Never Tell eh-4 Page 8

  It was the first time Ellie had been punched, but she’d known it wouldn’t be the last. She also knew she’d need to get better at it.

  Now she was a kickboxer at the total-contact level, allowed to apply full power, force, and strength against an opponent in a ring. Instead of tears, she felt beads of sweat pour down her face as she threw jab after jab against the heavy black practice bag.

  The intensity of her one-sided fight was telling her something about her own energy. She was grinding it out the way she could usually muster only inside the ring against a live opponent. Something was eating at her.

  As she chopped her lower shin against the side of the bag, she found herself thinking about Julia. And not the appearance of her thin, naked body in the pink bathwater, but her words on the lined yellow pages. Every word. Every sentence. The hesitation marks and cross-outs. Without realizing she’d done so, Ellie had committed the entire note to memory.

  She could picture the girl in life, sitting cross-legged on her low platform bed, staring at the legal pad, three-quarters of a page already filled with blotchy black ink, crossing out yet another word. Unsatisfied with that single deletion, she would have stabbed the pen across the last four lines of text, running the ballpoint tip across the page so many times she actually managed to poke a hole in the paper.

  I know I should love my life, but sometimes I hate it. My parents tell me all the time how lucky I am. Lucky to have good schools, a nice house. Money. Them. Yes, they actually said that. I was lucky to have them.

  Julia had crossed out everything after the word money. Maybe she didn’t feel like writing about her parents. Maybe she realized they were the kind of people who never should have had children, but that the observation was better kept to herself.

  Ellie followed the jab series with alternating hooks and uppercuts, then started to throw in front and roundhouse kicks, the appearance of Julia’s words still fresh in her visual cortex.

  I understand why other kids would assume my life is easy. No one wants to hear a spoiled rich girl complain. I know some kids who would kill (maybe in some cases literally)

  She had scratched out the parenthetical. It had probably been an attempt at humor, but she’d concluded correctly that it just didn’t belong there. She had tried to block the words out completely, but Ellie had been able to piece them together beneath the scratches.

  I know some kids who would kill to have the “privileges” I know I have. But sometimes I wonder if maybe their lives aren’t actually better. Or at least more free. No one expects anything from a kid who has nothing.

  I’m constantly being told how lucky I am, but the truth is, my so-called privileged life

  Ellie felt her heart pound in her chest.

  She could almost hear Julia’s thoughts as the girl held the tip of the pen above the page, trying to choose the right words to complete the sentence. That this life is harder than it seems. That this life can be challenging. That this life sucks. That this life- hurts.

  Yes, Julia had settled upon that word. Maybe she had even recognized it was a little melodramatic. She hadn’t suffered from actual, physical pain or paralyzing depression. But she would have felt injured from the pressures of her life that no one wanted to hear about. And so what if she was melodramatic? She was sixteen years old, after all. Shouldn’t she be allowed to be a drama queen? Shouldn’t she be allowed to be a lot of the things other teenagers were permitted to be? And wasn’t that the purpose of the letter?

  She pictured Julia writing the word she finally selected on the page: my so-called privileged life hurts.

  It hurts to be told that I’m not allowed to waste my potential. It hurts to hear that more is expected of me because more has been given to me. It hurts to believe that I can never amount to the person I’m supposed to be. It hurts to feel so alone every second of every day, even when I’m surrounded by other people. And it hurts to know that I have all of these feelings but am not supposed to voice them.

  Ellie could hear blood racing through her veins. Her damp hair was plastered against her scalp. Her arms and legs began to ache, but she kept working the leather of the bag.

  Julia’s thoughts moved in errant directions a few more times as she wrote, requiring more scratch marks on the page, but the words were flowing more easily now. She would have felt her emotions pouring from her like the ink from the pen, like Ellie’s sweat from her pores.

  And then the tear had fallen to the notepad, hitting the letter f in feelings, blurring the shape into an amorphous blob. And then words began to fail her. It was time to wrap things up.

