by Lisa Gardner
I knew another site to try. I didn’t go there as much. It made me sad.
I typed into my Internet search engine: www.doenetwork.org. And in two seconds, I was there.
The Doe Network deals primarily with old missing-persons cases, trying to match skeletalized remains found in one location with a missing-persons report that might have been filed in another jurisdiction. Its motto: “There is no time limit to solving a mystery.”
The thought gave me a chill as I sat, one hand now clasping the vial of my mother’s ashes, the other hand typing in the search parameter: Massachusetts.
The very first hit sent me reeling. Three photos of the same boy, starting when he was ten, then age-progressed to twenty, then to thirty-five. He had gone missing in 1965 and was presumed dead. One minute he’d been playing in the yard, the next he was gone. A pedophile doing time in Connecticut claimed to have raped and murdered the child, but couldn’t remember where he’d buried the body. So the case remained open, the parents working as feverishly now to find their son’s remains as they must have once worked, forty years ago, to find their child.
I wondered what it was like for the parents to have to look at these age-progressed photos. To get that glimpse of who their son might have been, had the mom not gone inside to answer the phone or the father not rolled under the car to change the oil.…
Fight, my father always told me. Seventy-four percent of abducted children who are murdered are killed within the first three hours. Survive those three hours. Don’t give the bastard a chance.
I was crying, I don’t know why. I never knew this little boy. Most likely, he died over forty years ago. But I could understand his terror. I felt it every time my father started one of his lectures or training exercises. Fight? When you are a fifty-pound child against a two-hundred-pound male, whatever in the world can you do that will honestly make a difference? My father may have had his illusions, but I have always been a realist.
If you are a child and someone wants to hurt you, chances are, you’ll wind up dead.
I moved to the next case: 1967. I looked at just the dates now; I didn’t want to see the pictures. It took me five more clicks. Then, November 12, 1982.
I was staring at Dori Petracelli. I was looking at her photo, age-progressed to thirty. I was reading the case study of what had happened to my best friend.
Then I went into the bathroom and vomited until I dry-heaved.
Later, twenty, forty, fifty minutes, I didn’t know anymore, I had the leash in one hand, the Taser in the other. Bella danced around my feet, practically tripping me in her haste to get downstairs.
I clipped the leash to her collar. And we ran. We ran and we ran and we ran.
By the time we returned home, a good hour and a half later, I thought I had composed myself. I felt cold, even clinical. I still had my family’s luggage. I would start packing immediately.
But then I turned on the news.
Bobby arrived home shortly after nine p.m., a man on a mission: He had approximately forty minutes to shower, eat, chug a Coke, then return to Roxbury. Unfortunately, South Boston parking had other ideas. He worked an eight-block radius around his triple-decker before getting pissed off and parking up on the curb. A Boston cop would take great personal delight in ticketing a state trooper, so he was living dangerously.
A pleasant surprise: One of his tenants, Mrs. Higgins, had left him a plate of cookies. “Saw the news. Keep up your strength,” her note said.
Bobby couldn’t argue with that, so he started his dinner by eating a lemon square. Then three more as he sorted through the pile of mail scattered on his floor, picking out key envelopes bearing bills, rent checks, leaving the rest.
One more lemon square for the road, chewing without even tasting anymore, he headed down the long narrow hallway to his bedroom at the back of the unit. He unbuttoned his shirt with one hand, emptied his pants pockets with the other. Then shrugged out of his shirt, kicked off his pants, and hit the tiny blue-tiled bathroom in beige dress socks and tighty whities. He got the shower going to full roar. One of the best things he still remembered from his tactical team days—coming home to a long, hot shower.
He stood under the scalding spray for endless minutes. Inhaling the steam, letting it sink into his pores, wishing, as he always did, that it would wash the horror away.
His brain was a spin cycle of overactive images. Those six little girls, mummified faces pressed against clear plastic garbage bags. Old photographs of twelve-year-old Catherine, her pale face hollowed out by hunger, her eyes giant black pupils from spending a month alone in the dark.
