Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

“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 from 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.

Still, he believed that if Jessica were in a locked room with one dead girl and another who appeared to be well on her way to dead, she wouldn’t have lingered. She would have gotten to that door by any means possible, unlocked it, and gone down the hallway on her belly if she had to. His daughter was scrappy, more of a fighter than her older brother, truth be told. Jason was a dreamer, safe in a gauzy world of his own making. But even Jason would have the instinct to save himself.

So why had the other girl stayed? Did she think the shooter might have the wherewithal to come after her? It was a foolish notion, but if you had grown up on a steady diet of horror movies in which the killer kept getting up again and again, you might think it possible. Had she been hiding in the stall and emerged only after it was all over?

“Like I said, ninety percent of what I’m seeing and hearing matches up with the shooter being the girl in Shock Trauma,” Lenhardt said. “But I don’t think anyone in this room is going to be happy with a ninety percent certainty if the case falls apart in court. The dead girl’s father is already busting our balls. Imagine what he’ll be like if we fuck this up.”

“I thought it was a given in homicide that the obvious solution is the obvious solution.” The colonel smirked at what he thought was a brilliant ploy, throwing Lenhardt’s oft-repeated words back at him.

“I never disdain the obvious,” Lenhardt said. “But I don’t let myself get seduced by it either.”

“Is it too late for tulips?”Susannah Goode asked the funeral director.

“Probably,” said Stan Jasper. “And they’re not a flower we work with, normally.”

“Oh. I hadn’t thought about that. Still, if they were in season…She loved tulips.”

“Whatever you choose, I’d recommend a palette of white. White, or pale yellow, or pale pink. Very appropriate to one so young.”

“Yellow,” Dale Hartigan said. “Roses.” Susannah squeezed his hand. More correctly, she squeezed his fist, because Dale’s hands had been pretty much balled into fists for the last twenty-four hours, except when occupied by tasks that insisted on uncurled fingers. Driving. Eating, except he hadn’t been able to eat, no matter how others urged him. Drinking, which he had done, well into the night, after the last phone call to his father, who wanted to know what the chief had said. He should be hungover today, yet he had never gotten drunk, much less achieved the total numbness he was going for. It was as if he had cried the liquor out before it could reach his blood.

“We work with a florist whose roses are exquisite.”

“Yellow roses are often quite bright,” Susannah pointed out. “Not pastel.”

“Oh, no, the ones we use are very, very light in hue.”

Dale had a weary moment of insight: He was being bilked. Well, not bilked, exactly, but the unctuous funeral director had sized him up nicely: Dale Hartigan, a well-fixed man who would spare no expense in burying his daughter, a businessman who would have no stomach for this negotiation. One man’s tragedy was another man’s workaday life, pure and simple. Stan might have been Dale, pricing out the electrical work on his latest project or girding for battle with the historic review board. Kat’s death was just a job to so many people-the police, the assistant state’s attorney, the medical examiner.