To The Power Of Three

21

The Kahns were adamant that they did not want to speak to the police in Perri’s room, but neither did they want to leave her for even a few minutes. Middle-class people, used to having rights, they assumed this ended the discussion. They couldn’t leave their daughter, they didn’t want to be interviewed in front of their daughter, so the police would have to come back later.

But they were also reasonable people, and when it was explained that the conversation could not be postponed, they agreed to take turns, meeting with Lenhardt and Infante in the hospital’s food court one at a time. Lenhardt allowed them to think he was accommodating them, but it was what he had wanted all along, getting each parent alone. He was surprised they didn’t insist on calling their high-priced lawyer, but it probably didn’t occur to them that they needed legal advice. Good.

First came the father, Zachary Kahn, although his wife called him Zip. Lenhardt began by asking about that, a way of settling in, as if he were making small talk with the father of one of Jessica’s or Jason’s friends.

“An old nickname,” the man explained, grasping his cup of black coffee in two hands as if it were a winter day and he was trying to warm himself. “I gave it to myself, in my twenties. I wanted a nickname, and I liked that comic Zippy the Pinhead, so I anointed myself Zip. Twenty years later I’m still Zip. The follies of youth.”

“I always wanted a nickname, too. But my mom insisted that people call me Harold. Not Harry or Hal. Now I can’t bear it when someone shortens my name straight off, without even asking.”

Zip Kahn-what an unfortunate name to carry into adulthood-looked as if he wanted to say something normal, something expected, except he no longer knew what normal was. He and his wife had been at the hospital for almost seventy-two hours, going home only to shower. Of course Lenhardt couldn’t know what the guy looked like on a typical day, but there were traces of energy and vitality. Zip was stocky and athletic-looking, with a round face and an admirably thick crop of hair, the kind that never fell out and barely grayed.

“As I told you Friday, we traced the gun,” Lenhardt said, plunging in. “To Michael Delacorte.”

“Right. Perri baby-sat for the Delacortes.” He seemed to think this fact explained and closed the discussion.

“Now that we’ve checked it out, we don’t see any of the other girls having access to that gun. But I also have to assume you didn’t know it was in your daughter’s possession.”

Like a boxer getting a second wind, the guy seemed to sharpen through sheer will. “How can you be so sure the gun was ever in her possession? Have you been able to make that connection with certainty? Opportunity doesn’t equal certainty.”

Eddie Dixon had prepared the parents well, then.

“Your daughter worked for them. The other girls didn’t.”

“And Dale Hartigan was pals with Stewart Delacorte. For all you know, he took the gun, and his daughter took it from him, and that’s how it came to be at the school.”

Yeah, right. “We’ll ask him about that. Believe me. We’ll ask him.”

“Okay, then.” Said emphatically, as if something important had been settled. Lenhardt did not want to be unkind to the man, but he needed to tug him gently back to reality, away from the paranoid rationalizations he was using to comfort himself.

“Now, as you know, your daughter’s hands were tested for gun residue, but the weapon was a.22, which almost never leaves enough barium or antimony to detect.”

He could have said “trace evidence,” but he wanted to let the father know he was on top of the technical stuff.

“They bagged her hands. They put paper bags on her hands, and they wouldn’t take them off, not for hours. I wanted to hold my daughter’s hand, and I couldn’t. Can you imagine what that’s like?”

“I’m sorry,” Lenhardt said. With a look he tossed the interview to Infante. It wasn’t a routine with them, it wasn’t good cop-bad cop, just a rhythm born of practice. Lenhardt could imagine all too well what it would be like, seeing his daughter hurt, not being able to hold her hand.

“What we didn’t do on Friday was get fingerprints. We’re here today to do that, and we’re asking only as a courtesy,” Infante said. “The gun was taken from the home of a family for whom she worked. If her fingerprints are on the gun, we have to proceed on certain assumptions.”

They really wanted the fingerprints so they could ascertain the letter had been written and mailed by Perri, but Lenhardt and Infante had agreed between themselves not to mention the letter at the top of the conversation and, no matter what, not to reveal that it raised far more questions than it answered.

“I would think,” Zip Kahn said, growing more defiant, “that you would want to do quite the opposite. If you investigate on the basis of a narrow hypothesis, you end up finding what you were looking for. That’s human nature. You need to collect the facts with minds open to any possibility.”

“There is a witness,” Infante reminded him. “A girl who knows your daughter quite well, a girl who was there and has stated that Perri brought the gun to school and shot Kat Hartigan.”

“I’ve heard the Patels obtained a lawyer. Is that something all witnesses do? In fact, they’ve hired an excellent criminal defense attorney, Gloria Bustamante, someone who has a great deal of expertise in homicide. Why does Josie Patel need a lawyer?”

