To the Power of Three Page 9

  After a week of this, Val Morrisey stopped by Eve’s locker at day’s end.

  “Hey,” she said. She was a big girl, broad-shouldered, unremarkable-looking except for her eyes, a light, clear green.

  “Hey,” said Eve, steeling herself for some new form of taunt she hadn’t imagined. Val had a legendary mouth, as quick and lethal as Perri Kahn’s. Unlike Perri, she used it only for her own amusement, refusing to join the debate or drama clubs.

  “Some of us were going to get some coolers at Caribou Coffee. You want to come?”

  “I take the bus home,” Eve said. “I live pretty far out.”

  “This guy I know, Tom, he has a car. He could drop you home, after.” Val saw Eve hesitate. “He’s my friend, and he’d take you home if I told him to, and if he tried anything—not that he would with me in the car—I’d knee him in the balls. Okay?”

  “I’d have to call my mom. I mean, I don’t have to ask for permission or anything. She’ll just need to know that I’m coming home in someone’s car.”

  “Here,” Val said, proffering her cell.

  It was that easy. Val liked Eve because she hadn’t broken down in the face of the diva girls who had been intent on humiliating her. And whomever Val liked, Lila liked and the other skeezers accepted. Val and Lila even knew why Eve had attracted the divas’ wrath. “You’re cute,” Val said, and Lila nodded a little reluctantly. “They hated that boys were looking at you.” Eve finally had the new start she had wanted. The divas’ only recourse was to go to Ms. Cunningham and tell the whole story, pretending it was because they were so very, very concerned about Eve.

  Ms. Cunningham had summoned Eve’s parents to school, which was what the divas had wanted all along. Again—why? That was the part that Eve still didn’t get. Not even Val understood this strategy. Did they want her parents to come to school in hopes that their very queerness would destroy what she had with Val and Lila? Eve remembered a goat that had been born blind, the way the other goats had cowered in the pen, afraid of it, when it was the weakest and most helpless of all. Was she the blind goat of Glendale High School? No, she was just a girl who had been dumb enough to yearn openly for what she wasn’t supposed to have. That was the lesson Beverly and Thalia had been intent on teaching her. Know your place, redneck.

  In Ms. Cunningham’s office, bracketed by her parents, Eve had a terrible moment. She was still more good girl than skeezer then—she had not started smoking, much less using pot, although she would learn to do those things over time—and she could not imagine the punishment her father would fashion when he learned what she had done with Graham Booth. Her father always said the punishment should fit the crime, by which he meant it should have a certain Old Testament logic. Would he bind her mouth with duct tape? Make her swallow something even more disgusting? Did her parents even know about oral sex? It seemed unlikely. As Eve understood it, the activity had been pretty much abandoned until the former president made it popular again.

  But Ms. Cunningham did not tell. She had meant to, Eve was sure of it, perhaps had thought Eve would volunteer the story, which showed how little Ms. Cunningham knew of Eve. In the end, however, she could not form the words, and Eve certainly didn’t volunteer any information. Ms. Cunningham told Eve’s parents that she was worried about Eve’s thinness, to which her father had said, “You wouldn’t be if you could see our food bill. The girl eats like there’s no tomorrow.”

  Her mother put in, “It’s just genes. I was built the same way, as a girl.”

  Ms. Cunningham gave Eve’s parents some pamphlets on eating disorders. Her father glanced at them, then stared at Eve. “Do you do this? Eat good food and throw it up? Because that’s just wasteful.”

  “No, sir,” she said. It was so easy, being sincere when telling the truth. It almost seemed like cheating. Then again, Eve was pretty sure she could be just as sincere when lying. Ms. Cunningham waited to see if Eve could be bluffed into saying anything, then finally sent the Muhlys on their way.

  “That was a strange to-do over nothing,” Eve’s father grumbled. “Making a man come all the way up to the school just to ask why a girl is thin.”

  Eve supposed that Ms. Cunningham thought Eve owed her now, which is why she kept asking her questions yesterday. But Eve didn’t see it that way. Besides, people didn’t really want to know the truth. They thought they did, then got mad at the people who insisted on it. It was a lesson Eve had learned over and over in high school. Stick to the official version of things. Say what people wanted to hear. And no one, no one, wanted to hear what she knew now.

