by Lisa Gardner
“Can’t rule anything out,” D.D. said honestly.
“Then we’ll bring full gear. You said search area was probably within an hour drive of Boston?”
“Best guess.”
“Then I’ll bring my book of Mass. topographic maps. Topography is everything when working scents.”
“Okay,” D.D. said again.
“Is the ME or a forensic anthropologist gonna be on-site?”
“Why?”
“Sometimes the dogs hit on other remains. Good to have someone there who can make the call right away that it’s human.”
“These remains … less than forty-eight hours old,” D.D. said. “In below freezing conditions.”
A moment of silence. “Well, guess that rules out the anthropologist,” Murray said. “See you in ninety.”
Murray hung up. D.D. went to work on assembling the rest of the team.
28
Tuesday, twelve p.m. I stood shackled in the processing area of the Suffolk County Jail. No sheriff’s van parked in the garage this time. Instead, a Boston detective’s Crown Vic had rolled into the secured loading bay. Despite myself, I was impressed. I had assumed the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department would be in charge of transport. I wonder how many heads had rolled and markers had been called in to place me in Detective D. D. Warren’s custody.
She got out of the car first. Derisive glance flicked my way, then she approached the command center, handing over paperwork to the waiting COs. Detective Bobby Dodge had opened the passenger’s door. He came around the vehicle toward me, his face impossible to read. Still waters that ran deep.
No pedestrian clothes for my road trip. Instead, my previously issued pants and top had been replaced with the traditional orange prison jumpsuit, marking my status for the world to see. I’d asked for a coat, hat, and gloves. I’d been granted none of the above. Apparently, the sheriff’s department worried less about frostbite and more about escape. I would be shackled for the full length of my sojourn into society. I would also be under direct supervision of a law enforcement officer at all times.
I didn’t fight these conditions. I was tense enough as it was. Keyed up for the afternoon events to come, while simultaneously crashing from the morning’s misadventures. I kept my gaze forward and my head down.
The key to any strategy is not to overplay your hand.
Bobby arrived at my side. The female CO who’d been standing guard relinquished my arm. He seized it, leading me back to the Crown Vic.
D.D. had finished the paperwork. She arrived at the cruiser, staring at me balefully as Bobby opened the back door and I struggled to slide gracefully into the backseat with my hands and legs tied. I tilted back too far, got stuck like a beetle with its legs in the air. Bobby had to reach down, place one hand on my hip, and shove me over.
D.D. shook her head, then took her place behind the steering wheel.
Another minute and the massive garage door slowly creaked up. We backed up, onto the streets of Boston.
I turned my face to the gray March sky and blinked my eyes against the light.
Looks like snow, I thought, but didn’t say a word.
D.D. drove to the nearby hospital parking lot. There, a dozen other vehicles, from white SUVS to black-and-white police cruisers were waiting. She pulled in and they formed a line behind us. D.D. looked at me in the rearview mirror.
“Start talking,” she said.
“I’d like a coffee.”
“Fuck you.”
I smiled then, couldn’t help myself. I had become my husband, with a Good Tessa and a Bad Tessa. Good Tessa had saved Kim Watters’s life. Good Tessa had fought off evil attacking inmates and had felt, for just one moment, like a proud member of law enforcement.
Bad Tessa wore prison orange and sat in the back of a police cruiser. Bad Tessa … Well, for Bad Tessa, the day was very young.
“Search dogs?” I asked.
“Cadaver dogs,” D.D. emphasized.
I smiled again, but it was sad this time, and for a second, I felt my composure crack. A yawning emptiness bloomed inside. All the things I had lost. And more I could still lose.
All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.…
“You should’ve found her,” I murmured. “I was counting on you to find her.”
“Where?” D.D. snapped.
“Route two. Westbound, toward Lexington.”
D.D. drove.
We know about Trooper Lyons,” D.D. said curtly, talking from the front seat. We’d taken Route 2 past Arlington, exchanging urban jungle for suburban pipe dreams. Next up, the old money of Lexington and Concord, to be followed by the quaint, country charm of Harvard, Mass.
