Catch Me

by Lisa Gardner

  “The Three Musketeers,” D.D. said.

  “Precisely, and given that, I can’t blame Charlene for making the assumption that she’s next. Best case scenario, she wakes up pleasantly surprised January twenty-second. Worst case scenario…”

  “Hope for the best, plan for the worst,” D.D. murmured.

  “Exactly.”

  “All right,” D.D. said briskly. “For the sake of argument, let’s assume the entire trio has been targeted. So why now? Wouldn’t it make more sense to try to kill them when they lived in the same town? All together? For that matter, why pick them off, one by one? And why on January twenty-first?”

  “Excellent questions, Detective. When you find the answers, please let me know.”

  “It’s ritualized,” D.D. continued thinking out loud. “The perpetrator’s whole approach is deeply personal to him or her. The date, the methodology, even the individual targeting. Perhaps the target cluster is a trio of friends, but the killer’s style ensures each one dies alone.”

  “An interesting observation, Detective.”

  “All right, so let’s say the killer is morally opposed to BFFs. First murder was two years ago, nearly eight years after the women had gone their separate ways. Why wait until so many years have passed, then start by attacking Randi on the twenty-first?”

  “There are several points to consider there,” Quincy replied. “One, age. The women parted ways at eighteen. Assuming the killer is someone who knew them from childhood, it’s possible the killer is of their peer group. Eighteen is a transitional age, the boundary between being a teenager and being an adult. You could argue the killer needed to gain more experience before having the wherewithal to act out his or her impulse…”

  “Grooming,” D.D. muttered. “Had to go to various murder-r-us chat rooms, learn how to get it done.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Eighteen is also a pivotal age in mental health. There are many conditions, including bipolar or schizophrenia, that manifest around this stage of development.”

  “Meaning, the attacker transitioned from ‘normal’ to ‘abnormal,’ including an abnormal need to kill BFFs?”

  “Possible, worth considering, I think. The issue with this theory is that the nature of the crime scenes argues for a perpetrator in full possession of his or her faculties. An organized, not disorganized killer.”

  “But something happened,” D.D. murmured. “If you assume that three friends are the target, something happened to make the perpetrator embark on this ritual.”

  “Maybe it happened on the twenty-first,” Quincy said.

  “Did the women see something, witness something?” D.D. mused. “Maybe they were home for the holidays, as adults, they came across an incriminating auto accident, happened to witness a Mafia killing, something, anything.”

  “Question has been asked many times. Charlene has always responded negatively.”

  “Okay,” D.D. kept thinking. “Three best friends. Who hates three girls?” And then it came to her, so obvious she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it before. “The fourth,” she breathed out. “The fourth girl, who never made the cut.”

  “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” Quincy said. “It’s a good theory. In fact, I’m sorry I never thought to ask that question.”

  “So I return to Charlene, I ask about other childhood friends.”

  “No,” Quincy corrected immediately. “Don’t ask about friends, ask about the girls who were never friends. The loner in the classroom. The girl who always sat by herself at lunch, the outsider, looking in.”

  “But you said the killer has above average communication skills. When has that loner had above average communication skills?”

  “Maybe I was wrong about that. Maybe Randi and Jackie opened their doors out of lingering pity for a former classmate, not warm welcome of a charismatic stranger.”

  “Okay, okay. I can do that,” D.D. muttered. “But even if Charlene remembers a name, I’m down to forty-eight hours to track a person for a case that isn’t even yet my case. Given the time line, maybe this girl is already in Boston, on the hunt for Charlene…”

  “You want a strategy that is more proactive?”

  “I want to draw the killer to us. I was thinking of setting up a Facebook page, something commemorating the anniversary of the murders, honoring the victims. I want to stir the pot. Crawl inside the killer’s head. How do I do that?”

  The phone line fell quiet. She could feel Quincy considering the matter.

  “I wish I could come to Boston,” Quincy muttered. “I would feel better, I think, if I were in Boston.”

