“I don’t know about you, Mrs. Liska, but I find this extremely offensive.”

Like he thought she probably sat around looking at gay porn as a matter of course and found it perfectly acceptable if her son wanted to draw pictures of overly muscular men having anal sex.

Kyle turned to her. “I didn’t do that, Mom! You know I wouldn’t do that!”

“I know,” she reassured him.

Rodgers gave her a patronizing look. “Mrs. Liska, I’m sure no mother wants to think her son would draw something like this—”

“My son did not draw that,” she said firmly.

“Mrs.—”

“Principal Rodgers,” she said, biting the words off, her temper fraying. “If you’re going to insist on everyone having a title, you may call me Sergeant Liska, but you will definitely stop calling me Mrs. And please stop talking to me like I’m some meek little housewife.

“I’m a homicide detective,” she said. “I know exactly what people are capable of. And I know my son. I also know my son’s dedication to his art.

“Look closely at this,” she said, leaning over the table, tapping a finger on the drawing. “If you think for a minute an artist who would put that much painstaking detail into every line of his drawing would then ruin his work with badly rendered penises, you don’t know anything about artists. If my son was going to draw pornographic images of men having sex, I assure you, the penises would be anatomically correct and proportional.”

Rodgers was looking at her like she had just walked out of his worst nightmare. He had no idea what to say.

“That means someone else defaced Kyle’s work,” she said. “I don’t find that funny. I find it aggressive and offensive behavior in a school that makes so much of its high standards. If other kids took my son’s sketchbook, defaced his work, and wouldn’t give it back to him, tormenting him to the point he felt the need to take drastic action, Mr. Rodgers, I think you need to look more deeply into the real root of the problem.”

He didn’t like being chastised. His expression was as tight and pinched as a sphincter. He closed the cover of the sketchbook and slid it away from him.

“Because the facts of this incident aren’t entirely clear,” he said, “I’m giving you a warning this time, Kyle. But a notation will be made in your file, and I will not be lenient if there’s a next time.”

“And Aaron Fogelman will receive the same note in his file,” Nikki said. Not a question. A statement.

Rodgers didn’t quite make eye contact. He took a beat too long to answer. “Yes. A notation will be made.”

They were dismissed like a pair of servants. Nikki thought the top of her head might blow off from the pressure of the anger steaming inside her. She tried not to let it show as they walked out of the school and across the parking lot. She had a momma bear’s ferocity when it came to defending her offspring. At the same time, she didn’t want Kyle to think she condoned how he had handled the situation with the Fogelman boy—even though she wanted to track the bigger kid down and beat the shit out of him herself.

The contradictory emotions buzzed around inside her mind like angry bees and gave her an instant headache. At times like this she cursed Speed more than usual. They were supposed to both shoulder the burden of difficult parenting moments. As usual, she got to do all the heavy lifting. When he finally cruised into the picture days from now, he would probably give Kyle an attaboy for getting the better of Aaron Fogelman.

She looked at her son walking beside her with his hands stuffed into his coat pockets and his shoulders hunched up to his ears against the biting cold, his backpack hanging heavy over one shoulder. Now was when she was supposed to come up with something profound and motherly to say, but she couldn’t think of what that might be. And if she was conflicted, how must he feel?

They got in the car in silence and she started the engine and cranked up the heater. She looked over at her son and sighed.

“I hated being fifteen,” she confessed. “I didn’t feel like I fit in anywhere. Every day I felt like I was holding my breath, waiting for someone to see through me and then everyone would turn on me. Then I finally figured out the best thing about high school: It doesn’t last forever. And when it’s over, none of what seemed so important about it matters at all.”

Kyle said nothing, but she knew what he was thinking. He was thinking he was just a sophomore and graduation was a tiny light at the end of a long tunnel full of the daily horrors of being a kid who was a little too sensitive and cared a little too much.

She thought of their Jane Doe, the same age as Kyle, with her piercings and her half-shaved head and her tattoo declaring acceptance of all people, and wondered if she had been that kid too—on the outside, trying to figure out who she wanted to be. She hadn’t lived long enough to find out.

“I love you,” Nikki said softly as she put the car in gear and headed it toward the gate. “And I promise you, you won’t die of high school.”

17

“What would you be doing tonight if we weren’t doing this?” Elwood asked.

Elwood had commandeered the car keys, citing a desire to survive the night. Kovac hadn’t put up much of a protest. He sat in the passenger seat feeling drained as they cruised the rutted, frozen streets of one neighborhood and then another, knocking on doors in search of teenage girls who had been absent from school that day. If he were home, he would probably be falling asleep on the couch, drooling on the cushions while the Travel Channel played in the background, showing all the exotic places he had never been and would probably never see.

“Oh, I’d be working out for a couple of hours, bench-pressing Buicks before a gourmet dinner and an evening of competitive ballroom dancing and crazy hot sex with my supermodel girlfriend,” he said. “You?”

“Bikram yoga.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Kovac said, cringing. “I could have lived my whole life without that image in my head.”

Now it was there in vivid color: Elwood looking like a Sasquatch in a Speedo, contorting his massive body into unnatural positions.

“It’s very therapeutic,” Elwood said. “The heat opens the pores and allows the body to eliminate toxins through sweat.”

“Oh, Christ. Thanks for the Smell-O-Vision. Pull over. I’m gonna puke now.”

“You should try it, Sam. Yoga would do you a world of good.”

“Yoga would put me in the hospital,” he returned. “I’ll settle for a lead on this case and a decent night’s sleep.”

Tippen had gone off with his niece to look through whatever the hell young people were doing and commenting about on the Internet, looking to see if Sonya had gotten any interesting responses to the story she had posted. Kovac had taken his place on the KOD patrol with Elwood, knocking on doors of families whose teenage daughters had been absent from school. A needle-in-the-haystack exercise that came with a side order of twisted emotions.

They wanted to find their victim’s identity, which meant going up to the homes of families and hoping they were missing a child, and being weirdly disappointed if they weren’t able to shatter some parent’s life.

It always sucked when the victim was a kid. There were never any winners in a murder investigation, but it especially sucked when the victim was young. And if they didn’t find the unlucky relatives tonight, Kovac would go home, nuke some horrible plastic plate of frozen whatever, and eat it in front of the computer while he trolled the websites that featured thousands of people gone missing from around the country. Misery everywhere. Despair from one side of the country to the other.