by Lisa Gardner
D.D. set down the report. “Mrs. Groves can’t imagine Rochelle harming anyone, though she had nothing good to say about the parents. ‘Uninvolved,’ ‘uninterested,’ and ‘unloving’ were just a few of her choice adjectives. She viewed Rochelle as essentially raising herself, and doing a decent job of it, all things considered.”
“Shit,” Alex said.
“Agreed.”
“What about the two youngest?”
“Not in school yet,” D.D. reported. “Which leaves us with the statements from the neighbors—”
“Let me guess: They ‘don’t know nothin’ ’bout no one.’ ”
“How’d you know?”
“I think the neighborhood was Hermes’s customer base, and most of them are pissed off they didn’t get to that back shed before we did.”
“True. And now their bitterness makes it difficult for them to cooperate with the fine local cops who did get to the shed first. Jealousy, plain and simple.”
“The younger girl was covered in some pretty nasty cuts,” Alex said quietly. “I saw scarring, too. Arms, legs, and around her face.”
“I’m assuming Phil will have some info from child services.” D.D. didn’t like thinking of the four-year-old either. There was something too pitiful—that poor scarred body, curled up on a dog bed. It made her pinch the bridge of her nose, as if that would wipe the image away.
“Holding up?” Alex asked quietly.
“Always.”
“Not offending, just offering.”
D.D. looked at him. “I’m good at my job.” It was important to her that he know that.
“I’ve noticed.”
“Don’t need a man to fix me. Don’t need a man to save me.”
“I’ve noticed.”
She grimaced. “I hate my fucking pager.”
He smiled. “I love working at the Academy.”
“Not gonna give it up for all this glamour?” She spread her hands over their piles of notes and reports.
“No. Visiting the field is good. Don’t need to live here. ’Course, it helps me to be more understanding of a fellow investigator’s crazy schedule.”
“Nothing regular about this job,” D.D. agreed.
“Plans get made and unmade. Dinners could be prepared that sadly grow cold.”
“Very sadly,” she assured him.
“I’m good at my job,” he said.
“I’ve noticed.”
“Don’t need a woman to wait on me. Don’t need a woman to stroke my ego.”
“I’ve noticed.” She paused, regarding him more seriously. “So what do you want?”
“Let’s start with dinner.”
“Really?” She didn’t mean to sound disappointed.
“But I’m open to all possibilities,” he added hastily.
“Because I saw this ad—” D.D. realized what she was about to say, and broke off, mortified.
Alex grinned. “ ‘Cool chills, warm thrills’?”
She leaned closer. “I’m dying to know,” she admitted.
He leaned closer. “I’m dying to be of service.”
They both sighed. Heavily. Then leaned back, and returned to work.
“So,” D.D. said after a minute, clearing her throat, forcing herself to sound brisk. “Where are we at? We got a drug dealer, a welfare mom, a truant teen, a brainy preteen, and two unknowns. High-risk lifestyle. Isolated mother and kids. What are the odds that Hermes smoked too much dope, tried a new product, and went postal on his own family?”
“Don’t like the knife,” Alex remarked. “If he starts with the knife, he should end with the knife.”
“Maybe stabbing Audi was the impulse part. They got into a fight in the kitchen, he took it too far. Ishy saw him, started to run, and Hermes realized he’d better do damage control real quick. Hermes gets out his handgun and goes to town.”
“Then, once he realizes what he’s done …”
“Decides to finish it all. Suffocates his own baby, then lies down on the sofa and blows out his brains.”
“You’re wrong.”
D.D. and Alex looked up sharply. Neil had appeared in the doorway, his pale face so lit up his freckles glowed. “I got news, straight from the ME,” he burst out. “Hermes wasn’t shot. I mean, well, okay, he was shot. But it doesn’t matter, because at the time he was shot, he was already dead. Whole sofa scene—totally staged.”