  “Hey, nothing personal, Mr. Former Fed, but Boston PD is not a bunch of local yokels. We try to keep at least one person alive a year. I’m thinking this year that’ll be Charlene Grant.”

  “I’m worried about her,” Quincy said quietly.

  “You should be,” D.D. said bluntly. “I spent an hour with the girl. She needs to gain about twenty pounds, sleep twenty days, and lay off the twenty-two. Other than that, though…”

  “My wife and I. We’ve recently adopted.”

  “You have a baby?” D.D. was shocked. She hadn’t seen a photo of the former profiler to determine age, but given that his daughter was a full-grown fed with kids of her own…

  “Not a baby. We are much too old for that,” Quincy replied dryly, as if reading her mind. “A ten-year-old girl we fostered first. We love her dearly. And if we are very lucky, one day we hope she will be able to feel that love. But she isn’t there yet.”

  “Project,” D.D. said.

  “Potential,” Quincy corrected gently. “My wife is a former law enforcement officer as well. We’ve seen both sides of the equation. We know what we’re up against. When I heard of Jackie Knowles’s murder…It was good to have a child in the house again. It was good to remember the promise of the future and not just dwell on past regrets.”

  D.D. didn’t say anything. Quincy’s words made her think of everything she loved about coming home to Jack. She’d worried in the beginning that having a baby would limit her ability to do her job. And maybe Jack did limit her hours, but he also balanced the equation. Children, the hope for a better tomorrow, was everything a homicide cop worked for. You took the hit, so your child wouldn’t have to. You put in the long hours, as her case team had done last night, so that other kids could feel safe.

  “Fourth friend,” Quincy said.

  “What?”

  “That’s what you need. Based on your own analysis. You need to create a fictional fourth friend. A fresh target to distract your killer.”

  D.D. frowned, turned it over. “But how? If we assume the killer is someone from childhood who knew the trio, the murderer will know it’s false.”

  “You need to be the fourth friend.”

  “What?”

  “The person who initiates the Facebook page. Position yourself as a person of honor and ownership of Jackie and Randi. You met them in college maybe. First Jackie, then Randi, then Charlie. You all hung out together in Boston. You love them, you grieve for them, and now you’ve appointed yourself memory keeper. If your theory is correct, and the killer is a social outsider, that alone will aggravate her. She murdered Jackie and Randi so that they would belong to her. And now in death, you’re taking them back. You’re claiming their memory. Colloquially speaking, that should piss her off.”

  “I like it,” D.D. said.

  “Killing is about power. So you must interrupt the power equation, deliberately provoking and threatening the authority of the killer. She’s not in control. You are. In fact, you are the best friend Jackie and Randi ever had, because you will keep them alive forever. Your love, your power, is greater than hers.”

  “And I have better shoes,” D.D. added. “Women can’t stand that.”

  Quincy’s low chuckle. “Sounds like you’re on the right track.”

  “Thank you,” D.D. said honestly. “Thi
s has been very helpful.” She paused. “Can I ask you one last question?”

  “By all means.”

  “Could it be Charlene? She’s setting herself up as the third victim, but what if that’s just a ruse? What if she’s the perpetrator and this is how she’s covering her tracks?”

  The receiver was quiet again. “I don’t know,” Quincy said at last. “That’s a complicated way to get away with murder. But one thing’s for certain—you’ll know on the twenty-second.”

  Chapter 21

  J.T. AND I SHOT ROUNDS for an hour. I practiced at twenty feet, then fifty feet, then thirty yards. No long-range targets for me. For me, the challenge would be up close and personal.

  When I emptied my last box of ammo, I sat on a hay bail near the fence line and worked on cleaning my gun. Snow had started, dusting my dark hair with light flakes as I hunched over my Taurus, meticulously taking it apart.

  Tulip had left me for the warmth of J.T.’s house and the comfort of his wife’s company. J.T. was still shooting. He had a 150-yard target he liked to play with. Sometimes, he’d shoot happy faces, or a five-point star, maybe a heart for his wife on Valentine’s Day. I guess we all have our talents.

