He thought about the girl Julia Gray had portrayed through her words and her attitude this evening: defiant, disrespectful, disappointing in every way. He thought about the girl who had written this poem, the girl with the acceptance tattoo: a kid trying to express herself, trying to figure out who she was and who she wanted to be, feeling misunderstood, like every teenage kid did. He thought about the girl whose body he had knelt over on the cold and frozen road New Year’s Eve: used, abused, discarded. Taken. Lost. Gone.

It was his job as a detective to be the one person in the world who accepted her for exactly who she had been. It wasn’t his place to judge her, and in judging her close off his mind to possibilities in the investigation. It was his job to see her for who she was and to see every avenue that opened to him from that place of acceptance.

Somehow, he doubted that was what Penny Gray had had in mind when she had gotten that tattoo or when she had written this poem.

“Lost”

Looking for me

I am

Who do they see?

Not I

I want to be

Myself

They want me to be

Gone

I’m lost

21

“The Rock and Bowl?” Liska asked.

Kovac looked at her from the passenger’s side as he buckled his seat belt. “You know it?”

“I’ve been there with the boys.”

She had been there more than once—to a couple of birthday parties and to an outing with R.J.’s hockey team. It was the kind of place that drove her crazy as a mother who happened to be a cop—or a cop who happened to be a mother. The place was too big with too many different things going on, catering to too many different kinds of people. It was a bowling alley / arcade / pizza place à la Chuck E. Cheese, with a second-story dance floor that overlooked the lanes. The crowd was a mix of families, kids, teenagers, single young adults. It was the kind of place where she always worried about pedophiles and low-level drug dealers slipping shit to kids in the midst of the chaos.

“And this girl goes to PSI,” she said flatly, wondering vaguely if any of this was really happening. Maybe she was asleep and dreaming. Maybe these last couple of days had all just been part of the same long, strange nightmare. God knew she felt that tired. Maybe she was asleep and dreaming she was exhausted and that her life was a mess.

“I’d say what are the odds,” Kovac said, “but the odds are no different she’d go to that school than any other. Everybody comes from somewhere.”

“You really think this is our girl?” Liska asked, pulling away from the curb, leaving behind the pretty Tudor-style house with its cheery Christmas tree in the front window.

“Too many pieces match up,” he said. “The tattoo, the piercings, the hair, the fact that she’s missing. This girl broke her wrist last April. The mother will get us a release for the X-rays for comparison.”

He looked hard at her. “Do you know these people?”

“No,” she admitted, hating the way that answer made her feel.

She should have known every kid who went to school with her son. She should have known their parents too. She should have served on committees with this girl’s mother. They should have been in a book club together. Never mind that there were more than a hundred kids in Kyle’s class, and probably no one’s mother knew all of them. Never mind that she did her part working with PSI’s drug awareness program. None of that seemed like enough now.

“This girl is sixteen,” Kovac said. “Her friends call her Gray. She’s artsy, writes poetry. Sounds like someone Kyle might know.”

Liska huffed a sigh as she turned the corner, heading toward 35W. “Maybe she is. Maybe she’s his girlfriend. I obviously know nothing about what goes on in his life. I just occasionally show up to drive him someplace and feed him the odd meal.”

“You’re not the only mother that has a job, Tinks.”

“No,” she said. “But I’m the only mother my sons have.”

“Even if you were June fucking Cleaver, you wouldn’t know everything that goes on in their lives.”

“That’s not the point.”

“The point is you’re a control freak.”

“And you’re not?”

“We’re not talking about me,” he said. “Did Kyle get kicked out of school today?”

“No.”

“Is anyone pressing charges against him?”

“No.”

“Were lives lost today?”

“No.”

“Then get your head where it belongs,” he said. “Here. Now. Unless you win the lottery or land yourself a millionaire husband, you’re going to be a working mother.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I need to rethink what that means,” she said, merging onto the freeway, heading south. It sounded ominous. It scared her a little to have said it out loud. She felt like Pandora cracking open the box. She was afraid to even steal a glance at her partner. She could feel his reaction from across the car.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked. It was more of a dare, really. His tone was almost intimidating, as if maybe he could bully her into taking back what she was thinking.

She took a deep breath. “It means there’s a big difference between being a mom who works nine to five at a desk and a mom who gets called out at all hours of the night and pulls—how many hours have we been on this? I’ve had half a night’s sleep in three days. Marysue spends more time with my kids than I do.”

“You’re a cop,” Kovac said, bemused by this whole strange turn her brain seemed to be taking. Being a cop was the absolute fabric of his being. He didn’t know anything else—didn’t want to know anything else. “That’s how it is. You’re a homicide detective.”

“That’s what I’m saying. I choose to work Homicide. That’s my choice. There are other options. I could go to Forgery/Fraud. I could go to Internal Affairs—”

“IA,” he said. “You. Right. Why don’t you aim for the stars,” he said sarcastically. “Join the graffiti squad. Better yet, become a department chaplain.”

“Don’t be such an ass,” she snapped. “I’m serious, Sam. I choose to work a job with crazy hours.”

“You’re damn good at it.”

“I love it,” she confessed. “I love my job. But I love my kids more. If I have to pick one over the other, that shouldn’t be a hard choice.”

And yet, she had never made it in all these years.

“You don’t have to pick,” he said stubbornly. “Every once in awhile we get a case like this one, and yes, the hours suck, but—”

“Every once in a while?” she said, incredulous. “What’s our caseload right now? How many active open cases do we have going? Murders and assaults.”

He didn’t answer, conceding defeat on the point. They seemed always overworked and understaffed. He complained about it all the time, constantly lobbying Kasselmann to fight with the brass for more detectives.

“Maybe you should apply for Kasselmann’s job,” he said, only half-sarcastic.

“The brass would never let me go straight from investigation to running Homicide,” she said. “That’s too big a plum. Every wannabe chief is champing at the bit to cycle through Homicide. They’d stick me somewhere else first, somewhere boring and awful. I’d be an underling to some dickhead in the pencil-counting division.”

“You’re serious,” Kovac said. “You’re seriously thinking about this.”

She signaled a lane change, checked the rearview, refrained from looking over at him. She didn’t answer him.

“Jesus, Tinks.”

This wasn’t the first time in her career she’d thought about making a change. She had thought about it, but only vaguely. There had always been a good argument to stay put when she had first made her way into the division. She’d been on a good track, increasing her pay grade, building seniority. Homicide was the place to get noticed. Theoretically, it made a good launching pad to bigger things.