There were moments D.D. didn’t like her job. The stress of working too many hours without a break. The tedium of poring over investigative reports. Her damn pager going off at precisely the wrong moment …
This moment, however, was not one of those moments. She, Alex, and Neil had taken over the conference room so they could spread out, and Neil was currently pacing up and down the length of the table, talking a mile a minute.
“Hermes Laraquette was hit with a Taser in the chest. Two jolts would be the ME’s guess, to judge by the twin set of burns. Most men would’ve gone down, but recovered. Laraquette’s lifestyle wasn’t exactly heart-healthy, however, so he never got up again.”
“Taser killed him?” D.D. reiterated.
“Taser caused a massive coronary event, which dropped him deader than a stone.”
D.D. was standing at the whiteboard, dry-erase marker in hand. With Neil’s affirmation of cause of death, she jotted down a fresh note. “Hang on. If a Taser was used in the attack, where’s the confetti?”
Tasers, which were illegal in Massachusetts, were supposed to discharge coded confetti with each stunning jolt. The code on the confetti could then be used to trace which Taser had been used in an attack—compensating for the fact that there was no bullet left behind for the police to trace. The confetti was a huge, fluttery mess, nearly impossible to clean up, especially given conditions at the Laraquette household.
“Don’t know,” Neil said. “But the ME is convinced it was a Taser. Has no doubts about the marks.”
D.D. frowned, decided to come back to the confetti. “Okay. So that gives us four instruments for attack: Taser, handgun, knife, pillow. What else did the ME have?”
“Definitely stabbing as COD for the woman. Single fatal blow. No hesitation marks,” Neil reported, still pacing.
“Like the Harringtons,” D.D. said.
“Same size blade,” Neil reported. “Meaning both households contained knife sets, and in both attacks perpetrator selected the same size blade.”
“The largest blade,” Alex said, his tone cautious. “Which, if you think about it, is the most logical choice for murder.”
“True, true,” Neil mused, stopping his pacing long enough to stick his hands in his front pockets and jiggle the loose change.
“Can the ME check Patrick Harrington’s body?” D.D. asked. “See if he was tasered, too?”
“Already made the request.”
“Well?”
“Give him a couple of days. Between the two scenes, plus the rest of the city’s normal mayhem, bodies are stacking up.”
“August,” D.D. muttered. “Always a busy time of year. So what about the kids? The son was shot.”
“Yep. Same with the four-year-old and eleven-year-old girls,” Neil reported. “Infant’s gonna be tougher. Harder to rule on asphyxiation. More like nothing else seems to be physically wrong with the child, ergo it was probably suffocation. ME’s sent the pillow out to be tested for DNA. Might be able to trace saliva on the pillow back to the infant, then it’s a bit more conclusive.”
“How long?” D.D. was already bracing herself.
“Three to six months,” Neil said.
“Fuck.”
“Not right now, I’m already too excited.”
D.D. rolled her eyes at Neil. Sure, the lanky redhead talked a good game, but it wouldn’t help her any. Alex, on the other hand, should look out.
“So what does this tell us?” she mused, riding the same adrenaline wave as Neil. She studied her whiteboard, then got busy with the marker: “One, this takes Hermes out of the per
petrator column and moves him squarely into the victim category. After all, the man couldn’t very well taser himself to death, then shoot himself to death.”
“Ambush,” Alex said.
She looked at him, nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking.”
“Stun Hermes, incapacitating him, then go after the rest of his family,” Alex continued.
“Why does Hermes have to be first?” Neil asked. “Couldn’t it be someone had attacked the family, then Hermes walked in on it?”
“If Hermes walks in, why taser him?” Alex pointed out. “Someone walks in on a shooting, the perpetrator fires off an extra round. The perpetrator doesn’t set down the gun and dig through his pockets for a new weapon.”
“True, true.”
“I think Hermes went first,” D.D. agreed. “Perpetrator incapacitates the most obvious threat—the father—by stunning him multiple times.”
“Not exactly foolproof,” Alex commented. “Especially a hard-core drug addict. I’ve seen guys stunned half a dozen times and they’re still screaming bloody murder.”
