Love You More

by Lisa Gardner

  Hamilton appeared stunned. Maybe even a little shaken, but he recovered quickly enough, finger back on the trigger.

  Just as Sophie crested the knoll and spotted us.

  I had a vision. My daughter’s pale, sweet face. Her hair a wild tangle of knots. Her eyes, a bright, brilliant blue as her gaze locked on me. Then she was running, the way only a six-year-old could run, and Hamilton did not exist for her and the woods did not exist for her, nor the scary fire, or the threat of night or the unknown terrors that must have tormented her for days.

  She was a little girl who’d finally found her mother and she tore straight toward me, one hand clutching Gertrude, the other arm flung open as she threw herself on top of me and I groaned from both the pain and the joy that burst inside my chest.

  “I love you I love you I love you,” I exhaled.

  “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.”

  “Sophie, Sophie, Sophie…”

  I could feel her tears hot against my face. It hurt, but I still brought up my hand, cradling the back of her head. I looked at Hamilton, and then I tucked my daughter’s face into the crook of my neck. “Sophie,” I whispered, never taking my gaze off him, “close your eyes.”

  My daughter clung to me, two halves of a whole, finally together again.

  She closed her eyes.

  And I said, in the clearest voice I could muster, “Do it.”

  The darkness behind Hamilton materialized into a man. At my command, he raised his rifle. Just as Hamilton placed the barrel of his Sig Sauer against my left temple.

  I concentrated on the feel of my daughter, the weight of her body, the purity of her love. Something to carry with me into the abyss.

  “You should’ve done what I said,” Hamilton hissed above me.

  While in the next heartbeat, Bobby Dodge pulled the trigger.

  45

  By the time D.D. made it to the top of the property, Hamilton was down and Bobby stood over the lieutenant colonel’s body. He looked up at her approach and shook his head once.

  Then she heard crying.

  Sophie Leoni. It took D.D. a second to spot the child’s small, pink-clad form. She was on the ground, covering another dark-clad figure, skinny arms tangled around her mother’s neck as the girl sobbed wildly.

  Bobby dropped to one knee beside the pair as D.D. approached. He placed his hand on Sophie’s shoulder.

  “Sophie,” he said quietly. “Sophie, I need you to look at me. I’m a state policeman, like your mother. I’m here to help her. Please look at me.”

  Sophie finally raised her tearstained face. She spotted D.D. and opened her mouth as if to scream. D.D. shook her head.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay. My name is D.D. I’m a friend of your mom’s, too. Your mom led us here, to help you.”

  “Mommy’s boss took me away,” Sophie said clearly. “Mommy’s boss gave me to the bad woman. I said no. I said I wanted to go home! I said I wanted Mommy!”

  Her face dissolved again. She started to cry, soundlessly this time, still pressed against her mother’s unmoving body.

  “We know,” D.D. said, crouching down beside them, placing a tentative hand on the girl’s back. “But your mother’s boss and the bad woman can’t hurt you anymore, okay, Sophie? We’re here, and you’re safe.”

  To judge by the look on Sophie’s face, she didn’t believe them. D.D. couldn’t blame her.

  “Are you hurt?” Bobby asked.

  The girl shook her head.

  “What about your mommy?” D.D. asked. “Can we check her, make sure she is okay?”

  Sophie moved slightly to one side, enough so D.D. could see the dark stain on the left side of Tessa’s dark flannel shirt, the red blood in the snow. Sophie saw it, too. The girl’s lower lip started to tremble. She didn’t say another word. She simply lay down in the snow beside her unconscious mother and held her hand.

  “Come back, Mommy,” the girl said mournfully. “Love you. Come back.”

  Bobby scrambled down the slope for the EMTs.

  While D.D. peeled off her own coat and used it to cover both mother and child.

  Tessa regained consciousness as the EMTs went to load her. Her eyes popped open, she gasped sharply, then reached out frantically. The EMTs tried to hold her down. So D.D. did the sensible thing, grabbing Sophie and lifting the child onto the edge of the gurney.

  Tessa clutched her daughter’s arm, squeezed hard. D.D. thought Tessa might be crying, or maybe it was the tears in her own eyes. She couldn’t be sure.

