“Yeah,” he said.
“Now, that was a scene.”
“Looked like a scrapple factory. An abattoir.” Lenhardt savored the word, which had popped up on Jason’s vocabulary test a few weeks back. He loved words and loved running the vocabulary lists with his son. Abattoir, albatross, abdomen, aberrant.
“Woodlawn was a good case,” Infante said, and Lenhardt agreed. It had been easier to walk among those four men’s disfigured corpses than it was to confront this one girl with a single bullet wound. Such men were supposed to die.
“I’m still bugged by this,” Lenhardt said, pointing to the trail of blood that seemed to lead to the door. “The door was locked, right?”
Infante checked his notes. “Yeah, responders said the bathroom door was locked when they arrived. They spoke to the conscious girl-girl number three-through the door, and she convinced them that the shooter was down, but she refused to get up and open the door because of her injury. They had to find a custodian to unlock it.”
“She was here, right? The injured girl?” Lenhardt followed the trail to a corner by the stalls.
“Think so.”
“And she said she couldn’t get up?”
“Right.”
“So who locked the door?”
“Presumably the shooter, when she came in.”
“But here, just here.” He pointed to a faint mark, which had been smeared. “Doesn’t that look like a footprint? Not a shoe but a foot?”
“It does look like someone’s big toe. Maybe the girl who was shot hopped around a little at first.”
“But it’s leading away from the door. Wouldn’t you hop toward it?”
“She might have been a little freaked out and disoriented.”
Lenhardt revolved slowly, taking in the whole room. Except for the lack of urinals, it was no different from the boys’ room. Three sinks. Three stalls. One of the doors, the middle one, had a hand-lettered sign taped to it, declaring it out of service. The door to the right was ajar, but the door to the left, the one against the wall, was shut tight. He pushed it, but it didn’t give. Latched. What the fuck? It made sense that the out-of-service stall would be locked. But why this one? He bent down, saw loamy dirt on the floor.
He glanced at Infante, who was now measuring the room with a retractable yardstick. He had rank and seniority. He could make Infante do it. But it would be an argument, with Infante trying to get out of it by insisting there was no reason to do it at all, and Lenhardt had no heart for an argument just now. Lenhardt wished briefly that Nancy Porter, Infante’s usual partner, were not on maternity leave. He had never put much stock in the idea that either gender brought anything special to detective work. If you were good at it, it was a personality type unto itself. But Nancy, with her keen eyes, might see something here that he was missing.
And Nancy, being a woman, would probably be less freaked out by the prospect of sliding under a locked stall door in a women’s room.
Sighing, he removed his jacket and folded it, laying it with great care on the window ledge, next to the digital camera. His knees creaked as he lowered himself to the floor, and he worried about his back. He went in headfirst, gingerly, straightening up as soon as he could. Funny, it took him a second to realize that he could unlock the door then, freeing himself from this confined and alien space. He sat on the toilet seat-actually, he hovered over it, using his thigh muscles to avoid contact-and looked around. There was no graffiti, although the door and walls bore the sign of having graffiti scoured from their surfaces over the years. A relatively full roll of toilet paper was in the dispenser. And-he stood then, turning around-the toilet was empty. So that was that-Nancy Drew and the Mystery of the Locked Bathroom Stall. What did he think he might find anyway? There were no casings, not with the little six-shooter this girl had used. Her bullets were all going to be lodged in her victims, including herself.
Then he noticed the metal box on the wall. Pulling a pen from his breast pocket, he used it to lift the lid slightly, promptly dropping it with a bang.
“Shit,” he said. “Fuck me.” Then, “Hand me a Baggie, okay, Kevin?”
“What could you possibly have found in there?”
“You don’t want to know.”
This is no job for a man, he thought as he used tweezers to extract the tampon from the bag inside the metal box and sealed it in a Baggie. It was fresh, or reasonably so, which meant someone had been in this locked stall-and left it, without unlocking the door. Had the shooter hidden here, waiting? If you’re waiting to shoot someone, do you have the presence of mind to change your tampon? And why would you leave without unlocking the door? He tested it several times, slamming it shut to see if the lock engaged by itself. But, if anything, the door needed to be forced into position before the bolt could be engaged.
“Infante…”
“What?”
“Never mind. If anyone knows less about teenage girls than me, it’s you.”
“I know a lot about teenage girls.” His tone was one of mock outrage.
“You’re attracted to them. It’s not the same thing.”
4
The things we can do without thinking, Dale Hartigan decided, are nothing short of amazing. Breathing, for example. No, that was a bad example, because one didn’t have to learn how to breathe, it wasn’t a skill that one mastered and later did automatically. Breathing was instinctive, from that first whack on the backside, although doctors had stopped doing that, of course. Dale’s generation may have started life with that stern little pat on the rump, but his daughter had arrived in a private birthing room, full of soft colors and kind lights. That was a good day.
So no, not breathing. Driving, on the other hand, started off as something that engaged every fiber of your being in the early going, then became unconscious over time. How often had Dale snapped to behind the wheel, the highway sliding effortlessly beneath his humming wheels, with no real memory of the last few miles? And he didn’t think he was unique in this way, far from it. Every day people climbed into these contraptions that you weren’t even supposed to operate while on ordinary cold medicine and never gave it a thought. It was a wonder there weren’t more accidents. Yet here he was, more conscious than he had ever been behind the wheel, and everyone-the cops, Chloe-had kept saying he shouldn’t drive, he mustn’t drive, please don’t drive.
Couldn’t they understand that this errand was his only way of asserting his sanity? Every action-changing lanes, using his turn signal, braking, accelerating-proved he was functioning. Not that he was sure he wanted to be functioning, but what choice did he have? Dale was supposed to be the calm one, the capable one. And while his daughter’s death entitled him to be otherwise, he wasn’t sure he knew how to be anything else.