by Lisa Gardner
“We’ll be in touch.”
“Sure,” I said without a trace of conviction.
She looked at me sharply. “And Annabelle—”
I shook my head immediately. “Tanya. I go by Tanya Nelson; it’s safer.”
Another raised brow. “And Tanya, if you remember anything more about the locket, or the days before you left town…”
I had to smile again. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “I learned how to run away with the best of them.”
I exited the glass doors into the brisk fall air and started my journey home.
BOBBY WOULD LIKE to believe he’d been asked to help with the Boston State Mental Hospital investigation because of his natural brilliance and solid work ethic. He’d even settle for being welcomed aboard for his good looks and charming smile. But he knew the truth: D.D. needed him. He was the trump card she had tucked away in her back pocket. D.D. had always been good at looking ahead.
Not that he was complaining. Being the only state detective on a city team was awkward at best, filled with daily shots of resentment at worst. But such arrangements had precedent. D.D. declared him a source of “local knowledge” and, voilà, hijacked him for her purposes. The fact that he was new and not embroiled in any major state investigations made the transition swift and relatively painless. One day he’d reported to the state offices, the next he was working out of a teeny tiny interrogation room in Roxbury, Mass. Such was the glamorous life of a detective.
From his perspective, it was a no-brainer: serving on a high-profile task force would add heft to his file. And having entered that underground chamber, having seen those six girls…It wasn’t the kind of thing a cop walked away from. Better to work it than to just dream about it night after night.
Most of the other detectives seemed to feel the same. The case wasn’t lacking for overtime hours. Bobby’d been at the BPD headquarters for nearly two days now. If people disappeared, it was simply to shower and shave. Food consisted of pickup pizza or take-out Chinese, consumed mostly at one’s desk, or perhaps in a task-force meeting.
Not that real life magically went away. Detectives still had to attend to previously scheduled grand jury hearings, sudden developments in a current case. The arrival of an informant. The murder of a key witness. Other cases didn’t stop just because a new and more shocking murder leapt into the fray.
Then there was family life. Last-minute calls to apologize for missing Junior’s soccer game. Guys disappearing into interrogation rooms at eight p.m., trying to find a little privacy for the good-night phone call that would have to do in lieu of a kiss. Detective Roger Sinkus had a two-week-old baby. Detective Tony Rock’s mother was in the intensive care unit, dying of heart failure.
High-profile homicide investigations were a dance, a complex work flow of officers fading in and out, of attending to critical tasks, of abandoning any others. Of single guys like Bobby staying until three a.m., so a new father like Roger could go home at one. Of everyone trying to push one case forward. Of no one getting what they needed.
And at the top of it all sat D.D. Warren. First big case for the newly minted sergeant. Bobby had a tendency to be cynical about these things, but even he was currently impressed.
For starters, she had managed to keep one of the most sensational crime scenes in Boston history under wraps for nearly forty-eight hours. No leaks from the BPD. No leaks from the OCME’s office. No leaks from the DA. It was a miracle.
Second, while operating under the full onslaught of a dozen major TV personalities screaming for more information, ranting about the public’s right to know, and alternately accusing the Boston police of covering up a major threat to public safety, she’d still managed to organize and launch a half-decent investigation.
First step in any homicide case, establish a time line. Unfortunately for the task force, a time line was usually generated by the victimology report, which included an estimated time of death. Forensic anthropology wasn’t exactly an overnight kind of analysis, however. Plus, in Boston, the forensic anthropologist’s position wasn’t a full-time one, meaning one half-time expert, Christie Callahan, was now trying to handle six remains. Then you had the mummified condition of such remains, which no doubt demanded a whole slew of painstaking, methodical, and frighteningly expensive tests. All in all, they’d probably have the victimology report about the same time Detective Sinkus’s new baby hit college.
D.D. had brought in a botanist from the Audubon Society to help them out. He’d studied the woodland brush, grass, and saplings that had taken root above the subterranean chamber. Best guess—thirty years’ worth of overgrowth, give or take a decade.
Not the most precise time line in the world, but it got them started.
One three-person detective squad was now creating a list of missing Massachusetts girls, going back to 1965. Since records were only computerized from 1997 on, that meant manually skimming massive printouts of every single missing person from ’65 to ’97, identifying which of the cases were still unsolved and involved a female minor, then record those case-file numbers to be looked up separately on microfiche. Currently, the squad completed six years of missing persons every twenty-four hours. They were also consuming approximately one gallon of coffee every ninety minutes.
