by Lisa Gardner
“O probably didn’t know Charlie would be in Boston, and probably didn’t need to. Think about it: by moving to Boston, O arrived in the heart of New England. From here, it’s an easy day trip to New Hampshire, Rhode Island, half a dozen other states. She would’ve had to fly to Atlanta for Jackie Knowles, but even that’s just a couple of hours out of Logan Airport. Meaning regardless of wherever Charlie or her other victims would be on January twenty-one, O would have easy access.”
“I checked with her supervisor,” Phil spoke up. “Right now, looks like Detective O didn’t work January twenty-one last year, or the year before. She’s technically on duty today, but we can see how well that’s working…”
D.D. nodded, made another note for her presentation to Horgan.
Neil spoke up. “Why kill Randi Menke first? Why not just kill Charlie?”
“I think Abigail is looking for something more than a quick kill. If that were the case, you’re right, she could’ve driven up to New Hampshire and dispatched Charlene with a double tap to the forehead, just as she did with the pedophiles. I think she wants to torture Charlie first, make her feel just as alone and vulnerable in the world. As for why Randi versus Jackie…” D.D. shrugged. “Abigail had to start somewhere, and Randi probably seemed the easiest target. Lived only an hour outside of Boston, already traumatized by an abusive relationship. I imagine O drove down, maybe flashed her badge and said she was investigating Randi’s evil ex-husband. And just like that, Randi would’ve let her in.”
“But still didn’t fight back while she was being strangled,” Phil pressed.
“Details, details,” D.D. muttered, acknowledging his point. “As for Jackie Knowles…O would’ve had to fly to Atlanta, but no big whoop. She could’ve performed a routine background check in advance, determined Jackie’s occupation, place of residence, favorite restaurants from her Visa bill. Or just sat outside Jackie’s office, then followed her to the bar and set about introducing herself. She bought Jackie a drink or two, let one thing lead to another.”
“Got invited back to Jackie’s home,” Neil filled in. “Took out BFF number two, moving closer to final target.”
D.D. thought about it. “If you think about their mother’s psychosis, what these girls grew up with…Their mother didn’t just hurt them, she hurt them, in a highly ritualized manner. Maybe that’s what Abigail understands best. She’s not looking for death for her sister. She’s looking for suffering and acknowledgment. That’s something they both can relate to. Maybe, for Abigail, suffering even signifies love. Why does Mommy hurt you? Because she loves you so much.”
“But in both cases, Randi and Jackie didn’t suffer,” Phil said with a frown.
“Because it’s not their attention she wants. It’s Charlene’s. And the mysteriousness of those murders—no sign of forced entry, no sign of struggle—definitely added to Charlene’s mental anguish, while helping capture her attention.”
“I don’t think Charlie will be that lucky,” Phil said.
“No, I don’t think she will be either. At least she has some training on her side.”
“So does O,” Neil pointed out.
D.D. pursed her lips. “True. And O stole Charlie’s gun earlier. Though maybe that’s for the best. That will lower her expectations of resistance, which might help Charlie in the end.”
“So now it’s a race?” Phil asked. “Do we, or does O, find Charlie first?”
“You didn’t offer Charlene police protection?” Neil asked in surprise.
“Offer it to her? Please, she won’t even return my phone calls. She called me once, told me her side of the story. She’s not so interested in our side of things. I’m thinking she doesn’t trust us much. Which may or may not have something to do with the fact that it’s one of Boston’s own officers who’s trying to kill her.”
“That’s why you didn’t pull the arrest warrant for her,” Phil said. “You still want her picked up, off the streets.”
“I think that’s safest for her, yes.”
“But no news.”
“Nada. The girl’s holed up good.”
“Hopefully,” Phil commented, “O’s thinking the same.”
“All right,” D.D. tapped the table. “Next up, I gotta meet with Horgan to secure permission to request a search warrant for Detective O’s apartment. Neil, I’ll need you to execute that warrant. Phil, I want you to continue to dig into O’s past. Anything we can learn about her—friends, hobbies, pets, food allergies—anything that might give us some insight to what she’s doing and how she might be doing it. I want time lines and facts, boom, boom, boom, including a list of all known firearms registered in her name. While you do that, I’m going to speak with her commanding officer.”
