“Were you there? Did you see her fall off the bike?”

“No, but I’m sure it was an accident. Julia said—”

“It might have been,” Kovac conceded. “Stuff happens in the heat of the moment, right, Christina? Gray lashed out at you, you lashed out at her—all in the heat of the moment. That’s what people do. They react. Sometimes it gets out of hand.”

“I didn’t break her wrist!” she said, alarmed that he might be accusing her. “I didn’t do anything to her!”

“No, sweetheart,” Kovac said, smiling like a kind distant uncle. “I don’t think you broke her wrist, but I have reason to believe somebody did. And I mean to find out who. You say you want to help, so if you hear anything, if you think you might know someone who knows someone who knows something about it, you need to call me.”

He held out one of his business cards for her. She took it and looked at it. Her fingernails were perfectly lacquered with glittering rose-pink polish.

“That night at the Rock and Bowl,” Kovac said. “I heard things got a little physical, that Aaron got a little rough with Gray. Is that something he does? Smack girls around?”

“No! He was only protecting me!” she said dramatically. “Gray attacked me! She hit me and she scratched me!”

She pulled down the high neck of her sweater to reveal a trio of red marks on her skin.

“Aaron was in trouble here the other day for getting physical with another student,” Kovac said.

“That wasn’t his fault!”

“That’s not how I heard it.”

“Kyle Hatcher knocked him down,” she said. “And kicked him too. And Kyle punched Aaron in the mouth that night at the Rock and Bowl too. He’s the violent one.”

Michael Warner leaned forward. “You can’t seriously be considering any of these kids had something to do with what’s happened to Gray? There’s a serial killer running around loose! You should be out trying to find him, not accusing children, not accusing Julia!”

Kovac gave him a benign smile. “I’m paid to be suspicious of everyone, Dr. Warner. Don’t take it personally.”

“And in the meantime, there’s a maniac running around the city abducting young women.”

“We’re on that.”

“Really?” Warner asked. “How many unsolved homicides are being attributed to this man? Eight? Nine? Isn’t that what I read? Penny could be the ninth girl this animal has hurt, and you’re here questioning kids? You’re questioning her mother? This is absurd!”

“If the tables were turned and your daughter was the one missing, would you want us to leave stones unturned?” Kovac asked.

“I would want you not to waste precious time,” Michael Warner said, standing up. “And I’m not letting you waste any more of mine. Come on, Christina. We’re going home.”

•   •   •

“ALL THIS ANIMOSITY and rejection is going to fuck with my self-esteem,” Kovac said as he watched them go. He rolled his shoulders back to loosen the knots and twisted his head to one side against the kink developing in his neck.

“I checked in with Elwood,” Tippen said. “Still no luck finding the girl’s car. He’s tracking down her Facebook friends. Nothing is panning out so far. He’s spoken to a couple of them. They claim they barely knew the girl.”

“Why should we be surprised? The people who knew her her whole life don’t seem to have a clue who she really was.”

“Sometimes those are the people who know us the least,” Tippen observed. “They have all that time to build us into who they want us to be in their heads so we can disappoint them over and over. Just ask my mother.”

“Or any woman you’ve ever dated,” Kovac said. “So far, this girl was nothing but an irritation and a disappointment to everyone she knew. Miss Acceptance.”

“Life is full of little ironies.”

“Yeah. I hate that,” he said with a sigh. “Go talk to the girl’s teachers. I’ll see what more I can squeeze out of Brittany Lawler. We can both be thankful we’re not Tinks. She’s on her way to tell Julia Gray her daughter is dead.”

•   •   •

LISKA PULLED ONTO Julia Gray’s block to the too-familiar sight of TV news vans with satellite antennae raised and video cameramen roaming the street, looking for interesting angles and shots of curious neighbors. She had to slow the car to a crawl and open the window to hold up her ID—her pass to the end of the block and the Gray house.

The way the house was situated on the lot gave it a privacy that was a blessing and a curse. A blessing to Julia Gray, holed up inside, a curse to investigators. It was almost impossible to see the driveway or garage door from any other house in the neighborhood. Potential witnesses would probably have little to tell them about any vehicles parked at the Gray home on the night in question.

She pulled in the driveway beside a patrol car and behind Julia Gray’s black Lexus and sat for a moment, recalling Jamar Jackson’s scant description of the vehicle Penny Gray’s body had fallen from New Year’s Eve. A dark sedan. No make. No model.

Julia Gray drove a dark sedan. Penny Gray drove a dark sedan. Probably more than half of Minnesotans drove darker-colored vehicles. They were easier to see against the white backdrop of winter. White cars—popular everywhere south of the Northland—were undesirable here and were involved in a higher percentage of accidents during the winter.

Still . . . no coincidence was a good coincidence as far as Liska was concerned.

She got out and went to the patrol car, holding her ID up for the uniformed officer behind the wheel. He ran the window down.

“How’s it been?” she asked, glancing to the street. Reporters were coming like hungry animals to food. She recognized several. The short guy from channel eleven, the perky blond girl from the early morning news, Dana Nolan.

“Quiet,” the officer said. “Once we chased the riffraff off the property.” He glanced in his rearview mirror and made a sound of disapproval. He flicked a switch on the dash, picked up the mike, and barked an order that blasted over the speakers into the street. “Stay back, folks! This is private property. Stay back!”

He shook his head and glanced up at Liska. “Fucking vultures.”

“Is anyone in the house with Mrs. Gray?”

“I don’t think so. I haven’t seen anyone come or go since the boyfriend dropped her off. What’s the news?”

“Bad.”

“Damn. I’ve got a daughter myself,” he said. “I don’t even want to imagine. I don’t envy you being the messenger, Sarge.”

“Better giving that news than getting it,” Liska said.

She went to the front door, rang the bell, and waited. And waited. And waited.

Maybe Julia Gray was sedated and asleep, she thought. Then again, what mother could sleep awaiting news of a missing child?

Kovac had told her Julia Gray had left her phone in her car while she’d been at the station half the morning, even though she had claimed to have gotten a text message from her daughter just the night before.

She rang the bell again, her mind racing as she waited. Who scraped up their kid from a bike accident and didn’t go straight to an ER? A drug rep with long-standing relationships in the medical community? Maybe.

She rang the bell a third time, her nerves starting to itch. What kind of emotion choked a mother whose child went missing, whose last words to that child had been delivered in anger? As angry as she was with Kyle, she still felt guilty for being so hard on him that morning. To see him fight tears at her caustic recriminations was like pouring acid on her soul. If those had been her last words to him, Nikki would never have been able to live with herself.

Maybe Julia Gray wouldn’t be able to either. Maybe she would take too many pills. Maybe she would slit her wrists.

As she began to think about getting one of the uniforms to kick in the door, it cracked open and Penny Gray’s mother peered out at her with red-rimmed eyes.