one I kept running into?”
“Yeah, the one I met that day I stopped by.”
Cogan had forgotten about that. “That’s right. She and her friend were out in front of the house with my neighbor’s kid when you drove up. Well, I never told you this but one night two or three months ago they stopped by my house late at night. The girl was drunk, practically unconscious. They’d been to a party—”
“The same girl you treated?”
“Yeah. Same one. It was the night of your birthday. After we went out.”
Klein vaguely remembers something about it. “I called you after I came home. I heard them in the background and asked you who they were, and you said ‘No one, just an old girlfriend and her friend.’ That was them?”
“Actually, there were three.”
Cogan explains why the girls had come—that Kristen’s friend had brought her there because she remembered where he lived and hadn’t wanted to take her to a hospital because they were afraid they would get in trouble with their parents.
They pleaded with him to help them. At first, he said no—he could get in trouble if he did. But they begged him to, and he gave in. Under normal circumstances he would have sent them on their way. But the truth was he was pretty buzzed himself after their outing that night. He’d actually had more to drink than he thought—even more than Reinhart—so his judgment wasn’t a hundred percent.
“How bad was she?” Klein asks.
“She wasn’t good. But compared to some of the shit that comes through here, she was OK.”
He decided he’d take a quick look and if he couldn’t handle it, he’d send them to the hospital. Well, they walked her around and gave her water. An older girl—a college girl—was there, too, helping. They basically babysat her for half an hour, and she started to get better. Then, at some point, they stuck her in the guest room and she went to sleep. At eight-thirty the next morning, the friend came back and picked her up and that was the end of that. He didn’t hear anything about it until today.
“So the girl spent the night?”
“Yeah.”
Klein makes a face and shakes his head.
“Look, it was incredibly poor judgment. I know it was. But at the time, I was just trying to help. I mean, we’ve all been in a situation like that when we were kids.”
“The thing is,” Klein says, “when you become a parent you stop thinking like a kid.”
“Please, I don’t need any of Trish’s high-and-mighty crap right now. And if you tell her about this, I’ll kill you. Not a word to anyone.”
“Sorry, man. So, go on, what happened?”
It got worse. A lot worse. As he said, he hadn’t heard anything about it until today. The girl, Kristen, who’d spent the night had come to see him once after that night. She thought she might have left her earrings in his house. She’d brought him a present, which he thanked her for, but told her he couldn’t accept. Afterward, he told her she couldn’t come to his house again, that he could get into trouble if she did. She seemed to understand his position. And when he ran into her at the Safeway the next week, everything seemed fine. They said hello. Everything was cordial.
That was back in March. Then about half an hour ago he got word there were two cops looking for him. He couldn’t imagine they had anything to do with the incident. He’d worried about it for a couple of weeks, but when nothing came of it, he’d put it out of his mind. As far as he was concerned, it had never happened.
“How’d they find out about it?”
He looks at Klein. “You’re not going to believe this,” he says, not believing it himself. “The girl kept a diary. And her mother found it and read it.”
“You’re kidding. Online? On MySpace or something?”
“No. On paper. In a notebook, I guess.”
“I didn’t know kids did that anymore.”
“Apparently so.”
“And she wrote about how she was over at your house?”
He lowers his voice even more, almost to a whisper. “Not only that. She wrote about how she had sex that night—with me.”
“Jesus.”
“No, wait. It gets worse. On Saturday, she killed herself.”
Now it’s Klein’s turn to be shocked.
“She’s dead?”
“That’s what they’re telling me. And it just so happens she called me a few hours before it happened.”
“And you spoke to her?”
“That’s just it. I told her I couldn’t speak to her. I think she