Catch Me

by Lisa Gardner

  “Randi never even felt it,” she said, as if that should mean something to me. “Your other friend, Jackie, she turned around when I pricked her. I told her there had been some kind of thorn stuck to the back of her shirtsleeve and she believed me. Aunt Nancy saw me coming with it, though. I let her. I wanted her to know.”

  Abigail led me past my own bedroom to the large living room, with its multiple seating areas plus kitchen. I’d been right earlier—no one’s lucky day. Both Aunt Nancy and my landlady, Frances, were present. Frances was slumped, pale and weak-looking, in a faded wingback chair, the farthest from me. My aunt was closer, reclined on the camelback sofa, eyes closed, eyelids fluttering in a way that didn’t appear good.

  I rushed to her immediately and felt for a pulse. I found it, but it was weak. My aunt’s skin was clammy, and she was shivering uncontrollably.

  “What did you do?”

  “You mean she never tried it on you?”

  “What?”

  “Insulin. Crashes the blood sugar. Leads to coma, possibly death. Or a free trip to the emergency room.”

  She delivered the words flippantly. I understood the untold story behind them, the countless episodes she must’ve endured at our mother’s hands. I would’ve liked to offer her compassion. Instead, I faced off against her, legs spread for balance, and pleaded my case.

  “I’m here, you have what you wanted. Now, let me give Aunt Nancy and Fran some sugar cubes, and we’ll send them on their way.”

  “Frosting,” Abigail stated. “Works better. I gave it to both of your friends right at the end. Otherwise the postmortem blood tests would’ve revealed low blood sugar, giving away my little game. But a little frosting applied at the right moment…You’ll find a spray can of it behind you on the kitchen counter.”

  Her ready agreement to let me treat my aunt and landlady puzzled me. Instead of being relieved, I felt even more on edge as I turned around and headed toward the darkened kitchen. Halfway to the center island, my legs suddenly faltered. I missed a step, stumbled slightly, then caught myself. I shook off the episode, blinking my eyes against a sudden bout of light-headedness. The insulin, going to work. I retrieved the silvery spray can of decorator’s frosting sitting in the middle of the counter and returned with it to my aunt’s side.

  “You may give them the frosting. Take any for yourself, and I will shoot you.” Abigail had pocketed the needle. In its place she now held a. 40-caliber Sig Sauer.

  “And take away all your fun?” I asked lightly.

  “I didn’t say I’d kill you. I just said I’d shoot you.”

  It took me a bit to figure out the spray nozzle, which came complete with four decorative tips. Color was white, flavor vanilla. Decorate cookies, rouse a loved one from impending death. My hands were shaking. I had to concentrate to make my fingers do what I needed.

  I tended first to my aunt, who seemed worse off. Next, I crossed to Frances, jamming the nozzle into her slightly gaping mouth and squirting in more frosting.

  Then I stepped back, and both my sister and I studied them.

  “How did you become Detective O?” I asked. I stood six feet from her, slightly in front of her, her Sig Sauer aimed at my left shoulder. Without any lights on, the room was dark, a series of larger and smaller lumps which indicated furniture, other objects that could be used for cover.

  I thought the lack of lighting gave me the advantage, as I knew the space better than her. But she still held the gun, and looked very comfortable with it.

  “Patron,” she said.

  “Patron?”

  Her features remained flat, hard. A cop’s face, a victim’s face. I had never realized until now how little separated the two.

  “When I was fourteen, I left dear old mom. We were living in Colorado by then. She’d stopped hurting me and started selling me instead. See, her looks were no longer what they used to be, and a girl’s gotta pay rent. She still brought home the boyfriends, only they didn’t stay in her room anymore.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “One night, it occurred to me that as long as I was selling my body, I ought to call the shots. So I waited for the right guy to come along—you know, one with lots of cash—and I made him a deal. I’d become his exclusive property, if he’d take me away.

