Kovac And Liska: The 9th Girl Part 9

12.

Gerald Fitzgerald never missed the news if he could help it. It was a Minnesota thing. Minnesotans, from childhood, watch the news daily. He had not realized there was anything unusual in that until he heard Garrison Keillor make jokes about it on A Prairie Home Companion. He still didn't get why people thought that was funny.

Some of his earliest memories were of sitting on the living room floor watching Walter Cronkite while his mother banged pots and pans together in the kitchen, making supper. As an adult, the first thing he did upon waking up was turn on the TV to catch the news. Lunch and dinner happened in front of the television, watching the local news. The day officially ended with the ten o'clock news.

The news was the scale of the day, the place to find out if society was in balance or out of whack. People trusted the news, and they trusted the people who delivered the news. News was truth. At least it had been in Cronkite's day.

Nowadays, you couldn't trust the news. Used to be you went to the news to get the facts. Now you had to fact-check everything that came over the airwaves yourself. News personalities seemed to have no compunction lying outright to slant things in the favor of whomever they worked for. Cronkite had to be rolling over in his grave. It was disgraceful.

The headline on the screen caught his attention first.

ZOMBIE MURDER.

He grabbed the remote off the nightstand and jacked up the volume. The perky blonde seemed to look right at him as she spoke.

"Sources close to the investigation of a New Year's Eve homicide in Minneapolis say this murder may be the work of a serial killer law enforcement agencies have dubbed 'Doc Holiday.'

"The partially nude body of an unidentified female fell from the trunk of a vehicle New Year's Eve in the Loring Park area. The gruesome condition of the disfigured corpse led one witness to describe the deceased woman as a zombie!"

Film footage showed the New Year's Eve scene. A giant white Hummer sitting crosswise in the road. Emergency vehicles with strobe lights rolling. Uniformed officers walking around.

"No official statement has been made by the Minneapolis Police Department regarding the victim or the possibility of a serial killer in the metro area. The detective in charge of this most recent case would neither confirm nor deny any possible connection to several similar crimes committed over the course of the last year with the bodies of victims being discovered on holidays."

He spotted the detective. Kovac. He knew him. He had met him, had spoken with him. Decent guy, Kovac. A straight shooter, an old-school cop. Appropriately suspicious, thorough. But, like all cops, he was not an original thinker. He put one foot in front of the other and plodded along.

And there was his partner, the little blonde. Liska. She was a pistol. He liked the look of her, but she was too old for his tastes, and he had no doubt that messing with her would be like grabbing a wildcat by the tail. Way too much trouble. He didn't mind a little sporting fight in his girls, but one that could seriously mess him up? No, thanks. Maybe when she was eighteen or nineteen . . .

The blonde giving the news was more his speed-wide-eyed, young, idealistic. He could easily picture her in his control. He could see those wide eyes even wider and filled with terror. He could feel the blood start to heat in his veins. She could be one for Doc Holiday.

Doc Holiday. He liked the name, the play on words.

Growing up, he had been a big fan of Westerns-Gunsmoke and Bonanza on television, and all the old Western movies. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral had always been a favorite when he was a kid. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. He owned the DVDs of the two movies made in the nineties-Wyatt Earp and Tombstone. He preferred Tombstone's Kurt Russell over Kevin Costner as Wyatt Earp, but he thought Dennis Quaid should have won the freaking Oscar as Doc Holliday in the Costner film. Val Kilmer's portrayal of the dentist/gunslinger had been way too gay for his taste.

Not that the historical Doc Holliday had anything to do with the Doc Holiday who left dead girls on the side of the road.

That was his doing.

Doc Holiday. Gerald Fitzgerald.

He hadn't gotten nearly the publicity he could have for his exploits. He was much more prolific than anyone would ever give him credit for. But that was the trade-off. He could be careful and successful, or careless and caught.

He had no intention of getting caught. Not by anyone. Not ever. He was very skilled. He was very smart. He thought of himself as a professional. He didn't make mistakes. The risks he took were calculated. He always had a plan.

He had one now.

13.

"What time did you last eat?" Liska asked.

The forensic artist was a short, doughy, twentysomething young man named Nam Pham, whose actual job was as a computer nerd in the business technology unit.

