“Any idea who she might be talking about?” Kovac asked.

“Her father, obviously,” Warner said. “She was lashing out at him. He has all but cut her out of his life. She was especially feeling the sting of that over the holidays.”

“But what’s the lie?” Kovac asked. “It’s been four years since your husband left you and Penny, Mrs. Gray. It’s no secret he was cheating on you, that he left you for a younger woman. Considering your daughter’s penchant for public displays of drama, I can’t imagine anyone didn’t know how she felt about it all. So what’s the lie? What’s the secret? Who’s the star she means to bring down?”

Michael Warner slid the sheet of paper back toward him and said, “We can only hope we get a chance to ask her.”

“And for the record, Mrs. Gray,” Elwood said, “where were you New Year’s Eve?”

“We went out for drinks,” she said, tearing up. Michael Warner put an arm around her shoulders to offer comfort while she covered her mouth with her injured hand.

Kovac imagined her remembering the revelry of the evening, dressed to the nines, ringing in the New Year while her daughter was lying dead in the road, a spectacle under the harsh portable lights, TV news cameras angling to get a shot of the carnage.

Every mother’s nightmare.

He hoped.

27

“You are not to leave this house. Do you understand me?” Nikki said. “I don’t care if it’s on fire. You are not to leave this house.”

Kyle didn’t look at her. He hung his head and said yes in a barely audible voice.

They had ridden home in absolute, oppressive silence. She couldn’t trust herself to speak. She couldn’t stand to have music on the radio or DJs trying to fill everyone with phony hilarity. The sound of the blinker was intolerable. Kyle slouched down in the passenger’s seat, trying to make himself invisible.

The house was equally silent save for the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen. The quiet seemed to press in on her eardrums. Every small sound—her purse touching the dining table as she set it down, Kyle unzipping his hoodie—seemed magnified ten times.

He sat down at the table looking despondent. She refused to feel badly for him.

“I can’t talk to you about this now,” she said. “I am so angry and so disappointed in you, I can’t talk about it.”

He hung his head. “Are you going to tell Dad?”

“Why would I bother to involve your father?” she snapped. “He’s as juvenile as you seem to be. He’ll probably think it’s funny. It’s not funny. It is so not funny.

“You could lose your scholarship over this. You could be expelled. You can sit here all day and think about that, and what that means. No television. No Internet. And if I find out you’ve been on Facebook or tweeting on your secret account, I will take your phone and smash it with a hammer right before your eyes.

“I have to go now,” she said, “because I have to have a job so I can provide for you and your brother, and feed you, and clothe you, and buy you things—all of which you seem to have no appreciation for whatsoever.”

He was trying to hide the fact that he was crying. She had to fight like a tigress against the urge to go to him and put her arms around him. She loved him so much it hurt like being stabbed in the heart with an ice pick.

She felt like she was going to explode into a million glass shards as she went back out into the cold and got in the piece-of-crap car from the department pool. It smelled of cold Mexican takeout food. She left the windows cracked as she drove.

Alone, she couldn’t help but let some of her own tears fall. She was exhausted, both from the case and from all the drama with Kyle. At times like this she found that terrible, insidious worn-out wish sneaking in the back door. The one where she imagined someone stronger than she felt offering to take some of the burden away and let her rest in a safe place. It was a cruel dream, one she never expected to be fulfilled. But it crept in the back door just the same.

She drove to the medical plaza where Penny Gray had been treated for her broken wrist and picked up the X-rays that were waiting at the front desk, then headed downtown to the ME’s offices.

She was informed at the front desk that Möller was in the middle of an autopsy.

“Which suite is he in?” she asked.

The receptionist blinked at her. “You can wait in his office. He’s in the middle of an autopsy.”

“Yeah, I got that the first time you said it.” She held up the large manila envelope with Penelope Gray’s name on it. “I need him to look at these X-rays now. I don’t care if he’s knee-deep in decomposing corpses. Which room is he in?”

The young woman looked alarmed, torn between fear and duty.

“Look, sweetheart,” Nikki said brusquely. “You can call Dr. Möller and interrupt him or you can tell me which room he’s in and I’ll interrupt him myself. I need to know if his Jane Doe is my missing child case. I have a mother hanging in limbo.”

Still uncertain, the young woman swallowed and said, “He’s in two.”

She was already picking up the phone to call the suite and cover her ass as Nikki turned and headed down the hall.

The smell hit her in the face like a baseball bat as she went into the autopsy suite.

“Holy Mother of God!” she exclaimed, reeling. Her stomach flipped over like a beached fish, and her head swam.

Möller looked up at her, his eyes sparkling above his mask. “Ah, welcome, Sergeant Liska! You don’t like our ambience today? So sorry. The piquant bouquet of our latest customer isn’t for the more delicate nose, I’m afraid.”

Liska clamped her nose shut with thumb and forefinger and tried to breathe through her mouth. Her eyes watered as if she had just sliced open an onion. “What the hell is that?”

“A dissatisfied client from a funeral home in north Minneapolis. One of several. Apparently, they ran out of storage while waiting for the weather to cooperate for burials,” he explained. “And ran out of embalming fluid, it would seem, as well. Seven corpses stacked in a closet like cordwood.”

“I’m gonna puke,” she said, then promptly turned toward the nearest receptacle and unloaded her breakfast into a laundry bin.

Unfazed, Möller went on about his business, waiting for her to recover.

“Okay,” she said, still breathing hard through her mouth. “That guy isn’t going to get any deader. I’ve got the X-rays to match to our Jane Doe. Can we go somewhere with a lower gag factor and have a look?”

“Of course,” Möller said pleasantly, stepping back from the table. “If you had allowed the girl at the desk to call ahead, I would have met you in the hallway.”

He stripped off his gloves, mask, and gown and threw them in the laundry bin, then washed his hands in one of the big stainless steel sinks.

Liska didn’t wait for him, bursting out of the room and sucking in fresh air by the lungful. Möller stepped into the hall and offered her a wrapped peppermint, which she took in exchange for the X-rays.

They went into his office and he clipped the pictures of Penny Gray’s broken wrist to a light box. He had already mounted the matching X-rays from the Jane Doe autopsy. He stood looking at the images, frowning and silent.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Are our pictures the healed version of that?”

“Yes,” Möller said. “How did this allegedly happen?” he asked, pointing to Gray’s known X-rays.

“The mother said the girl fell off a bike. Why?”

“No,” he said. “You fall from a bicycle, you reach out to break your fall like so,” he said, stretching out one arm, his hand flexed back. “Your hand strikes the ground, the break happens here.” He cut his other hand across the wrist. This is not what happened to this girl.”