He paused, making sure he had both detectives’ full eye contact. “You understand what I’m saying? There’s no advantage in us talking about Ronnie Fuller or Alice Manning until we get a charge on one of them. And even then, you gotta remember they were juveniles, all those years ago. No one’s going to be able to drop their names into a court computer and make a match. If you talk about this, you’re talking about stuff that’s sealed, that nobody can get. It ain’t public record.”
“We’re not the only ones who know,” Infante said, and Nancy nodded. “City police who remember Olivia Barnes won’t mind leaking what they know, because it won’t come back on them. Hell, the kid’s mother can tell anyone she wants that she called us because her kid is a dead ringer for the-for the other kid.”
In her head, Nancy finished the sentence the way Infante had intended: a dead ringer for the dead kid.
“I hear the state’s attorney met with the Barnes family and the father-in-law, Judge Poole, last night,” Lenhardt said. “And swallowed a lot of shit, getting them to see it her way. But they were made to understand there’s no advantage in allowing a single scenario to dominate. If the public starts thinking this case is solved, they stop noticing stuff that might matter. As long as we’ve got the damn Amber Alert out, we might as well have people paying attention to it.”
“But a search,” Nancy said. “It’s such a waste of time and money.”
“Only if you think of our job as solving cases. If you remember we have to jerk off the media from time to time-well then, the commissioner reckons it’s a good show for a Sunday. Tonight, they’ll have video of cops searching the woods. They’ll report that we’re working solid leads, which we are. But that’s all they’re going to report, right?”
Nancy flushed, aware that Lenhardt was staring at her, not Infante, insisting she make eye contact with him.
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Now, cut her loose, go home, and get some sleep.”
“I’d like to have one more go, if you don’t mind.” Nancy nodded toward the closed door of the interview room. “I know we’re heading into double digits, but she’s slept for most of it. I just want one more chance.”
“She never lawyered up?”
Nancy shook her head. “No. It’s weird. She stonewalls like a veteran, but she never asks for a lawyer, never asks to make a phone call, doesn’t seem to care if her parents have been notified. When she’s not sleeping, all she says is ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ ”
“Then why go in there again?”
“I’ve been thinking about the T-shirt we found in the trash. It has blood on it, right? Blood that doesn’t match the girl or her mother. It’s gotta match someone.”
Lenhardt nodded. He was much too smart not to have thought this through before Nancy did.
“See anything on her?”
“No, and I ran my hands over her arms while cuffing her, to see if there was anything there. But she’s wearing long pants.”
“So, what, you’re going in there and hand her a penknife and say, ‘Hey, could you poke yourself?’ Ask her if she wants to shave her legs? Make a pact with her and become blood sisters?”
“Blood sisters,” Infante repeated, but he was too tired to make it into whatever ill-considered joke had occurred to him.
“I don’t know. Maybe she’ll consent to give us her blood so she can be eliminated as a suspect.”
“Except it won’t, as you know,” Lenhardt said. “It will just eliminate her as the person who bled on the T-shirt. We have to stay open to the possibility that two people were involved in this. In fact, I don’t see how one girl does it by herself.”
“Look, if the evidence doesn’t go with us, even a moron of an attorney is going to know to make an issue of it. But if we can get a match, that’s a better use of our time than sending every available body in the county over cold ground.”
Lenhardt shrugged. “Go for it. But you gotta go home after, get some sleep.”
The sergeant had brought them a bag of bagels that morning. Nancy picked out one of the sweeter ones, a blueberry, and took it into the interview room with an orange soda.
“Here,” she said. “Breakfast of champions.”
Ronnie was sitting, staring into space. Even awake the girl had an eerie quality about her, almost as if she drifted in and out of a semi-catatonic state. Good Ronnie or Bad Ronnie?
“Where’s this from?” Ronnie said, poking the bagel, then pulling a small piece off and chewing it carefully, as if she might decide to spit it out.
“Einstein’s, over on Goucher Boulevard.”
“Ours are better. I mean, this is okay, but the texture is different. We use a frozen dough from Brooklyn, so it’s almost like a New York bagel. Which is what people want, Clarice says. She worked another place where the bagels were too sweet-she called it a Montreal bagel-and that’s not what people want in Baltimore.”
“Clarice?”
“The manager at the Bagel Barn. You met her.”
“Yeah, that’s right. We talked to her after you ran away.”
“Oh. Yeah.” She seemed embarrassed and surprised, as if she had hoped the incident would never be mentioned again.
“Why did you run away, Ronnie?”
“I told you.” Her voice was weary, but patient. It occurred to Nancy that the girl would never ask to leave, didn’t assume she had any rights at all. “I knew you were cops, and I don’t get a fair shake with cops. I didn’t last time.”
“How so?”
Ronnie shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Except you’re here. So it does matter.”
“I mean-no one believed me then, so why would anyone believe me now? People made up their minds what happened, so that’s what happened.”
Nancy had been sitting, an untouched bagel in front of her, trying to act as if this were an ordinary breakfast between two people who happened to be sharing a table in a crowded diner. Now she hunkered down, her chin barely an inch above the table, and stared into Ronnie’s eyes as best she could. They were an unexpected blue beneath all that dark hair. Her brows were wild, her complexion a little spotty. But she could be pretty if she made the smallest effort.
“Ronnie, I can’t undo anything you’ve done, and you can’t undo anything someone else has done. But you can keep it from getting worse, you know what I mean?”
“No, I don’t,” Ronnie said, “because I don’t know anything.”
“Doesn’t it strike you as kind of a coincidence that this happens so near where you work? And that-” Nancy stopped, still not willing to reveal the missing child’s resemblance to the sister of Olivia Barnes. She needed the girl to volunteer that piece of information. Sharon Kerpelman had said Alice was suggestible, that she would agree to anything in order to be helpful. But Ronnie seemed far more vulnerable on that score.