“More background?” Phil said.
“I’m working a hunch.”
“Care to share?”
She eyed him for a second. “Actually, I’ll go one better and give you the credit since you’re the one who got the ball rolling. Remember when I was going through the tox screen reports on Randi and Jackie earlier today, and I couldn’t find evidence of any drugs in their systems, and yet the only thing that makes sense is that they were drugged?”
He nodded.
“You said I needed to start thinking about drugs that didn’t leave a pharmaceutical fingerprint. Ones not covered in the tox screen.”
Phil thought about it. “Pretty smart of me. Did I mention which drug that might be?”
“No, but O did.” D.D. drummed her fingers. Of all the pieces of the puzzle, this one bothered her the most. That she had sat, shoulder to shoulder with a fellow investigator, and remained unsuspecting, even as O had leaked tiny insights into her homicidal game. Had she been reaching out, in her own way, another version of Catch Me? Or had she been simply taunting an older, more experienced detective, who should’ve known better?
“O told me about a case she’d worked as a sex crime detective: the evil stepdad was drugging his twin stepdaughters with insulin. Their blood sugar would crash, rendering them nearly comatose and unable to resist. Later, he’d bring their blood sugar levels back up by administering frosting.
“Insulin,” D.D. said softly. “Available over the counter. Easy to administer, just a quick prick to the back of the victim’s arm, into the subcutaneous fat. Within fifteen to twenty minutes, the victim would be rendered unconscious and O could do whatever she wanted. And there’d be nothing they could do to stop her.”
Neil stared at her. “Insulin,” he repeated. “Yep, that would do it.”
D.D. rose to standing. “We need to locate Detective O,” D.D. stated firmly. “And we need to find Charlene Grant. It’s three forty-three on January twenty-first, gentlemen. Abigail is once again on the hunt. And no amount of boxing or running is going to save Charlie, if Abigail, and her insulin, finds her first.”
Chapter 41
I STARTED AT MY AUNT’S CAMBRIDGE HOTEL. A frugal woman, she’d looked up budget motels in the Yellow Pages and called for rates before making her decision. Given that she would’ve used a credit card to check in, I figured it wouldn’t be too hard for a Boston cop to track her down. Detective O could follow the credit card transactions right to my aunt’s hotel door, flash her badge, and my aunt would let her in.
I parked a block away. Telling Tulip to stay, I approached cautiously, trying to appear inconspicuous, while simultaneously scoping out the area for a sign of my aunt and/or Boston cops. The cheap no-tell motel formed a two-story horseshoe built around a central parking area. I followed the covered stairs up to my aunt’s room on the second story. Door was closed, but the curtains of the main window had been drawn back to reveal a brightly lit, perfectly kept, empty brown-and-gold space. I stood there a minute, absorbing the deliberateness of such a gesture. No woman in her right mind stayed in a hotel with the curtains drawn back to expose her entire room. And my aunt never left the lights on. Wasting money, you know, not to mention burning energy and ruining the planet.
&nbs
p; Detective O. Had to be. Letting me know the room was empty. Letting me know, she had my aunt.
I headed back to Tom’s truck, hands thrust deep in my coat pockets, head down, ears acutely tuned for the sound of fast-approaching footsteps that might or might not signal an ambush from behind. But nothing. Just a dark, bitterly cold Saturday evening, where the rest of the world was hunkered down safe in their homes, laughing with the ones they loved, while I walked the empty streets of Boston, realizing that I was too late and it was going to cost me.
Clearly, Detective O had reached my aunt first. But she hadn’t strangled her in the middle of the hotel room; instead she’d taken my aunt elsewhere. Why?
Because a hotel room wasn’t her home. They had to die in the safety and security of their own homes.
Why? Because we never had safety and security? Or to heighten the terror, make it worse?
My hand went unconsciously to my side, I rubbed my scar.
