The corridor had doors to the parking lot and an enclosed staircase that led to a parking garage below this strange addition, an attempt to create a mall out of what had once been a traditional shopping center. Nancy and Infante walked the corridor once, twice, three times, then began going up and down the stairs. Nancy was walking up the stairs when she saw the glint of something gold. An earring.
“Didn’t Brittany Little have pierced ears?” She was thinking of the photo, the curly hair slicked behind two shell-perfect ears. She was pretty sure the girl had been wearing earrings.
“Maybe. But how can you tell one ball stud from another?”
“I don’t know. Maybe ears have DNA. Maybe the mom can make an ID.” She sealed it in a baggie, just in case. “Let’s go talk to the head of security.”
The guy was a rent-a-cop, anyone could tell. Fifty-something, short gray hair, a florid face, at least three hundred pounds. Bernard Carnahan.
“You gotta understand,” he said, his tone apologetic now that he was caught. “It wasn’t my call. Mall management says it’s all about liability. The camera malfunctioned. Tape’s nothing but snow. We can get sued for that. But we can’t get sued for not having a camera. That’s how it was explained to me. So we gave you what we had, and didn’t give you what we didn’t have. No harm, no foul.”
Nancy suddenly realized she could raise just one eyebrow, so she did.
“No harm?” Infante sputtered. “If we had known there was a malfunctioning camera at the exit, we would have spent more time in that part of the mall. We just found what could be the girl’s earring-which, if it is, confirms the mom’s story. She was here and someone took her out. We would have liked to know that four days ago.”
Carnahan shrugged. “So, what, now that you got an earring, you got it all figured out?” The detectives had no answer for that. “Look, I’m sorry. I did what my boss told me to do. It didn’t seem like a big deal to me. It still doesn’t.”
The detectives left his office. Everyone lies, Nancy reminded herself. It was a rule of police work. The sheer volume of lies in the world on any given day was staggering. The mall management lied about the camera because they feared a lawsuit. The mother lied about how long she turned her back on her daughter because she didn’t want the cops to think she was a bad mother. Alice Manning was lying, too. About what, and to what purpose, Nancy didn’t know. But the girl was definitely lying, and had been from the start.
Ronnie Fuller-Ronnie Fuller, she wasn’t so sure about.
“You feel like a bagel?” she asked Infante.
“Yeah,” he said, getting it. “I definitely feel like a bagel. I feel big and round and chewy, and I want someone to slather me with cream cheese.”
The one thing that Ronnie Fuller had known cold the first day of kindergarten was her alphabet. Other things came harder-blowing her nose, tying her shoes, playing well with others-but she had memorized the ABCs because she had a little board with magnetic letters in various colors, passed down from her brothers. The arrangement of the colors was mysterious to her, something that hinted at an internal logic that Ronnie could not quite figure out. A through F were light, light blue. G through L were orange. Then came M through R, Christmas red, S through W, grass green, and finally X-Y-Z, blacker than black.
Ronnie decided the letters were like groups of friends. If she had known the word cliques at six, she might have used that. The pale blue bunch had the coolness of those who always got to go first, while the middle letters wore bright colors to get attention. She was most troubled by the placement of her own initial, R, at the end of the red group. Because R had to stand next to Q, and anyone could see that Q was odd, sort of retarded, a letter that couldn’t make a word without U around to help. Yet Q stood between P and R, as if R wasn’t good enough to be P’s friend. Q was like one of those fat girls who stood next to a pretty girl, shooing everyone else away. But R couldn’t be with S, T, U, V, W because they were green. It was all very disturbing.
She was thinking about her old alphabet board as she picked through the white letters that needed to be arranged on the marquee, announcing the next day’s specials. Wednesday was Pizza Bagel day-an open-face bagel with a fountain drink and a bag of chips for $3.99.
“What do you want for the manager’s special?” she asked Clarice.
“Turkey,” Clarice said. “We’re swimming in turkey. They screwed up the order, I guess.”
Ronnie laughed a little, entranced by the image-her, Clarice, and O’lene dog-paddling through mounds of pressed white meat.
“Your friends came back today, I see.”
“Uh-huh.” The detectives had talked to Ronnie on her smoke break, asked the same questions, gotten the same answers.
“Why they keep coming back, Ronnie?”
“I don’t know.”
Clarice let a minute or two go by before she spoke again.
“You got a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Why you say it like that, like it’s a weird question?”
“Because…because where would I get one?” There had been boys at Shechter, but there had been strict rules about contact, and Ronnie had never dared to break the rules at Shechter.
Clarice misunderstood. “You’re pretty enough. Skinny, but white boys like skinny.” She shook her head at the strange preferences of white men.
“I work here, I go home. I haven’t met anybody since-well, not since a long time.”
“What about when you were in school. You have a boyfriend then?”
Ronnie finally got it: Clarice assumed these visits from the detectives were about someone she dated. It never occurred to her that Ronnie could do anything bad enough, on her own, to get detectives to come around. Clarice thought she was good.
The detectives had been indirect, never mentioning the missing girl by name. They had asked Ronnie what she had done since they saw her last. “Slept,” she said. “Then I came to work. Then I went home. And I slept again.” They asked if she had seen or spoken to Alice, and she shook her head, wondering if Alice was telling them something different. She never knew what Alice might say, what lie she might tell. They asked if she wanted to come talk to them some more, at their office.
“Not really,” she said, and waited to see if they would tell her she had to come talk to them anyway.