Never Tell. Alafair Burke
Who’d the Whitmires call?”
“Everyone, from what I can tell. I did, in fact, get an earful from the Lou. So I asked myself whether we might have missed something.”
“I know, you told me that on the phone. So what is it? What did we miss?”
He turned off the engine, only to turn it right back on. “You know what kills me? This is exactly the kind of thing that you would notice. Think, Hatcher. Think about what we saw today.”
“Are we playing twenty questions? Is it bigger than a bread box? Animal, mineral, vegetable? Oh, wait, I know: it’s a screwed-up kid in a bathtub. Will you hurry up and tell me before we knock on that door again? Because we better have a damn good reason if we’re going to disturb that woman just as she probably finished downing her third Valium to try to get some sleep after watching her daughter’s body hauled away.”
Rogan turned off the engine again, and this time took the keys out of the ignition. “You were the one who spent the most time in her room,” he said. “The girl was a junior in high school—a member of her generation in every way, with every gadget in the world at her fingertips.”
“Yep, every luxury money could buy, and what did it do for her?”
He shook his head once again. “You still don’t see it? Ellie, you really got to get yourself right on this one.” He didn’t wait for her to get out of the car before making his way to the front door.
Katherine Whitmire started talking as soon as she opened the door. “It’s about time. The EMTs. The medical examiner. The two of you. Your lieutenant. I lost count of the number of times I heard the word suicide today and the number of people who used it. All of you were lining up to tell me and my husband that our daughter did this to herself. And every single time, I believed it even less. I tried. I begged.”
A man came up behind her and placed a protective arm around her shoulder. “I’m Julia’s father, Bill Whitmire. Please, come in.”
As she took the seat offered in the parlor room adjacent to the foyer, Ellie found herself distracted by the man’s appearance. He was more than twice her age, but still handsome with longish salt-and-pepper hair, a strong jaw, and the kind of wear and tear considered distinguished on a man.
But Ellie kept seeing the man he’d once been—the man photographed so many times with famous musicians from her childhood, at spots like Studio 54, with then-starlets like Ali MacGraw and Carrie Fisher. He still carried himself with a rock-and-roll edge that looked out of place in this sterile townhouse. Ellie suspected the man spent little time here and had nothing to do with a decorating plan whose only reflection of his personality was relegated to photographs in the elevator.
“I’m sorry about that outburst at the door,” Katherine said, “but we’re just … we’re … our daughter—she’s gone. And I’ve had to spend the entire day on the phone arguing and fighting and twisting arms. But you’re back now, right? You’ll be listening to what I’ve been trying to say? You’ll be treating Julia’s death as a murder?”
This was exactly what Ellie had been afraid of. They were getting these people’s hopes up for no apparent reason. She was going to let Rogan handle this one on his own.
“We can’t imagine what you’ve been through today,” he offered. “We want to be absolutely sure that we didn’t miss anything before—”
“Before you shut the folder on my daughter and move on to your next statistic.” Bill Whitmire wiped away a drop of saliva that stuck to his lip as he’d hissed the words. “You write case names on a whiteboard, don’t you, Detective? Like on television? Have you crossed her name off the board yet?”
“Mr. Whitmire—”
“You say you want to be sure you didn’t miss anything, but we all know the first twenty-four hours of an investigation are absolutely critical.” Apparently the record producer spent a lot of time watching crime TV. “You should be talking to our neighbors and her friends, checking sexual offenders released nearby, doing whatever it is you people do to find whatever monster came into our home and did this.”
Uniformed officers had already knocked on the doors of the other townhouses on the street, but no one reported seeing anything out of the ordinary.
She wished Rogan would cut to the chase, but he was still trying to manage the parents’ expectations. “The initial evidence, as we explained earlier today, indicated that your daughter was alone in the bathroom and was the author of the note we found on her bed.”
“Well, at least this time you avoided the S-word, but I think my wife and I heard the same message enough times today.”
Katherine placed a hand on her husband’s knee. “Please, let the detectives speak. They’re here for a reason.”
Rogan paused before continuing. “When we were in your daughter’s room earlier, I noticed that her homework all seemed to be printed out. Did she usually do her schoolwork on a computer?”
Ellie noticed the blankness in Bill’s face as he looked to his wife for the answer. Katherine nodded. “That’s all kids do now. They take laptops to school for note taking. Seems recently she was even getting by just with her iPad. Kids can’t even spell or print correctly anymore without a computer there to help them.”
“So if she had to write a letter of some kind—”
“She doesn’t write letters. No one her age does.”
Ellie now saw what Rogan had been trying to get her to realize on her own in the car. Julia’s suicide note had been handwritten, on paper. And not just written on paper, but drafted on paper, with false starts and crossed-out words.
Julia’s mother saw the point as well. “Julia wouldn’t have written that ridiculous note on her bed. Even if you could convince me that my daughter authored that note, I simply can’t imagine her putting a pen to paper in order to do it. She would go to her computer. Even if she wanted us to have a handwritten version, she’d draft it first on the screen, then write it out afterward.”
“That’s why we’re here. The note had scratched-out words and other scribbles on it, like Julia had started fresh, with a blank page, when she sat down to write.”
“No, not Julia.”
“What about the paper? The letter was on yellow lined paper, with holes punched on the side. I don’t recall seeing a notebook like that when we went through her room. Do you keep yellow legal pads around the house?”
This time it was the wife who looked to her husband. “No, not to my knowledge,” he said.
“So that means she didn’t write the note.” Katherine sounded hopeful for the first time since they’d encountered her. “That proves she didn’t kill herself.”
Ellie finally had to cut in. “It’s always possible she got the paper somewhere else. We’re here because we didn’t want to jump to conclusions.”
But like his wife, Bill Whitmire had already reached his own verdict. “Based on your experience, Detective, do you really believe this scenario makes any sense?”
“We’d like to take another look around if you don’t mind.” Rogan was already on his feet, heading for the stairs.
They searched through every drawer, cupboard, box, and bag of the four-story townhouse, but nowhere did they find a yellow legal pad matching Julia’s supposed suicide note.
“You mentioned your daughter’s friends, Mrs. Whitmire. Who knew Julia best?”
It was a simple question, but Ellie recognized the look of determination on Rogan’s face. They were going to rework this case from the beginning, whether she liked it or not, and he blamed her for the crucial hours they had already wasted.