And, of course, the other image he was forced to see, would probably be seeing for the rest of his life: the look on Catherine’s husband’s face, Jimmy Gagnon’s face, right before the bullet from Bobby’s rifle shattered his skull.
Two years later, Bobby still dreamed about the shooting four or five nights a week. He figured someday it would become three times a week. Then twice a week. Then maybe, if he was lucky, he would get down to three or four times a month.
He’d done counseling, of course. Still met with his old LT, who served as his mentor. Even attended a meeting or two of other officers who’d been involved in critical incidents. But from what he could tell, none of that made much difference. Taking a man’s life changed you, plain and simple.
You still had to get up each morning and put on your pants one leg at a time like everyone else.
And some days were good, and some days were bad, and then there were a whole lotta other days in between that really weren’t anything at all. Just existence. Just getting the job done. Maybe D.D. was right. Maybe there were two Bobby Dodges: the one who lived before the shooting and the one who lived after. Maybe, inevitably, that’s how these things worked.
Bobby ran the shower till the water turned cold. Toweling off, he glanced at his watch. He had a whole minute left for dinner. Microwave chicken, it was.
He stuck two Tyson chicken breasts into the microwave, then retreated to the steamy bathroom and attacked his face with a razor.
Now officially five minutes late, he threw on fresh clothes, popped open a Coke, stuck two piping-hot chicken breasts onto a paper plate, and made his first critical mistake: He sat down.
Three minutes later, he was asleep on his sofa, chicken falling to the floor, paper plate crumpled on his lap. Four hours of sleep in the past fifty-six will do that to a man.
He jerked awake, dazed and disoriented, sometime later. His hands lashed out. He was looking for his rifle. Jesus Christ, he needed his rifle! Jimmy Gagnon was coming, clawing at him with skeletal hands.
Bobby sprang off his sofa before the last of the image swept from his mind. He found himself standing in the middle of his own apartment, pointing a greasy paper plate at his TV as if he were packing heat. His heart thundering in his chest.
Anxiety dream.
He counted forward to ten, then slowly back down to one. He repeated the ritual three times until his pulse eased to normal.
He set down the crumpled plate. Retrieved the two chicken breasts from the floor. His stomach growled. Thirty-second rule, he decided, and ate with his bare hands.
First time Bobby had met Catherine Gagnon, he’d been a sniper called out to the scene of a domestic barricade—report of an armed husband, holding his wife and child at gunpoint. Bobby had taken up position across from the Gagnon residence, surveying the situation through his rifle scope, when he’d spotted Jimmy, standing at the foot of the bed, waving a handgun, and yelling so forcefully that Bobby could see the tendons roping the man’s neck. Then Catherine came into view, clutching her four-year-old son against her chest. She’d had her hands clasped over Nathan’s ears, his face turned into her, as if trying to shield him from the worst.
The situation went from bad to worse. Jimmy had grabbed his child from Catherine’s arms. Had pushed the boy across the room, away from what was going to happen next. Then he had leveled the gun at his wife’s hea
d.
Bobby had read Catherine’s lips in the magnified world of his Leupold scope.
“What now, Jimmy? What’s left?”
Jimmy suddenly smiled, and in that smile, Bobby had known exactly what was going to happen next.
Jimmy Gagnon’s finger tightened on the trigger. And fifty yards away, in the darkened bedroom of a neighbor’s townhouse, Bobby Dodge had blown him away.
In the shooting’s aftermath, there was no doubt that Bobby made some mistakes. He’d started drinking, for one. Then he’d met Catherine in person, at a local museum. That had probably been his most self-destructive act. Catherine Gagnon was beautiful, she was sexy, she was the grateful widow of the abusive husband Bobby had just sent to an early grave.
He’d gotten involved with her. Not physically, like D.D. and most others assumed. But emotionally, which was perhaps even worse, and the reason Bobby never bothered to correct anyone’s assumptions. He had crossed the line. He’d cared about Cat, and as the people around her had started dying horrific deaths, he’d feared for her life.