Damn Eddie Dixon. He was just too plugged in, Lenhardt thought. And if Dixon knew the Patels had hired Bustamante, he might know why as well.

“A letter arrived at the Hartigan house today,” Infante said. He was always coldly patient in an interview, unless the person opposite him required out-and-out bullying. Infante played it like a Department of Motor Vehicles bureaucrat, someone who couldn’t be moved under any circumstances.

“Which one? The house in Glendale or the little love nest that he set up in Baltimore with his young girlfriend?”

His resentment was palpable, and it interested Lenhardt. Was Zip Kahn trying to suggest that Dale Hartigan deserved to have a dead daughter, because he had left his wife, while the still-together Kahns should not be penalized? Or was he bitter in the way some men were when they saw another guy get out? In Lenhardt’s experience, the only outsiders who begrudged a person the end of a marriage were those secretly wistful about their own.

Even if you were happy in your marriage, as Lenhardt was, it could give you a pang, seeing a guy your age with someone new, someone young. There had been a Christmas party last year, and he had been reminded of the kinds of girls that young cops can get-the pretty young emergency-room nurses, the good-time party girls, even an occasional assistant state’s attorney. Infante’s girl-of-the-moment was enough to give a man a coronary, with long black hair and big fake tits, not that Lenhardt deducted points for surgical enhancement. These were the girls that Lenhardt had once gotten, part of the reason he hadn’t married again until he was in his forties. And Marcia, twelve years younger, was the best of the best-cute, down to earth. Plenty of his colleagues still gave her approving looks. But it wasn’t the young guys and the young girls that had unnerved him at the party. What had been weird was seeing a guy his age, a robbery detective, show up with this total piece. Lenhardt could live with Infante’s beautiful girls, but it had been strange seeing fifty-two-year-old Fred Duda with a high-assed waitress.

“The envelope was addressed to Kat Hartigan,” Infante continued in his robotic voice. “It came to the house where she lived with her mother. Mrs. Hartigan says the handwriting looks like your daughter’s.”

“So what does the letter say?”

“It’s not so much what it said, “ Lenhardt put in, all too aware that the one-line letter could be a boon to a smart defense attorney. “It’s that we want to establish it isn’t a forgery. So between that and the nonconclusive tests on your daughter’s hand, we decided we should get her fingerprints sooner rather than later. Really, we should have done it earlier, but…”

He didn’t finish the thought, that they hadn’t worried about fingerprints because Perri Kahn was comatose, and not going anywhere.

Kahn made a move as if to crumple the coffee cup in his hands, realizing just in time it was still full. “That’s shitty,” he said. “That’s just plain shitty. You don’t need to do that now. My daughter might not live. Do you know that? So maybe none of this matters anyway.”

“But if your daughter didn’t send the letter, and her fingerprints don’t match any of the latents lifted from the gun, we need to know that sooner rather than later. Right? Like you said, we have to be open to every possibility.”

“Why? What does it say? Was it a threat?”

“It was kind of…obscure in its intent. In and of itself, the letter tells us nothing. That’s why we need to check the envelope against your daughter’s fingerprints.”

“Do what you have to do,” Zip Kahn said. “And go fuck yourself.”

Mrs. Kahn came down fifteen minutes later. She was a large woman, but she carried herself with the confidence of someone who had once been thin and attractive.

“Perri was her normal self these past few months,” Eloise Kahn began before either Lenhardt or Infante had a chance to ask her a single question.

“What was normal for Perri?” Lenhardt asked.

“She was like any teenager, moody and rebellious, nothing more. In fact, it makes sense for a high-school senior to get a little irritable. It’s a way of preparing for the transition to college.”

“Had she quarreled with Kat over anything, to your knowledge?”

“Girls don’t really do that,” Eloise Kahn said. “They just…drift apart, for whatever reason. Kat and Perri were heading in different directions. Their differences hadn’t mattered as much when they were younger, but that started to change, and it became harder to overlook the ways in which they were incompatible.”

“Differences?”

“Kat was…well, so mainstream in her attitudes and aspirations. I don’t mean to be unkind…”

In Lenhardt’s experience, people said they didn’t wish to be unkind only when they intended to be extremely unkind but wanted dispensation for their cruelty.

“Kat became more…well, dilettantish after her parents’ divorce. Kat was a charming little girl, but as a teenager all she cared about were the most superficial things. Cheerleading, grades for grades’ sake, but not knowledge. She had a gorgeous soprano voice, but she didn’t want to do anything with it-until she realized that appearing in a school play might round out her college applications. She wanted to get top grades and go to a top college because her father had been preparing her for that since she was small. I don’t know what you’ve heard, but Perri was the one who tired of Kat, not the other way around.”