  9

  Harold Lenhardt had made sergeant twice in his life, first in city homicide, where he got his twenty and got out when the new commissioner proved to be a jackass, and now he was a sergeant in the county, going on five years. Funny, that “new” commissioner back in Baltimore was almost ten years and four commissioners ago. Time flies, whether or not you’re having fun. His colleagues liked to tease him, ask if he was going to retire from Baltimore County when he got his second twenty, then head to Carroll, the next county over, and make sergeant yet again.

  “It’s not out of the realm of statistical possibility,” he said this morning, as he and Infante reviewed their notes in preparation for a meeting with higher-ups who wanted to be briefed on the Hartigan shooting. “I’d only be eighty-three when I was done.”

  “Qualifying on the range might get tricky,” Infante said. “They say the hands are the first thing to go.”

  “Maybe your hands, Infante. Given how much extracurricular activity they see.” Lenhardt made a pumping motion with his fist, one universally understood by men everywhere. Or was it? Did, say, Chinese peasants or aborigines in the outback do the same thing? It was the kind of topic you never saw tackled on the Discovery Channel, but why not? It could be interesting—the rituals of male bonding around the world.

  “I thought when Nancy went on leave, you wouldn’t be able to gang up on me,” Infante mock-complained. “I’m still the butt of every joke.”

  “Not today,” Lenhardt said. “Today the joke’s on the guy who’s not getting overtime. And that would be yours truly.”

  No overtime for sergeants, to paraphrase the title of a movie that Lenhardt’s father had loved beyond reason. Gary Cooper? No, he had been Sergeant York. Andy Griffith? Yes, that was it.

  Normally Lenhardt didn’t mind not getting overtime. He saw it as proof of his professionalism and rank. When he worked an eighteen-hour day, everyone knew it wasn’t because he was padding his time sheet. Besides, he was already drawing his city pension, so he didn’t need the money as much as the younger guys. But on a brilliant Saturday morning in June, it was hard to leave his wife at the breakfast table and his children in their beds, hard to know that he had to miss Jessica’s swim meet. Harder still to realize that Infante would make buckets of overtime on this case, whereas all he would get was grief. At home and here, if this meeting was any indication of what was to come. A veritable exacta of aggravation.

  He looked over his notes, trying to find the holes that his colonel would be sure to highlight, if only to embarrass him in front of the chief. The first day had been hit-and-miss. After the interview with the dead girl’s parents, he and Lenhardt had run the gun through state police and gotten an owner—Michael Delacorte, with a Glendale address. The parents of the girl at Shock Trauma had readily admitted that their daughter baby-sat for the Delacorte family, although that was before Lenhardt explained why it was of interest. Once informed of the gun, they had started backpedaling like hell. The parents, the Kahns, then insisted it was unthinkable their daughter would have stolen a gun, any gun. “She was opposed to violence,” the mother kept saying, as if this assertion could somehow undo the inconvenient fact of one dead and two wounded, and a Shock Trauma doctor agreeing the Kahn girl’s wound appeared to be self-inflicted if poorly aimed—more off the cheekbone than the temple. ER docs were notoriously bad at forensics, having been trained to save live peopl
e as opposed to autopsying dead ones, but even a first-year resident should be able to identify the entry wound. All in all, it was shaping up to be a pretty straightforward event. Girl shoots two, then self. So why the meeting?

  And, more relevant to Lenhardt’s way of thinking, why this nagging at the back of his own mind, a sense that things were far from right? He was not an instinct guy, more of a context one, so the problem had to be in his notes. What had he neglected to do yesterday, what were they going to bust his balls for?

  The chief finally showed up, not that Lenhardt begrudged him being late to his own meeting. The chief was a good guy, solid and long-lived in a job where most achieved longevity through mediocrity. Lenhardt got along with his lieutenant, too, a city refugee like himself. The colonel—the colonel was another story. Tall and lean with reddish hair, he was one of those guys who could score points only at someone’s expense. He couldn’t put himself up, so he settled for constantly putting everyone else down.

