Kovac And Liska: The 9th Girl Part 42

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 f.u.c.ked him first?'"

Julia Gray stared at the table, her eyes vacant and gla.s.sy.

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 compet.i.tion; 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.

"Maybe this will jog your memory," she said, touching the Play icon. She put the phone on the table and pushed it toward the woman.

Julia appeared on the screen, angry, her face contorted with rage, screaming, "Shut up! Shut up! You're lying!"

Her daughter's voice behind the camera: "I f.u.c.ked him first! How do you like that, Mommy? Your precious fiance. He's nothing but a f.u.c.king child molester!"

"I hate you!" Julia screamed, her face nearly purple, her eyes bulging. "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!"

There was no question at all what happened next. They didn't need Julia Gray's memory or Michael Warner's eyewitness testimony. It was captured there on her daughter's phone: Julia grabbing a short knife off the kitchen counter and lunging at the girl, screaming and slashing.

The picture went topsy-turvy as the phone fell to the floor. The rest of the video was of the ceiling, but the audio went on and on and on. The screams, the pleading, the horrible sounds of a horrible crime. Michael Warner shouting in the background, "Julia! No!"

Across the table, Julia Gray's eyes went wider and wider. Her whole body began to shake violently, as if she were being given jolt after jolt of electricity.

"Oh my G.o.d. Oh my G.o.d! OH MY G.o.d! PENNY!!"

Scream after scream tore from her throat. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she fell to the floor, convulsing.

"SHE GRABBED A KNIFE and just started stabbing her," Warner said. "It was surreal. I couldn't move. I couldn't believe it was happening. It was all a blur."

"Really?" Kovac said. "She had seventeen stab wounds. It takes a while to stab someone seventeen times."

He raised his fist and brought it down on the tabletop once, twice, three times, four times. Over and over and over. Michael Warner flinched with each blow. Seventeen of them.

Penny Gray would have ruined him. He had thought about it every day, that a bitter, angry, hurt child had but to say something to the right person and his life would unravel like a cheap sweater.

"Why didn't you call the police?"

Warner rubbed a hand across his forehead and shifted on his chair, his agitation growing.

Now came the hard part of the story. How could he explain away what they had done next? A crime of pa.s.sion happened in the heat of a single moment. Nearly twenty-four hours had pa.s.sed between the murder of Penny Gray and her body falling from the trunk of Julia Gray's car.

"It was too late," Warner muttered. "The girl was dead. Julia was out of her mind. I had to help her. I felt responsible. What good would it have done to call the police? It happened in the heat of the moment. She just snapped. Julia doesn't deserve to go to prison. She's not a killer."

Kovac said nothing. His silence was a greater condemnation than if he had pointed out the truth. Penny Gray was dead at the hands of her mother. Julia Gray was a murderer. She was a murderer who had then attacked Brittany Lawler.

"I had to help her," Warner said.

"What did you think?" Kovac asked. "That you could just get rid of the body and no one would notice the girl was gone? People would think she just ran away? No one would give a s.h.i.t?"

All of the above.

The saddest part of that was that he was probably right. Penny Gray had a reputation of running away, of being defiant. Anything could happen to a girl like that.

"You had to help her," Kovac said. "You had to make the girl unrecognizable, so in the event her body was found, she would be just another Jane Doe. Probably a runaway. And take half her clothes off while you're at it, so it would look like a s.e.x crime. She was probably turning tricks and crossed paths with a bad, bad man."

Warner hung his head.

"Turns out, she did," Kovac said. "You know, Doctor, she wasn't dead."

He waited for Warner to look up at him, his expression a mix of suspicion, confusion, and panic.

"She may have been almost gone," Kovac said. "I hope so. But she wasn't dead when you poured that acid on her face. The autopsy showed she had both inhaled and ingested it. You need to know that. You need to think about that. Every d.a.m.n day for the rest of your miserable life."

Warner turned gray. Sweat rolled down his face and he began sucking in gulps of air.

"You watched your girlfriend murder her child," Kovac said. "You took the girl's body into the garage and poured acid on her face while she was still alive.

"Ironic, isn't it?" he said, getting up from his chair. "Doesn't that doctor's oath you take say do no harm? I guess maybe you didn't read that part."

Kovac left the room, closing the door on the sound of Michael Warner vomiting.

Tinks stood in the hall, leaning back against the wall with her arms crossed over her chest. She looked as disgusted as he felt.

"I need some air," he said.

"Me too."

They went out on the steps on the south side of the building. The sun was shining its weak winter glow, too far from the earth to be of any real good to Minnesota in January. Liska shoved her hands in the pockets of her purple wool blazer and hunched her shoulders up to her ears. Kovac flipped the collar of his sport coat up, a token defense against the wind. He dug a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it.