“What do you know?” I asked. I was genuinely curious.
“That he beat you up, in order to substantiate your claim of spousal abuse.”
“Have you ever hit a girl?” I asked Detective Dodge.
Bobby Dodge twisted in his seat. “Tell me about the hit man, Tessa. Find out how much I’m willing to believe.”
“Can’t.”
“Can’t?”
I leaned forward, best I could with my hands tied. “I’m going to kill him,” I said somberly. “And it’s not nice to speak ill of the dead.”
“Oh please,” D.D. interjected crossly. “You sound like a Looney Tune.”
“Well, I have taken some blows to the head.”
The eye roll again. “You’re no more crazy than I’m kindhearted,” D.D. snapped. “We know all about you, Tessa. The gambling-addicted husband who cleaned out your savings accounts. The horny teenage brother of your best friend, who figured he might get lucky one night. You seem to have a history of attracting the wrong men, then shooting them.”
I didn’t say anything. The good detective did have a way of cutting to the heart of the matter.
“But why your daughter?” she asked relentlessly. “Trust me, I don’t fault you for plugging Brian with three in the chest. But what the hell made you turn on your own kid?”
“What did Shane have to say?” I asked.
D.D. frowned at me. “You mean before or after your loser friend tried to deck me?”
I whistled low. “See, this is what happens. You hit your first woman, and it gets easier after that.”
“Were you and Brian arguing?” Bobby spoke up now. “Maybe the fight turned physical. Sophie got in the way.”
“I reported for duty Friday night,” I said, looking out the window. Fewer houses, more woods. We were getting close. “I haven’t seen my daughter alive since.”
“So Brian did it? Why not just blame him? Why cover it up, concoct such an elaborate story?”
“Shane didn’t believe me. If he couldn’t, then who would?”
Red-painted apple stand, off to the left. Empty now, but sold the best glasses of cider in the fall. We had come here just seven months ago, drinking apple cider, going on a hay ride, then visiting the pumpkin patch. Is that what had brought me back, Saturday afternoon when my heart had been pounding and the daylight fading and I had felt like a Looney Tune, crazed by grief and panic and sheer desperation? I’d had to move, fast, fast, fast. Less thinking. More doing.
Which had brought me here, to the place of our last family outing before Brian shipped out for the fall. One of my last happy memories.
Sophie had loved this apple stand. She’d consumed three cups of cider and then, hopped up on fermented sugar, had run laps in the pumpkin patch before picking out not one pumpkin, but three. A daddy pumpkin, a mommy pumpkin, and a girl pumpkin, she’d declared. A whole entire pumpkin family.
“Can we, Mommy? Can we can we can we? Please, please, please.”
“Sure, sweetheart, you’re absolutely right. It would be a shame to separate them. Let’s save the whole family.”
“Yippee! Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, we’re gonna buy a pumpkin family! Yippee!”
“Turn right up ahead,” I murmured.
“Right?” D.D. braked hard, made the turn.
>
“Quarter mile up, next left, onto a rural road.…”
“Three pumpkins?” Brian shaking his head at me. “Softy.”
“You bought her the donuts to go with the cider.”
“So three donuts equals three pumpkins?”
“Apparently.”
“Okay, but dibs on carving the daddy pumpkin …”
“The tree! Turn here. Left, left. Now, thirty yards, road on the right.”
“Sure you couldn’t have drawn a map?” D.D. scowled at me.
“I’m sure.”
D.D. turned right onto the smaller, rural road, tires spinning on the hardpacked snow. Behind us, one, two, three, four cars labored to follow suit, then a couple of white SUVs, then the line of police cruisers.
Definitely going to snow, I decided.
But I didn’t mind anymore. Civilization was long gone. This was the land of skeletal trees, frozen ponds, and white barren fields. The kind of place lots of things could happen before the general population noticed. The kind of place a desperate woman might use for her last stand.
Bad Tessa, rising.
“We’re here,” I said.
And Detective D. D. Warren, heaven help her, pulled over.