Turned out, for good reason.
To this day, D.D. contended that Catherine Gagnon was one of the most dangerous females ever to live in Boston, a woman who had most likely (though they lacked solid evidence) set up her own husband to be killed. And to this day, whenever Bobby thought of her, he mostly saw a desperate mother trying to protect her small child.
A person could be both noble and callous. Self-sacrificing and self-absorbed. Genuinely caring. And a stone-cold killer.
D.D. had the luxury of hating Catherine. Bobby understood her too well.
Now Bobby threw away the paper plate, crumpled the Coke can, tossed it in the recycling bin. He was just gathering up his car keys, mentally steeling himself for what would probably be a very expensive parking ticket, when his phone rang.
He glanced at caller ID, then at the clock. Eleven-fifteen p.m. He understood what had happened before he ever picked up the receiver.
“Catherine,” he said calmly.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” she exploded hysterically.
Which was how Bobby learned that the media had finally discovered the truth.
“All right, people,” D.D. Warren said crisply, passing around the latest reports. “We have approximately”—she glanced at her watch—“seven hours, twenty-seven minutes for damage control. The big guys upstairs are in agreement that at oh-eight-hundred, we’re giving our first press conference. So, for God’s sake, give me some progress to report or we’re all going to look like assholes.”
Bobby, who was trying to slip discreetly into the conference room, caught the tail end of her statement, just as D.D.’s gaze swung up and spotted his late entrance. She scowled at him, looking even more exhausted and ragged than the last time he’d seen her. If he’d caught six hours of sleep in the past two and a half days, D.D. had snagged about three. She also appeared nervous. He scanned the room, then spotted the deputy superintendent, head honcho of Homicide, sitting in the corner. That would do it.
“Nice of you to join us, Detective Dodge,” D.D. drawled for the room’s benefit. “I thought you were grabbing dinner, not six hours at a spa.”
He gave the best apology a cop could make. “I brought lemon squares.”
He placed the last of Mrs. Higgins’s homemade treasures in the middle of the table. The other detectives pounced. Eating baked goods trumped needling the state guy any day of the week.
“So, as I was saying,” D.D. continued, slapping away hands until she could snag a cookie for herself, “we need news. Jerry?”
Sergeant McGahagin, head of the three-man squad in charge of compiling the list of missing girls, looked up from the table. Rather hastily, he brushed powdered sugar off his report, fingers shaking so hard from his two-day caffeine binge, he actually missed the single sheet of paper the first three times. McGahagin settled for reading the executive summary where it lay on the table.
“We got twelve names of missing females under the age of eighteen unsolved from ’65 to ’83; six names from ’97 to ’05; and, of course, fourteen years to go in between,” he spat out as one rapid-fire sentence, eyes blinking furiously. “I could use two more bodies to help scan lists if anyone finds himself with free time. ’Course we also need the forensic anthropologist’s report for cross-reference. And then you gotta wonder if the bodies are all from Mass. or do we need to broaden out to the greater New England area—Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine. Really hard to do, you know, without a victim profile; I don’t even know if we’re barking up the right tree, that’s all I have to report.”
D.D. stared at him. “Jesus, Jerry. Lay off the coffee for an hour, will you? You’re gonna need a blood transfusion the rate you’re going.”
“Can’t,” he said, twitching. “Will get a headache.”
“Can you even hear through the ringing in your ears?”
“Huh?”
“Oh boy.” D.D. sighed, stared out at the wider table. “Well, Jerry has a point. Hard to know how good any of our research is going without the victimology report. I spoke with Christie Callahan two hours ago. Bad news is, we probably get to wait at least two weeks.”
The detectives groaned. D.D. held up her hand. “I know, I know. You guys think you’re overloaded? She’s even more screwed than we are. She’s got six mummified remains that all have to be processed properly, and not even a brilliant—and might I add charming—task force to assist. Of course, she’s also doing this by the book. Which means the remains first had to be fumigated for prints. Then they had to be sent to Mass General for X-rays, and are just now returning to her lab.
