The 9th Girl Read Online Free Page A

on a handful of sad excuses. She got the house in the divorce. It was the only home her sons knew. It was convenient for their father to visit.
    Speed worked Narcotics for the St. Paul PD. His schedule was erratic at best. Nikki had reasoned it would be better if he could drop in to see his sons when he could. If she moved them closer to her job in Minneapolis, he would have to make an effort to visit. Effort was not Speed Hatcher’s forte, not even where his boys were concerned.
    But he had let them down so many times, Nikki had begun to think it would be better if they lived in the other of the Twin Cities. Easier for her to make excuses for him. Instead of blaming their dad for being absent from their lives, they could blame their mom for moving them away from him. Hell of a compromise.
    The move had not gone over well. Uprooting a twelve-year-old and a fourteen-year-old had been nothing short of child abuse by the boys’ standards. The adjustment period had been brutal. But R.J.—her youngest—had inherited his father’s easy charm and made friends quickly, and Kyle—her studious one—had immersed himself in his new school. A year and a half later, they didn’t entirely hate their mother anymore.
    They had made this house their own, their family of three. There was no Ghost of Speed Past haunting their holidays here. There were no memories of rare happy family times or too-common arguments that ended with doors slamming.
    As predicted, Speed’s visits were infrequent, but better to be infrequent with the excuse of distance than infrequent with the excuse of just doesn’t give a shit. Nikki accepted that bargain and considered her short commute to work downtown her consolation prize for the rest.
    The house was quiet as she let herself in. She stopped in the powder room off the front hall, as was her habit coming home from a homicide. She wanted to see what she looked like, as if the most recent murder might have left some indelible mark on her—a line, a scar. All the years she’d been working homicides, if they had each left a visible scar she would have looked as much like a zombie as her Jane Doe by now.
    She checked herself in the mirror. Purple shadows were smudged beneath blue eyes that had been bright with the promise of a night out New Year’s Eve. All that remained of her eye shadow was a dark line in the crease of her eyelids. Her pixie-short silver-blond hair had been flattened by her Elmer Fudd hat, then had made a halfhearted effort to bounce back with a few swipes of her hands. She looked a little like she might have stuck her finger in a light socket at some point during the evening, or seen a ghost . . . or a zombie.
    The thought took her back to the scene on the highway, to the young woman lying like a discarded bundle of rags, torn and stained and forgotten.
    Probably not forgotten, she corrected herself. Assuming the killer had been the one driving the mystery car, he must have had a rude surprise when he realized his victim had managed to somehow get out of the trunk.
    While there was probably some valid twist of the laws of physics that might have allowed that body to fall out of a moving vehicle and bounce back upright, Nikki was set on the idea that their Jane Doe had still been alive when the Hummer hit her. It was a terrible thought. It would have been less terrible to believe the victim had already been deceased, but she didn’t. That the young woman had been alive when she came out of that trunk was a stubborn notion that had dug its talons in deep and wasn’t about to let go.
    She sank down on one end of her couch and closed her eyes as her body relaxed. She tried to imagine what that would have been like: stuffed in the trunk of a car, surely thinking her life was over, then seeing light as the trunk latch let go. Hope would have surged, would have urged her to do something to save herself no matter how impossible it seemed. Adrenaline would have given her the strength to sit