Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

He handed him his own pad and pen, asking, “Who’s Maurice?”

“My driver. It’s about an hour to Harrisburg. I can’t afford that much downtime, so he drives, I work. I moved here because I thought I could commute by helicopter, but the neighbors went berserk on my ass. That’s how I got to know Dale. He tried to broker a compromise, but there was no dealing with these nuts. I could have fought them in court, but it wasn’t worth it, not with everything else going on.”

“Why are you going in on a Sunday, though?”

“The usual things,” he said. “Papers to go through. Some things to box up and put into storage.”

His tone had the vague, innocent air of a lying kid, and he was no longer making eye contact.

“It’s illegal, you know. Getting rid of stuff once an investigation is under way.”

“Thanks for the free legal advice, Sergeant. Helps defray the cost of the official advice that costs me six hundred dollars an hour. Got any other pearls of wisdom for me?”

Lenhardt knew he was being put down, but he pretended to take the guy’s words at face value. “Okay, one more tip: Everything you steal, your wife is entitled to half of, under Maryland law. So if she knows where you hid all your assets before you gutted your company, you’ll have to cut her in.”

He left in a good mood, even though he hadn’t established anything other than the probability that Perri Kahn was the only girl who could have taken the gun from this house. It would be interesting to pin down the when, which would suggest just how long she had been planning her morning of havoc. And Delacorte hadn’t been able to place Josie in his home, a complication that Lenhardt had been happy to sidestep, even if he did think the girl was lying her head off.

What if she stalled on purpose? The thought hit him with a happy shock as soon as he was back on the highway, another possible resolution to the inconsistencies that were nagging at him. What if she hoped that refusing to open the door, pretending to be incapacitated, would be more likely to lead to the other girl’s death?

He filed it away and continued to the office, where he and Infante were going to write up the paperwork necessary to get permission for a medical examiner to eyeball the girl’s wound. According to the X-rays, the trajectory had been remarkably straight, as if someone had held the gun directly over the girl’s foot and fired. As if she had stood still, polite and proper, the best-behaved kid lining up for a flu shot.

Alexa had her Sunday routinedown pat-the gym, then the farmers’ market under the expressway, shopping for whatever new recipe she had picked out for that night’s supper, usually something from Gourmet, or Food & Wine, or Nigella’s column in the New York Times, but not Martha, never Martha, even before her legal problems. Martha Stewart was cold, while Nigella Lawson had an earthy sensuality that Alexa believed was not unlike her own nature. Warm, giving. And although Alexa sometimes invited Washington friends to her Sunday-night suppers, entertaining was not the point of her ritual. In fact, she prepared meals just as elaborate when alone-single portions of pot-au-feu, soufflés, paella. She refused to be one of those women who were stingy with themselves, postponing pleasure until the proper husband or boyfriend showed up.

That was one reason it had been so important to buy her own house, rather than settling into some sterile rental. The house needed quite a bit of work, but Alexa was patiently renovating one room at a time, which meant living in a perpetual cloud of dust. Only the kitchen had been done before she moved in, because the kitchen is the heart of any home. She had a hunch that granite was over, and she couldn’t afford it anyway, so she had gone with an almost retro look, all white wood and milk glass. In the eighteen months since then, she had completed the downstairs half bath and the dining room-refinishing the floor, installing her own moldings, even finding an old chandelier at a flea market and rewiring it herself. It was a beautiful, sensuous room with cranberry red walls and a mahogany dining room set that Alexa had unearthed at an antique store not far from Glendale.

The antique stores and flea markets in north county had been her primary solace after being assigned to Glendale by the nonprofit that was underwriting her pilot program. A certified teacher and guidance counselor-Alexa preferred to think of herself as an ethnographer-she had designed a curriculum intended to tap into current concerns over girls’ self-esteem. Unlike others in the field, who concentrated on psychology and sociology, Alexa had designed her program around language, the girls’ weapon of choice. She had assumed she would find a berth in Montgomery County, which would make it possible to keep her apartment in D.C.’s Adams-Morgan, close to her friends from graduate school. When she found out she was being sent to the distant reaches of north Baltimore County, she had insisted on living in the city, a curious choice in the mind of her new colleagues, who couldn’t see why anyone would choose the city over the suburban apartments and condos, especially with so many move-in specials available. “I suppose you get a lot more house for your money in Baltimore,” Barbara Paulson, the principal, had said, in a tone that suggested she didn’t understand at all. “And the reverse commute isn’t so bad.”

The truth was, Alexa had gotten very little house for her money, a tiny bungalow, Craftsman era but definitely not a Craftsman, on an unusually large lot in Beverly Hills, a neighborhood ripe for a yuppie influx that would send prices soaring. If she just sat on her investment for a year or two, doing nothing, the house’s value would probably triple from the land alone. But Alexa could not live that way. She needed a home, for emotional reasons so psychologically naked that they made Alexa, with her double degrees in rhetoric and psychology, a little sheepish.

She had done well by the house, but she was ill suited to harnessing its greatest asset, the wild and overgrown lawn. A neighborhood man had helped her with the basics-clearing out the weeds, cutting back on the overly rambunctious border plants-but the yard would have to wait for someone with a greener thumb to realize its true potential. Alexa’s primary grudge against gardening was that it was never done. A room might take three months to renovate, especially if one were doing it in piecemeal fashion, but once finished, it was finished for years. A kitchen might take three hours to clean after a particularly ambitious day of cooking, but it would still be tidy the next morning. One could work in a garden every day, from first to last light, and a half-dozen tasks would remain, while another dozen would spring up overnight. Gardens were just so ceaselessly needy.

Teenage girls were, too, of course, but Alexa did not find them as exasperating-quite the opposite. When she stood in front of a group of girls, she felt an almost spiritual thrill. Not holy per se, but as if she were the holder of simple but essential truths that could free them. They needed only to understand the power of words and stop using them to harm and harass. That was Alexa’s gospel, and she had been making progress at Glendale, in the same way she was making progress on her house-one room at a time, one project at a time, and, right now, on her hands and knees in the living room, one strip of Pergo at a time. It was much harder than the guy at Home Depot had suggested, however, and Alexa was trying not to cry at the seeming impossibility of fitting the floor into her slightly off-kilter living room.

Secretly, selfishly, she wondered how her pilot program would be affected by Perri Kahn’s-But Alexa did not know how to describe the actions of her star pupil. “Act”? Far too weak. “Crime”? Not if she were mentally ill, which she must be. But how could Alexa have missed the warning signs of such a profound psychosis? She had approved of Perri’s break with Kat, seeing it as an important stage in the girl’s development. True, Perri had been gloomy this year, emotional and secretive, and her papers had been increasingly fixated on violence, but in a cool, analytical way. She had written a particularly smart piece on the role of minorities as sacrificial totems in horror films, showing how even those movies that seemed to subvert this trope ended up serving it. For proof she had offered some B-movie about a snake, in which Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube emerge heroic, yet all their efforts center on helping the injured blond hero, just as Sigourney Weaver had battled aliens to save a similarly comatose white male. Perri had been an absolute delight to teach, but Alexa knew that this was not information anyone wanted just now.