Kovac And Liska: The 9th Girl Part 32

"Dana Nolan is dead," Quinn said bluntly. "I don't mean to be a pessimist here, but that's a foregone conclusion. Unless you can find her within the next twenty-four hours or so, she's dead. He kidnapped her to kill her. That's what he'll do. That's where the payout is for him. The buildup is just foreplay.

"He might drag it out longer this time because he has a stage," he said. "That's the best you can hope for."

"That's a h.e.l.l of a thing to be optimistic about," Kovac muttered. "If we're lucky, he'll spend more time torturing her before he stabs her to death and beats her head in with a hammer."

"It's more time to look for her," Quinn said.

"Yeah. If we had a freaking clue where to look." Kovac turned to his boss. "I've got a small army canva.s.sing Dana Nolan's neighborhood. They're knocking on every door that has a sight line to that parking lot and the street."

"And you haven't found anything to go on from the previous cases?" Ka.s.selmann asked.

Kovac shook his head. "Nothing. I've got guys double-checking, triple-checking, quadruple-checking everything from each of those cases-every report, every statement. They're calling the families of the victims. They're reinterviewing the people who reported finding the bodies. Nothing."

"He's smart, he's careful, he's experienced," Quinn said. "But he just changed the way he does things. That's when these guys make mistakes. He's always hunted victims of opportunity, but he singled this girl out. He knew where she lives. He knew her schedule."

"He stalked her," Kovac concluded. "He singled her out because of the coverage of the Penny Gray case."

"This is his big moment to show the world he's smarter than everybody."

"So far," Ka.s.selmann said, "he is."

"We've got to trace Dana Nolan's every move over the last few days," Kovac said. "If he was stalking her, someone might have seen him."

"He might have even interacted with her in the days leading up to this," Quinn said. "He was able to get right up to her in an otherwise abandoned parking lot. He's either a master of the blitz attack or she didn't feel threatened. And the only way she didn't feel threatened in this circ.u.mstance was if he was somehow familiar to her."

"So he's probably not a scary-looking guy," Liska said.

"Probably not. Probably average size or smaller," Quinn said. "He's probably friendly, smiling, familiar. He could be using a ploy, like he needs help with something or he needs directions, or something like that.

"I got that feeling looking at a couple of his older cases. The Rose Reiser case, in particular. She disappeared walking out of a convenience store, and no one saw anything, which means she didn't struggle. He had to have gotten right up to her without causing alarm. Then he probably used a stun gun or some other quick way of subduing the victim."

Kovac looked up at the wall and the photos of Penny Gray and thought about the video of her walking out of the Holiday station down the street from the Rock & Bowl.

"The Holiday station," he said. "If he's the one who s.n.a.t.c.hed Penny Gray, that location probably wasn't a coincidence either. It was probably this sick b.a.s.t.a.r.d's idea of a joke. Doc Holiday s.n.a.t.c.hes his victims from the Holiday stations of Minneapolis."

"If he was the one who s.n.a.t.c.hed Penny Gray," Liska said. "I'm still not convinced she's his ninth girl. And neither are you, Sam. We've got too many other red flags flying."

Ka.s.selmann looked like he needed an antacid tablet. "That's all we need: two homicidal s.a.d.i.s.ts. Who else are you looking at, Sam?"

"The girl had a complicated life," Kovac admitted. "She wasn't exactly Miss Congeniality. And she might have had a secret someone felt was worth killing her for."

"We can't drop that angle just because serial killers are more exciting in the news," Liska said. She looked to Quinn and Ka.s.selmann. "We think she might have been s.e.xually abused by the mother's fiance. There's some pretty strong indicators if you look at the timeline and the changes in the girl's behavior over the last eight months or so. We have to look hard at him. She also had a run-in with his daughter and her boyfriend the night she went missing."

"It's a freaking sh.e.l.l game," Kovac admitted. "And every time we stop and lift a sh.e.l.l, there's a different killer under it."

Ka.s.selmann frowned hard. "Dana Nolan has to be the priority now."

Liska sighed and looked away. "Great. Everybody else in Penny Gray's life abused and abandoned her. Now we get to do it too."

"Penny Gray is dead, Sergeant," Ka.s.selmann said.

"I understand that. I don't have to like it. I feel an obligation to my victim, and to her mother. How am I supposed to tell Julia Gray that her daughter's death isn't as relevant today as it was yesterday? How would you feel if that was your child?"

"Maybe you're too close to the situation," Ka.s.selmann said with a fine edge of steel in his voice.

"Yeah," Tinks returned. "You're probably right. If the department isn't going to give a s.h.i.+t about these people, then it's probably best to a.s.sign a detective who doesn't care about them either."

