Nikki shouted at her: “Up against the car! Get up against the car, you fucking bitch!”

The woman looked at her with wide, blank eyes. “What’s happening?”

“I’ll tell you what’s happening,” Nikki barked. She grabbed Julia Gray by one shoulder and spun her around, shoving her roughly up against the Lexus. “You’re under arrest. Where’s the girl? Where’s Brittany? Answer me!”

“I don’t know! I don’t know what you’re talking about!” she cried.

Michael Warner was sobbing as Kovac hauled him out from behind the wheel of the car. “She’s in the trunk! Oh my God! I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!”

“Not as sorry as I’d make you if I could,” Kovac said. He dragged the doctor by his coat collar away from the car, shouting, “Get down on the ground!”

Sirens were wailing as radio cars sped toward them.

A man came running from one of the houses shouting, “I’m a doctor! Is anyone hurt?”

Nikki had hold of Julia Gray by a handful of blond hair. She leaned in close and spoke directly into her ear. “If you killed that girl, I will personally see you in hell.”

•   •   •

IT LOOKED LIKE a scene from a Die Hard movie, Kyle thought as he turned onto Gray’s block—a chaos of flashing strobe lights and uniformed officers, sirens and voices, and cars clogging the street at odd angles. Crashed cars and an ambulance.

“Britt!” he shouted, wide-eyed with terror. “Brittany!”

A uniformed cop tried to stop him from running into the middle of the madness. Kyle feinted right, then ducked left and ran past him.

“Kyle!” his mother called. She caught him by one arm and hung on.

Someone had been put on a stretcher that was being wheeled toward the ambulance. Kyle didn’t recognize the face. It was bloody and swollen and misshapen. A girl, he guessed by the hair—blond hair.

“Brittany!”

His mom wrapped her arms around him and held him in place as he tried to lunge toward the ambulance.

“She’s going to be all right,” his mom said. She reached up and turned his face toward her and said it again. “She’s going to be all right, Kyle. She’s alive. She’s alive.”

Kyle stared at her, not knowing what to do next. He was shaking and sweating, and there were tears in his eyes.

“It’s going to be all right,” she said again, putting her arms around him.

Kyle hugged his mother as tight as he could, and they stood in the middle of the street and cried.

54

Nikki walked beside her son through the waiting room of the Hennepin County Medical Center ER. Post–New Year’s madness, it was a slow night. Assorted drunks and junkies, people who thought the common cold was a medical emergency.

“I can’t believe any of this happened,” Kyle said as they walked outside, where flurries had begun to fall like crystals in a snow globe. “It’s like a crazy nightmare.”

“I wish that’s all it was,” she said, rubbing a hand slowly up and down his back—as much to comfort herself as to comfort him.

Kovac had gone back to the office to get the paperwork started on Julia Gray and Michael Warner, letting her bring Kyle to the ER to see that Brittany would be all right.

Fractures to her chin and jaw would require surgery, and she had a concussion and several broken fingers and fractured ribs, but she would recover physically faster than she would recover from the trauma of what had happened to her. That would be a much longer battle.

With her mother sitting beside her in the exam room, stroking her hair, Brittany had answered what questions she could, barely able to speak, mostly using her uninjured hand to indicate yes or no. With her mother’s heart breaking for the girl, Nikki kept her questions to the bare minimum. Yes, Julia Gray had attacked her. Yes, Michael Warner had been a party to it. Yes, they had talked about Julia Gray having killed her daughter.

When she was done asking questions of Brittany, Nikki asked Mrs. Lawler if Kyle might see her daughter for a minute. Standing beside Brittany’s bed in the exam room, Kyle had earnestly promised her he would be there for her through her recovery.

Nikki thought she would die of pride and love for him.

Now they stood outside the ER doors. Nikki breathed in the cold night air and wished it would cleanse them both of what had happened that night.

“Gray’s mom killed her,” Kyle said. “How could that happen? How could she kill her own kid? Over what?”

Nikki didn’t know what to tell him. There would be a long explanation made by psychiatric experts at Julia Gray’s trial. Explanations of Julia’s personality disorders and the stresses of raising a difficult child, of tainted family dynamics and how normal needs and desires could morph and twist into something grotesque. Some expert witness would cast the blame on Penny Gray, painting her as a seductress who had tried to usurp her mother’s dominant position by sleeping with her man. They would beg for mercy and understanding for a woman who “just snapped.”

And all of it was just a fancy way of saying that people could be selfish and people could be evil, and even if your only real desire in the world was to be accepted, life could fuck you up in the blink of an eye for no reason that made any sense to anyone.

All she could say to her son was “I don’t know.”

Kyle gave her a long look. So quiet, so internal. She always had to wonder what was going on inside him, but she had never wondered that he didn’t have a good heart.

“I love you, Mom,” he said.

“I love you too,” Nikki said. She looked up at him and reached up and touched his cheek. “I love everything about you. Don’t you ever think I don’t. Even when you make me mad, I love you so much I can hardly stand it.”

A radio car was waiting at the end of the ambulance bay to take them home.

“When this is over, I’m going to take a hot bath and sleep for an entire day,” she said as they walked toward the car. “But when I finally come to, we’re going to talk about spending some serious family time together. How does that sound?”

“Sounds good,” he said. “We miss you, you know. When you work too much. We miss you, me and R.J.”

“I know,” she said. “I miss you guys too. We’re going to fix that. I promise.”

But the promise would have to wait.

Kovac stood beside the radio car with a grave expression.

He put a hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “The officer is going to give you a lift home, sport. I need your mom.”

Nikki didn’t ask the question until the squad car had pulled out. And then it wasn’t a question, but a statement.

“Dana Nolan.”

•   •   •

THE SCENE WAS already awash in artificial light by the time they got there. At a glance it appeared to be a traffic accident. A nondescript panel van had run head-on into a light pole on an otherwise dark stretch of service road leading to the Loring Park sculpture garden. Police vehicles blocked off the scene. Kovac pulled in behind one, and they got out to walk the rest of the way.

A young uniformed officer hustled toward them and filled them in as they walked.

“He told her she was his masterpiece!” he said excitedly. “It’s fucking sick. You’ll see.”

“She’s alive?” Kovac asked.

“She’s messed up. In and out of consciousness. They’re loading her in the bus now. She just keeps saying ‘I’m his masterpiece’ over and over. Apparently, he decided he wanted to leave a living victim, but she was a little more alive than he realized.”

Kovac’s breath caught hard in his throat at his first sight of Dana Nolan. The perky morning news girl was unrecognizable, her face battered and cut and misshapen. Her tormentor had drawn a huge red smile around her mouth. She looked like a clown from a macabre nightmare. Her eyes were glassy and flat, like doll’s eyes, and she babbled incessantly.