  And that is why I have decided to kill myself.

  Ellie continued to kick the bag. No forced entry. No signs of a struggle. Cuts consistent with self-infliction-the bathwater and a 0.16 blood-alcohol content helping the blood flow. One bump on the back of her head, but Ginger at the medical examiner’s office thought it consistent with collapsing against the tub after Julia slit her wrists.

  And then Ellie started hearing snippets of voices from throughout the day.

  Katherine Whitmire pleading, “You have to do something. It’s my daughter.”

  The EMT saying, “There’s nothing for us to do here.”

  Max, wanting to say more, but leaving it at, “You’re okay with that?”

  Rogan, saying they screwed up. “You really got to get yourself right on this one.” Even Jess, asking if she was all right.

  And then she heard voices from her past. You just have to learn to let it go, Ellie. How many times had she heard that damn phrase over the years? As if she could just open her hands and release the fact that her father’s brains had been blasted out the back of his head by his own gun. As if she could simply set aside her own past like a discarded shopping bag.

  Ellie threw a flying punch as she worked through her own thoughts.

  When Ellie’s mother tried to explain that Jerry Hatcher would never kill himself, no one listened to her-not the Wichita Police Department, not the city attorney’s office that made the call on whether to release his pension, not the neighbors, no one-no one except Ellie. And look where that had gotten them.

  So today, when Katherine Whitmire had implored her, “Please listen to me,” of course she hadn’t. Ellie had wanted to scream at her: “Take a lesson or two from the tale of Jerry Hatcher.”

  But Ellie didn’t want to be that kind of cop. She didn’t want to be the person who joked around about the girl’s crappy mother, like those EMTs. She didn’t want to passively check off the boxes like the medical examiner she called Ginger. She didn’t want to be the cop who didn’t at least pause to ask why Julia Whitmire’s suicide note had been handwritten, not typed, and on a notepad that was nowhere to be found in her home.

  Ellie didn’t want to be like everyone else.

  Then, like she’d been sucker-punched in the head, Ellie realized what had really been nagging at her about that scene at the Whitmires’. She suddenly stopped pummeling the bag. She held her gloves to her chest and bent over while she caught her breath, favoring one side to forestall an oncoming cramp.

  Rogan had a good point. She had to get herself right on this one.

  PART II

  Ramona

  Chapter Fifteen

  As an investigator, Ellie firmly believed she was best at her job when she could live inside the heads of her victims. That kind of empathy hadn’t been as important to her when she was working property cases and vice busts. But coming up on two years of cases in the homicide squad, she knew that some little part of her would always be able to imagine what the final moments of each of those lost lives had been like for the victim.

  Ellie liked to think she had a natural ability to imagine the life of another person. She’d grown up watching people. She noticed patterns. She read facial expressions. She had a good sense for what made people tick.

  But, other than imagining what it must have been like to write that suicide note, Ellie was having a hard time inhabiting the wo
rld of Julia Whitmire.

  She surely did remember the emotions that came with being a teenage girl. She also remembered the pressure to mold one’s body into perfection. You don’t become Miss Teen Kansas with all that baby fat.

  And she knew what it was like to pine for the attention of a parent. She had idolized her father. He protected people. He was like a superhero in the battle between good and evil. She remembered playing on the basement floor in the makeshift office he had created, the walls decorated with photographs of the victims of the College Hill Strangler and a map filled with pins-red for known kills, yellows for suspected. Ellie would bounce her psychedelic-colored rubber ball and pick up jacks, offering questions and theories for her father as she played. Usually he shushed her, but the days when he’d actually talk through the case with her, despite her mother’s scolding that it “wasn’t right”? Those were Ellie’s most cherished memories of her father.

  But, in too many ways, a life like Julia Whitmire’s was so completely unlike anything in her prior experience. From a three-bedroom wood-frame ranch house in Wichita, Kansas, Ellie could never have dreamed of having the independence that Julia Whitmire enjoyed. Once her dad was gone, to describe their family as middle class was overly generous. Ellie had never been east of Kansas City or west of Dallas until she followed her brother up to New York City.

