Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

The only problem was how were they going to make an arrest? The biggest break in the case would be the saddest one as well-the discovery of a body, which might yield more clues than the men’s room at Westview Mall. Nancy had barely slept last night, wondering if the girl might still be alive. She so wanted her to be alive. The case had been given to Homicide because of the large amount of blood on the T-shirt, but now they knew it wasn’t the girl’s blood, so it was a not unreasonable hope.

“Does it seem weird to you,” Nancy asked the lab tech, “that the blood is on the front of the jumper?”

Holly shrugged. “Not particularly. Someone was bleeding heavily. A head wound could have dripped. Then again, the bloody T-shirt could have nothing to do with the jumper, could have stained it when someone tossed it in the trash.”

“But if you were standing behind a child, cutting hair-” Nancy mimed the motion more for herself than Holly, and finished the thought in her head. It would be hard to cut oneself that severely with a pair of scissors, harder still to drip just a few drops of blood on the girl’s jumper while leaking blood all over a T-shirt. But if the kidnapper were standing in front-she acted out that scenario, too. No, it didn’t make sense. Perhaps the blood had fallen on the jumper after it was removed. Or, worse luck, maybe Holly was right, and the blood-soaked T-shirt had landed in the trash after the jumper, staining it by accident. Nancy could imagine some homeless man reaching into the garbage can to find a rag to stanch a wound.

Had the child reached out and scratched the person who was cutting her hair? Children didn’t like haircuts, or so Nancy had heard from her cousins with kids. But you could hardly call this a haircut. Based on the thick coil of hair found in the trash can, the kidnapper had sliced the hair just below the elastic band that held Brittany Little’s ponytail. The act had been swift, with little attempt to shape or style the hair left on the girl’s head.

Nancy carried the news, such as it was, back downstairs to Infante, who was cursing his luck at being the primary on this case. Not only was the disappearance of Brittany Little not a dunker or a gimme, it was going to attract press attention once the details began to shake loose. The department had managed to stall the press on Friday with the usual wink-wink, nudge-nudge signals. A few years back, there had been a rash of what Lenhardt called six-hour kidnappings. Teen girls in the city, girls who were apparently too impatient to take the nine months necessary to have their own babies, had started grabbing other people’s children as if they were dolls left untended. But it’s hard to steal a baby without drawing attention to yourself if you’re a teenage girl living with your own family, so those cases were always wrapped up in a matter of hours. “Easier to hide a pregnancy than a child,” Lenhardt sometimes said, usually when they were trying to track down a girl who had left her own baby in a Dumpster.

The rash of six-hour kidnappings had been during the spring, seven years ago. The city cops had thought Olivia Barnes was one of those cases, Nancy recalled, at least in the beginning. There had been a baby-sitter, a heavyset, dimwitted girl whose story hadn’t tracked. Another seventy-two hours passed before they asked the academy class to search Leakin Park. Even then, they had thought it was more of a field exercise for the cadets than a mission that would yield results.

“Stranger blood, huh?” Infante echoed when Nancy told him what she had learned on the eleventh floor. “Now, if I were a lucky guy, it would match the boyfriend.”

“I thought they both came up pretty clean. No Social Services file, no neighbor complaints, no record of 911 calls to the address.” When a parent-or a parent’s partner-killed a child, there were usually a few practice runs.

“Yeah, other than an assault charge on her and a weapons charge on him, they’re the nicest young couple since Mary and Joseph. But it’s the only thing that makes sense . Boyfriend goes too far administering discipline, he and panicky girlfriend concoct a cover-up. Who grabs a little girl from Value City? That’s not exactly the best place to find the next Lindbergh baby. You just know it ain’t going to be a big payday.”

“Yeah, for that you gotta go to Ethan Allen, maybe Crate & Barrel.”

Infante laughed. “You’re such a secret smart-ass. If Lenhardt knew half the shit you said-”

“Did you check for sex perverts in that part of the county? Could be a Peeping Tom or a groper who’s worked his way up to the next level.”

“No one jumped out of the computer. The most likely ones are locked up.”

“Biological father?”

“He’s also locked up, in Worcester, Massachusetts.”

Nancy picked up the photo of the girl off Infante’s desk. Such beautiful, beautiful hair, thick and shiny even under the cheap studio lights. It had been slicked back for the photo, but those baby ears could barely hold that cascading mane. Her ears were pierced, Nancy noticed, which she thought barbaric on children. “What about the scissors?”

“What do you mean?”

“You saw the hair. It was shorn, not hacked off with a pen knife. Do you carry scissors on you? Real scissors, not Swiss Army knife ones? Because that’s what it’s going to take to go through a hank of hair like that.”

“So either the guy is walking around with a pair of scissors-”

“Or bought a pair after identifying his target. We should check the CVS, Jo-Ann’s Fabrics, every store in the mall that sells scissors. Everybody’s got computerized inventory, right? So we should know who sold scissors yesterday at what time. We also might want to see who bought clothes for a toddler at Westview yesterday. Because he didn’t take her out of there naked, or just in a pair of pull-ups.”

Infante wagged an approving finger. “I like you, Porter.”

“That can be our secret.”

Infante opened a crisscross directory and began compiling a list of stores in Westview Mall. He didn’t have to tell Nancy that they would visit the stores in person. They did their job face-to-face, showing badge and ID. No one worth talking to ever volunteered anything over the telephone.

Nancy kept staring at the photo, the original they had used to make the dupes for the television stations and the newspaper. It was a Kmart special, or one of those mall photo studios, the girl backed by a field of fake flowers. Nancy should stick it in an envelope now, make sure it got back to the mother as soon as possible. How horrible it would be if the photo arrived after the fact-assuming the fact turned out to be the worst possible fact of all. That was the assumption, despite the hair and the discarded clothes. There was no getting past the blood on the T-shirt, even if it wasn’t the girl’s. Something had happened in that rest room.

It was funny about the photo, how it had been played in the media. As usual, the Beacon-Light had demanded the most from the department and given the least. They had even tried to persuade Nancy to drive the photo to the downtown office last night, arguing that it would mean overtime if a reporter had to act as the courier. As if Nancy cared about their overtime. The paper had ended up sending a young reporter from the county bureau. But because the department was noncommittal about the nature of the girl’s disappearance, the paper hadn’t used the photo at all. Clearly, some Beacon-Light editor had run the available information through his formula for news and decided it didn’t qualify. Because the girl’s parents were poor? Because the girl was biracial? It was hard to understand how newspapers thought. Television was better for this stuff, anyway. Played it high, got results. People watched television.