"Does that get rid of the taste?" Liska asked.

He shook his head. "No."

They stood in silence for a moment.

"Why do you think she kept the video on the phone?" she asked.

Kovac shrugged. "She probably didn't realize what she had. The girl never says anything about the camera running. She would have just been standing there holding the phone in her hand . . . Julia said she wasn't very good with gadgets. By the time she picked that phone up after everything that happened, the screen was probably blank. . . ."

They went silent again as both of them played the whole thing through in their heads for the millionth time.

"They'll go away for a long, long time," Tinks said at last.

"How long is long enough?"

"There's no such thing."

Kovac took another long drag on the cigarette and blew a stream of smoke toward the sky. "Gotta hope there's a special place in h.e.l.l."

"At least we get to say we sent them there."

"That's something."

"Is it enough?" she asked. "I don't know, Sam. I look at this-Julia Gray took the life of the child she brought into the world and threw it away so she could have what she wanted. I look at my boys, and all I want is to spend time with them. We know better than most people, it can all be gone with one bad decision, one wrong turn off the freeway."

Kovac gave her a long look. "Are you gonna leave me, Tinks?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "I don't know what to do. I just know these are years I don't get back with them. There are no do-overs.

"I love what I do," she said. "And I love the people I do it with. But I love my boys more."

"You're gonna do what you need to do," Kovac said, one side of his mouth curving upward. "I might not like it, but what else is new?"

"You'll be miserable without me."

"I'm miserable most of the time with you," he teased.

She squinted her eyes down to mean little slits and punched him on the arm as hard as she could.

"Ouch!"

He pinched out his cigarette and threw it away.

"Before you leave me, let's go have a drink for Penny Gray."

Liska nodded and sighed. "All she ever wanted was to be accepted."

"I guess that's what we all want deep down," Kovac said.

"I accept you, Kojak," she said, mustering a little humor. "In spite of your many flaws."

"That's big of you, Tinker Bell," he said. "I accept you too. I mean, who else would have us?"

They turned and started back inside, mutually frozen.

"Hey, partner," she said. "After we get that drink will you go with me somewhere?"

"Sure. Where?"

"I want to get a tattoo."

Kovac chuckled and put an arm around her. "That's my girl."

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

Every four years I donate a special opportunity to the fundraising auction for the United States Equestrian Team Foundation: the chance to appear as a character in one of my books. Proceeds from the auction go to help fund our Olympic equestrian team.

The winner of the 2012 auction was Ullrich Ka.s.selmann of Performance Sales International. Based in Hagen, Germany, P.S.I. is renowned as one of the largest and most famous auctions of international quality show horses in the world. Mr. Ka.s.selmann himself is a longtime fixture in the horse business as a top rider, trainer, and supporter of the industry. My thanks to Mr. Ka.s.selmann and everyone at P.S.I. for their incredible generosity in supporting the USET Foundation. And to Dr. Ulf Moller, also from P.S.I., happy birthday from Betsy Juliano!

For the purposes of the story, Mr. Ka.s.selmann is playing the part of Minneapolis Homicide Captain Ullrich Ka.s.selmann. Dr. Ulf Moller appears as a.s.sistant chief medical examiner of Hennepin county. And P.S.I. has become Performance Scholastic Inst.i.tute. Sorry there wasn't a horse to be seen in this book!

My cup runneth over with generous people this time around. I also need to thank Mr. Kevin Boyle, who purchased the same privilege for his fiancee, Marysue Zaytoun, with the proceeds going to the American Heart a.s.sociation. I hope Marysue enjoys her fict.i.tious stint as Nikki Liska's wonderful neighbor!

AUTHOR'S NOTE In The 9th Girl, fifteen-year-old Kyle Hatcher both experiences bullying and crusades against it, supporting the acceptance of others regardless of race, religion, interests, or s.e.xual preference. Kyle's hero and role model is real-life hero and role model, Ultimate Fighting Championship mixed martial arts welterweight champion of the world Georges St-Pierre.

GSP, as he is known to fans around the world, is the shining example of what a champion should be: dedicated, driven, hard-working, generous, a gentleman, and, above all, respectful of himself and others.

As a boy growing up in Saint-Isidore, Quebec, Canada, St-Pierre experienced bullying on a daily basis. As one of the most famous mixed martial artists in the world today, he now works through his Georges St-Pierre Foundation to bring awareness and solutions to the epidemic of bullying in contemporary society.

Please visit GSP's website, www.gspofficial.com, for more information on his foundation and for links to other excellent sources of information on fighting the good fight against bullying, such as www .s...o...b..llying.gov, www.bullying.org, and www.stompoutbullying.org.