And for an instant, I could almost feel it. My ribs, wet and sticky, my legs trembling, starting to go. Watching flames leap up a wall. Thinking it was strange, to feel so cold while staring at fire.
SisSis, a voice called to me. SisSis!
Sorry, I said. Sorry.
MY CELL PHONE RANG. Twenty feet away from Tom’s truck, I answered it.
“Do you remember yet?” my sister asked.
“The house was on fire.”
“Dear old mom. Always had a flair for the dramatic.”
“You beat out the flames.”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
I hesitated. “SisSis. You called me SisSis.”
This time, she didn’t answer right away. When she finally did, her voice was bitter.
“You promised to always take care of me. You promised to keep me safe. But you didn’t keep that promise, did you, Charlene? You left me. Then you forgot me completely. So much for sisterly love, SisSis.”
I didn’t know what to say. It didn’t matter, she was already filling the silence: “Tell me, Charlene, are you still a good soldier?”
“Why?”
“Because everyone has to die sometime. Be brave, Charlie. Be brave…”
I felt the chills go up my spine. Not just because of the words she spoke, but because of the way she spoke them. A voice, rising out of the grave. My mother, whispering across the years.
“Please don’t hurt her,” I forced myself to say evenly. “This has nothing to do with Aunt Nancy. This is between you and me.”
“Then you still don’t remember.”
“What do you want?”
“You should know that.”
“Tell me, and I’ll come to you.”
“You should know where I am.”
Then I did. I understood. I opened the truck door. I climbed inside, phone still glued to my ear. I felt the weight of what had to happen next.
January 21. A day twenty years in the making.
“I love you, Abby,” I whispered to the sister who was about to kill me. “Remember, whatever happens, I love you.”
My baby sister hung up on me.
I thought long and hard about what I had to do next.
FOR MY ENTIRE LIFE, I understood on some basic level that my mother was insane. Maybe I didn’t dwell on what specifically happened when I was two or four or five. But the flashes of memory I did have were never warm and fuzzy. I didn’t picture my mother reading me a bedtime story or associate her with fresh-baked cookies.
Cold winter nights, when the wind howled through the mountains and the walls quaked from the unsettling power of it, I thought of my mom. Dank basements, the smell of rust, the tang of blood, I thought of my mom. Falling off the monkey bars at school one day, the funny popping sound my shoulder made when I landed, and the even louder sound it made when I whacked it against a tree trunk to pop it back in, I thought of my mom.
She’d been insane in the truest sense of the word. Unpredictable, unstable, unreliable. Driven by wild ambitions and deeper, darker bouts of despair. She loved, she hated. I was her best girl, her favorite daughter. Now, be a good girl and stand still, while she dropped a bowling ball on my foot.
In my mother’s world, to love someone was to hurt someone. Therefore, the more she hurt me, the more I should feel adored.
Insanity is genetic, you know.
I’d spent most of my adolescence terrified I’d wake up one morning suddenly overwhelmed by the need to hurt someone. I’d start hitting my friends, screaming at my aunt. I’d stop compulsively cleaning my aunt’s mountain B&B and start ransacking the rooms instead.
I’d go to bed Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant, and wake up Christine Grant, terrorizer of small children everywhere.
Fortunately for me, that never happened.
But I don’t think my younger sister had gotten so lucky.
MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS that my sister would take our aunt back to New Hampshire, to her cozy B&B tucked away in the White Mountains. But that involved a three-hour drive north. Plus, just because you’re crazy, doesn’t mean you’re stupid—my aunt ran a business in her home, meaning the place would be crowded with witnesses.
Far better for this final family reunion—my own little Cambridge rental. One room in a historic house occupied by a single older woman. I hoped for my landlady’s sake that she had been out today. I doubted any of us would be that lucky.
I parked across the street, at the Observatory. After 5 P.M. on a Saturday, the parking lot held only a scattering of automobiles. Dark had fallen completely, the street lamps casting a feeble glow which reflected off the white snowbanks.
I’d planned for Tulip to stay, but the moment I opened the truck door, she bounded out, using my lap as a springboard. She ran a couple of quick circles in the snowy parking lot, clearly happy to be on the move. I contemplated rounding her up, forcing her back into her four-wheeled prison, but in the end, I didn’t have the heart for it.
