“If he was the one who snatched Penny Gray,” Liska said. “I’m still not convinced she’s his ninth girl. And neither are you, Sam. We’ve got too many other red flags flying.”

Kasselmann looked like he needed an antacid tablet. “That’s all we need: two homicidal sadists. Who else are you looking at, Sam?”

“The girl had a complicated life,” Kovac admitted. “She wasn’t exactly Miss Congeniality. And she might have had a secret someone felt was worth killing her for.”

“We can’t drop that angle just because serial killers are more exciting in the news,” Liska said. She looked to Quinn and Kasselmann. “We think she might have been sexually abused by the mother’s fiancé. There’s some pretty strong indicators if you look at the timeline and the changes in the girl’s behavior over the last eight months or so. We have to look hard at him. She also had a run-in with his daughter and her boyfriend the night she went missing.”

“It’s a freaking shell game,” Kovac admitted. “And every time we stop and lift a shell, there’s a different killer under it.”

Kasselmann frowned hard. “Dana Nolan has to be the priority now.”

Liska sighed and looked away. “Great. Everybody else in Penny Gray’s life abused and abandoned her. Now we get to do it too.”

“Penny Gray is dead, Sergeant,” Kasselmann said.

“I understand that. I don’t have to like it. I feel an obligation to my victim, and to her mother. How am I supposed to tell Julia Gray that her daughter’s death isn’t as relevant today as it was yesterday? How would you feel if that was your child?”

“Maybe you’re too close to the situation,” Kasselmann said with a fine edge of steel in his voice.

“Yeah,” Tinks returned. “You’re probably right. If the department isn’t going to give a shit about these people, then it’s probably best to assign a detective who doesn’t care about them either.”

Kovac intervened before Kasselmann could draw breath to suspend her.

“The bulk of the manpower should go to Nolan,” he conceded. “There’s a chance we can still get to her before it’s too late. Tinks and Elwood should stay on Penny Gray. I’ll keep a hand in each.”

The captain looked at his watch. “I have to go upstairs and explain this to the chief. Keep me up to the minute on Nolan.”

Kasselmann left the room, taking none of the tension with him. Kovac felt like something huge had sunk its talons into his shoulders.

“He’ll look worse to more people if we don’t drop everything and chase after the missing news girl,” Liska said bitterly.

“Brass is brass,” Kovac returned. “Now tell me again how you want to go into management.”

“I’d rather eat my gun than be like that.”

“I’m glad to know it.”

Ignoring the office politics, Quinn had gone to the wall to scrutinize the photos from the New Year’s Eve scene. Kovac watched him take in the details as if he were looking at a Picasso exhibit, trying to make sense of the lines and the details.

“This was sloppy and careless,” he concluded. “If Doc Holiday didn’t do this, and the media has been trying to pin it on him, he might have taken Dana Nolan to prove a point.”

“And if that’s the case?” Kovac asked, dreading the answer because the only reason the media was blaming Doc Holiday was because he had told them to.

John Quinn looked grim. “Then God have mercy on her soul.”

•   •   •

“WE FOUND THIS video on YouTube late last night,” Elwood said, setting up his laptop.

Kovac had gone to organize the Nolan investigation. Elwood had arrived together with Sonya Porter, who was wearing the same sweater she had had on the night before, Liska noted.

“There are a bunch of them,” Porter said. “They all look like they were uploaded from her phone. So there could be more. Do you have her phone?”

“We don’t,” Liska said. “We don’t have her phone or her laptop. But my son, Kyle, says Gray was always shooting video with her phone.”

“Her mother told us she keeps everything on her laptop and she keeps her laptop with her,” Elwood said. “We found some notebooks with her writing in her room, but those were all a few years old. It’s safe to assume the laptop is either in her car, wherever that is, or the killer took it for his or her own reasons.”

He clicked the Play icon.

Penny Gray had chosen to shoot herself in profile as she looked down. She shot from the side where her hair was long and hung down like a curtain, hiding half her face. She moved the camera slowly as she spoke, bringing it around from one side of her head to the other, to the side where the hair had been shaved to the scalp and piercings rimmed the shell of her ear with wires and spikes.

The poem was entitled “Help Me.”

Refuge

Asylum

Safest place to be

Secrets

Hard truths

Soul laid bare to see

Comfort

Guidance

Shoulder. Lean on me

Seduction

Destruction

Help not meant to be

Silence

Shameful

Not to be believed

Don’t tell

Go to hell

There’s no one here for me

“That certainly sounds like abuse to me,” Sonya declared. “I say you go arrest the son of a bitch and string him up in public by his balls.”

“I told you why we can’t just do that,” Elwood said gently. “She doesn’t spell out what happened to her, let alone name names. And even if she did, we would need some corroborating evidence.”

“You should at least be able to drag him in here and scare a confession out of him,” she said stubbornly.

“Miss Journalistic Integrity,” Elwood said. “Would you write a story about it and present facts not in evidence?”

“No, but there’s no law against you lying to him in an interview, right? Tell him you have video of him molesting her.”

“I like your style,” Liska said. “But if we do that and he calls our bluff, we’re screwed. We have to be cagier than that. I want to go to Julia Gray first and plant some doubt. If we attack Michael Warner head-on, he’s going to call a lawyer, and he’s going to tell her to call one too.”

“Do you think she knows he abused her daughter?” Porter asked. “How could a mother know something like that and not do anything about it? And not only not do anything about it but also get engaged to the creep. That’s fucked-up!”

Her outrage pushed her out of her chair to pace back and forth with her arms crossed tight beneath her breasts.

“I’m betting the daughter never told her—or if she told her, she wasn’t believed,” Liska said. “Look what the girl wrote in that other poem—that she’s a burden, a liar, no one believes her.”

“What’s the matter with women like that?” Sonya asked. “It’s not the 1950s anymore. Women need to believe each other and stand up for each other in the face of sexist oppression. Men suck! Present company excluded, of course,” she added, smiling sweetly at Elwood.

“I understand your sentiment,” Elwood said. “Most violence committed against women is perpetrated by men. I once read a quote that the thing a man fears most from a woman is that she’ll laugh at him, and the thing a woman most fears from a man is that he’ll kill her.”

“I think Dr. Warner has more to fear than being laughed at,” Sonya said. “His whole existence is based on people trusting him with their kids. And if he molested her, his fiancée’s daughter had the ability to destroy him.”

“The day the girl’s wrist got broken, she was supposedly on her way home from an appointment with him,” Liska said. “He made out like he didn’t have much knowledge of the event, but Julia Gray gave the impression she included him in the decision making about a doctor.

“So what was Michael Gray doing the evening of the thirtieth?” she asked.

Elwood flipped back through his little notebook. “He and Mrs. Gray went to see the Joffrey Ballet company at the Orpheum, followed by dinner at Solera. He dropped Julia Gray off at her house between twelve and twelve thirty and says he was home when his daughter got in around one.”