  “Turns out, I picked well. He was a successful attorney, had plenty of assets, and had always envisioned himself as one of those wealthy men with a little something-something tucked away on the side. I got my own apartment, and with a bit more negotiation, I got a new identity—you know, so Mommy Dearest couldn’t track me down and take me away. Perfectly legal, of course, which is the advantage of prostituting yourself to a legal eagle. Eventually, I enrolled in some online courses and earned my GED. Only problem became when I turned eighteen, and I wanted to go to college, and he wanted to keep me in a gilded cage.”

  She stopped talking. On the couch, my aunt moaned, her eyes fluttering opened. She stared at both of us, but her eyes were still glazed over. I doubted she was seeing anything.

  “When’d you kill him?” I asked conversationally.

  Abigail smiled. “That’s not the relevant date. You should know the relevant date.”

  “January twenty-one.”

  “Absolutely. But why, SisSis? What’s so important about January twenty-one? You tell me.”

  I studied her. I tried to remember our time together, the past I’d worked so diligently to forget. “Your birthday?”

  She eyed me funnily. “No.”

  “My birthday?”

  “Please. Your birthday is in June.”

  Frances was awake. Her breathing had changed, evened out. She wasn’t sitting up any straighter, but I could tell she was more alert. I wondered if Abigail could tell the same.

  But my sister wasn’t paying any attention to my aunt or my landlady. She was staring at me. She appeared, for the first time, uncertain.

  “Did you really forget…everything?”

  I shrugged, feeling half-foolish, half-ashamed. “Most things, yes.”

  “Even me?”

  “I’m sorry, Abigail. I’ve tried and tried to remember, but I swear, I just…You’re a baby and then you’re not there anymore. I was so sure she’d killed you. Like Rosalind. Like Carter. These beautiful little babies, so perfect and precious and then…”

  “I watched her kill the boy.”

  “You did?”

  “I remember everything. He was crying, and she took a pillow. It was bigger than his entire body. She pressed it down on him. ‘This is what we do when babies cry, Abigail,’ she told me. ‘Don’t be a crier.’”

  “You would’ve been just a toddler yourself.”

  “I think I was two. You would’ve been four.”

  “How can you remember what happened when you were two?”

  “How can you forget what happened when you were four?”

  My aunt, sitting up straighter, moved her hand at her side.

  “I wanted to die,” I heard myself say. “I woke up in the hospital, and the doctors were talking about how they put me back together and it had been touch and go, but I’d be okay now. Except, instead of feeling grateful, I wanted to kill them for saving me. I was so…angry. I was so…depressed.” I took a small step away from my aunt, easing toward the rear door, willing Abigail’s attention to follow me, and turn farther away from the two now waking women.

  “I think I had to forget,” I told my sister honestly. “I think it was the only way I could remember how to live again.”

  “She killed you,” Abigail said. “She stabbed you with a knife. I saw that, too.”

  “There was fire.”

  “You do remember!”

  “I remember blood and flames and thinking it was strange to feel so cold.”

  “She tried to burn the house down.”

  “After stabbing me?”

  “Yes. She’d gotten you first, but I didn’t see that part. She’d come back upstairs for me, then we were in th
e kitchen and she had the matches, and I couldn’t get away. She was going to burn us alive, but you appeared behind her and you hit her over the head with this heavy old lamp.”

  “I did?”

  She peered at me, and I was rewarded with a trace more uncertainty in her eyes. “You really don’t remember?”

  “I wish I did. I would like to remember hurting her. Mostly, I feel like I’ve spent my entire life trying to learn how to be me. That she crawled into my head when I was too young to fight back and it’s taken me twenty-eight years to find my own thoughts, to be my own person. Our mother was crazy, Abigail. And we were too little to fight her. But we’re grown up now, and she’s dead. She doesn’t have to call the shots anymore. We can be ourselves. We can finally win.”

  “I tried to kill her that night,” Abigail murmured, as if I hadn’t spoken. “You were dead, I thought. And she was waking up and I couldn’t survive without you. I knew that, Charlie. Even back then, I knew I wasn’t that strong. So I picked up the lamp, and I was going to hit her. Except, next thing I knew, she kicked my legs and I fell to the floor, and while I was lying there, she picked up the lamp and whacked me with it.”