  When my phone rang, I ignored it at first, then remembered Michael, the prepaid cell I’d slipped into the boy’s pocket on the bus, and quickly checked the display.

  Not Michael, but I recognized the number. I hit answer and brought Detective D. D. Warren to my ear.

  “Work last night?” she asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “Sleep this morning?”

  “No.”

  “Same as the rest of us then. Come on down. We got a plan.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m your new best friend. Literally. Meet me at police headquarters, thirty minutes. We got something to show you.”

  The detective hung up. I looked up to find J.T. watching me.

  “Gotta go?” he asked.

  “Guess so.”

  “’Kay,” he said.

  “’Kay.”

  I went to fetch my dog. When I returned outside with Tulip, J.T. was gone and only the scent of gunpowder lingered in the air.

  “He’s not good at good-bye,” his wife, Tess, murmured behind me. She’d come out onto the covered front porch, arms crossed over her black-and-gray plaid shirt for warmth. She was younger than J.T., closer to fifty than sixty, with silver strands liberally sprinkling her pale blond hair. In faded jeans and fleece-lined slippers, with her hair pulled loosely back to reveal a delicately boned face, she wasn’t a beautiful woman, but striking. She had a way of looking at me that reminded me of J.T. They didn’t just look, they saw, and they trusted in their ability to handle what they’d seen. The two of them fit each other perfectly.

  I peered out at the empty shooting range. “I know how he feels,” I said.

  Tess came to stand beside me. “I told him he should stay with you, on Saturday the twenty-first. Just in case.”

  “No.”

  “And he said that’s what you would say.”

  “Have you ever been hit?” I asked her abruptly.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you take it, or did you fight back?”

  “Both. People change. Kids grow up.”

  “J.T. says I have to get my mother out of my head.”

  “He’s smart like that.”

  “But I don’t know how.”

  “Do you hate her?” Tess sounded genuinely curious.

  I had to think about it. “I don’t know. I avoid her. Don’t think, don’t remember. Then, I don’t have to feel.”

  “That’s your problem then.”

  “Denial? But it’s a personal strength of mine.”

  “If you believe you’re honestly going to die on Saturday, Charlie, if you believe you’re honestly going to have to fight for your life, you should feel something about that.”

  “I’m pissed off,” I offered.

  “It’s a start. There’s no right answer. I forgave my father. J.T., on the other hand, will probably never stop hating his.”

  That surprised me, but I didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t like to hate,” Tess said simply. “Not my father, not my ex-husband. I held on to the rage as long as I needed it to do what I needed to do. Then, I let it go. I look at my children. I feel how much I love them. I feel how much they love me. And that makes me feel better instead.”

  “I love my dog,” I said, automatically bending to pat Tulip’s head. “And she’s not even my dog.”

  “Sounds like a country-western song. You’re welcome to stay here, Charlie, for as long as you need.”

  I nodded, then straightened, adjusting my messenger bag, fiddling with my grip on Tulip’s leash. “Good-bye, Tess,” I said.

  She wasn’t surprised. “Good-bye, Charlie.”

  Tulip and I stepped off the front porch, and even though Tulip whined a little, neither of us looked back.

  IT TOOK TULIP AND ME twenty minutes to walk through the light snowfall to an area busy enough to hail a cab. Then another twenty minutes for the cab to deliver us to the BPD headquarters in Roxbury. The driver wasn’t happy to transport a dog, so I had to tip him five bucks extra, and that quickly, I was broke.

  Let me tell you, a girl doesn’t work police dispatch for the money.

  I thought of Officer Mackereth, felt myself flush, and reminded myself sternly I didn’t work at police dispatch for that either.

  To enter HQ, I had to go through security. The first officer, a mountain of a black man, got a little excited about my. 22. I showed my license to carry, but he remained skeptical. Leave it to Massachusetts to create a gun policy so paranoid that even when you took the proper legal steps no one believed you.

