The 9th Girl (35 page)

“Breaking news: Foul play is suspected in the apparent disappearance of
NewsWatch 3
’s own Dana Nolan,” the woman reported. “Police were dispatched to Dana Nolan’s Minneapolis apartment just an hour ago when Dana failed to show up for work and failed to respond to numerous phone calls and text messages.”

Kovac could see the fear and panic building in the woman. Her eyes gleamed with tears. Her voice tightened and trembled as she spoke.

“Personal belongings found in the parking lot of the apartment building near Ms. Nolan’s abandoned vehicle seem to indicate she may have been taken against her will.”

The screen filled with the image of the missing reporter.

“Her most recent assignment has been covering the disappearance of Minneapolis teenager Penelope Gray, and the possible connection between the discovery of the murder victim known as Zombie Doe and the serial killer law enforcement agencies throughout the Midwest have come to call Doc Holiday. Anyone having any information as to the whereabouts of Dana Nolan is asked to call the number posted on the screen.

“Please,
please,
” the woman implored, her tenuous hold on her emotions quickly eroding. “If anyone watching has any information
at all, please
call this number as soon as possible.

“Dana, if you’re somehow seeing this broadcast, please know that we’re all looking for you and praying for you to come home safe.”

The station went to commercial as the reporter broke down sobbing.

Kovac swore, grabbed his coat, and bolted for the door.

•   •   •

“
W
HY THE FUCK WASN’T
I called the minute this came in?” Kovac snapped at the young detective who had caught the call. “I was right down the fucking hall!”

They stood in the parking lot of Dana Nolan’s apartment complex. The early morning darkness had been banished by portable lights from the crime scene unit, and from the half dozen news vans that had circled the scene like wagons in an old Western movie.

The detective—Dickson—barely looked old enough to have a job. Kovac had come out of the womb older than this kid. Still, the young detective tried to put up a tough front.

“Since when do we have to clear our calls through you? It’s not even your shift.”

“Oh. It’s not my shift?” Kovac thought his head might explode. Acutely aware of the cameras and microphones trained on them, he leaned in close. “It’s a fucking abduction, you fucking moron! I’ve got half the fucking department working an abduction/homicide that’s all over the goddamn news, and you think you don’t have to bother telling me? The fucking janitor would know enough to tell me! You’re a fucking idiot! And where’s your partner? He’s a fucking idiot too.”

One of the uniforms who had responded to the initial call intervened, wedging himself between the two detectives.

“Sarge, the newsies are getting restless. They’re asking for a statement.”

“They want a statement?” Kovac asked, feigning shock. “It’s a clusterfuck. That’s my statement. They want a statement, they can pull one out of my ass. I just got here. I don’t even know yet what young Dickhead here has managed to fuck up in my absence.”

Dickson waved him off. “Fuck you, Kojak.”

Kovac turned and looked at the center of their crime scene: a dark green Mini, parked near the security light. Dana Nolan had parked exactly where young women were supposed to park their cars for safety—under a pool of light where they would be able to see danger coming.

Nothing good ever happened in a parking lot after midnight. It was unlikely there had been any witnesses. This was a quiet residential neighborhood. Dana Nolan’s belongings still lay on the ground where she had dropped them. She probably had seen danger coming. There just hadn’t been a damn thing she could do about it.

Kovac walked over to the car and squatted down for a closer look at Dana Nolan’s abandoned belongings. A purse. A makeup bag. A tote bag with papers spilling out of it. He picked one of the papers out and frowned as he looked at it—the missing girl poster of Penny Gray.

He stood up and looked at Nolan’s car, at the piece of paper tucked under the windshield wiper. A sick feeling began to stir like a snake waking in his belly.

Careful to touch just the edges of the page, he took it from under the blade and looked at it.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?

Penny Gray looked at him over her shoulder. The photo he had gotten from Brittany Lawler.

At the bottom of the page scrawled in black magic marker were two words and a smiley face.

HAPPY HOLIDAY
.

37

“That’s not his MO,”
Liska said.

“It is now.”

John Quinn stared at the photocopy of the note left on Dana Nolan’s windshield, frowning darkly. He needed a shave. Kovac had called him from the scene and asked to meet him downtown. Quinn had thrown on jeans and a sweater and drove in from his cozy home in the suburbs to join the madness.

Kovac didn’t want the press seeing Quinn at the scene. Or, more to the point, he didn’t want Quinn being seen on the news. Speculation would come quickly as it was. He didn’t want to pour fuel on the fire. Doc Holiday was sure to be watching the news. He hadn’t chosen Dana Nolan by accident. Kovac wanted as much control as possible over what went out over the airwaves. If Quinn thought it would be useful to include his name, that was what would happen. If he thought it was better to stay out of the spotlight, then so be it.