Instead, I called her to me one last time, kissed her on the top of the head, and thanked her for being the best dog in the world. She whined a little, wagged her tail, then shook her white-and-tan body as if to ward off a chill. She trotted across the parking lot, moving away from my unit, off on some adventure that maybe someday she’d tell me about, if only I were alive to hear.
I watched until she disappeared around the side of the brick buildings. My throat was thicker than I wanted it to be. I patted my coat pockets, fidgeted with the scarf wrapped tight around my neck.
I had spent a year planning, preparing, and strategizing.
Now I simply heard my mother’s words, back inside my head: Everyone has to die sometime. Be brave.
I headed across the street for my landlady’s darkened home.
THE BOTTOM ROW OF EMPTY WINDOWS gaped like a toothless smile as I approached. No front porch light burned, no back patio light beckoned. Maybe the front door was unlocked. Maybe my sister was standing on the other side, waiting for me to walk right in.
I decided to do the unexpected. She wanted me here, obviously. There was unfinished business on both sides, so I didn’t think she’d simply shoot me. She wanted to talk. I wanted to listen. She wanted to kill my aunt and hurt me as much as possible. I wanted her to know that I was sorry, that I loved her, and that, even though I didn’t know how to fix the past, doubted it could be done at this stage of the game, I wished it could be.
I wished we both could start over.
No sign of life on the street as I walked to the rear garden fence, opened the gate, and closed it gently behind me. Now free from prying eyes, I approached the back door, the one I used to come and go.
Deep breath in. Deep breath out.
I knocked. Three times. Rap, rap, rap.
And ten seconds later, she answered.
The hallway loomed dark and shadowed behind her, while I imagined the Cambridge night sky cast a faint urban glow behind me.
She was dressed in black jeans and a tight-fitting black sweater. She looked leaner and mean
er than Detective O, with her hair scraped back in a tight ponytail and her eyes blazing with crazy blue contact lenses.
I looked at her, and I saw my mother.
I looked at her, and I saw myself.
“Hello,” she said. “My name is Abigail.”
SHE RAISED HER RIGHT HAND, revealing a hypodermic needle, which she pointed at me.
“Arm,” she said.
“What is it?” I gestured to the needle.
“You of all people know better than to question. Now, be a good girl, and do what I tell you.”
“No.”
“Charlene Rosalind Carter—”
“Our mother is dead. I won’t go back and neither should you. We’re sisters, and sisters don’t treat each other like this.”
“Arm.”
“No.” I turned and walked away.
“Leave now and she dies,” she shrilled behind me. “Eight minutes. Maybe nine. All your aunt has left. Or maybe you don’t care. Maybe leaving your family to die is what you do best, SisSis.”
She had used my old nickname, which I considered a victory of sorts. The beginning of getting both of us to remember. I needed to recall most of my childhood if I was going to survive the next fifteen minutes. And Abigail…I needed her to recall at least some parts when she didn’t hate me so much. When maybe, she even loved me a little.
I turned back toward her. She once again pointed the needle. After another moment’s hesitation, I held out my arm. She moved quickly, before I changed my mind, jamming the needle straight through my coat into the fleshy part of my upper arm. I barely felt it, a faint pinprick that could’ve been a piece of grit caught in the weave of my shirt. She hit the plunger, and the whole thing was done in a millisecond.
Abigail eyed me. I returned her gaze levelly, waiting to feel something. Woozy, a burning in the back of my throat, maybe tingling down my arm. Most of our mother’s tricks were meant for instant gratification, but I didn’t feel a thing.
Abigail nodded, apparently satisfied, then made me strip my coat and hand it to her, immediately divesting me of most of my homemade weapons, which I’d stuck in the pockets. Next she patted me down, claiming my cell phone, but overlooking the ballpoint pen tucked into the back of my hair and the duct-tape knife covered by my ragged jeans, thick wool socks, and worn winter boots. Once I’d passed inspection, she opened the door wider, letting me into the darkened hall.