“Apparently, wet mummification is its own peculiar thing. It occurs naturally in the peat bogs of Europe, and there’ve been a few cases in Florida. But this is a first for New England, meaning Christie is learning as she goes. She’s guessing three or four days to process each mummy. Given six mummies, you do the math.”
“Can she give us results one at a time, as she gets each corpse processed?” Detective Sinkus asked. He was the one with the new baby, which probably explained the state of his clothing.
“She’s considering it. There’s archaeological protocol, or some shit like that, which argues for treating the remains as a group. Individually, we may not see what is implied by the group as a whole.”
“What?” Detective Sinkus asked.
“I’ll work on her,” D.D. said. She switched gears to Detective Rock, who was handling the Crime Stoppers reports. “Tell us the truth: Anyone confess yet?”
“Only about three dozen. Bad news, most of ’em have recently gone off their meds.” Rock picked up an impressive stack of papers and started passing it around. Rock had been on the Boston PD roughly forever. Even Bobby had heard stories of the veteran detective’s legendary abilities to zoom straight from hideous crime A to random bit of evidence B to evil perpetrator C. Tonight, however, the detective’s hearty boom carried a forced undercurrent. His buzz-cut black hair seemed to have picked up extra highlights of gray, while shadows had gathered beneath his eyes. Given his mother’s rapidly deteriorating health, working a massive investigation had to be difficult. Still, he was getting things done.
“You only have to pay attention to the top sheet,” Rock was explaining. “The detailed logs are just for those of you with time to kill.”
That elicited a few tired chuckles.
“So, we’re averaging a call every few minutes, and that’s before the media went ballistic tonight. Kind of sad about the leak.” He looked at D.D. as if she might comment.
She merely shook her head. “Don’t know how it happened, Tony. Don’t have time or energy to care. Frankly, I’m impressed we made it as long as we did.”
Rock shrugged philosophically at that. Fifty-six hours under the radar had been a minor miracle. “Well, before the leak, we had a pretty easy time eliminating the whackos. We’d just ask if they buried the remains together or separately. Onc
e they went into elaborate descriptions of the grave site, we could merrily cross them off our list. So yeah, there’s been a lot of calls, but it’s been pretty smooth sailing. Don’t know if you’ll find me saying that tomorrow.”
“Any good leads?” D.D. pressed.
“Couple. Got a call from a man who claimed to be an attendant nurse at Boston State Mental in the mid-seventies. Said one of the patients at that time was the son of a very wealthy family in Boston. They didn’t want anyone to know the kid was there, never paid him a visit. Rumor mill was that the son had done something ‘inappropriate’ with his little sister. This was the family’s way of dealing with it. Patient’s name was Christopher Eola. We’re running it now, but can’t find a current address or driver’s license for him. We’re working on tracking down the family.”
D.D. raised a brow. “Better than I expected,” she said. “Gives us at least one person to dangle in front of the press.”
“Given the location,” Rock said dryly, “I thought we’d have a longer list of crazies to track down. Then again, the night’s young.”
He took a deep breath, scrubbed at his gray-stubbled cheeks. “And, as you’d expect with these types of cases, we’ve had some out-reach from families with missing kids. I have a list.” He held it up for Sergeant McGahagin. “Some of these folks are outta state, so I guess we’re getting started on that wider survey you were talking about. And”—he skimmed down the names McGahagin had reported—“I see three matches already: Atkins, Gomez, Petracelli.”
D.D.’s expression didn’t change. Bobby thought it interesting she hadn’t volunteered any details from her conversation with Annabelle Granger yet, including the mention of Dori Petracelli. Then again, D.D. always liked to play things close to the vest.
He’d done some follow-up digging on Dori Petracelli himself, so inclusion of her name on the list of missing girls didn’t surprise him. It was the date—November 12, 1982—that continued to stump him.