“I guess it’s safe to say he’s liking the attention,” Kovac said.

“Loving it,” Quinn replied.

They sat in the war room, surrounded by everything to do with Penny Gray’s case. They were going to need another room dedicated to Dana Nolan. They would have to reassign the manpower to divide their efforts between the two cases. Penny Gray was dead. To the best of their knowledge, Dana Nolan was still alive. There was a chance they were dealing with the same perp. If so, then one effort benefited both cases. They would have to shift the manpower to benefit the victim who was potentially still alive.

Quinn sat back against the table and crossed his arms over his chest. “He’s taking it to a whole new level. With the others it was enough to dump the victim and then read about it in the paper. Now he’s getting cocky. The media has given him a name. He wants to be a star.”

“This is why I didn’t want to challenge him,” Kovac said. “I was afraid he would take me up on it.”

“What do we do now? Do we acknowledge him?” Kasselmann asked. He looked harried for the first time in all of this. “Do we keep the note to ourselves? If we let the media run with this, they’ll have the public in a panic. I can’t have that, and I guarantee that’s not going to fly upstairs.”

“It’s going to be bad enough as it is,” Liska said. “First we’ve got a dead zombie, then a missing girl, now this. One of their own snatched out from under our noses. The news media is going to connect the dots and come up with Doc Holiday anyway. They already have. They don’t need to see the note for that.”

“If you don’t acknowledge him, he’s going to get frustrated,” Quinn said. “Frustrated could be good.”

“Not for Dana Nolan,” Liska pointed out.

“Dana Nolan is dead,” Quinn said bluntly. “I don’t mean to be a pessimist here, but that’s a foregone conclusion. Unless you can find her within the next twenty-four hours or so, she’s dead. He kidnapped her to kill her. That’s what he’ll do. That’s where the payout is for him. The buildup is just foreplay.

“He might drag it out longer this time because he has a stage,” he said. “That’s the best you can hope for.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to be optimistic about,” Kovac muttered. “If we’re lucky, he’ll spend more time torturing her before he stabs her to death and beats her head in with a hammer.”

“It’s more time to look for her,” Quinn said.

“Yeah. If we had a freaking clue where to look.” Kovac turned to his boss. “I’ve got a small army canvassing Dana Nolan’s neighborhood. They’re knocking on every door that has a sight line to that parking lot and the street.”

“And you haven’t found anything to go on from the previous cases?” Kasselmann asked.

Kovac shook his head. “Nothing. I’ve got guys double-checking, triple-checking, quadruple-checking everything from each of those cases—every report, every statement. They’re calling the families of the victims. They’re reinterviewing the people who reported finding the bodies. Nothing.”

“He’s smart, he’s careful, he’s experienced,” Quinn said. “But he just changed the way he does things. That’s when these guys make mistakes. He’s always hunted victims of opportunity, but he singled this girl out. He knew where she lives. He knew her schedule.”

“He stalked her,” Kovac concluded. “He singled her out because of the coverage of the Penny Gray case.”

“This is his big moment to show the world he’s smarter than everybody.”

“So far,” Kasselmann said, “he is.”

“We’ve got to trace Dana Nolan’s every move over the last few days,” Kovac said. “If he was stalking her, someone might have seen him.”

“He might have even interacted with her in the days leading up to this,” Quinn said. “He was able to get right up to her in an otherwise abandoned parking lot. He’s either a master of the blitz attack or she didn’t feel threatened. And the only way she didn’t feel threatened in this circumstance was if he was somehow familiar to her.”

“So he’s probably not a scary-looking guy,” Liska said.

“Probably not. Probably average size or smaller,” Quinn said. “He’s probably friendly, smiling, familiar. He could be using a ploy, like he needs help with something or he needs directions, or something like that.

“I got that feeling looking at a couple of his older cases. The Rose Reiser case, in particular. She disappeared walking out of a convenience store, and no one saw anything, which means she didn’t struggle. He had to have gotten right up to her without causing alarm. Then he probably used a stun gun or some other quick way of subduing the victim.”

Kovac looked up at the wall and the photos of Penny Gray and thought about the video of her walking out of the Holiday station down the street from the Rock & Bowl.

“The Holiday station,” he said. “If he’s the one who snatched Penny Gray, that location probably wasn’t a coincidence either. It was probably this sick bastard’s idea of a joke. Doc Holiday snatches his victims from the Holiday stations of Minneapolis.”

“
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.”