As in most police departments, there was no salaried position for a forensic artist in the MPD. City budgets didn't allow for that kind of extravagance. There wasn't enough work to warrant a full-time artist here. In fact, there were only a handful of salaried, full-time positions for forensic artists in the entire country. It was standard op-and far cheaper-to make use of someone with artistic talent who was already getting paid for doing something else within the department.

Pham had been a poli sci major and an art minor in college. The department had footed the bill for a couple of seminars in forensic art. He had paid out of pocket for additional training, just to get the opportunity to do the job. He had been doing suspect composite drawings for the last eight or nine months in addition to his regular duties.

He looked at Liska with confusion.

"When did you last eat?" she asked again.

"About an hour ago," he said, apprehension dawning. "Why do you ask?"

Liska didn't answer. She would have worried about the contents of her own stomach this morning, considering the hangover, but she was feeling too mean to get sick, aggravated by the situation of the case. She hated the politics that manipulated a high-profile investigation. There should have been no place for it, and yet they had to play that game just to get what they needed in order to do their jobs. It sucked.

They followed Moller down the hall toward the room where Jane Doe 09-11 lay waiting. Pham glanced around, trying not to look as uncomfortable as he was to be at the county morgue.

"Have you ever seen a dead body?" Liska asked skeptically. Everything about Nam Pham was annoying her now. His hair was too thin. His s.h.i.+rt was too green. He looked clammy.

"Yes," he said defensively.

"And I don't mean your grandmother in a casket."

"Um, then, no."

"Great," she muttered.

"I can work from photographs," Pham said. "I mean, really, I need to work from photographs. It takes time to get it right. I need to study the angles. You could have just brought me the photographs. It really isn't necessary for me to see the actual body."

Liska grabbed a packaged gown off the service cart parked in the hall and hit him in the stomach with it like a quarterback handing off a football.

"Put this on, and try not to puke in your mask."

The room Moller took them into was cold and smelled strongly of burned flesh and a terrifying death, a smell that hit like a fist and forced its way down a person's throat. Liska scowled as if she might frighten it away. Nam Pham turned green.

Moller, already in scrubs, getting an early start on the day's autopsies, shrugged and apologized as he waited for them to gown up.

"A house fire in Whittier," he said, waving a hand at the charred remains of what had once been a human being, now lying on a gurney like some strange, grotesque, twisted driftwood sculpture. "Someone cooking meth for New Year's supper."

"Meth cooked the cook," Liska remarked. "That's a crispy critter if ever I've seen one. Man, I'd rather roll around in week-old, maggot-infested roadkill than smell that smell. I couldn't have your job, Doc."

"What smell is that, Sergeant?" Moller asked. ME humor. "Barbecue?"

Nam Pham pressed his mask to his mouth and m.u.f.fled a gag.

"Any leads yet on our Jane Doe?" Moller asked, moving on toward another door.

"Nothing," Liska said. "If she's going to be missed by someone, I would think that someone would be pretty worried by today. We can only hope if she has loved ones, they live in the area.

"We've got to get this sketch done and out there on the Internet, on TV, in the newspapers," she said.

Moller led the way into a cold-storage room where several bodies lay covered on steel tables. He looked at Pham.

"Have you done reconstruction work, Mr. Pham?"

"I took a course," Pham said weakly, his eyes fixed on the draped human form the ME stood beside.

Moller arched a brow as he picked up the corner of the sheet. "You're about to take another."

Even the green drained from Nam Pham's complexion as he got his first look at their Jane Doe.

Liska counted half under her breath. "Three . . . two . . . one . . ."

Pham's knees started to buckle. He yanked down his mask, turned, and grabbed on to a laundry cart and threw up into it.

Moller sighed. Liska rolled her eyes.

"I think perhaps your artist is a bit overfaced," Moller said. "No pun intended."

Liska stepped over and cuffed Pham hard on the shoulder. "Suck it up, nerd boy. You're all I've got. And you're all she's got, too."

She curled a hand into the collar of his s.h.i.+rt and pulled him back to the table like a recalcitrant third grader. "Do you understand now why I insisted you come here and see her in the flesh?"

"To make me puke?" he said miserably. He was staring just to the left of the victim's head, concentrating on not seeing her.

"This isn't about you. It's about her. Look at her," Liska ordered, yanking on his collar like she was pulling on the leash of a dog. "Look at her!"

Pham took a breath as if he were about to put his head underwater and looked straight at the disfigured mess that was their victim.

