Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

“Do you know what this is?”

“A map,” Infante said. He was absolutely earnest. The sergeant had asked a question, and by God, the detective had an answer. Nancy started to giggle, only to end up yawning instead. It was 11 A.M., and she had slept for a few hours while Infante kept trying to rouse the sleeping Ronnie, but they were getting punch-drunk from exhaustion. They were also beginning to smell from being in the same clothes for more than twenty-four hours.

“Excellent, Detective Infante. Yes, this is a map,” Lenhardt said. “But a map of what?”

“ Baltimore?”

“No, my friend. It may look like Baltimore, but this is Fuckedville, U.S.A., our new hometown for the foreseeable future.”

“Why…are…we…fucked?” Nancy yawned involuntarily between each word. Lenhardt had cursed in front of her. Things must be bad indeed. She wondered if this meant he could never go back to not-cursing in front of her.

“Don’t be crude, Nancy.” The sergeant’s correction was automatic and unironic. “The commissioner wants to do a search.”

“We can’t do a search. We don’t have any information on where the child might be.”

“No, but we do have a dedicated young detective who pulled a suspect out of Leakin Park late last night.” Lenhardt nodded at Nancy. “Good work, by the way, although I wish you had told someone where you were going. And you should have used a car with a radio. Just to be safe.”

“Pulled a suspect out,” Infante said. “But she hasn’t told us anything.”

“We don’t even have a charge on her,” Nancy said.

“What’s her story for Friday night?”

“Home alone.” Nancy had managed to learn that much. “Parents were at a bullroast for dad’s union, which matches up with what her mother told us. But she doesn’t have anything to prove where she was from four, which is when she said she got home from the bagel shop, to eleven, when her parents came home.”

“A teenage girl didn’t make a phone call? Didn’t get on a computer and do that weird talkie-typie thing they do? My kids can’t go twenty minutes without making some kind of contact with their friends.”

“She doesn’t have any friends.” Nancy remembered the mother’s sad, resigned phrase. No boyfriend. No friends. Period .

“What about Alice Manning?”

“The girls claim they haven’t connected since they got home. Alice admitted she went by Ronnie’s workplace, just to get a look at her, but said Ronnie has no idea.”

“That was weird, Sarge,” Infante interrupted. “The girl comes in here, on her own steam, to tell us this story that puts her right there a few hours before everything happens. Then this lawyer shows up-a lawyer the girl called and left a message for before she headed in here-and the girl’s suddenly saying that it wasn’t on Friday, that it was a week or two ago, on a Saturday.”

“Yeah, what was that about?” Lenhardt wondered, with no expectation of an answer.

What indeed, Nancy echoed in her head. Her best guess was that Alice, either out of well-intentioned helpfulness or a maliciousness nursed for seven years, wanted to make sure that no one overlooked Ronnie’s proximity to the scene. She had lied. Or had she? Sharon Kerpelman said she had picked her up for dinner at eight on Friday evening. Four hours wasn’t enough time to abduct a child, disguise her, stash her or kill her, then walk three miles home. But what if Alice wasn’t on foot? And what if she wasn’t acting alone?

“As long as the girl is missing, the commissioner wants a search,” Lenhardt said. “He wants to make sure we look like we’re doing everything we can. At the same time-and the commissioner told this to the major, who passed the word to me-he doesn’t want anything to get out about how this case may be linked to any other.”

He paused, making sure he had both detectives’ full eye contact. “You understand what I’m saying? There’s no advantage in us talking about Ronnie Fuller or Alice Manning until we get a charge on one of them. And even then, you gotta remember they were juveniles, all those years ago. No one’s going to be able to drop their names into a court computer and make a match. If you talk about this, you’re talking about stuff that’s sealed, that nobody can get. It ain’t public record.”

“We’re not the only ones who know,” Infante said, and Nancy nodded. “City police who remember Olivia Barnes won’t mind leaking what they know, because it won’t come back on them. Hell, the kid’s mother can tell anyone she wants that she called us because her kid is a dead ringer for the-for the other kid.”

In her head, Nancy finished the sentence the way Infante had intended: a dead ringer for the dead kid.

“I hear the state’s attorney met with the Barnes family and the father-in-law, Judge Poole, last night,” Lenhardt said. “And swallowed a lot of shit, getting them to see it her way. But they were made to understand there’s no advantage in allowing a single scenario to dominate. If the public starts thinking this case is solved, they stop noticing stuff that might matter. As long as we’ve got the damn Amber Alert out, we might as well have people paying attention to it.”

“But a search,” Nancy said. “It’s such a waste of time and money.”

“Only if you think of our job as solving cases. If you remember we have to jerk off the media from time to time-well then, the commissioner reckons it’s a good show for a Sunday. Tonight, they’ll have video of cops searching the woods. They’ll report that we’re working solid leads, which we are. But that’s all they’re going to report, right?”

Nancy flushed, aware that Lenhardt was staring at her, not Infante, insisting she make eye contact with him.

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Now, cut her loose, go home, and get some sleep.”

“I’d like to have one more go, if you don’t mind.” Nancy nodded toward the closed door of the interview room. “I know we’re heading into double digits, but she’s slept for most of it. I just want one more chance.”

“She never lawyered up?”

Nancy shook her head. “No. It’s weird. She stonewalls like a veteran, but she never asks for a lawyer, never asks to make a phone call, doesn’t seem to care if her parents have been notified. When she’s not sleeping, all she says is ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ ”

“Then why go in there again?”

“I’ve been thinking about the T-shirt we found in the trash. It has blood on it, right? Blood that doesn’t match the girl or her mother. It’s gotta match someone.”

Lenhardt nodded. He was much too smart not to have thought this through before Nancy did.

“See anything on her?”

“No, and I ran my hands over her arms while cuffing her, to see if there was anything there. But she’s wearing long pants.”

“So, what, you’re going in there and hand her a penknife and say, ‘Hey, could you poke yourself?’ Ask her if she wants to shave her legs? Make a pact with her and become blood sisters?”

“Blood sisters,” Infante repeated, but he was too tired to make it into whatever ill-considered joke had occurred to him.

“I don’t know. Maybe she’ll consent to give us her blood so she can be eliminated as a suspect.”

“Except it won’t, as you know,” Lenhardt said. “It will just eliminate her as the person who bled on the T-shirt. We have to stay open to the possibility that two people were involved in this. In fact, I don’t see how one girl does it by herself.”

“Look, if the evidence doesn’t go with us, even a moron of an attorney is going to know to make an issue of it. But if we can get a match, that’s a better use of our time than sending every available body in the county over cold ground.”