Kovac intervened before Ka.s.selmann could draw breath to suspend her.

"The bulk of the manpower should go to Nolan," he conceded. "There's a chance we can still get to her before it's too late. Tinks and Elwood should stay on Penny Gray. I'll keep a hand in each."

The captain looked at his watch. "I have to go upstairs and explain this to the chief. Keep me up to the minute on Nolan."

Ka.s.selmann left the room, taking none of the tension with him. Kovac felt like something huge had sunk its talons into his shoulders.

"He'll look worse to more people if we don't drop everything and chase after the missing news girl," Liska said bitterly.

"Bra.s.s is bra.s.s," Kovac returned. "Now tell me again how you want to go into management."

"I'd rather eat my gun than be like that."

"I'm glad to know it."

Ignoring the office politics, Quinn had gone to the wall to scrutinize the photos from the New Year's Eve scene. Kovac watched him take in the details as if he were looking at a Pica.s.so exhibit, trying to make sense of the lines and the details.

"This was sloppy and careless," he concluded. "If Doc Holiday didn't do this, and the media has been trying to pin it on him, he might have taken Dana Nolan to prove a point."

"And if that's the case?" Kovac asked, dreading the answer because the only reason the media was blaming Doc Holiday was because he had told them to.

John Quinn looked grim. "Then G.o.d have mercy on her soul."

"WE FOUND THIS video on YouTube late last night," Elwood said, setting up his laptop.

Kovac had gone to organize the Nolan investigation. Elwood had arrived together with Sonya Porter, who was wearing the same sweater she had had on the night before, Liska noted.

"There are a bunch of them," Porter said. "They all look like they were uploaded from her phone. So there could be more. Do you have her phone?"

"We don't," Liska said. "We don't have her phone or her laptop. But my son, Kyle, says Gray was always shooting video with her phone."

"Her mother told us she keeps everything on her laptop and she keeps her laptop with her," Elwood said. "We found some notebooks with her writing in her room, but those were all a few years old. It's safe to a.s.sume the laptop is either in her car, wherever that is, or the killer took it for his or her own reasons."

He clicked the Play icon.

Penny Gray had chosen to shoot herself in profile as she looked down. She shot from the side where her hair was long and hung down like a curtain, hiding half her face. She moved the camera slowly as she spoke, bringing it around from one side of her head to the other, to the side where the hair had been shaved to the scalp and piercings rimmed the sh.e.l.l of her ear with wires and spikes.

The poem was ent.i.tled "Help Me."

Refuge

Asylum Safest place to be Secrets Hard truths Soul laid bare to see Comfort Guidance Shoulder. Lean on me Seduction Destruction Help not meant to be Silence Shameful Not to be believed Don't tell Go to h.e.l.l There's no one here for me "That certainly sounds like abuse to me," Sonya declared. "I say you go arrest the son of a b.i.t.c.h and string him up in public by his b.a.l.l.s."

"I told you why we can't just do that," Elwood said gently. "She doesn't spell out what happened to her, let alone name names. And even if she did, we would need some corroborating evidence."

"You should at least be able to drag him in here and scare a confession out of him," she said stubbornly.

"Miss Journalistic Integrity," Elwood said. "Would you write a story about it and present facts not in evidence?"

"No, but there's no law against you lying to him in an interview, right? Tell him you have video of him molesting her."

"I like your style," Liska said. "But if we do that and he calls our bluff, we're screwed. We have to be cagier than that. I want to go to Julia Gray first and plant some doubt. If we attack Michael Warner head-on, he's going to call a lawyer, and he's going to tell her to call one too."

"Do you think she knows he abused her daughter?" Porter asked. "How could a mother know something like that and not do anything about it? And not only not do anything about it but also get engaged to the creep. That's f.u.c.ked-up!"

Her outrage pushed her out of her chair to pace back and forth with her arms crossed tight beneath her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"I'm betting the daughter never told her-or if she told her, she wasn't believed," Liska said. "Look what the girl wrote in that other poem-that she's a burden, a liar, no one believes her."

"What's the matter with women like that?" Sonya asked. "It's not the 1950s anymore. Women need to believe each other and stand up for each other in the face of s.e.xist oppression. Men suck! Present company excluded, of course," she added, smiling sweetly at Elwood.

"I understand your sentiment," Elwood said. "Most violence committed against women is perpetrated by men. I once read a quote that the thing a man fears most from a woman is that she'll laugh at him, and the thing a woman most fears from a man is that he'll kill her."

