Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

Helen stared, perplexed, at Alice ’s outstretched hand.

“They gave you a card, right? Well, give it to me.”

Helen fished it out of her robe pocket and handed it over. Nancy Porter. Baltimore County Homicide.

“Are you going to call?” Helen asked, as if Alice were the adult, the one who got to make decisions.

“After dinner. It’s pizza night, remember?”

“They might have gone home by then.”

“Then I’ll talk to them Monday.”

“But-”

“If it’s important to them, they’ll come back,” Alice said, going into the kitchen to grab the carryout menu from beneath the refrigerator magnet shaped like Glinda the Good. Even though she knew the menu and the phone number by heart, she liked to study it before ordering, just in case she decided to try something other than her usual. “They always come back.”

Nancy and Infante managed to make good use of their time that afternoon-canvassing the mall’s shops, looking for anyone who might have sold scissors or a new outfit for a toddler. The people they interviewed were all helpful, too, which wasn’t always the case. At least they wished to be helpful. A missing girl generated that kind of response. But no one really knew anything, and ignorance took longer to process and assess than pertinent information.

Still, Nancy and Infante felt almost at peace with the day they had put in. Almost. Flight was tantamount to confession. Ronnie Fuller was hiding something, and she would tell them what it was when they found her. And they would find her. A teenage girl who worked in a bagel shop and lived with her parents could hide only so long. Ronnie didn’t even know how to drive- Nancy and Infante had learned that from her mother, a woman who wasn’t so much pale as gray and lumpy, like a doll left outside too long. Ronnie didn’t have a boyfriend, or any friends, period. That was how her mother put it, sitting at her kitchen table, head bowed in shame: “No boyfriend. No friends. Period.”

But what if time mattered? Even if their client was a corpse-which was Lenhardt’s private slogan for their department, “Your corpse is our client”-time was important. But if the girl was being kept alive, as Olivia Barnes had been, then time was an enemy and an ally, a tease and a cheat. Every minute that passed gave them hope. Every minute filled them with despair.

“And you know what would be the worst possible outcome?” Nancy said, speaking as if she had been airing her thoughts out loud all along.

Infante caught up with her, a ballroom dancer used to following a partner’s improvisations.

“If she was alive for a while and now isn’t,” he said. “I mean, if she’s going to be dead, it’s better if she’s been dead all along, since early Friday night. Otherwise, it’s lose-lose. People will be second-guessing us, and whatever we did will be the wrong thing in hindsight. Solving the case won’t matter.”

“It won’t matter as much.”

“I gotta say, I think she’s dead.”

“I don’t know what to think. It doesn’t make sense. Cutting the hair and changing the clothes suggests abduction for a purpose. But then there’s this T-shirt with blood on it.”

“Only not her blood.”

“It just doesn’t sound like what they would do. The girls, I mean. It’s nothing like what they did last time.”

“That’s right-you know them, don’t you?” Infante’s tone was supercasual, the kind of tone he might use in an interrogation. Nancy wondered what Lenhardt had confided in Infante last night, in the men’s room. She was told he wanted them to work the case because Jeffries was up, and Jeffries wasn’t much good. A year from his twenty-and-out, he was like a piece of furniture that had gone out of style and they just kept shifting him around the room, too sentimental to call bulk trash to haul him away. So it was credible that Lenhardt didn’t want him to work this case. Credible, plausible-but Lenhardt would be the first to remind Nancy that those words didn’t guarantee truth, just a reasonable facsimile. Credible stories were the kind they picked apart every day.

“I wouldn’t say I know them,” Nancy said, choosing her words carefully. She had never spoken to Ronnie Fuller before today, and Alice Manning was still nothing more than a face she had glimpsed at the courthouse long ago. It was their handiwork that had gotten tangled up in her life, the evidence of their venality, not the girls themselves. “I had a…minor connection to the Olivia Barnes case. So, some coincidence, huh, me working this case?”

She was giving Infante a chance to contradict her, to tell her if Lenhardt had moved them up in the rotation for any specific reason.

“I don’t know. You work in law enforcement long enough, you’re going to see certain people more than once, even if you change jurisdictions. Like Lenhardt and the Epstein case.”

“Yeah.” Nancy didn’t have a clue what Infante was referencing. She didn’t mind asking questions when she didn’t know something, but she had also figured out that much would be revealed from context, if a person was patient. The Epstein case . She filed it away, knowing the story would emerge eventually.

They were on the Beltway, completing the long, sweeping loop around the city, making their way back to headquarters. The vast, inefficient expanse that was the county still amazed Nancy. Driving, just driving, accounted for a third of her overtime every year. Some people said the county was shaped like a wrench, and Baltimore was the lug. Nancy thought it looked like a piece of snot hanging from the Pennsylvania line. “So much space, so little crime,” Lenhardt said, his voice almost wistful for the felony-dense precincts of the city. It had to be an easier place to hide. But then, Ronnie didn’t know the county either. She was a city girl, and the only place she had known for the last seven years was whatever juvenile facility had held her.

All Ronnie had was a five-minute head start on them, but so far it had proved to be enough. That’s how long they had needed to conclude that she wasn’t going to emerge from the kitchen, wasn’t hanging up her apron, or going to the bathroom, or combing her hair. O’lene, the girl who worked the ovens, just shrugged her skinny shoulders and said she hadn’t noticed anything. The manager, Clarice something, had been as unhelpful as she dared, her loathing for Nancy and Infante palpable. A middle-aged black woman living and working in Southwest Baltimore was not likely to be a fan of the police under any circumstances. But Clarice’s antipathy had been pronounced, personal. Nancy had the impression that the woman didn’t want anyone to talk to Ronnie until she had a chance to question her.

Yet it was Clarice who, unwittingly, told them what they needed to know: On Friday, the day Brittany Little had disappeared, Ronnie had left the store at 3:30 P.M. Clarice had told them this as a way of praising Ronnie’s constancy, her excellent work habits, and they had nodded, as if they agreed. But all it meant was that Ronnie was off on her own, a few hundred yards from Value City, only a few hours before Brittany was reported missing.

“ Brittany Little’s mother called the police about six-thirty,” Infante said. “That gives Ronnie Fuller three hours to walk across the parking lot, buy whatever she needed, then pick out her victim.”

“But see, that doesn’t make sense if the whole point is that the girl looks like the younger sister of the baby Ronnie killed seven years ago. If Cynthia Barnes is right, it’s a case of mistaken identity. But Ronnie knows what Cynthia and her husband look like. If she saw Brittany with her real mother, she wouldn’t make that mistake.”