarette and exhaled a jet stream of smoke.

Head honcho Maggie Stone, who had performed the autopsy on Rose Reiser a year ago, had gone to Vegas for New Year's with the latest of her slightly shady boyfriends. Moller, who had spent the last New Year's holiday visiting family in Germany, had done the autopsy on the Fourth of July vic-Independence Doe.

"What do you think, Sam? Is this the work of our serial killer?"

Kovac shrugged. "You'll have to tell me. I don't like the coincidences: holiday, dumped on the road, stabbed, disfigured . . . I don't want to think there are a lot of guys running around doing s.h.i.+t like that."

"Any prospects for an ID of the victim?"

"No local missing persons matching her description. At least, not yet. Someone goes missing New Year's Eve, it might take a day or two for anyone to sound the alarm," Kovac said. "I pulled a few sheets for missing females in a five-state area. Whoever she is, I hope to G.o.d she has a record and we can ID her from her fingerprints. That face is nothing to work with. Have you had a look at her yet?"

"And start the party without you and your lovely partner?" Moller said. "I wouldn't dream of it. Cigarette?"

Kovac took the offer automatically, as a matter of male bonding. He had officially quit the rotten habit about thirty-two times-had quit entirely when he had been seeing Carey Moore and spending time around her little girl, Lucy.

Intellectually, he knew smoking was a stupid thing to do. And Liska kicked his a.s.s for it every time she caught him doing it. Emotionally, he didn't always care. In his darker moods, he did it deliberately, daring the universe to kill him. Who would give a s.h.i.+t anyway? Today was one of those days.

Moller shared his lighter. They both lit up and stood there in the freezing cold, tarring up their lungs like a couple of f.u.c.king idiots. Kovac felt perversely pleased with himself. He reminded himself how much he liked smoking, how soothing the ritual of it was; how a cigarette was like an old friend you called up every time the world kicked you in the teeth, and you went out and got drunk together and felt like s.h.i.+t afterward.

Liska pulled up to the curb then and parked her car in a loading zone. She got out wearing her don't-f.u.c.k-with-me face and stomped up to them.

"You're a couple of d.a.m.ned fools, and when you die slow, lingering, horrible deaths, don't come crying to me."

Moller arched a brow. "Lovely to see you, as well, Sergeant Liska. Happy New Year."

Liska gave him the stink eye.

Kovac had the grace to feel guilty. He dropped his smoke and ground it out in the snow that had acc.u.mulated on the sidewalk overnight. He picked up the b.u.t.t and discarded it properly. She could accuse him of being a fool, but at least he had some common courtesy.

Liska shot him her mother's look of utter disgust nevertheless and headed into the building. Kovac looked at Moller and shrugged.

The ME's mouth curved up on one side in amus.e.m.e.nt. "You make such a lovely couple."

"The h.e.l.l," Kovac grumbled as they fell in step behind his partner. "She'd eat me alive."