D.D. chewed her lower lip. Considered it. “Given that Tasers are illegal in Mass., maybe our perpetrator has a truly illegal, illegal Taser. Meaning, as long as he was acquiring a black market Taser, he got one with super-sized voltage. For the military, commercial grade, etc. Maybe custom cartridges, which would explain why no confetti was left behind. For a buck fifty, you can buy just about anything on the black market. Why not a super-volt Taser, guaranteed to silently incapacitate your problem, while leaving no evidence behind?”
The more D.D. thought about it, the more she liked it. “Higher voltage might also explain Hermes’s massive coronary event,” she continued. “He wasn’t just hit by a Taser, he was hit by a Taser.” She glanced at Neil. “Any way the ME can study the burn patterns on Hermes’s chest to estimate size of the hit?”
“I have no idea,” Neil said, “but I can ask.”
“All right. Back to where we were. We know a Taser is being used, and it was strong enough to kill at least one man. So we’ll assume that’s part of the perpetrator’s plan. Incapacitate the father figure with a Taser. Next up is the second adult—the mother. She’s ambushed in the kitchen with a knife. Another silent weapon, maybe an attempt on the perpetrator’s part to remain undetected for as long as possible. Once someone notices, however—”
“Ishy, in the hallway,” Alex said.
“Yeah. Now the subject has to move fast. Ishy’s raising the alarm, there are two other kids capable of bolting for the neighbors’. The subject’s gotta tamp down, or the whole scene will spiral out of control.”
“So the subject grabs a gun—”
“One he’s taken off Hermes?” D.D. questioned.
“Unregistered, so no way to determine,” Alex said. “But subject has a gun and now it’s quick and dirty business. Fumbles the first shot with Ishy, but makes it right with the second. Then hits the girls’ room. Boom. Boom. Kids are done. It’s down the hall to the last member of the family.”
D.D. nodded. “All right. But the last member of the Laraquette family is a five-month-old baby. Infants can’t talk or bear witness. Why kill the baby?”
Neil and Alex were both silent for a minute, contemplating the matter.
“He has to kill the baby,” Alex said at last. “Because it has to be the whole family. It’s a script, remember? The family must be dead and the father must appear to have done it. So the baby must die. Then Hermes must be moved to the sofa and posed accordingly. It’s what the killer does. What he needs.”
“Not a gangland hit,” D.D. said slowly. “Because in a gangland hit, the shooter would want to take credit. He’d want it known that he’d eliminated his rival’s entire family, to strike fear into the hearts of other up-and-coming drug dealers. Plus, he wouldn’t mess around with four different weapons. Too much fuss. This isn’t about revenge. This is something deeper, something more personal to the killer.”
“A reenactment,” Alex murmured.
D.D. frowned, uncomfortable, not sure why. “Hermes’s death screwed it up. He was supposed to be stunned unconscious. Then, when the rest of the family had been eliminated, the killer could return, move Hermes to the sofa, wrap Hermes’s fingers around the gun, and complete the final act in the story. But Hermes had a heart attack, breaking with the script, and giving us our first clue.”
Alex said suddenly, “Hermes had the gun on him.”
D.D. and Neil turned to him. “How do you figure?”
“Because the gun has to come from inside the home. It’s part of the pattern, and if you think about it, it works. At the Harrington residence, the subject eliminates Patrick first. Stuns him, we’ll assume for the sake of argument. Then the subject slips into the kitchen, grabs a knife, and goes to town. Finally, the staging takes place. Patrick gets moved, the subject locates the gun, performs the final act.”
“Patrick lived,” D.D. pointed out.
“The risk you take with a twenty-two,” Alex countered. “But the gun was registered to Patrick, remember? That’s all he owned, and I bet if we ask his neighbor Dexter, he’ll agree that Patrick was conscientious about handgun safety in a household with three kids. I bet he kept the twenty-two in a lockbox. So the killer had to wait to access it and use it. Hermes, on the other hand—”
“Probably had it stuffed in the waistband of his jeans,” D.D. finished for him. “Lucky he didn’t blow off his nuts.”