“Get out,” she said crossly.
I smiled. I couldn’t help myself. I looked the fine detective in the eye and I said, “Words I’ve been waiting to hear all day.”
29
I don’t want her walking the woods!” D.D. was arguing with Bobby ten minutes later, off to one side of the stacked-up vehicles. “Her job was to get us here. Now her job is done, and our job is beginning.”
“The canine team wants her help,” Bobby countered. “There’s no wind, meaning it’ll be hard for the dogs to catch the open cone of the scent.”
D.D. stared at him blankly.
“Scent,” he tried again, forming a triangular shape with his hands, “radiates from the target in the shape of an expanding cone. For the dog to catch the scent, it has to be downwind, in the opening of the cone, or the dog can be two feet from the target and still miss it.”
“When did you learn about dogs?” D.D. demanded.
“Thirty seconds ago, when I asked Nelson and Cassondra what they needed us to do. They’re concerned about the conditions. Terrain’s flat, which I guess is good, but it’s open, which is more complicated—”
“Why?”
“Scent pools when it hits a barrier. So if this were a fenced-in field or brush-lined canyon, they’d start at the edges. But no fence or brush. Just big open … this …”
Bobby waved his hand around them. D.D. sighed heavily.
Tessa Leoni had brought them to one of the few half-forested, half-fielded, all-in-the-middle-of-nowhere places left in Massachusetts. Given Sunday night’s fresh snowfall, the fields were a flat white expanse of sheer nothingness—no footprints, no tire tracks, no drag marks, interspersed with dark patches of skeletal trees and shaggy bushes.
They were lucky they’d been able to drive in, and D.D. still wasn’t sure they’d be able to get back out. Snowshoes would be a good idea. A vacation even better.
“Dogs are gonna tire faster,” Bobby was saying, “trudging through fresh snowfall. So the team wants to start with the smallest search area possible. Which means having Tessa get us as close to the target as possible.”
“Maybe she can point us in the right direction,” D.D. muttered.
Bobby rolled his eyes. “Tessa’s shackled and trying to walk through four inches of powder. Woman’s not running away any time soon.”
“She doesn’t have a jacket.”
“I’m sure someone has a spare.”
“She’s playing us,” D.D. said abruptly.
“I know.”
“Notice how she answered none of our questions.”
“I noticed.”
“While doing her best to milk us for information.”
“Yep.”
“Did you hear what she did to the male inmate who attacked the CO? She didn’t just take him out. She drove a shank into his thigh and twisted it. Twice. That’s a little beyond professional training. That’s personal satisfaction.”
“She seems … edgy,” Bobby agreed. “I’m thinking life hasn’t gone too well for her the past few days.”
“And yet here we are,” D.D. said, “dancing to the beat of her different drummer. I don’t like it.”
Bobby thought about it. “Maybe you should stay in the car,” he said at last. “Just to be safe …”
D.D. fisted her hands to keep from hitting him. Then she sighed and rubbed her forehead. She hadn’t slept last night, hadn’t eaten this morning. Meaning she’d been tired and cranky even before receiving the news that Tessa Leoni was willing to take them to her daughter’s body.
D.D. didn’t want to be here. She didn’t want to be trudging through snow. She didn’t want to come to a faint mound and brush it back to find the frozen features of a six-year-old girl. Would it look like Sophie was sleeping? Wrapped up in her pink winter coat, clutching her favorite doll?
Or would there be bullet holes, red droplets giving testimony to a last moment filled with violence?
D.D. was a professional who didn’t feel professional anymore. She wanted to crawl into the backseat and wrap her hands around Tessa Leoni’s throat. She wanted to squeeze and shake and scream, How could you do such a thing! To the little girl who loved you!
D.D. probably should stay behind. Which meant, of course, that she wouldn’t.
“The SAR team is requesting further assistance,” Bobby was stating quietly. “We have four hours of daylight left, in less than ideal conditions. Dogs can only walk so fast. Same with the handlers. What do you suggest?”
“Shit,” D.D. murmured.