“We haven’t really gotten into that,” Lenhardt said. “No one’s told us much of anything about the girls’ relationship. We’ve been giving the Hartigans a little space. Her mom said she knew the girls weren’t close anymore, but Kat hadn’t confided in her.”

“Oh.” Mrs. Kahn looked thoughtful, as if considering whether she was at an advantage or a disadvantage, getting to tell this part of the story before anyone else. “Well, some people assumed it was the other way, that Kat and Josie had dropped Perri because she wasn’t a cheerleader who dated jocks. The thing is, Perri has very high standards for herself and her friends. Always has.”

“Who were her friends? Besides Kat Hartigan and the Patel girl?”

This question seemed to pain the mother, and she stammered a bit. “There wasn’t…after Kat and Josie. A lot of kids from drama class, of course. There’s this one boy-not a boyfriend. Just a friend. But very sweet.”

“What’s his name?”

“Dannon Estes, poor thing. His mother…well, honest to God, I think she named him after a cup of yogurt. Literally.”

“That so?” Lenhardt was making a mental note to get to know Dannon Estes.

“His mother is a little unusual,” Eloise Kahn said, still in the vein of not meaning to be unkind, yet managing it with flying colors. “Sort of a hippie type, but married to the straightest arrow you could imagine. Her second husband, Dannon’s stepfather, and not a great fit, based on what Dannon tells me. The boy has practically lived at our house this past year.”

“Huh.” His neutral, noncommittal noise was intended to keep her talking. Sometimes people could be helpful when they got revved up about inconsequential things.

“It’s funny how much you can determine about someone based on the children’s names. Social class, education. I named Perri after a writer. A wonderful writer who’s also a doctor. I thought it would be a good omen, sort of like christening her left and her right brain at the same time. And she turned out to be good at both things-not writing and science per se, but she had a creative side-drawing, drama, writing. Yet she was great at math. She loved geometry. Have you ever heard of a teenage girl-a normal one, I mean-who loved geometry? Perri used to make up her own theorems for extra credit.”

Eloise Kahn’s words, which had been coming in a great rush, halted abruptly. Lenhardt wondered if she was thinking about whether her daughter would ever again do anything for extra credit. Perri Kahn had one of those injuries that flummoxed doctors, as brain injuries sometimes do. Lenhardt had seen a case, a would-be suicide, who fired a gun straight into his temple and woke up four weeks later, functions virtually unaffected. Yet the shot from the.22 had cut a cruel path through Perri Kahn’s face and brain. What would be the best scenario for Perri’s parents? Alive and in prison? Brain-dead and here? Dead-dead? Could a parent ever wish for a child’s death, under any circumstances?

“Sergeant?”

“Yes, Mrs. Kahn?”

“You believe me, right?”

“About…?”

“That we really didn’t see anything in Perri’s behavior? That there really wasn’t anything to observe or notice? She’s a good kid. Yes, I know every parent says that. The parents of serial killers say that every time. But Perri is truly good. Principled. All we ever asked her to do is stand up for what she thought was right, not just go along with the herd. She wasn’t up in her room playing violent computer games. She didn’t do drugs or drink. She’s a little high-strung. Passionate, sure, but that’s how she was raised to be. The fact is, we’re very proud of her.”

“I’m sure you didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary,” Lenhardt said, and Mrs. Kahn accepted it as the benediction she needed, although his wording had been carefully noncommittal.

As soon as Eloise Kahn boarded the elevator to Shock Trauma, Lenhardt began making a list. “We’ll want a warrant to search her room, by tomorrow if possible. I hope the parents haven’t thought to mess with it. And we’ll want to seize the computer, check to see if the full body of the letter is on it.”

“Wouldn’t it be great,” Infante said, “if she kept an online diary like so many kids now, one where she conveniently wrote all about this in great detail, so we’d know exactly what was going on?”

“We never get that lucky. But there might be e-mails, or some other kinds of records.”

“We need to check the phone.”

“Phone records, sure.”

“Not just the landline,” Infante said. “The cell phone, assuming she has one, and I bet she does, although it wasn’t at the scene. Probably in her car or something.”

“Yeah, maybe the list of incoming and outgoing calls will show something.”

“And the text messages. Those live forever, depending on the provider. These kids are crazy for text messaging.”

“They are?” Lenhardt was refusing to give his kids cell phones until they were in high school and restricted their IM use on the computer, despite Jessica’s contention that this made him the cruelest, meanest father in the universe.

Infante grinned knowingly. “That girl I brought to the departmental Christmas party? She was nineteen.”

“That’s barely legal.”

“Hey, same age difference as you and Marcia. Anyway, it seemed like the only time she ever put her phone down and stopped texting her friends was when we were in bed.”

“Well, yeah,” Lenhardt said. “Everyone knows that’s nothing to call home about.”