Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

“Aren’t we meticulous,” he said. “It’s not exactly a fuckin’ whodunit.”

“No, it’s not a whodunit. But it has the potential to be a gigantic pain in the ass.”

“You can say that again. She was pretty, wasn’t she?”

“Pretty in pink.”

Neither one mentioned her body, although they might have if she had been a little older. She had a notable shape, with large, round breasts straining against the polo shirt, so much tighter and shorter than the polos Lenhardt remembered from the last time this preppy look was the rage. Not that the prep look ever went out of style in Baltimore. His daughter had wanted a shirt like this for Christmas, one with the little alligator, and he had almost fainted when he saw the seventy-dollar price tag. He was happy to spend seventy dollars on Jessica, but not for a polo shirt. “Dad,” she had whined, “it’s a limited edition.” How in the hell could a shirt be a limited edition? Had this girl’s parents balked at such an expense? No, a Glendale girl probably had a closetful of such shirts.

Her skin was pale, getting paler by the minute, but roses had probably bloomed in those cheeks, the round kind that grandparents pinched. Assuming she had grandparents. So many kids didn’t nowadays, as people started families later and later. His kids, Jason and Jessica, had never really known Lenhardt’s parents, although Marcia’s were still alive and very doting.

“Remember Woodlawn?”

The question would have seemed a non sequitur to anyone else. “Woodlawn” was shorthand for a murder they had worked late last year, in which four members of a drug gang were killed by a competitor. It had been a particularly nasty scene-torture marks on all the bodies, the floor slick with blood-and their work on the case had been nothing less than inspired. It had taken them six months to identify a suspect and make an arrest, working with nothing more than a fingerprint on the cellophane from a cigarette pack. But when they made the case, it did wonders for the department’s clearance rate. After all, four murders were one-eighth of the county’s annual caseload.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Now, that was a scene.”

“Looked like a scrapple factory. An abattoir .” Lenhardt savored the word, which had popped up on Jason’s vocabulary test a few weeks back. He loved words and loved running the vocabulary lists with his son. Abattoir, albatross, abdomen, aberrant.

“Woodlawn was a good case,” Infante said, and Lenhardt agreed. It had been easier to walk among those four men’s disfigured corpses than it was to confront this one girl with a single bullet wound. Such men were supposed to die.

“I’m still bugged by this,” Lenhardt said, pointing to the trail of blood that seemed to lead to the door. “The door was locked, right?”

Infante checked his notes. “Yeah, responders said the bathroom door was locked when they arrived. They spoke to the conscious girl-girl number three-through the door, and she convinced them that the shooter was down, but she refused to get up and open the door because of her injury. They had to find a custodian to unlock it.”

“She was here, right? The injured girl?” Lenhardt followed the trail to a corner by the stalls.

“Think so.”

“And she said she couldn’t get up?”

“Right.”

“So who locked the door?”

“Presumably the shooter, when she came in.”

“But here, just here.” He pointed to a faint mark, which had been smeared. “Doesn’t that look like a footprint? Not a shoe but a foot?”

“It does look like someone’s big toe. Maybe the girl who was shot hopped around a little at first.”

“But it’s leading away from the door. Wouldn’t you hop toward it?”

“She might have been a little freaked out and disoriented.”

Lenhardt revolved slowly, taking in the whole room. Except for the lack of urinals, it was no different from the boys’ room. Three sinks. Three stalls. One of the doors, the middle one, had a hand-lettered sign taped to it, declaring it out of service. The door to the right was ajar, but the door to the left, the one against the wall, was shut tight. He pushed it, but it didn’t give. Latched. What the fuck? It made sense that the out-of-service stall would be locked. But why this one? He bent down, saw loamy dirt on the floor.

He glanced at Infante, who was now measuring the room with a retractable yardstick. He had rank and seniority. He could make Infante do it. But it would be an argument, with Infante trying to get out of it by insisting there was no reason to do it at all, and Lenhardt had no heart for an argument just now. Lenhardt wished briefly that Nancy Porter, Infante’s usual partner, were not on maternity leave. He had never put much stock in the idea that either gender brought anything special to detective work. If you were good at it, it was a personality type unto itself. But Nancy, with her keen eyes, might see something here that he was missing.

And Nancy, being a woman, would probably be less freaked out by the prospect of sliding under a locked stall door in a women’s room.

Sighing, he removed his jacket and folded it, laying it with great care on the window ledge, next to the digital camera. His knees creaked as he lowered himself to the floor, and he worried about his back. He went in headfirst, gingerly, straightening up as soon as he could. Funny, it took him a second to realize that he could unlock the door then, freeing himself from this confined and alien space. He sat on the toilet seat-actually, he hovered over it, using his thigh muscles to avoid contact-and looked around. There was no graffiti, although the door and walls bore the sign of having graffiti scoured from their surfaces over the years. A relatively full roll of toilet paper was in the dispenser. And-he stood then, turning around-the toilet was empty. So that was that-Nancy Drew and the Mystery of the Locked Bathroom Stall. What did he think he might find anyway? There were no casings, not with the little six-shooter this girl had used. Her bullets were all going to be lodged in her victims, including herself.

Then he noticed the metal box on the wall. Pulling a pen from his breast pocket, he used it to lift the lid slightly, promptly dropping it with a bang.

“Shit,” he said. “Fuck me.” Then, “Hand me a Baggie, okay, Kevin?”

“What could you possibly have found in there?”

“You don’t want to know.”

This is no job for a man, he thought as he used tweezers to extract the tampon from the bag inside the metal box and sealed it in a Baggie. It was fresh, or reasonably so, which meant someone had been in this locked stall-and left it, without unlocking the door. Had the shooter hidden here, waiting? If you’re waiting to shoot someone, do you have the presence of mind to change your tampon? And why would you leave without unlocking the door? He tested it several times, slamming it shut to see if the lock engaged by itself. But, if anything, the door needed to be forced into position before the bolt could be engaged.

“Infante…”

“What?”

“Never mind. If anyone knows less about teenage girls than me, it’s you.”

“I know a lot about teenage girls.” His tone was one of mock outrage.

“You’re attracted to them. It’s not the same thing.”

The things we can dowithout thinking, Dale Hartigan decided, are nothing short of amazing. Breathing, for example. No, that was a bad example, because one didn’t have to learn how to breathe, it wasn’t a skill that one mastered and later did automatically. Breathing was instinctive, from that first whack on the backside, although doctors had stopped doing that, of course. Dale’s generation may have started life with that stern little pat on the rump, but his daughter had arrived in a private birthing room, full of soft colors and kind lights. That was a good day.