  She’d told herself at the time that the move was to allow the one responsible Hatcher child to keep an eye on the other, but in retrospect she knew she had hungered for a different life. As much as was missing in her life, though, she’d never been unhappy. And she’d definitely never been ungrateful.

  She had no idea how to get into the mind of a girl like Julia. With the Whitmires’ money and the streets of New York waiting just outside her townhouse door, Julia already had a more sophisticated life than most people could ever imagine. And yet she was miserable.

  Ellie and Rogan sat side by side at her squad desk, scrolling through Julia Whitmire’s Facebook profile, hoping to find some clues about her last days.

  “The girl’s final status update was Friday night,” Rogan observed. “ ‘Just noticed the name of this toe polish color: Ogre the Top Blue. Groan!’ Those are some lame-ass last words. Don’t you think a girl who killed herself Sunday night would post some kind of goodbye message?”

  “She did,” Ellie said. “With a suicide note.”

  By now, that last comment typed by Julia on Facebook was buried deep at the bottom of the page, replaced by more than two hundred comments posted since news of the girl’s death had leaked out. Most of them appeared to be from strangers sending condolences to Julia’s father. “I didn’t know you, Julia, but I’m sorry you weren’t able to find joy in this life. May music follow you to the next.” “Your father changed the face of rock and roll. RIP to his little angel.”

  “I swear,” Rogan said. “I just don’t get people.”

  They continued to scroll through the comments, compiling a list of the Facebook friends who appeared to be closest to Julia in life. They had already spoken to Julia’s brother, Billy, that morning. Despite being distraught and still in a state of shock, he tried his best to be helpful. Like most college freshmen, however, his recent attention had been focused on classes, parties, and hooking up, not on his little sister back home.

  Rogan clicked on the Facebook tab marked “Photos.”

  Most of the pictures were the typical ones that teenage girls posted online these days: close-up self-portraits with a cell phone, lips pursed as if saying the word prune. There were a couple of bikini shots on a beach with Ramona. Snapshots of ridiculously overpriced dresses she admired. Pictures from recent trips to Rome, Paris, Madrid, and Belize. A face mask from last summer’s Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most recently, a picture of her appearing relaxed and makeup-free on open country land.

  “That’s the fattest goat I’ve ever seen,” Rogan said of the animal whose long neck Julia Whitmire had draped an arm around. In the background stood a red post-frame barn with a sloped green metal roof. It was a perfect rural shot.

  Ellie spooned out a bite of Nutella from the jar she kept in her desk. “I think it’s an alpaca. It’s like a small, hairy llama. They’ve become sort of a status symbol for country homes because they’re super expensive-something about their fur or whatever.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “When are you going to learn there are no boundaries to your partner’s knowledge?” Her ex-boyfriend, the finance guy, had been close to buying two alpacas a few years ago when she’d moved out. “They also spit and make this creepy humming sound like injured cows.”

  “The poor thing’s so ugly he’s almost cute.”

  “You’re such a softy,” she said. “Any word from Julia’s doctor?”

  With the parents’ permission, they had contacted Julia’s physician about the Adderall capsules they found in her purse. “The nurse just called. The only prescription drug her doc had for her was the birth control. And no referrals to a psychiatrist, either. The bottle wasn’t labeled. Maybe she didn’t have a prescription for them.”

  Ellie opened a new window on her computer and searched for “Adderall.”

  She clicked first on a video titled, “Teens and ADHD Medications: Intervention or Addiction?” Four panelists sat side by side at the front of a generic lecture hall. A purple velvet curtain adorned with NYU’s torch logo served as the backdrop.

  According to one psychologist-her nameplate was blocked by a pitcher of water-psychotropic drugs were wildly overprescribed, especially in kids, where use was up nearly four hundred percent in a decade. About eighty percent of cases were “off label,” meaning doctors were prescribing the drugs in ways the FDA never approved.