  I jolted. I felt a shiver…no, a shock wave…move through my entire body. For a moment, I wasn’t sure if it was the insulin nose-diving my blood sugar level, or the seismic shift of a long-buried memory.

  “I watched you die,” I heard myself whisper. “I…she…she killed you. With the lamp. I remember that. And I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t raise my arm, yell, beg, nothing. I was stuck on the floor, feeling so cold and so hot. And screaming on the inside. I remember that. Feeling my whole body scream and scream as you fell down and she got up, but no sound came out. Nothing happened. I screamed, and there she was with the lamp, raising it up, bringing it down. Killing you.

  “I’d kept you safe for so long, Abby. You have no idea. The nights I fled with you through the woods, or shoved you under the bed, or hid you in the crawlspace. I’d failed with the others. Hadn’t been smart enough, strong enough. But with you…by the time you were three or four, I remember thinking I’d done it. I’d saved you and you were mine, and I loved you. I loved you, Abigail.”

  My voice wavered, broke. My body started shaking uncontrollably while my thoughts scattered, flew apart, refused to come back together. Losing it. Blood sugar plummeting. Confusion, disorientation. Grief. Genuine grief. My baby sister had died. And in the crazy way my mind worked, I hadn’t remembered it, but I had known it. I believed I had watched Abby die and that had broken me in ways no doctor had been able to put back together again.

  “But I didn’t,” Abigail said. Her own hands were shaking, the gun unsteady. I should move, take advantage.

  I couldn’t get my legs to respond. Instead, I reached for the wall, feeling the world lurch again, desperate for balance.

  Hadn’t practiced for this, I thought. Hadn’t prepared for this complication.

  “I lived,” Abigail continued, her voice hoarse, both accusing and mournful. “She took me away and it was terrible and awful and I prayed for you every night, Charlie. You were my big sister and you’d promised to save me and I prayed for you. Night after night after night. Then I was ten, and the first man, and it hurt. I cried and begged for you to save me. But you never came. You never saved me. Instead, I turned fourteen, and sold myself to a professional pervert just to get out. Except it wasn’t quite enough, so I had to kill him. Except that wasn’t enough either, so I had to track her down and kill her, too. I thought I’d feel better then. But it turned out, that still wasn’t enough.”

  I stared at my sister. “You killed our mother?”

  “Of course.” She smiled. “Tell me when.”

  “January twenty-one. You killed her January twenty-one.”

  “Yes. Finally, you understand. I used her own pillow and did it just the way she taught me.”

  I wondered if I should feel horrified. I wondered if I should feel grateful. “But…it should’ve been over then. That should’ve been enough.”

  “Of course not, because that still left you. The one who never came. The one who never saved me.”

  “But I didn’t even know you were alive!”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “No, I didn’t. How could I have?”

  “Because she would’ve told you.”

  Abigail turned and thrust her finger at Aunt Nancy, who was now fully awake and staring at both of us.

  “I’m sorry,” my aunt burst out. “Charlie, I’m so sorry!”

  Just as Frances suddenly lunged out of the wingback and, with an unexpected roar, hurtled herself at Abigail.

  The gun went off.

  I fell to the floor.

  Screaming. Frances, Aunt Nancy, Abigail.

  “SisSis,” Abigail’s voice. My little sister, calling for me.

  “SisSis!”

  I grabbed the can of frosting, which was rolling across the floor, and started to crawl.

  Chapter 42

  D.D. WAS LOSING HER MIND.

  5:02 P.M., Saturday, January 21.

  No sign of either Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant or Detective O.

  Several uniformed patrol officers had cruised by Charlie’s Cambridge rental the hour before. No lights were on, no landlady answered the door. Grovesnor, of course, was scoping out all local contacts connected to her job. Charlene, however, was not due to work again, nor had she contacted any of her fellow officers.

