“It’s not my place to draw conclusions,” he said.

“But you’ve seen Penny’s photograph,” Warner pressed. “And you’ve seen the victim. Either it’s her or it isn’t.”

“It’s not that simple, Dr. Warner,” Kovac said. “I’m going to leave it at that. No need for all of us to have the same nightmares tonight.”

Warner frowned at the implication. “This is going to require dental X-rays?”

“X-rays,” Kovac qualified.

“Has Penny ever broken a bone?” Elwood asked.

Now the color began to drain from Julia Gray’s face as she looked from one of them to the other. “Oh my God,” she whispered as realization began to dawn that this could go the wrong way for her—and for her daughter. “She . . . she . . .”

She didn’t want to finish the sentence. If she finished the sentence, then it was out there and there was no taking it back and pretending it might not be true. They were asking her this question for a reason, for a real reason, a serious reason. And they were telling her that if her daughter was dead, she was also unrecognizable, that she had been brutalized in the most horrible way imaginable. Julia Gray didn’t want to know that.

She started to cry. First just a few tears in a slow trickle; then a dam burst somewhere inside her, and the emotion came in a flash flood of tears and snot and spittle and panic, like something inside of her head had exploded.

“Sh-sh-she b-b-b-ro-ke h-h-her wrist! Oh my God!”

Dr. Sweater Around His Neck looked at her with the same horror with which any man first regarded a sobbing woman.

Kovac got to his feet and sighed, weary to the bone. “We’ll need to see those X-rays.”

The sound that came from Julia Gray was terrible and primal, like a wounded animal. That’s what they all were, in truth, anyway, Kovac thought. Strip away the Christmas lights and the nice house, the stylish clothes and the trappings of society, they were all just animals trying to survive in a cruel world.

Julia Gray was just a mother now, frightened for the offspring she had given life and been charged to keep safe. Before the cops had shown up on her doorstep, she had been struggling but still in possession of the hope that she could turn things around with her child. If her child was dead, then failure was a done deal. There would be no second chances.

Kovac and Elwood moved off to one side of the room while Michael Warner tried to comfort and calm Julia Gray. Kovac pulled his phone out and texted Liska with the address of the Gray house and pick me up asap. Elwood would go back to the office and get the paperwork rolling.

“Mrs. Gray,” he said after the worst of her hysteria had passed. “We’ll need to have a look in your daughter’s bedroom.”

Michael Warner helped her up from her chair and held on to her as they went slowly up the stairs, as if she had suddenly become physically frail beneath the weight of the stress.

In contrast to Brittany Lawler’s sunny yellow bedroom, Penny Gray’s bedroom was somber and dark, the walls and ceiling a charcoal blue-gray that absorbed the light instead of reflecting it back into the room. The posters on the walls were of grim and angry young people. Singers and actors, Kovac supposed, though he’d never heard of any of them. They all looked like their moods could be greatly improved by a decent meal and a smack upside the head.

Someone had painted the acceptance tattoo on the wall above the bed in silver paint with the words Be Who You Are beneath it. The bed itself was a tangle of sheets and pillows. There was a chair nearby stacked with clothes, and a dresser cluttered with all the stuff girls found essential—jewelry and makeup, hairbrushes and perfume bottles. A bookcase was filled to overflowing with books and magazines and notebooks. Old stuffed toys and odd keepsakes—the things girls collected.

The thing he didn’t see in Penny Gray’s bedroom that had been in abundance in Brittany Lawler’s room: photographs of her with her friends. There were none—not in the bookcase or on the dresser or on the walls.

Kovac had long ago acquired the skill of reading people from the things they surrounded themselves with, the things they placed importance on, the things they didn’t have, the things they kept hidden. As he poked around the bedroom of the girl her friend called Gray, he put these pieces together with what he had seen in her photograph and the things people had said about her.

Her mother called her Penny—a name that called to mind something shiny and bright. She called herself Gray—the color of gloom and ambiguity. Her bedroom was an obvious reflection of that self—a difficult, conflicted girl who seemed to work at alienating herself while preaching a message of acceptance.

The thought crept into his mind as he looked around that somewhere on the far side of the country he had a daughter. He wondered what her room might look like, what it might say about her, and he thought about how he would have to gather together the pieces of information about her by looking at her stuff because he knew absolutely nothing about who she was.

These thoughts sifted around in the lower reaches of his mind as he looked through Penny Gray’s room and formulated his thoughts about who Penny Gray was. Julia Gray and Michael Warner watched from the doorway.

“Is there something in particular you’re looking for?” Warner asked.

“Does your daughter keep a calendar or a diary, Mrs. Gray?” Elwood asked.

“I don’t know. She keeps everything in her phone and on her laptop.”

“Is her laptop here someplace?”

“I doubt it. She always has it with her. She thinks she’s going to be a writer. A poet. Who reads poetry anymore?”

“I do,” Elwood admitted.

Kovac glanced over the things on Penny Gray’s desk—schoolbooks, a dog-eared paperback novel about vampires, some completely indecipherable math homework. Not that long ago the girl’s computer would have been an immovable box, and files would have been stored on floppy disks that he could have taken and given over to a geek to figure out. Now everything was portable and files got saved to a cloud in the ether someplace.

On the upside, technology would allow them to track her telephone—provided it was turned on. They would be able to narrow down a location based on the towers the signal was pinging off. As soon as they got the missing persons report filed and the AMBER Alert up and a warrant to get the information from the phone company . . .

“Is her phone in her name?” he asked. “Or do you have a family plan?”

“We have a family plan.”

Elwood looked at him. “That makes life a little easier,” he said quietly.

They had run into walls in the past trying to get information from the cell phone service providers of missing individuals. The phone companies were more concerned about being sued over violations of privacy laws than about hindering a police investigation.

“I still want a warrant,” Kovac murmured. “Dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. I don’t want a hairsbreadth of room for some oily lawyer to slide through if it comes to that.”

He glanced at his watch. Half past exhaustion, with a long night to go.

“Is this some of your daughter’s poetry?” Elwood asked, pointing to the wall above the small cluttered desk, where printed pages and small drawings and pictures cut out of magazines had been taped into a patchwork collage of teenage angst and self-expression.

“I guess so,” Julia Gray said.

She didn’t know her daughter’s writing. She didn’t know her daughter’s friends. She didn’t know where her daughter went, didn’t know why she made the choices she made. It struck Kovac that this woman didn’t know much more about her daughter than he knew about his. Even living in the same house, they were living worlds apart.

The title of one of the poems caught his eye. He pulled his reading glasses out of his coat pocket and stepped closer, a deep sense of sadness settling inside him as he read the words.