  “I was on the phone late last night and early this morning,” the chief began, and he looked haggard enough for it to be the literal truth. “It turns out the father of the dead girl, Dale Hartigan, is good buddies with our county executive, and he wants to be as involved as possible. Those were his lawyer’s words—as involved as possible.”

  “Shit,” Infante said, and he was only blurting out what everyone else was thinking.

  “He wants to know where the gun came from,” the chief continued. “He wants to know if there are federal charges that apply. The lawyer even asked if cases such as this could ever be death penalty—and then insisted his client would never support that, and it’s his understanding Baltimore County won’t go for it without familial consent. Hartigan is, in short, all over the map. But the one message that came through loud and clear is that he’s going to ride our asses for the duration of this investigation.”

  “Nothing worse than a good citizen,” Lenhardt said, and every man in the room nodded. You’d think it would be the other way around, but in Lenhardt’s experience middle-class victims were just hell. People who paid their taxes, toed the line—they believed they should be exempt from crime, that it was a constitutional guarantee.

  “I think the family’s grief is perfectly understandable,” the colonel said. “They’ve lost a child.”

  Lenhardt wished the gathering were large enough so he could catch Infante’s eye, make a face, but he shouldn’t risk it. Instead he said, “We’ve already traced the gun and established that Perri Kahn had access to it.”

  This was Lenhardt’s way of saying, We know how to do our job, dickhead.

  “I know,” the chief said, “because as of this morning, her parents have hired Eddie Dixon. He called me at home to give me a raft of shit about you guys talking to the parents while their daughter was in surgery. So—good work. Any time Dixon is pissed, I figure that’s a point for our side.”

  Dixon had a fearsome reputation as a defense attorney. A thin, light-skinned black man, he dressed in a style that Lenhardt called Park Avenue pimp—beautiful hand-tailored suits in not-quite-right colors. He was particularly partial to a shade of dove gray, for example, which he wore with a rose-colored shirt and matching handkerchief poking out of the breast pocket. His success in the city, where juries were prone to acquit, was understandable. It was harder to explain how Dixon had done so well in the county, where jurors tended to be law-and-order types. Lenhardt, who was three-for-one lifetime against the lawyer, chalked it up to Dixon’s way with voir dire. He had an eye for the bleeding hearts wrapped in the most unlikely packages—stern-faced White Marsh men, starchy Ruxton women.

  “That’s an odd match,” the lieutenant said. “You wouldn’t expect a Glendale family to gravitate toward a city slick like Eddie.”

  “He might have gravitated toward them,” the colonel said.

  “More like orbited, circling Shock Trauma like the ambulance chaser he is. Helicopter chaser,” Lenhardt amended, caught up in his own whimsical vision. “I think I saw him hanging from the chopper as it lifted yesterday. It was like the fall of Saigon.”

  “Were you there when the girls were taken out?” The colonel was not much for Lenhardt’s brand of humor, which was Lenhardt’s secondary complaint against the man. But then the colonel had never been a murder police, and that was Lenhardt’s primary complaint. The colonel had come up through various property crimes—burglary, auto theft. Want to follow a serial number? He was your guy. Need tips on how to canvass pawnshops? No one better.

  But when it came to the simple task of talking to another human being one-on-one, the colonel was in way over his head.

  “No, both had been transported by the time we got there,” Lenhardt said.

  “First-four protocol,” Infante put in. “And of the first four who went in, not a single one was homicide.”

  “So?” The colonel all but bristled at the implicit rebuke for the new policy, which he had helped implement.

  “So,” Lenhardt said, “some things didn’t get done. No one thought to ride with the witness in the ambo, keep talking to her. They accepted what she said at the scene at face value and let her go unescorted.”

  “Why shouldn’t they?” the colonel asked.

  The question so appalled Lenhardt, went so directly to the heart of everything he believed, that he was left uncharacteristically speechless. In his head, however, he had an answer: Because people lie, dickhead. Especially people at murder scenes.

  The lieutenant stepped in, all too familiar with the friction between his sergeant and colonel. “Did you get to her later, interview her at the hospital?”