“Lucky he ate so much fast food, and suffered a heart attack.”
“So now all we have to do is find some kind of link between the Harringtons and the Laraquette-Solis family,” D.D. said. “And figure out why someone’s idea of fun is murdering entire families. Then we catch him. Preferably in time for the five o’clock news. Ideas?”
She looked at Alex, he looked at Neil. Neil looked back at her.
“Trace evidence,” Neil said finally, with a small shrug. “Hair, fiber, prints, some link between the two crime scenes.”
“Look for parking tickets,” Alex offered. “Subject had to come and go, and let’s face it, parking in the city is a bitch, especially during the summer months.”
“Footprints outside the windows.” Neil again, getting into the spirit of things. “Subject probably scoped out the place first.”
Alex’s turn: “Reinterview the neighbors. To pull off something this sophisticated, the perpetrator had to have reconned. Did any of them notice the same car driving around the block several times? Or a new face suddenly taking walks in the morning, only to disappear again? Guy had to get his intel somehow.”
D.D. wrote down the list, added two of her own: ballistics, in case the slugs bore any similar markings between the two scenes, and also the ME’s report on Patrick Harrington. If he had Taser burns on his chest, the scenes were linked. No doubt in her mind.
“Neil,” she said, tapping that last item, “get back to the ME for us, will you? Couple of days is too long to wait for Ben to reexamine Patrick. We need the ME’s report tomorrow morning at the latest, even if it’s only his preliminary opinion. But this matters. Matters a lot.”
Neil nodded, then there was a rap on the door. Phil stuck his head in.
“Miss me?” the third member of their squad asked. “I’ve been looking all over the damn place for you. What’s with the conference room?”
“More space,” D.D. said. “Neil caught a break from the ME. Turns out Hermes Laraquette actually died from a Taser, and the whole suicide-on-the-sofa thing was staged. Now we just gotta link the Harrington scene to the Laraquette-Solis scene and we’ll be able to prove we’re looking for a single predator who likes to reenact family annihilations. Why? What’d you do with your afternoon?”
“Tell me you love me.”
“Is this more or less than I love a medium rare cheeseburger?”
“Definitely more. I’ve linked the Harringtons to the Laraquette-Solis family. Remember the Laraquettes’ four-year-old girl with the cuts all over he
r limbs?”
D.D. nodded her head; not an easy thing to forget.
“Child services was called, and the girl was taken into temporary state care, and guess what? Mommy and Daddy aren’t the ones who hurt her. She does it to herself. A form of self-mutilation that has something to do with compulsion, depression, anxiety, yada yada yada. To make a long story short, the girl can’t stop slicing her own skin. Uses everything from sharpened twigs to paper clips to the tabs from Coke cans. Well, nine months ago, Tika got her hands on a disposable razor and starting working on her neck. By the time Mommy noticed, girl was covered in blood. Mom rushed her to the emergency room, where she was diagnosed as an immediate threat to herself and …” Phil paused a beat, waited for the drum roll.
D.D. connected the dots, just as Phil spoke the words out loud.
“And four-year-old Tika was admitted to the Pediatric Evaluation Clinic of Boston. Otherwise known as Ozzie Harrington’s former home-away-from-home.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY
VICTORIA
Am I a good mother?
In the months prior to our marriage unraveling, Michael claimed that my personal failings were holding Evan back. I refused to view my son and his issues objectively. I refused to consider that someone else—or perhaps, more specifically, somewhere else—would be in my son’s best interest.
By believing I was the only person who could help Evan, I was, in fact, guilty of the worst sort of hubris. I was arrogant, self-centered, and putting my needs as a mother above the needs of my son. I was also ignoring my husband and my daughter, fracturing the family I was supposed to nurture and protect.
To hear Michael describe it, Evan’s temper tantrums, violent acts, and chronic insomnia were all my fault. If I could just be a better mom, Evan would be a better child. Preferably one who was locked up somewhere, where parents could visit at their convenience and a younger sibling could forget he ever existed.