“I’m his masterpiece. I’m his masterpiece.”

Kovac swore under his breath. Liska gasped and looked as shocked and shaken as he had ever seen her as the EMT drew back the sheet that covered the girl.

She was naked except for a wide red ribbon tied around one wrist, the long trailing ends fluttering in the cold breeze. The number 9 had been carved into her chest with a knife.

“Quinn was right,” Kovac said as they watched the crew load the girl into the ambulance. “He didn’t kill Penny Gray, and he didn’t want credit for it. There’s his ninth girl, right there.”

“It’s fucking sick. I told you,” the uniformed officer said, leading them toward the van. “But you have to see the rest.”

They stopped under the pool of white light washing down from the bent light pole and looked into the van from the passenger’s side.

“License says his name is Gerald Fitzgerald,” the officer said. “The van comes back to a Gerald Fitzpatrick.”

Kovac made a sound that was part laughter, part disbelief as he looked at the driver and said, “Frank, we hardly knew you.”

The man they had known as Frank Fitzgerald, the man who had reported the body of Rose Reiser a year past, sat slumped over the wheel of the van, his face turned toward them, eyes open, a screwdriver buried in his temple.

“He finally made his mistake,” Kovac said. “Happy holiday, motherfucker.”

55

“It only happened once,” Michael Warner said. He sat with his elbows on his thighs, his head in his hands, ashamed to look up, to see Kovac staring at him, to see his own attorney looking away in embarrassment and disgust. He had spent the last ten hours in a holding cell and looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.

“She came to my office upset, heartbroken, sobbing. She’d had a terrible fight with her father. It was always the same thing with Penny. So antagonistic, a tongue like a razor. She would push and push, then be crushed by the outcome. She dared people to love her and then couldn’t understand when they didn’t.”

“So she came to your office . . . ,” Kovac said. He sat with one arm resting on the table, looking bored, he suspected. Looking like he’d heard this story a hundred times. He had, in fact. The story of the young girl and the grown man who couldn’t help himself. It still made him want to puke. But it didn’t serve his purpose to let that show.

The lawyer spoke up for the third time. “Michael, I’m going to advise you again not to do this.”

“Shut up, Harold,” Warner said.

He was trembling visibly though the room was like a sauna and he had sweat through his shirt.

“That was both infuriating and heartbreaking,” he explained. “To see her crushed like that. I have a daughter of my own. I can’t stand to see her disappointed.”

Did you fuck her too? Kovac wanted to ask, but he said nothing.

“I wanted to comfort her,” Warner said. “That’s all I meant to do.”

And now would come the part of the story where the girl started to move against him, and then they were kissing, and one thing led to another, and he just couldn’t help himself . . . with a child.

He started to cry, then fought it back and wiped his face with his hands.

“I told her it could never happen again,” he said.

Because, of course, it had been her fault. Blame the victim. He couldn’t keep his dick in his pants, but it was the girl’s fault. A messed-up sixteen-year-old girl whose father rejected her and mother resented her. She was supposed to be the one in control.

“But . . . ,” Kovac prompted.

“I don’t mean to make it sound like I’m not taking blame,” Warner said, looking up at him. “I know it was wrong.”

But . . .

“Penny was a very manipulative girl. She understood power.”

And now, the seductive-temptress part of the story. Kovac heaved a sigh.

“What happened the day she broke her wrist?” he asked.

“She threw a tantrum. She came to my office with the intent of us . . .” He didn’t want to say “having sex.” The idea was disgusting to him now—or so he wanted to pretend.

The man of integrity standing up for what was right.

“She blew up. She started hitting me. I grabbed her arm to stop her. She tried to pull away . . . I was sick about it.”

“Did Julia know?” Kovac asked.

He shook his head.

“I didn’t want her ever to know. I care about her. I truly do. There was no reason for her know any of it. It was just a terrible mistake. I stopped seeing Penny as a patient . . .”

“And started seeing her mother.”

Warner said nothing.

And he bought the girl a car to shut her up. And he had probably kept fucking her on the side because she had probably blackmailed him into it. And that was why she hadn’t told anyone else. Kovac could have spun the story on and on into yet another sordid quilt of human perversion.

“What happened the night the girl died?”

The attorney stepped forward. “Michael, please . . .”

Warner turned away from him and looked across the table at Kovac. “You have to understand it happened in the heat of the moment. She just snapped.”

“Julia?”

“You have to understand what a struggle she’s had with Penny these last few years. Her whole life, really. One defiance after another. She was at the end of her rope.”

He stood up to move around, his hands on his head, his hands on his hips, his arms crossed in front of him.

“Why is it so hot in here?” he asked, rubbing the back of his neck. “I feel nauseous.”

“I don’t think that’s the heat,” Kovac said. “You need to sit back down, Dr. Warner.”

“Penny was upset about our engagement,” he said, coming back to the table. “She was at the house when we got back that night. She’d been drinking. She was belligerent.”

He paused and looked off at the wall as if he were watching the memory play there like a movie on a screen.

“They were in the kitchen. I was standing at the doorway to the hall . . .”

•   •   •

“SHE SAID, ‘How can you marry him when I fucked him first?’”

Julia Gray stared at the table, her eyes vacant and glassy.

Liska sat across from her. She glanced up at the one-way mirror, knowing a prosecutor from the county attorney’s office stood on the other side.

“That must have been a terrible shock,” she said.

“She had said it before. The night she left. We fought,” she said, absently rubbing her injured wrist. “I called her a liar. I told her to get out. Do you have children, Detective?”

“I have two boys.”

“Boys are so much easier.” She sat for a moment chewing at a thumbnail. “With girls, everything is a fight, a competition; they want to control and manipulate. It’s exhausting. She was relentless.”

She was a child.

“When she said it that night, Michael was behind her,” she said. “I could see his face.”

“You realized she was telling the truth. What happened then?”

Her eyes darted all around the room as if following the flight of some tiny frantic bird. Her attorney sat quietly, offering nothing. They would go for some kind of insanity defense, Liska imagined. Diminished capacity: the inability to know the difference between right and stabbing your own child to death because your boyfriend molested her.

“I don’t know,” Julia said, though her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. It was like a nightmare. I still can’t believe any of it happened.”

Liska picked up Penny Gray’s iPhone and tapped her way to the screen she wanted. The phone had been found in Julia Gray’s kitchen. Kyle and Brittany had both said Gray had made videos of everything with her phone—her performances, her poetry, her few friends . . . her own murder.