“Julia, they’re right,” Michael Warner said quietly. He put a hand on her shoulder as if to anchor her. “Let’s all sit down and try to figure this out.”

“Oh my God, this is—is—just so—,” she muttered, shaking her head, agitated as Warner herded her toward a seat at the dining room table. “I can’t believe she’s doing this.”

Kovac arched a brow at Elwood, who shrugged. It didn’t seem to be sinking in to Julia Gray that they were considering the possibility her daughter might be a victim of a brutal homicide or that, at best, her daughter had disappeared. This unpleasantness was something her daughter was doing to her, purposely making her look bad.

“She texted me,” she said, turning back into the foyer. She grabbed her phone off the hall table and brought up the message on the screen. “She texted me back an hour ago. She’s fine. She’s just off in one of her snits.”

She shoved the phone at Kovac. The message read: Y cant u leave me alone?

It meant nothing more than that whoever had Penelope Gray’s phone was smart enough to answer a text message.

“What kind of phone does your daughter have?” Elwood asked.

“An iPhone. The latest one. I got it for her for her birthday.” She shook her head. “It’s crazy the things these kids have to have. iPhones, iPads, iPods . . .”

“Do you know if the phone has a tracking app enabled?”

“I don’t know what that is. I’m not very good with technology.”

“If the software is enabled and the phone is turned on, we would be able to locate the device,” Elwood explained. “We’d need to access her Apple ID account, which means jumping through some legal hoops—unless you have her password.”

She laughed without humor. “No. I don’t have access to much of anything in my daughter’s life.”

The immediate implications of that truth pressed down on her, and tears flooded her eyes. She pressed a hand across her mouth.

Michael Warner corralled her with a long arm and steered her back into the dining room. “Julia, let’s sit. We’ll think out loud. We’ll figure this out.”

“Have you called any of your daughter’s friends?” Elwood asked.

She closed her eyes for a moment as she sank down onto a chair at the dining room table, as if against the pain of a monumental headache. “My daughter doesn’t share her friends with me.”

“Girls this age are asserting their independence,” Michael Warner said. “Particularly where their mothers are concerned.”

Kovac gave him a who-asked-you look.

“I’m a psychiatrist,” Warner said by way of explanation. “I work with a lot of girls Penny’s age. And I have a daughter myself. Between the flux of hormones and the changing brain chemistry, girls this age are volatile in the best of cases.”

“And this isn’t the best of cases?” Kovac asked.

“Her father and I divorced when Penny was twelve,” Julia Gray said, her attention on her phone again as she searched her contacts for a number. “The four years since have been . . . difficult, to put it mildly.”

She put the phone to her ear and listened to it ring on the other end.

“She’s a bright, talented girl,” Warner said. “But she doesn’t apply herself, she doesn’t try to fit in, she’s defiant—”

“Tim? It’s—” She checked herself, her brows knitting with frustration. She sighed, waiting for the voice mail message to play through. “It’s me. Is Penny with you? Have you seen or heard from her? Please call me back as soon as you get this.”

She clicked the call off and put the phone down on the table with a little more force than was necessary.

“Has your daughter ever been in trouble with the law?” Kovac asked, thinking if the girl’s prints were on file they could eliminate her as a possible victim. Their Jane Doe’s prints had not been in the system.

Even as he thought it, he could see Brittany Lawler’s photograph in his mind’s eye and the tattoo on Penelope Gray’s shoulder.

Pooch Halvorsen said a lot of kids had that tattoo. . . .

“No, thank God.”

“Does she have a boyfriend?”

“Not that I know of.”

Elwood got out his little spiral notebook and pen. “What kind of car does your daughter drive, Mrs. Gray?”

“It’s a black Toyota something—”

“Camry,” Michael Warner supplied. “An oh-four.”

“Is it registered in her name?”

“No. In mine,” Julia said. “Michael bought it for Penny’s sixteenth birthday, but it made more sense to register it to me—for the insurance, you know.”

Kovac reached inside his coat and pulled out the photograph Brittany Lawler had printed out for him from her iPad and put it on the table.

“This seems to be a more recent photograph than the one you showed us earlier,” he said.

Julia Gray got a sour look, narrowing her eyes. “She did all that this summer,” she said bitterly. “The piercings, the tattoo. I can’t stand the sight of it.”

“Penny feels the need to make self-destructive statements,” Michael Warner said. “It’s a manifestation of her inner pain. She feels emotionally isolated by her father’s abandonment. It’s normal, really.”

“If it’s so normal, why doesn’t Christina have holes in her face?” Julia asked him, the hint of bitterness in her voice old and worn. They’d been over this ground before.

“I didn’t abandon Christina,” he said. “Her mother’s death brought us closer together. Your split from Tim drove a wedge between you and Penny. It’s a completely different set of circumstances.”

“It’s my fault,” Julia said.

“Tim left you. The blame lies with him.”

“Not as Penny sees it,” she said. “I drove him away. That’s what she believes. It’s all my fault her father took up with his twenty-six-year-old receptionist.”

“Does Penny have any tattoos other than this one?” Kovac asked, tapping a finger on the grainy print.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I can’t imagine that she would hide them from me. She knows how much I hate them. It shouldn’t even be legal for a girl her age to get a tattoo.”

“It’s not,” Elwood said.

“Her latest act of defiance was shaving off half of her hair,” she said.

The statement struck Kovac like an electrical shock. He glanced at Elwood from the corner of his eye.

Tinks said girls shaved their heads now. They pierced everything. They got tattoos. How many did all three and then went missing?

“She claims it’s a statement about her sexuality,” Julia Gray went on bitterly. “This is her new thing—claiming she’s bisexual. I could have strangled her. She looks like she escaped from a concentration camp!”

“I’m going to suggest you file a missing persons report, Mrs. Gray,” Kovac said calmly. “That way we can get your daughter’s information into the system immediately.”

They could get out an AMBER Alert, giving them maximum media coverage. Even if Penelope Gray turned out to be Zombie Doe, it would take time to confirm that, and they wouldn’t have to release the information immediately. In the meantime, media spotlighting the case of a missing girl would make people aware, get people talking, get them looking for Penny Gray’s car. Maybe someone would remember having seen her.

“Oh my God,” Julia Gray murmured, pressing her hand to her forehead as if feeling for a fever. She grabbed the phone again as the screen lit up and a ping sounded, heralding the arrival of a text. Tears filled her eyes and her face turned mottled shades of red that clashed with her Christmas sweater. “Tim hasn’t heard from her.”

“You don’t think it’s her, though,” Michael Warner said to Kovac. “Your victim. You don’t think it’s Penny. If you think we should file a missing persons report . . .”

Kovac looked at him, Dr. Sweater Around His Neck, and wondered if Michael Warner had ever seen a corpse that had fallen out of the trunk of a moving car or the face of a young woman who had been disfigured with acid. Probably not. That kind of privilege was reserved for guys like himself . . . and the parents of murdered children.