  Equally convincing was the psychiatrist who saw the drugs as the best prospect to save children from needless heartache. He spoke with passion about children who worked as hard as they could, only to throw their books against walls, feeling stupid and hopeless.

  Rogan reached over and clicked the mouse, pausing the video.

  “Hey!” she complained.

  “Clock’s ticking, woman, and that video’s nearly an hour long. You’re digging that shrink a little bit, aren’t you?”

  She looked at the face paused on the screen. According to his nameplate, the doctor espousing the pro-drug views was David Bolt and, she had to admit, he was in fact attractive.

  She gave Rogan a fake sneer and took control of the mouse again. “Take a look at this.” The article was called “Students Seek Competitive Edge with Adderall. ” She scrolled down the screen as they skimmed together, catching bits and pieces. Perfectly healthy, undiagnosed teenagers… Mixture of amphetamine salts… Usually snorted… Helps you study… Have to get any academic advantage possible… Buy it from friends who have been legitimately diagnosed with ADHD… Effects on the brain similar to cocaine or methamphetamine… One in five students…

  “Look,” Ellie said, pointing to the penultimate paragraph. “ ‘Can cause depression and social anxiety when abused.’ Let’s try to get a rush on the toxicology reports. It’s one more indication she did this to herself.”

  “Let’s also try to find out where she got it,” Rogan said.

  Ellie clicked back to the Facebook “wall” filled with comments. She began to click on the names of Julia’s friends who had left notes on her page.

  She clicked on the profile of Marcus Graze, whom Ramona had described as Julia’s on-and-off-again fling.

  Sorry, this Profile is currently unavailable. Please try again shortly.

  As she began to click through Julia’s list of friends, she got the same message for several of the profiles.

  “Maybe some kind of system glitch,” Rogan said.

  “But I just looked at a couple of these half an hour ago,” Ellie said. She typed Jess Hatcher into the Facebook search box, and her brother’s profile appeared, third down on the list and open to full view without any pr
oblem, complete with latest ironic status update: I think I have Bieber Fever. “Seems weird.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll track these kids down in person at the school, anyway.”

  “Ah, the very two people I was looking for.” Lieutenant Robin Tucker gazed down at them from the other side of the desk. “Jesus, Hatcher, how can you constantly have a spoonful of pure sugar and fat in your mouth and still fit into your pants? Never mind. Just please tell me your eyes and that computer are focused entirely on Julia Whitmire.”

  Rogan gave her a casual wave. “All good, Lou.”

  “Not all good. I must have taken fifteen phone calls about the way you marched out of there yesterday. I just got another call from the dad trying to make sure you weren’t just shining him on when you went back last night.”

  Tucker was staring straight at Ellie as she spoke, but Rogan was the one to respond. “We’re working on it.”

  “How the hell did it take you so long to see that notepad issue?”

  Rogan was still speaking for them both. “It’s generational. Suicides are for people facing terminal cancer, divorce, financial ruin. People that age write their final letters on paper. We weren’t thinking.”

  “So is the handwriting hers or not?”

  “Hatcher took the note to one of her old profs at John Jay. The guy says the script in the suicide note appears to be consistent with Julia’s, but he can’t give an opinion with any confidence because we have so little to go by in terms of known samples of her writing-just a few notes in old birthday cards and from Mother’s and Father’s Days. Like we said, kids don’t write anymore.”

  “So you’re fully on board with this, too?” This time it was clear Tucker’s question was aimed directly at Ellie.

  “I’m doing the work, yes.”

  “Wonderful. Your enthusiasm is inspiring.”

  “Look, I could lie if you want me to. The only thing that matters is I agree we jumped the gun yesterday. I regret it, and I want to make it right. But, no, I don’t happen to think she was murdered, and I know for damn sure that no one would be complaining about us jumping the gun if we had the same exact facts with some poor kid dead in a tub in the projects. Regardless, I promise I’m working to get at the truth just as hard as if my instincts told me something different.”