"I think Dr. Warner has more to fear than being laughed at," Sonya said. "His whole existence is based on people trusting him with their kids. And if he molested her, his fiancee's daughter had the ability to destroy him."

"The day the girl's wrist got broken, she was supposedly on her way home from an appointment with him," Liska said. "He made out like he didn't have much knowledge of the event, but Julia Gray gave the impression she included him in the decision making about a doctor.

"So what was Michael Gray doing the evening of the thirtieth?" she asked.

Elwood flipped back through his little notebook. "He and Mrs. Gray went to see the Joffrey Ballet company at the Orpheum, followed by dinner at Solera. He dropped Julia Gray off at her house between twelve and twelve thirty and says he was home when his daughter got in around one."

"And the last we can account for Penny Gray is leaving the Holiday station between nine thirty and ten," Liska said. "She doesn't show up again until she falls out of the trunk of a car on New Year's Eve. That's a big chunk of time to account for. We need to know what Michael Warner, Christina Warner, and Julia Gray were doing all that time."

"I've already spoken to Dr. Warner a few times," Elwood said. "I can reach out to him again on the excuse of tying up loose ends."

"We need to feel him out on the general issue of whether or not Penny Gray may have suffered abuse without him playing the patient confidentiality card. Maybe we can ask him if he thought she might have had someone else she would confide in."

"You'd think the girl would have confided in somebody," Elwood said. "A girlfriend, a counselor."

"I don't think she trusted anyone," Liska said. "Kyle knew her. He said she didn't have friends like most girls have friends. She pretended with one group of acquaintances that she had friends elsewhere, and vice versa."

"She internalized everything," Sonya concluded, looking at the pages of poetry Elwood had taped to the wall. "I get that. Her poetry was her outlet. That's how creative people are. We bottle the feelings up inside until the feelings turn into words or images that have to come out onto a page or a canvas or a-"

"Tattoo," Elwood said.

The two of them exchanged a look.

"If you put out raw emotion, people can reject you directly, personally," Sonya said. "If you form that emotion into something else, then the thing you create can be rejected, but at least it's once removed from you."

"Everyone in this girl's life found her to be an irritation, a problem, something they didn't want to be bothered to deal with," Liska said. "But something happened that night. She pushed somebody's b.u.t.ton one time too many."

"Or Dr. Warner bought her silence with that car he gave her for her birthday," Elwood pointed out. "Or she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Sam is working the wrong place / wrong time angle. We get to take a harder look at the people she knew. The last people we know who interacted with her were the kids at the Rock and Bowl. She said something to Christina Warner that made the Warner girl angry enough to lunge at her. I want to know what it was."

"The Warner girl said Penny Gray attacked her," Elwood said.

"She lied. Kyle was there. He saw it go down. I want to know why." She looked at her watch. "PSI is having an a.s.sembly today for Penny Gray's cla.s.smates and any other students who feel the need to attend. It might be our only chance to talk to any of these kids without a parent or attorney looking over their shoulders."

She pointed a finger at Sonya. "You didn't hear me say that."

"Say what?"

"I'm not looking for anything to use in court. I'm looking for loose threads to pull to unravel the story these kids have woven together. Somebody knows exactly what went down. We have to find a way to make one kid want to tell us."

"What about me?" Sonya asked. "Can I come?"

"Absolutely," Liska said. "You're known to these kids through social media. I want them to feel like they can contact you somehow if they have something to say but don't want to say it to us. Can we make that work?"

"I'm in if the school will have me."

Nikki smiled a nasty smile, thinking how happy Princ.i.p.al Rodgers would be to have Sonya Porter with her tattoos and multiple facial piercings address his students.

"Oh, they'll have you," she said. "I will take great joy in making that happen."

38.

"I can't believe they're making us go to this," Jessie Cook said as they walked down the hall toward the a.s.sembly theater, Jessie shoulder to shoulder on Christina's left, Brittany on Christina's right. "Like any of us are traumatized because of Gray." She rolled her eyes dramatically. "Please."

Brittany said nothing. She hadn't wanted to come to school at all. Ironically, her mother had made her come because of the a.s.sembly. She thought it was important for Brittany to be at school among her friends instead of home alone, brooding, and for them all to listen to the counselors and talk about what had happened and how they should try to deal with their emotions.

"Are you traumatized, XT?" Jessie asked Christina. They shared a knowing look, like it was the funniest joke in the world that they didn't have any human feelings toward a girl they had known for years, a girl who had been killed and dumped in the road like a sack of garbage.

"How about you, Britt?" Jessie asked, leaning forward and looking at her past Christina. "Are you traumatized? You and Gray were such good friends."