"If I just showed you a photograph of this girl's face, what would you see?" Liska asked. "You'd see a monster. You'd see a character from The Walking Dead. You'd see something that your brain would tell you wasn't real.

"But she is real. This girl is real," she said. "She's not a zombie. She's not a movie prop. This was a living, breathing young woman. You need to get that. She had a life and someone took it away from her.

"I need you to give it back to her, Nam," she said. "I need a drawing of a real live girl. Do you understand me?"

"How?" he asked, shrugging away from her. "How am I supposed to do that? Half her face is missing! She doesn't even have a nose!"

Liska had made the same argument to Kovac. A bad sketch could be worse than no sketch at all. But they had so little to go on, they had to grab on to something, to start somewhere.

"You'll have to concentrate on what she does have, not what's missing," she said. "Get the jawline from the good side, get the one good eye and make two. Get the hair right. She had piercings. Draw them with jewelry in place."

"If I give you a drawing and it doesn't resemble what the victim looked like in real life, won't that be doing more harm than good?" Pham asked. "Her family won't recognize her."

"I have to trust that you're gifted, Nam. I have to hope that someone recognizes her haircut or the arch of her eyebrow," Liska said. "I have to hope that someone will find enough similarities in the features, add that to the tattoo on her shoulder, and come up with a name."

"No results with her fingerprints?" Moller asked.

Liska shook her head.

"The whole face needs to be reconstructed," Pham argued. "What I come up with is going to be a guess. You need to reconstruct her skull."

"That can be done," Moller said. "I can disarticulate the head from the body. We can soak the skull in acid to clean the flesh from the bone. Of course, there is a considerable amount of damage to the skull itself, and the flesh is all that's keeping it together in places. But then it's like a jigsaw puzzle. We glue it back together."

"And when we find her family, I get to explain why we decapitated their loved one and dissolved what was left of her face in acid," Liska said.

"If no one can identify her, there is no family which needs an explanation," Moller pointed out.

Liska tried playing that line through her mind in an imaginary conversation with Captain Ka.s.selmann. Even in her imagination he wasn't receptive.

"You need a forensic sculptor," Nam Pham said.

"Yeah?" Liska said. "Well, I don't have one. I have you. And I need a drawing. Today."

NAM PHAM TOOK his own photographs of Jane Doe. Liska had to give him credit. As squeamish as he was, and as horrific as Jane Doe's face was, he stood in there and took pictures from every possible angle. And Moller, as busy a man as he was, a.s.sisted, positioning the battered skull, arranging the dead girl's hair with the gentle hand of a man who had daughters of his own.

This was what it would take, she knew. This was what they would have to do. They had to become this girl's family. They didn't know her name or the circ.u.mstances of her life or her death, but they had to become her family. They had to be the first line to keep her connected to the world of the living, or else she simply ceased to exist and the universe closed the tiny void left by her light going out, and it would be as if she never mattered. No one should ever die as if his or her life never mattered. Until they found a family to mourn her, the people dealing with her case would be her family.

When Liska had first come into Homicide, Kovac had drilled into her that the person they worked for wasn't their immediate boss, wasn't their chief, wasn't the collective population of the city of Minneapolis. The person they worked for was the victim. They had to become the voice for the voiceless, the avengers for those who couldn't avenge themselves. That truth was no truer than when their victim had no name.

Avenger sounded so much more dramatic and grandiose than cop. Avenger was a word to describe a comic book hero, not a civil servant. Like the character Kyle had created for his comic book stories, Ultor. Avengers had names like Ultor, not Sam or Nikki. They looked like gladiatorial G.o.ds and wielded superhuman powers.

Liska would have settled for the power to see the past, to see who this girl had been and what had happened to her. But she had no such power. She would have to use the tools she had, the most prominent being tenacity and determination. She would have to leave the comic book heroes to her son.

14.

R U OK?.

Kyle typed the words into his phone, then stared hard at the recipient of his text message. She sat two tables down in the next row, facing him, pretending to read her history book. Brittany Lawler: blond, pretty, popular, with big blue eyes that were like lakes on a cloudless summer day.

They were in the library. No talking allowed. No phones either, but everyone brought them anyway, turned them to silent mode and spent the study hour texting or on Facebook or Twitter. The librarians didn't care as long as there wasn't any noise.

He could tell by the way her eyebrows pulled together that she had gotten his message. She frowned. She knew exactly where he was sitting, but she didn't look his way.

I C U, he typed and sent.