The 9th Girl Read Online Free

to see that face in his sleep for years to come.”
    “But he isn’t seeing a license plate?” Kovac asked. “A make and model? A parking sticker? Nothing else.”
    “He wasn’t paying attention. He was more interested in the two half-naked girls making out in the back of the Hummer.”
    “Where are they?” Tippen asked. “I volunteer to interview them.”
    Liska broke off a piece of her doughnut and threw it at his head. “You’re such a perv!”
    He arched a woolly eyebrow. “This is news to you?”
    “Topic, people!” Kovac barked. “It’s as hot as Dante’s fucking inferno in here. I’d like to get out of here sometime before heatstroke sets in.”
    “He says there was a box truck ahead of him,” Liska said, “on his left, as the car merged into traffic in front of him.”
    They all perked up at that.
    “What kind of a box truck?” Kovac asked.
    “I had to psychologically beat him like a rented mule to get that much out of him,” Liska said. “And how could that be relevant anyway? The truck was already to his left. The car was only just merging into traffic from the right. And the vic fell out of the car, not the truck. It’s the one thing he’s very clear on. The vic fell out of the car.”
    “Would he work with a hypnotist?” Elwood asked. “He’s too traumatized now to want to consciously go after those detailed memories. A hypnotist could be the thing.”
    “I’ll ask him,” Liska said. “What’s the harm?”
    “Go for it,” Kovac said. “If he can give us a tag number—even a partial—on that car, we could find our whodunit before we even know who he done it to.”
    Liska took his coffee and washed down the last of her doughnut, shuddering at the bitterness.
    “Oh my God! That’s horrible!” she said. “Start a fresh pot, for Christ’s sake!”
    “It’ll put hair on your chest, Tinks,” Kovac said.
    “Great. Something more for Tip to fantasize about,” she said, heading for the door.
    “And, Tinks?”
    She looked back over her shoulder.
    “Tell the guy he didn’t kill anyone.”

4
    The residents of Minneapolis were waking to a new year by the time Liska finally went home. Waking, or better yet, sleeping in. She had been up for twenty-four hours. Sleeping in sounded like the greatest luxury in the world. Unfortunately, she probably wasn’t going to find out firsthand whether it was or not.
    If she could grab a couple of hours before the boys roused themselves, she would be lucky. Kovac was pushing for the autopsy on their Jane Doe to be done ASAP. If he could get an ME to give up New Year’s Day and jump their dead body to the head of the line, they would all be standing around the dissection of a corpse instead of a holiday turkey before the day was out.
    She pulled into her driveway, enjoying the feeling of being home that was unique to this house. She had purchased it a year and a half ago—a side-by-side duplex in an established older neighborhood near Lake Calhoun. Built in the 1940s, it was solid and substantial. Renovated in 2000, it had all the necessary creature comforts. She and her boys lived on one side. The other side she rented to the twenty-six-year-old sister of a patrol cop she knew.
    Liska felt like she had been an adult for a hundred years, but the day she had bought this house, she had felt like she was just becoming a grown-up all over again. It was the first house she had ever purchased on her own. There was something very important in that.
    When she and Speed Hatcher had been married, they had done what all young married couples did—bounced from a cheap apartment to a better apartment to their first real home—a bungalow in a nondescript neighborhood a few blocks off Grand Avenue in St. Paul. There had been some happy times in that house, particularly when the boys were small. There had been plenty of not-so-happy times in that house as their marriage had disintegrated, and after the divorce.
    She had stayed there for too many years