“And who were these kids?” In the world of the Whitmires, kids from public school might be considered bad influences.
“I don’t know if they’re orphans or in foster care, or maybe they’re just homeless. I don’t know their names. There were maybe three of them here—two boys and a girl, I think. Ramona would know. Ramona Langston. She’s Julia’s best friend. I told Julia not to have those people over again, but, God knows, my daughter never did listen to me. Bill said she’d only hold on to them closer if I tried to push them away. What can you do, though? She was all grown up.”
“I was told she was sixteen?”
The woman blinked as if Ellie’s response was a non sequitur.
“So these kids were here two months ago?” Ellie asked. “You didn’t see Julia with them since then?”
“I’ve only been back once since then.”
“I’m sorry. You told us when we arrived that this was your house?”
“It is, but Bill and I only come in about once a month or so. We’ve been going back and forth between here and East Hampton for years, but we’ve tapered off our city presence. When Billy went to college, Julia moved upstairs.”
“And before Billy was at school?”
“Then the two of them would be here. Oh, they were inseparable. I don’t even know how to tell him what’s happened. Julia followed Billy everywhere. She has never liked being alone. That was probably why she befriended such desperate people. You know, I was here more often before Billy went to school. She had me. She had him. Now—”
“So, I’m sorry—Julia was basically living here alone?”
“Most of the time. That’s right. She preferred the city. Her school. Her friends. Everything is here.”
And this woman had called the street kids the orphans.
What else would a good, thorough, concerned detective ask? “Did she have a boyfriend?”
“A boyfriend?” Like the word was foreign.
“A guy in her life?”
“Well, my daughter certainly dated, I’m sure. But no one special I know about.”
“I found birth control pills in your daughter’s medicine cabinet. I thought that might indicate she was seeing someone regularly?”
“Oh, those? She’s been on the pill since she was fourteen. Bill’s idea, actually. Better safe than sorry.”
There was something about Julia’s father’s name that felt familiar to Ellie. Whitmire. Bill Whitmire. She couldn’t quite place it.
“What about other prescriptions? We found Adderall in her purse.”
“Adderall? I’ve never heard of it. I mean, she would get headaches. Maybe—”
“It’s a prescription stimulant used for ADHD.”
Katherine shook her head. “She didn’t have anything like that.”
“Did she see a psychiatrist?”
“No. Lord knows I do, as do a lot of her friends. But Bill thinks therapy and antidepressants and all of that are overused by overindulgent rich people. I suppose to you we might seem to fit that description.”
“Your husband’s name sounds familiar to me. Do you mind if—”
“CBGB.”
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t tell me you’re so young you don’t know about CBGB?”
Ellie and her brother, Jess, had probably logged a couple thousand hours at the celebrated music venue before it succumbed to escalating rent prices. “Of course I know it.” Then the light clicked. Bill Whitmire was the famed producer behind bands that had played with the Ramones and Blondie.
“It’s a John Varvatos boutique now,” the woman said sadly. “Can you believe that?”
Ellie stayed with the woman in the living room while CSU officers came and went. She heard about the school Christmas play Julia wrote in the fifth grade, where Santa Claus went to a doctor named Cal Q. Later to lose weight so the reindeer could still fly with him in the sleigh. She learned that Julia had been the one to write her older brother’s college admission essays. She found out that Julia had organized the first chapter of Amnesty International at Casden, her Upper East Side prep school. That she loved dogs but was allergic. That she once met Bono through her father and got his autograph—not for herself, but to donate to a charitable auction for an animal shelter.
Ellie interrupted on occasion to voice aloud the questions raging in her head.
Didn’t you notice your daughter had an eating disorder? Why would you ask that? She’s naturally thin. Right, despite that chubby adolescent picture on the mantel.
Did it dawn on you your daughter might have reasons to feel lost? Have you heard anything I’ve been saying to you, Detective? Have you been listening to yourself?
I assume this note is in your daughter’s handwriting? Handwriting can be imitated. You must have learned that on CSI.
And though she pontificated about her daughter and their family for well more than an hour, Katherine Whitmire never once mentioned the fact that her sixteen-year-old bulimic daughter died in her bathtub from a slit wrist, leaving behind a suicide note propped against her overstuffed down pillows.
Sometimes it was easier to deny undeniable facts than to acknowledge a painful truth. Ellie knew that better than anyone.
She took a deep breath of fresh air once they left the townhouse, as if freshly oxygenated blood could wash away her unwanted thoughts, imagining what it had been like to grow up with Bill and Katherine Whitmire for parents.
“Some house, huh?” Rogan had been spared all but a few sentences of the conversation with Katherine and was still looking up with envy at the four-story abode.
“Her dad’s Bill Whitmire. The music producer.” She rattled off a handful of the projects he’d backed.
“You and that loud white-boy music. Give me Prince any day. I wanna be your … lovah!”
“Hurry it up, will you?” She looked at her watch as she continued her march to the car. “I’ve got that hearing scheduled. Told you I’d make it in time, but only if you drop me by the courthouse straight from here.”
“I thought you said when we got the callout your testimony wasn’t that important. You said the DA could get by without you if necessary.”
“Well, I don’t see anything here that counts as necessity. You said yourself no one reported anything out of the ordinary here over the weekend.”
“We’ve still got uniforms canvassing the neighborhood,” Rogan said.
“They haven’t found any witnesses, and they’re not going to.”
“You know what’s going to happen if we blow this off, right?”
“Katherine Whitmire will huff and puff and blow our house down?”
“Seriously, Hatcher, what is up with you? We’ve worked cases before that we knew weren’t going anywhere. We don’t usually walk away.”
He was right, of course. How many hours did they waste a year on gang shootings where there was no such thing as a witness? But those cases were different.
“It’s just pathetic, Rogan. Some people have kids just to satisfy their own fucking egos. That girl was sixteen years old and was expected to be all grown up because her parents were too cool and too impatient to have