  Of course, I’m not sure what legal steps were taken to secure my gun permit. J.T. had done it for me, given the stringent standards. Probably called in a few favors. I never asked, unanswered questions being the whole key to my relationships.

  “What do you do for a living?” the BPD officer asked me now.

  “Comm officer, Grovesnor PD.”

  “Oh.” His massive shoulders came down. He gave me a grudging measure of respect. Officers liked dispatch operators. We took care of them, and they knew it.

  He kept my gun, handing me a tag. “You can claim it on your way out. Same with the dog.”

  “You can’t take my dog.”

  Officer Beefy got puffy again. “Honey, my house, my rules.” He jerked his thumb toward the glass door. “Dog goes outside; say pretty please, and I’ll keep an eye on it.”

  Having now gone twenty-four hours without sleep, I didn’t take this news well.

  “Look, your detective invited me here,” I informed him, beyond caring if he was three times my height and four times my weight. “This is my dog, and I’m not tying her outside in this weather or in this neighborhood. If Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren wants to see me, then she gets both of us. That’s the deal.”

  “Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren?” The officer’s dark face broke into a broad grin. “Ha, good luck with that.” He motioned to the desk sergeant, sitting on the other side of the security scanner, “Got a visitor, with dog, for Detective Warren.”

  “With dog?” the desk sergeant called back.

  “She sniffs out doughnuts,” I informed the sergeant. “Took years of training.”

  “Sounds like a Detective Warren dog,” the sergeant drawled. Tulip and I were finally allowed into the lobby, where we roamed the enormous glass-and-steel space while waiting for our date to arrive.

  Urban police stations should be dingy, with yellow-stained drop ceilings and tiny barred windows, I thought crabbily. Not modern art monstrosities, boasting cavernous lobbies filled with glass and gray winter sky, let alone the wafting odor of coffee and fresh baked goods. Rather helplessly, Tulip and I followed the tempting scents to the open doors of the building’s cafeteria. I hadn’t eaten in twelve hours, and neither had Tulip, but being
out of cash limited our options. As it was, Tulip and I would have to muscle our way onto the T if we wanted to get home.

  D. D. Warren finally appeared at the other end of the lobby. I recognized her by the bounce in her curly blond hair and the laserlike quality of her crystalline blue eyes. She spotted me, then Tulip, and zeroed in.

  “What happened to you?” she demanded. Guess I was starting to bruise.

  “Boxing.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to wear gloves?” She pointed to my hands, where the knuckles on both pinky fingers had turned bright purple.

  “I will remind my attacker of that on the twenty-first,” I assured her.

  “And the bruises around your neck?”

  “Hey, you should see the other guy.”

  “Legally speaking, I’m not sure you want that.”

  “True.”

  She stared at me a minute longer, as if trying to figure out just what kind of crazy she was dealing with today.

  Then she surprised me. “Nice dog.” She held out her hand for Tulip. “I like dogs for women. One of the best lines of self-defense. Better than guns. Guns can be taken and used against you. Not a good dog.”

  I shook my head. Should’ve known the detective would have a point.

  “I don’t plan on having Tulip around on the twenty-first,” I informed D.D. “I’m sending her to live with my aunt.”

  “Then you’re an idiot.”

  “I prefer the term responsible adult.”

  “Martyr.”

  “Considerate friend.”

  “Self-sacrificing fool.”

  “Self-sufficient fighter.”

  “Idiot,” Detective Warren said again.

  “Are we done yet?”

  “I don’t know. I find that now that I have a newborn, I appreciate adult conversation more. Want coffee?”

  “Who’s buying?”

  She eyed me, eyed my dog. I categorized D. D. Warren along with J. T. Dillon and his wife, Tess; like them, D.D. didn’t just look, she saw.

  “Come on, my treat.”

  Tulip and I followed D.D. into the cafeteria. I selected a roasted chicken sandwich for me, bread and cheese for Tulip. Then I added two cookies, a bag of chips, a cup of coffee, and a bottle of water. The detective didn’t say a word, just paid the bill.