  “I love you,” Tessa whispered to her daughter.

  “Love you more, Mommy. Love you more.”

  The EMTs wouldn’t let Sophie remain on the gurney. Tessa required immediate medical attention and the child would only be in the way. After thirty seconds of negotiation, it was determined that Sophie would ride in the front of the ambulance, while her mother was tended in the back. The EMTs, moving quickly, started to hustle the girl to the front.

  She twisted around them long enough to race back to her mother, and tuck something beside her, then ran for the passenger’s seat.

  When D.D. looked again, Sophie’s one-eyed doll was tucked beside Tessa’s unmoving form. The EMTs loaded her up.

  The ambulance whisked them away.

  D.D. stood in the middle of the snowy dawn, hand on her own stomach. She smelled smoke. She tasted tears.

  She looked up to the woods, where a fire was now burning down to ash. Hamilton’s last bid attempt to cover his tracks, which had cost both him and his female companion their lives.

  D.D. wanted to feel triumphant. They’d saved the girl, they’d vanquished the evil foe. Now, except for a few days of excruciating paperwork, they should be riding off in the sunset.

  It wasn’t enough.

  For the first time in a dozen years, D. D. Warren had reached the successful conclusion of a case, and it wasn’t enough. She didn’t feel like reporting the good news to her superiors, or supplying self-gratifying answers to the press, or even grabbing a couple of beers to wind down with her taskforce.

  She wanted to go home. She wanted to curl up with Alex and inhale the scent of his aftershave, and feel the familiar comfort of his arms around her. And she wanted, heaven help her, to still be at his side the first time the baby moved, and be looking into his eyes when the first contraction hit, and be holding his hand when their baby slid into the world.

  She wanted a little girl or a little boy who would love her as much as Sophie Leoni obviously loved her mother. And she wanted to return that love tenfold, to feel it grow bigger and bigger every single year, just as Tessa had said.

  D.D. wanted a family.

  She had to wait ten hours. Bobby couldn’t work-having used deadly force, he was forced to sit on the sidelines and await the arrival of the firearms discharge investigation team, which would formally investigate the incident. Meaning D.D. was on her own as she notified her boss of the latest developments, then secured the scene and began processing the outer fringes, while waiting for the last embers of the fire to cool. More officers and evidence techs arrived. More questions to answer, more bodies to manage.

  She worked through breakfast. Bobby brought her yogurt and a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. She worked. She smelled of smoke and sweat, of blood and ash.

  Dinner came and went. Sun set again. The life of a homicide detective.

  She did what she had to do. She tended what needed tending.

  And then, finally, she was done.

  Scene was secured, Tessa had been airlifted to a Boston hospital, and Sophie remained safely at her mother’s side.

  D.D. got in her car and headed back to the Mass Pike.

  She phoned Alex just as she reached Springfield. He was cooking chicken parm and delighted to hear she was finally coming home.

  She asked if he could change the chicken parm to an eggplant parm.

  He wanted to know why.

  Which made her laugh, then made her cry, and she couldn’t get t
he words out. So she told him she missed him and he promised her all the eggplant parm in the world, and that, D.D. thought, was love. His love. Her love. Their love.

  “Alex,” she finally managed to gasp. “Hey, Alex. Forget dinner. I’ve got something I need to tell you…”

  I was in the hospital for nearly two weeks. I got lucky. Hamilton’s shot was a through and through that missed most major organs. Hit man Purcell, however, had been a pro to the bitter end. He’d shattered my rotator cuff, resulting in numerous surgeries and endless months of PT. I’m told I’ll never regain full range of movement in my right shoulder, but I should get finger function back once the swelling goes down.

  I guess we’ll find out.

  Sophie stayed with me in the hospital. She wasn’t supposed to. Hospital policy said children should only be there during visiting hours. Within hours of my arrival, Mrs. Ennis had received word and shown up to assist. But she couldn’t peel Sophie off me, and after another ten minutes, the head nurse waved her off.

  Sophie needed her mother. I needed Sophie.

