The 9th Girl Read Free Page A

She wanted her witness zooming in on the details. She wanted him to see the picture as clearly as possible.
    “No, like a box truck. And then this car merged into traffic in front of me.”
    “Two doors? Four doors?”
    Jackson shook his head. “I don’t know.”
    “Could you see how many people were in the car?”
    “No. I didn’t look. I didn’t care. It was just a car—until the zombie came out of it.”
    “Can you describe the zombie for me?” Liska asked with a straight face. If it somehow made Jamar Jackson more comfortable calling the victim a zombie instead of a woman, so be it.
    He wasn’t happy with the request. “You saw it.”
    “I know what I saw,” she said. “I want to know what you saw before you ran over her. The trunk popped open and . . . ?”
    He squeezed his eyes shut as if it pained him to think about it, then popped them wide open to avoid what he saw on the backs of his eyelids.
    “It was freaky. She just popped up, and the next thing I knew she was right in front of me. Like something out of The Walking Dead. ” His mouth twisted with distaste at the mental image. “Man, her face was all messed up like it was rotten or melted or something. She was all bloody.”
    His complexion was looking ashen beneath the sweat. He was breathing through his mouth. Liska leaned over discreetly and inched the wastebasket closer to her chair.
    “Did she appear to be conscious? Were her eyes open?”
    Jackson grimaced again. Sweat rolled down his temples like rain. “That one eye—it looked right at me! And there was blood coming out the mouth, and I couldn’t stop the Hummer, and then I hit her, and— Oh, man, I don’t feel so good.”
    Liska handed him the wastebasket. “I’ll give you a moment alone.”
    She left the interview room to the sound of retching.
    “Cleanup on aisle twelve!” she called, walking into the break room.
    Kovac was pouring himself a cup of coffee that resembled liquid tar. He had stripped down to his shirtsleeves—now rolled halfway up his forearms—and jerked his tie loose at his throat, revealing a peek of white T-shirt underneath. His thick hair—more gray than brown as he skidded down the downhill side of his forties—looked like he had run his hands through it half a hundred times in the last five hours.
    “What did he come up with, besides puke?” he asked.
    He looked as tired as she felt, the assorted stress lines and scars digging into his face. He had sort of a poor man’s Harrison Ford look: a lean face with asymmetrical features, narrow eyes, and a sardonic mouth. He had recently shaved his old-time cop mustache because she had harped at him for months that it made him look older than he was.
    Liska leaned back against the counter and sighed. “Nothing much. He’s pretty hung up on the fact that he killed a zombie.”
    “Technically speaking, I don’t think it’s possible to kill a zombie,” Tippen said. “They’re already dead.”
    Tall, thin, and angular, he sat a little sideways to the table, like he was at a French sidewalk cafe, his long legs crossed, one arm resting casually against the tabletop. His face was long and homely, with dark eyes burning bright with intelligence and dry wit.
    “That’s not true,” Elwood Knutson corrected him from the opposite end of the table. “Zombies are the un dead. Which is to say, they were dead but have been reanimated, usually through some kind of black magic. So, technically speaking, they’re alive.”
    Elwood was the size and shape of a circus bear, with the mind of a Rhodes scholar and the sensitivity of a poet. They had all been working cases together for half a dozen years, going back to the Cremator homicides when they worked the task force to catch a serial killer.
    “We should all be shocked that you know that much about zombies,” Liska said, snagging a doughnut off the tray on the counter. “But we’re not.”
    “They’re always shooting zombies in the movies, but they