“My thoughts exactly.”
“Any funny business, I’m going to have to kill her,” D.D. said after another moment.
Bobby shrugged. “Don’t think too many people out here will argue with that.”
“Bobby … if we find the body … If I can’t handle it …”
“I’ll cover for you,” he said quietly.
She nodded. Tried to thank him, but her throat had grown too tight. She nodded again. He clasped her shoulder with his hand.
Then they returned to Tessa Leoni.
———
Tessa had left the Crown Vic. No coat, shackled at the wrists and ankles, she’d still managed to make it over to one of the SAR trucks, where she was watching Nelson unload his canines.
First two pet carriers contained smaller dogs, who were twirling in excited circles while barking maniacally.
“Those are search dogs?” Tessa was asking skeptically, as Bobby and D.D. approached.
“Nope,” Nelson said, opening a third, much larger carrier to reveal a German shepherd. “Those are the reward.”
“What?”
Having released the German shepherd, who loped around him in a tight circle, Nelson bent down to open the other two carriers. The smaller, shaggier dogs were out like twin shots, leaping at the German shepherd, Nelson, Tessa, Bobby, D.D., and everyone else in a twenty foot square radius.
“Meet Kelli and Skyler,” Nelson drawled. “Soft Coated Wheaten Terriers. Definitely smart as whips, but a little high strung for SAR work. On the other hand, Quizo thinks they’re the best playmates in the whole world, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t choose them for his reward.”
“He doesn’t eat them, does he?” Tessa asked skeptically. She appeared as a stain of orange against bright white snow, shivering from the cold.
Nelson was grinning at her, obviously amused by her statement. If talking to a murder suspect bothered him, D.D. thought, he didn’t show it. “Most important part of training a dog,” he said now, unloading more supplies from the back of his covered truck bed, “is learning the dog’s motivation. Each pup is different. Some want food. Some affection. Most hone in on a particular toy that becomes the toy. As a handler, you gotta pick up on those signals.
When you finally figure out what the reward is, the single item that truly motivates your dog, that’s when the serious training begins.
“Now, Quizo, here”—he gave the shepherd a quick pat on the head—“was a tough nut to crack. Smartest damn dog I ever saw, but only when he felt like it. ’Course, that doesn’t work. I need a dog who searches on command, not when he’s in the mood. Then one day, these two”—he flicked a hand toward the bouncing, barking terriers—“showed up. Had a friend who couldn’t keep ’em anymore. Said I’d help out for a bit, till he could make better arrangements. Well, damned if it wasn’t love at first sight. Miss Kelli and Mr. Skyler ran all over Quizo like twin rugrats and he chased them right back. Which got me to thinking. Maybe playtime with his best buds could be a reward. Tried it out a few times, and bingo. Turns out, Quizo is a bit of a show-off. He doesn’t mind working, he just wants the right audience.
“Now when we arrive on-scene, I bring all three. I’m giving Quizo a moment here to interact with his buds, know they’re on-site. Then Kelli and Skyler will have to be put away—or they’ll be underfoot the entire time, let me tell you—and I’ll give Quizo the command to work. He’ll get right to it, as he understands the sooner he’s completed his mission, the sooner he gets to return to his friends.”
Nelson looked up, regarded Tessa squarely in the eye. “Skyler and Kelli will also help cheer him up,” the canine handler said levelly. “Even SAR dogs don’t like finding bodies. Depresses ’em, making it doubly important for Skyler and Kelli to be here today.”
Was it D.D.’s imagination, or did Tessa finally flinch? Maybe a heart still beat under that façade after all.
D.D. stepped forward, Bobby beside her. She addressed Nelson first. “How much more time do you need?”
He glanced at his dogs, then the rest of the SAR team, unloading in the vehicles strung out behind his. “Fifteen more minutes.”
“Anything more you need from us?” D.D. asked.
Nelson cracked a thin smile. “An X to mark the spot?”
“How do you know when the dogs have found it, made a hit?” D.D. asked curiously. “Quizo will bark … louder?”
