The 9th Girl

Black splotches burst before Brittany’s eyes with each hard smash of her skull against the floor. She would lose consciousness again if she couldn’t get away. She gathered all her strength to roll and push and get the woman off her. Again she scrambled to gain her feet and try to run.

She was ru

Julia dove onto her from behind like an animal dragging down prey, knocking her forward, knocking her down, knocking the wind from her. Brittany’s chin hit the floor with a horrible, shattering pain in her jaw and inside her mouth as teeth broke. The bright metallic taste of blood flooded her mouth.

She couldn’t move. She couldn’t struggle. She tried to suck in air and choked on her own blood as Julia Gray kicked her and struck her again and again.

Beneath her, trapped against her stomach in the pouch of her hoodie, her phone vibrated, alerting her to another incoming text. She couldn’t answer. She imagined the person on the other end waiting for her reply as she was being killed.

48

They had been sitting at the island in her kitchen for long enough that her butt was starting to go numb, going over notes and reports and interviews until they were bleary-eyed.

Nikki had Pe

“This doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. “She went missing the night of the thirtieth. She stopped calling and texting friends. I don’t know about the other kids, but I know Kyle continued to text her right up until we ID’d her body. He never got an answer from her. He never heard from her after she left the Rock and Bowl.”

“I think she was dead that night,” Kovac said. “Dead or incapacitated.”

“But if her killer had her phone, why bother to answer the mother’s text messages and no one else’s? If the idea was to toy with her loved ones or, for whatever reason, try to make it look like she was still alive, why not answer a friend’s text? It’s not like it’s hard just to acknowledge a text. OK. Not now. Fuck off. Whatever. Why only answer the mother?”

Kovac pulled his reading glasses off and cleaned them with the tail of his wrinkled shirt. “I don’t know.”

Nikki paged through the records. Pe

She thought back to what Sam had said about Julia Gray having left her phone in the car the morning she had made the appeal to the media downtown with Captain Kasselma

She sighed and twisted her neck against the stiffness setting in. She looked at Julia Gray’s phone records now, looked at the dates and times and numbers called and text messages sent, and a sick feeling began to swirl in the pit of her stomach, stirring the gallon of oily coffee she had drunk.

“What?” Kovac asked.

He could feel the change in her energy. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t said a word. He just felt it. They had been partners for that long.

“Kyle texted this girl over and over after she went missing,” she said. She looked at her partner, seeing her concern mirrored in his face. “Why didn’t her mother?”

The moment hung between them, a thick tension vibrating with a dark sense of something too close to excitement.

“She wasn’t looking for her, Sam,” she said, glancing down at the paperwork again. “Even after she knew Pe

“But the girl’s phone went dead or got turned off at some point,” Kovac said.

“That doesn’t stop her mother’s phone from working.”

In a flash every conversation Nikki had had with Julia Gray went through her head. She saw her expressions, heard the emotions in her voice. She thought of the mixed messages of guilt and blame and self-absorption. She relived the moment Julia Gray had struck her, hard, with a hand she had already injured somehow. She thought of how she had described Aaron Fogelman earlier in the evening: narcissistic with violent tendencies. The same could be said of Pe

“Something set this all off,” she said. “They were going along, consistently miserable. What changed?”

“The engagement,” Kovac said.

“Let’s assume the molestation,” Nikki said. “Her mother gets engaged to the man who molested her. That’s got to be the biggest fuck-you ever.”

“There’s a confrontation,” Sam speculated. “Things get out of hand.”

“If what we think is true, Pe

“Warner is the better suspect of the two. Seriously, Tinks. You’re a mother. You think a mother could do that to her own child?”

Nikki frowned. Her head was throbbing. “I don’t know. I don’t want to think so, but people lose their minds. Her daughter was a burden, a problem, a thorn in her side. She finally gets a shot at wedded bliss with a doctor, no less, and her daughter had the capacity to ruin that for her.”

“That’s about as fucked-up as it gets,” Kovac said. “Maybe she didn’t try to reach the girl because she didn’t want her to come back. She could hate the kid and want her gone, but she didn’t want to hear you telling her her daughter was dead.”

“She was pissed off,” Nikki said. “Maybe she didn’t want to hear it because she never wanted anybody to find that body. Who knows where Pe

“Mom, can I go out?”

Nikki looked at Kyle as he came into the kitchen, her brain shifting gears awkwardly. He was in his coat and putting his watch cap on.

“No,” she said. “Of course not. It’s late.”

He gave her that look of incredulity perfected by teenagers everywhere. “But, Mo-om—”

“Where do you think you have to go all of a sudden?”

His cheeks flushed. He wanted to look away from her, but he didn’t. “I can’t get Brittany to answer my text messages. I’ve sent her a million of them. She hasn’t answered. I’m worried about her.”

“And you’re going to track her down?” Nikki said. “That’s called stalking. No. Absolutely not.”

“You don’t understand!” he said. “She said she would text me and she hasn’t.”

“Kyle—”

“She said she would text me when she got back, and she should have got back by now. But she hasn’t texted and she isn’t answering. I even called her,” he said, as if that was the surest sign of desperation. “She’s out alone and there’s some crazy serial killer ru

“Go where?”

“To see Gray’s mom.”

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