  So they let us be, two girls in our private room, an unbelievable luxury. We slept together, ate together, and watched SpongeBob Squarepants together. Our own little form of therapy.

  Day nine or so, we took a little walk to my former hospital room, where lo and behold, tucked in the back of the bottom drawer, we found Gertrude’s missing button eye.

  I sewed it on that afternoon with surgical thread, and Sophie made Gertrude her own hospital bed for recovery.

  Gertrude would be okay, she informed me solemnly. Gertrude had been a very brave girl.

  We watched more SpongeBob after that, and I kept my arm around my little girl and her head upon my shoulder even though it ached.

  The hospital arranged for a pediatric psych specialist to visit with Sophie. She wouldn’t talk about her captivity and hadn’t mentioned Brian’s name at all. The doctor advised me to keep “the channels of communication open” and to let Sophie come to me. When she was ready, the doctor said, she would talk. And when she did, I must keep my face neutral and my comments nonjudgmental.

  I thought this was funny advice to give a woman who’d committed three murders to save her daughter, but I didn’t volunteer that.

  I held Sophie. We slept, by mutual consent, with the lights on, and when she drew pictures filled with black night, red flames, and exploding guns, I complimented her level of detail and promised to teach her how to shoot the moment my arm healed.

  Sophie liked that idea very much.

  Detectives D. D. Warren and Bobby Dodge returned. They brought Mrs. Ennis with them, who took Sophie to the hospital cafeteria so I could answer the last of their questions.

  No, Brian had never hit me. My bruised ribs were because I had fallen down icy steps, and, being late for patrol, tended the injury myself. Shane, however, had beat me on Sunday morning, in an attempt to make it look like Brian’s death was self-defense.

  No, I didn’t know Trooper Lyons had been shot. What a terrible tragedy for his family. Did they have any leads at this time?

  They showed me photos of a thin-faced man with blazing dark eyes and thick brown hair. Yes, I recognized the man as the one I’d discovered in my kitchen on Saturday morning, holding my husband at gunpoint. He’d told me that if I would cooperate, no one would get hurt. So I had taken off my duty belt; at which time, he’d pulled my Sig Sauer and shot my husband three times in the chest.

  Purcell then explained that if I wanted to see my daughter alive again, I had to do exactly what he said.

  No, I’d never seen Purcell before that morning, nor did I know of his reputation as a professional hit man, nor did I know why he had my husband at gunpoint or what had happened to Sophie. Yes, I’d known my husband had a gambling problem, but I did not realize it had grown so bad that an enforcer had been hired to deal with the problem.

  After Purcell had shot Brian, I’d offered him fifty thousand dollars in return for more time before reporting his death. I’d explained I could freeze Brian’s body, then thaw it and call the cops on Sunday morning. I’d still do whatever Purcell wanted, I just needed twenty-four hours to prepare for Sophie’s return, as I’d be in jail for shooting my husband.

  Purcell had accepted the deal, and I’d spent Saturday afternoon covering Brian’s body in snow, then retrieving the dog’s body from under the deck, and building a couple of incendiary devices. I tried to rig them to blow back so no one would get hurt.

  Yes, I had planned my escape from jail. And no, I hadn’t felt it was safe to disclose to anyone, even to the Boston detectives, what was really going on. For one thing, I didn’t know who’d taken Sophie and I genuinely feared for her life. For another, I knew at least one fellow officer, Trooper Lyons, was involved. How could I know the taint didn’t extend to Boston cops? Or, as the case turned out, to a superior officer?

  At the time, I was acting on instinct, carefully trying to do as I’d been instructed, while also realizing that if I didn’t escape and find my daughter myself, chances were she was as good as dead.

  D.D. wanted to know who had given me a lift from the search and recovery site. I stared her straight in the eye and told her I’d hitchhiked. She wanted a description of the vehicle. Sadly, I didn’t remember.

  But I’d ended up at my father’s garage, where I helped myself to a vehicle. He’d been passed out at the time, in no shape to agree or protest.

  Once I had the Ford truck, I’d driven straight to western Mass. to confront Hamilton and rescue Sophie.

