He pulled his phone out of a pocket and called up a text message. “This is her last text to her father:

Have a Holly Jolly Christmas

with your happy family

Don’t think about the child you left

Your home, your wife, and me.

You live the life you want to

Have everything you need

That’s all that really matters

You’re all about the greed.

So happy, happy Christmas

my father great and true

From the daughter who means nothing

in the greater scheme to you.”

“Wow,” Kovac said. “She should write for Hallmark. They could have a whole new line of greeting cards for bitter people.”

“I’d buy them,” Tippen said. “But the bottom line for us here is that our derelict dad was out of state when Penny Gray went missing. He’s off the hook—at least directly. He did, however, have some ironic unflattering things to say about his ex-wife.”

Kovac arched a brow. “Doesn’t every guy?”

“Specific to how she’s raising their daughter. He claims if she was more maternal and less self-absorbed and angry, the girl would be more well-adjusted and not hate everyone so much.”

“Kind of like how if he was more paternal and less of a dick, the girl would have a brighter outlook on relationships?” Kovac suggested.

“That train of thought somehow escaped him. He says the girl has no respect for the mother as a parent or as a woman or as anything. They fight constantly, and she especially hates her mother’s choice in men.”

“The girl doesn’t like the boyfriend?” Kovac asked, then shrugged. “I don’t like the boyfriend either.”

“Too bad she isn’t your daughter, then.”

“Yeah. She’d hate me too.”

“She’s a teenage girl,” Tippen said. “They hate everybody. Except rock stars and Channing Tatum.”

“Who’s Channing Tatum?”

Tippen gave him a look. “Do you have even a passing acquaintance with popular culture?”

Kovac scowled. “Hell no. Why would I?”

“This is why you’re single.”

“That’s not why I’m single,” Kovac said irritably. “I’m single because I spend all my time with you assholes.

“What’s going on with your niece?” he asked. “Is she getting any feedback from her Internet stuff?”

“A lot of comments,” Tippen said. “Whether or not any of them lead anywhere is another matter. I’ve got a couple of the guys borrowed from Sex Crimes tracking down the more interesting ones.”

Kovac blew out a sigh. “This thing is going in so many directions, I feel like I’m wrestling a fucking octopus.”

“You need to know what happened after she walked out of that store,” Quinn said. “Right now, that’s your key moment. Who was she talking to? Did she leave with them? Did they follow her? Somebody had to see something.”

Kovac nodded. “We’ll get this video to the TV stations and stress the need for any kind of information at all. If someone remembers seeing her that night, I want to talk to that person whether they think they have information or not.

“In the meantime, Elwood,” he said, starting for the door, “let’s you and I go talk to the mother and see what lovely things she has to say about her ex.”

26

Julia Gray was pacing the narrow width of the interview room, her arms crossed as if holding herself together. Her head snapped in Kovac’s direction as he walked in. Under the harsh fluorescent lights, she looked haggard and ten years older than she had the night before. The bruise on her cheek had darkened.

Michael Warner sat at the small, round white table, composed, though he had already shed his coat and pushed up the sleeves of his black sweater. His forehead glistened with a fine mist of sweat. He rose and shook hands with Kovac.

“Detective Kovac.”

“Dr. Warner. Mrs. Gray.”

“Have you heard anything?” she asked. “Captain Kasselmann said leads are coming in. People have called in to say they’ve seen Penny. Is that true?”

Elwood pulled a chair out for her. “Have a seat, Mrs. Gray. We’ll go over everything.”

She glanced at Michael Warner as if looking for his permission. Kovac sat down, perched his reading glasses on his nose, and looked down at the cell phone records he had stuck in a file folder and carried in with him. Elwood took the remaining seat, dwarfing the table like a bear at a child’s tea party, ready to jot notes on a yellow legal pad. Julia Gray fidgeted in her seat. “Why is it so warm in here?”

“Apologies for that, ma’am,” Elwood said. “There’s something going on with the heating system.”

“It’s really uncomfortable,” she complained, yet she continued to keep her arms crossed tight around her.

Michael Warner leaned over and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Try to relax, Julia. Deep breaths.”

“We’ve had a number of calls to the AMBER Alert hotline,” Elwood said. “Every potential lead will be checked out. That said, we have yet to locate your daughter’s vehicle, and the last substantiated sighting of her was at a Holiday gas station the evening of the thirtieth.”

Kovac lifted his head. “May I see your cell phone, Mrs. Gray? I’d like to just take a look at your daughter’s text messages to you, see if there might be some bit of information that could be helpful to us.”

She hefted her purse onto the table. It was half the size of a gunnysack, with designer logos stamped all over it. She held it open with her injured right hand and dug for the phone with the left.

“Are you right- or left-handed, Mrs. Gray?” Kovac asked.

She glanced up at him. “I’m right-handed. Why?”

“I broke my right hand once. I couldn’t write, couldn’t type, couldn’t turn a doorknob. What a pain in the rear.”

“Yes, it is,” she said absently, looking into the purse. “I don’t have it. My phone. I must have left it in the car.”

Kovac flicked a glance at Elwood. What mother of a missing child absentmindedly left her phone in the car? Even if it was likely the girl was dead, until they had confirmation, a mother had to hold out hope, however slim.

“You haven’t had any text messages from your daughter’s number since we spoke last night?”

“No.”

“The phone seems to have been turned off,” Elwood said. “Or the battery died. I’ve been in contact with Apple. Your daughter did install the Find My iPhone app, but in that model the app only works if the phone is turned on.”

“So you can’t locate it,” Michael Warner said.

“No,” Kovac said, looking at the phone records. “But we can narrow down the vicinity the phone was in when it was being used. For instance, on the night she went missing, calls pinged off a tower near the Rock and Bowl. Since that night the phone has been in two areas. One hits off a tower on Pleasant Avenue South, west of 35W and north of Highway 62. The other is an AT&T tower located at 3910 Stephens Avenue just east of your own neighborhood, Mrs. Gray.”

She looked confused. “I’m not sure what we’re supposed to make of that.”

Kovac moved on, letting her wonder. “When was the last time you actually saw Penny, Mrs. Gray?”

“The twenty-eighth. Dinnertime. I had just gotten home from work.”

“You said the two of you had words. What about?”

She glanced at Warner as she pulled in a breath and sighed sharply. “She was angry. She was hurt. She didn’t hear from her father on Christmas, and she’d been stewing on that for two days. She was angry with me for—for—everything. For losing her father, for not being who she wants me to be, for my relationship with Michael.”

“Penny doesn’t approve of your relationship?” Elwood asked.

“Penny wouldn’t approve of any relationship her mother has,” Michael Warner said. “Unless Julia and her ex-husband got back together—and not even then. What she wants is a fantasy. She wants things to be the way her memory has painted the relationship between her parents when she was a little girl.”