  “No, and that’s another thing that bugs me. She was sedated when we finally got there, at her parents’ insistence. Yet her injury is pretty superficial.”

  “She was shot by her friend, who killed someone else and then planted a bullet in her own jaw,” the colonel said. “Even without an injury, she might have required a tranquilizer to sleep.”

  Lenhardt would concede this point. “Also, she’s at GBMC.”

  “GBMC, not Sinai?” The chief frowned. “But Sinai has the trauma center for north county.”

  “Exactly. This teenage girl insisted on GBMC, and the EMTs followed her instructions because GBMC was slightly closer and can handle that kind of minor gunshot injury. So, on the one hand, she’s so hysterical that she needs to be sedated, and yet she also has this moment of clarity in which she demands a certain hospital.”

  He let this information hang in the air, seizing the moment to begin passing around photocopies of his notes on the blood evidence in the restroom. Copies of the digital photos were attached, photos downloaded and printed with only seventeen malfunctions in the software and the laser printer. The chief may have been on the phone at all hours, but Lenhardt and Infante had been here until 1:00 A.M., at war with the computer.

  “Here’s some potential problems as I see it—there’s some stuff that doesn’t match the preliminary story, neat as it’s shaping up. We’ve got a living witness who told the responders that this one girl did the shooting, and most of the evidence fits. But some doesn’t, and those are the kinds of details that Eddie Dixon can make hay out of—like this trail of blood that seems to be leading away from the door. Or these two locked stalls.”

  He didn’t feel he had to mention the thing, as Infante insisted on calling the tampon. But it was another piece of the puzzle, or would be if it turned out that it didn’t match one of the three girls. The principal insisted that the restrooms were cleaned at day’s end, so it had to be from that morning, and the school’s doors had been open for only twenty minutes. Once these facts came up in discovery, Dixon was free to spin any fairy tale he wanted, defense attorneys not being bound by the facts, much less the burden of consistency. Their entire case was going to rest on the girl in GBMC, and Lenhardt was already troubled by her behavior so far. Why had she refused to open the door when rescuers arrived? Why hadn’t she crawled or hopped, if only to get away fro
m the considerable carnage around her? He knew rookie cops who had thrown up on their shoes at lesser sights.

  And why did she care which hospital treated her? Oh, how he wished he had been one of those first four. He would have knelt next to her, held her hand, ridden with her in the ambo, gotten her life story, been her best friend, her favorite uncle. Twenty-four hours later that opportunity was gone.

  “You’ve linked the girl in Shock Trauma to the gun, at least indirectly,” the chief said. “What about the witness? Have you got anything concrete?”

  “She’s a person of interest,” Lenhardt said. “And once we talk to her at length, she may be a lot more interesting. Even accounting for fear and shock, her actions don’t track. Maybe today she’ll be clearer. That’s what I’m hoping for.”

  He thought of his daughter in the same situation. Of course, she was only eleven, but Jessica could be very cool in an emergency. She had a breezy confidence that astonished him at times, a certainty about herself that had only started to wobble in the past year, her first in middle school. Jessica was prepared for disaster, too, but that, sadly, was a part of life for cop kids.

  Don’t ever tell anyone that Daddy is a cop, or that Daddy has a gun.

  This was the brave new world of post-9/11, when no law-enforcement official was ever truly off duty. Earlier this year they had shown the officers a video from a robbery in a parking lot, where some thug confronted a man and his daughter, demanded money. Even as the guy reached for his gun, the little girl piped up, “You can’t do that. My daddy’s a policeman.” And bam, bam, bam, the guy was dead, killed in front of his child. They were told to instruct their families that Daddy’s job—or Mommy’s—was a kind of secret among strangers, that it was up to Daddy (or Mommy) to let people know.

  It still broke Lenhardt’s heart to think of the night he found Jessica crying in her bed because she thought this meant that her dad couldn’t come to Career Day anymore. She took things so hard, Jessica did. Our daughter has no small emotions, as Marcia liked to say, but she could laugh when she said it, whereas Lenhardt brooded on the fact.