  That left the aunt with a house in northern New Hampshire and a hotel somewhere in Cambridge. D.D. had outreached to the New Hampshire State Police, who’d checked in with the B&B. Nancy Grant wasn’t there, and the young lady who served as her assistant claimed she hadn’t heard from her today and wasn’t expecting her home until at least tomorrow.

  D.D. followed up with a credit check, discovering a recent charge at a low-budget motel in Cambridge.

  She was driving there now, not because she thought she’d find Charlene magically hiding beneath the bed in her aunt’s hotel room, but because D.D. needed something to do.

  Night had fallen. The sky was pitch-black, thermostat plummeting. It was January 21 and D.D. would be damned before she had another murder on her watch, in her city. Not gonna happen. She was forewarned and forearmed.

  She found the motel easily enough. One of those late-seventies nondescript places, built in a double-decker horseshoe pattern around a central parking lot. Bit more snooping, and she’d identified Nancy Grant’s vehicle, then a room up on the second story.

  Three minutes later, D.D. stood in the open doorway of the room, frowning. The office clerk, who’d let her in, appeared equally unsettled.

  “Maybe she left,” the little bald Asian man said.

  “Maybe.”

  D.D. walked around the room, not touching anything. Sure enough, no luggage, no toiletries, not even a wrinkle on the bed. If Aunt Nancy had slept at all, then she’d cleaned up her own motel room after herself.

  Which, in the next instant, gave D.D. a long, snaking chill up her spine.

  Abigail. Had to be. The world’s most obsessive-compulsive killer. Strangled her victims, then fluffed their sofa pillows.

  Except no body lay in the middle of the room. Meaning that instead of killing Nancy Grant, she’d taken her instead. Why? It wasn’t like a murderer with such a highly ritualized approach to deviate from pattern this late in the game.

  Abigail had needed something else.

  Someone else.

  Like D.D., she was trying to find Charlene Grant.

  Except she’d found Nancy Grant first, to use as bait.

  D.D. got on her phone and arranged for a crime scene team to process the hotel.

  Then she was back in her car, pulling out of the parking lot, the gears of her mind churning as fast as the wheels of her Crown Vic.

  Abigail wanted her sister. Abigail wanted revenge. Where to next?

  Only one place that made sense to D.D. The Cambridge rent
al. Had to be. Except, of course, the patrol officers had checked it out. Driven by. Knocked on the door. Not seen any signs of life.

  Maybe because there were only signs of death.

  She’d just turned onto Charlene’s street, when she caught sight of a flash of movement on the sidewalk.

  D.D. hit the brakes hard, the car behind her just swerving around. The driver made an obscene gesture. D.D. didn’t even notice. She was already out of her car, holding out her hand.

  “Tulip,” she called out. “Here girl. Come on. It’s okay. That’s a good doggy. Remember me? You came to my office. I’m a friend of Charlie’s.”

  The white-and-tan dog wagged her tail uncertainly, then finally advanced, giving D.D.’s hand an experimental sniff.

  In return, D.D. stroked the shivering dog’s smooth head, patted her ears.

  “Where’s Charlie, Tulip? Do you know? Because I’m pretty worried about her. Want to help? Show me, Tulip. Where’s Charlie?”

  And much to D.D.’s surprise, Tulip turned around and headed back up the street. She looked behind her once, as if making sure D.D. was following. Then both dog and detective broke into a run.

  Chapter 43

  SO MANY DEFENSIVE MANEUVERS I’d practiced in the past year. How to duck and weave and dodge and deliver blows. How to stand steady and level my arms and squeeze a trigger. How to run and run and even when I stumbled with exhaustion, how to run some more.

  Now it was January 21.

  I lay in the dark, half-collapsed against the hardwood floors. I heard screaming. I smelled gunfire.

  And I did the most logical thing I could do.

  I raised a spray can of frosting to my lips and took a hit.

  Another gunshot, then three and four. I staggered forward on my hands and knees, heading into the melee.