  No, I didn’t know what happened to Shane that night, or how he came to be shot by Brian’s Glock.40. Though, if they’d retrieved the Glock.40 from the hit man’s house, didn’t that imply that Purcell had done the deed? Maybe someone viewed Shane as another loose end that needed to be wrapped up. Poor Shane. I hoped his wife and kids were doing okay.

  D.D. scowled at me. Bobby said nothing at all. We had something in common, he and I. He knew exactly what I’d done. And I think he accepted that a woman who’d already killed three people probably wasn’t going to magically crack and confess, even if his partner used her angry voice.

  I did shoot and kill Hamilton’s mistress, Bonita Marcoso. The woman had been assaulting my child. I had to use deadly force.

  As for the lieutenant colonel… In killing him, Bobby Dodge had saved my life, I informed D.D. And I wanted to go on record with that. If not for the actions of state detective Bobby Dodge, Sophie and I both would probably be dead.

  “Investigated and cleared,” Bobby informed me.

  “As it should be. Thank you.”

  He flushed a little, not liking the attention. Or maybe he simply didn’t want to be thanked for taking a life.

  I don’t think about it much myself. I don’t see the point.

  So there you have it, I wrapped up for D.D. My husband was not a wife beater or child abuser. Just a gambling addict who’d gotten in way over his head. And maybe I should’ve done more about that sooner. Cut him off. Kicked him out.

  I hadn’t known about the credit cards he’d opened in Sophie’s name. I hadn’t known about his skimming of union funds. There was a lot I hadn’t known, but that didn’t make me culpable. Just made me a typical wife, wishing fruitlessly that my husband would walk away from the card tables and come home to me and my child instead.

  “Sorry,” he’d told me, dying in our kitchen. “Tessa… love you more.”

  I dream of him, you know. Not something I can tell Detective Warren. But I dream of my husband, except this time he is Good Brian, and he is holding my hand in his and Sophie is riding ahead of us on her bike. We walk. We talk. We are happy.

  I wake up sobbing, which makes it just as well that I don’t sleep much anymore.

  Want to know how much the lieutenant colonel made in the end? According to D.D., internal affairs recovered one hundred thousand dollars in his account. Ironically, a mere fraction of what he would’ve received in legitimate retirement benefits if he
’d just done his job conscientiously, then taken up fishing in Florida.

  The lieutenant colonel had ordered my husband’s death, and lost money in the process.

  They hadn’t been able to recover the rest of the funds. No record in Shane’s accounts and no record in Brian’s. According to D.D., internal affairs believed that both men had gambled away their illicit gains at the casino, while Hamilton had saved his share of the scam. Ironically, their bad habit meant Shane and Brian would never be charged in the crime, while Hamilton and his girlfriend Bonita-who’d been positively ID’d as the female who’d closed out the shell company’s bank account-would posthumously shoulder the blame.

  Good news for Shane’s widow, I thought, and good news for me.

  I heard later that Shane was buried with full honors. The police determined that he must have agreed to meet with Purcell in the back alley. Purcell had overpowered him, then killed him, maybe to eliminate Shane, just as he’d eliminated Brian.

  Purcell’s murder remains open, I’ve been told, the weapon having yet to be recovered.

  As I explained to Detective D. D. Warren, I don’t know nothing about anything, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

  S ophie and I live together now in a two-bedroom apartment just down the street from Mrs. Ennis. We’ve never returned to the old house; I sold it in about three hours, because even if it was once a crime scene, it still has one of the largest yards in Boston.

  Sophie does not ask for Brian, nor speak of him. Nor does she talk about the kidnapping. I believe she feels she’s protecting me. What can I tell you-she’s a chip off the old block. She sees a specialist once a week. He advises me to be patient and so I am. I view my job now as building a safe place to land for when my daughter inevitably lets go.

  She will fall, and I will catch her. Gladly.

  I made Brian’s funeral arrangements alone. He’s buried with a simple granite marker bearing his name and relevant dates. And maybe it was weakness on my part, but given that he died for Sophie, that he knew, standing there in our kitchen, the decision I would have to make, I added one last word. The highest praise you can give a man. I had etched, under his name: Daddy.