Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

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It is early evening, summer time and hot. Two eleven year old girls, Alice and Ronnie, are on their way home from a swimming party when they happen to see a baby’s stroller, with baby girl sleeping inside, left unattended on the top step of a house. Ronnie says to Alice: “We have to take care of this baby.” But what exactly does she mean? Four days later the body of little Olivia Barnes is discovered in a hut in Baltimore ’s rambling Leakin Park by a young rookie detective, Nancy Porter. What can have happened in those four days to bring about this appalling crime? The girls are arrested and found guilty. Seven years later Ronnie and Alice, now eighteen, are released from their separate prisons, back into their old neighbourhood where the mother of baby Olivia still lives. Another child goes missing, and Nancy Porter and her partner get the case…

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The victim’s boss, a sixty-something white man, had fallen to his knees in the parking lot and started to cry after making the ID. “He’s been with me three years,” he said. “He’s the best worker I ever had.” Nancy, conscious of the camera crews arrayed along the perimeter of the yellow crime scene tape, had hustled the boss into his restaurant, seating him at a table where he wouldn’t get in the way of the lab techs. The reporters kept trying to get her attention, flag her over, elicit a tidbit or quote, but she ignored them. That was the unofficial protocol in the county department. No one talked to the media. Not on the record, not off the record, not on background, or whatever term reporters used when wheedling. Nancy wouldn’t be caught dead talking to a reporter.

It was going on eleven o’clock now and the television trucks were in place, ready to go live at noon. The Beacon-Light reporter had come and gone, was probably already stalking the dead boy’s mama. Nancy saw the tall young corporal who handled media, Bonnie something. Nancy and Bonnie were about the same age, although Nancy had started in city PD and Bonnie had always been out here in the county. She was said to be good police, fairly solid, and an excellent marks-man, not that county cops drew their weapons very often. Yet she had asked for the communications office when the number two job had opened up. Nancy couldn’t imagine wanting a job in which you did nothing but talk to the press. She especially couldn’t imagine being smug about it, as Bonnie seemed to be. “Corporal of communications,” Infante liked to say. “Corporal of crap.”

Nancy ’s stomach growled. She had been sitting down to her breakfast, a sorry little mess of sunflower seeds and carrot juice, when the call had come in. It had almost been a relief, getting an excuse to flee that breakfast. But now she was hollow.

“Cast-iron Connie rides again,” Infante said with a twisted grin. She accepted the gibe for the compliment he thought it was. Actually, it worried her that she never got nauseous on the job, never had, not even the first time she had seen a dead body. And if that didn’t make her sick, what could?

“I didn’t have any breakfast,” she said.

“Well, we could get you some biscuits to go,” Infante taunted. He knew she was on a diet, because she had munched her way through a green salad, dressing on the side, at Applebee’s yesterday. “I’m sure the staff wouldn’t mind whipping up something for you. Let’s walk through this again. I feel like we’re missing something.”

They were. On their next trip across the parking lot, Nancy spied a shell casing. This was her trademark, her gift-and sometimes her failing as well, according to her sergeant, who called her the Goddess of Small Things, which Nancy didn’t get, but the sergeant said it had something to do with a book his wife once read for her book club. Nancy always did have an eye for details. Back in the city, where she had started, she had been credited with psychic, almost otherworldly powers. In the county, it was understood as a skill, no different from Infante’s ability to break people down in interrogation, or Lenhardt’s amazing hunches. But it was understood as a weakness, too. A detective could get lost in details. Or so her sergeant kept telling her.

“Could be from another time, another robbery,” Infante said.

“Could be,” Nancy agreed.

“Who brings a gun, fires it once, and then ends up cutting the guy?”

“Morons,” she said. “Really mean morons.”

The dead boy had owned a four-year-old Nissan Sentra, a year from being paid off, according to the records at the MVA. That was pretty much all the registration records told, but Nancy could fill in the rest, just from what the manager had told her about his employee. It would be spotless, with a pine-tree deodorizer hanging from the rearview mirror, a folded road map in the seat pocket, and a decal of some sort on the back window-a sticker for the college he had been attending part-time, Coppin, or his fraternity, if he belonged to one. Nancy had a hunch he did and that initiation had been one of the happiest days of his life.

A Ford Taurus pulled up and their sergeant, Harold Lenhardt, got out. Nancy wondered if she should take that personally. She couldn’t recall him showing up when Infante was the primary. Baltimore County averaged about thirty homicides a year, and this was only her fourth in eight months in Homicide, so it was hard to establish a statistically accurate sample. Still, it irked her, seeing Lenhardt here. He was checking up on her.

“City cops found the car,” he said by way of a greeting. “They didn’t dump and run, but parked it in a shopping center lot over near Walbrook Junction. I guess they were trying to make it hard for us. Only the Laundromat owner noticed it hadn’t moved for six hours, got pissed, and called to have it towed.”

“Does the other kid, the one who worked here last night, happen to live within walking distance of where the car was found?” Nancy asked.

“No. But-go figure-he’s been truant four days out of five at Southwestern High School most of this semester. So I checked with the principal’s office and he was present and accounted for at roll this morning for the first time in a week.”

“What time do city high schools get out?”

“Two-thirty,” Lenhardt said. “But I don’t think we can wait. We’re going to have to deprive Junior of his day of book-larning.”

“Yeah,” Nancy said, seeing it. The kid thought he was smart, showing up for school today. He was counting on them to check attendance and be complacent, wait for the end of classes to talk to him. Then he’d try to cut out by lunch, find a place to lie low for a while, avoiding the cops for as long as possible. They would find him eventually, but it would still slow them down, screw up their momentum if they didn’t get him today.

“The goddess found a casing,” Infante said, and she shot him a look. She would take that from the sergeant, but not from her partner. “But I don’t think the ME is going to find a bullet in that kid. I think it’s all slices.”

“Nasty,” Lenhardt said. “These are some nasty mother-” He remembered Nancy was there and stopped himself. He would not curse in front of Nancy, in front of any woman, under any circumstances. Nancy tried to accept this as the simple courtesy it was. But she worried there were other things Lenhardt wouldn’t say in front of her because some things could not be expressed without profanity. And these might be things she needed to know if she was ever going to be a good homicide police.

“Stabbing takes time,” Lenhardt said. “You’ve got to have a taste for what you’re doing, you stab a guy to death.”

Even Nancy knew that. That was Homicide 101.

Her cell phone rang, which was weird because hardly anyone had her cell number, only Andy and her mom. The detectives still used pagers for official work and didn’t give those numbers out to anyone if they could help it. She pulled the phone out of her purse-there was no getting around it, she had to carry a purse because she couldn’t fit her life in her back pockets and breast pockets like the guys did. Her skirts didn’t even have pockets, and the blazers she bought were hit-and-miss when it came to breast pockets. She tried to answer the call, but there was no one on the line. Then she noticed she had a small text message on the screen:

I’M COMING HOME

So what, she thought. Of course Andy was coming home. It was his day off and he had been heading out to the gym when she left for work this morning. Why would he call and tell her that? Then she thought: he wouldn’t . And her mother wouldn’t know how to text-message if you gave her a year-long course. Her parents’ VCR had been flashing 12:00 for about a decade now.

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