Of course, the Crime Stoppers hotline was also going insane. The public only knew that the remains of six females had been found on the site of the former Boston State Mental Hospital, and the scene appeared to be dated. That was still enough to have the crackpots out in force. Reports of strange nighttime lights coming from the property. Rumors of a satanic cult in Mattapan. Two callers claimed to have been abducted by UFOs and had seen all six girls aboard the ship. (Really, what did they look like? What were they wearing? Did they give you their names?) Those callers had a tendency to hang up quick.
Other calls were more intriguing: girlfriends ratting out ex-boyfriends who had bragged of doing “something awful” at the former hospital site. Others were simply heartbreaking: parents, from all over the country, calling in to ask if the remains might be those of their missing child.
Every call generated a report, every report had to be followed up by a detective, including the monthly call from a woman in California who insisted that her ex-husband was the real Boston Strangler, mostly because she’d never liked him. It was taking five detectives to handle the load.
Which left D.D.’s squad, plus Bobby, with miscellaneous management tasks. Determining a list of “interview subjects” based on the various real estate developers and community projects active at the site. Trying to get a list of patients and administrators from a mental hospital that had shut down thirty years ago. Entering the crime-scene elements into VICAP, given the uniqueness of the subterranean pit.
Following up the resulting hit—Richard Umbrio—had become Bobby’s project. He had pulled the microfiche of the original case file, including a decent collection of photos. He’d also put in a call to the lead detective, Franklin Miers, who’d retired to Fort Lauderdale eight years ago.
Now Bobby was sitting in the tiny interrogation room that served as his temporary office, studying a hand-sketched diagram of the pit that had once held twelve-year-old Catherine Gagnon.
According to Miers’s notes, Catherine had been abducted while walking home from school. Umbrio had come upon Catherine when driving around the neighborhood and asked if she would help him look for a lost dog. She took the bait and that was that.
A hulking bear of a man even at the age of nineteen, Umbrio had no problem subduing the slightly built sixth-grader. He whisked her away to an underground chamber he had prepared in the woods, and that’s when Catherine’s real ordeal began. Nearly thirty days in an underground pit, where her only visitor was a rapist with a penchant for Wonder bread.
If hunters hadn’t stumbled upon the pit, most likely Umbrio would’ve eventually killed her. Instead, Catherine survived, identified her attacker, and testified against him. Umbrio was whisked away to pris
on. Catherine was left to rebuild her life, the so-called Thanksgiving Miracle whose adult life wasn’t so miraculous after all. Being held by a monster had definitely left its mark.
Miers’s notes described a case that was shocking, but routine. Catherine was a credible witness, and evidence found in the pit—a metal chain-link ladder, a plastic bucket, the plywood cover—bore out her story.
Umbrio did it. Umbrio went to prison. And two years ago, when Umbrio was mistakenly paroled from prison, he returned to stalking Catherine with the same homicidal zeal he had shown prior to his arrest.
In short, Umbrio was a murderous, monstrous freak of nature, quite capable of killing six girls and interring their bodies on the grounds of an abandoned mental institute.
Except Umbrio was safe behind bars by the end of 1980. And according to Annabelle Granger, she didn’t receive the locket found on Unidentified Mummified Remains #1 until 1982. Which meant…?
Forty-eight hours into a critical investigation, Bobby didn’t have any answers, but he was developing a fascinating list of questions.
D.D. finally returned from escorting Annabelle out of the building. She yanked out a chair and plopped down like a puppet whose strings had just been cut. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she said.
“Funny, I was thinking the exact same thing.”
She ran a hand through her tangled hair. “I gotta get a cup of coffee. No, wait, I drink any more java, I’m gonna start pissing Colombians. I need something to eat. A sandwich. Rare roast beef on rye. With Swiss cheese and one of those really big, no-messing-around dill pickles. And a bag of potato chips.”
“You’ve given this some thought.” Bobby set down the diagram. D.D. might look like a supermodel, but she ate like a trucker. When she and Bobby had been dating—back in their rookie days, ten years and God knows how many major career moves ago—Bobby had learned quickly that D.D.’s idea of foreplay generally included an all-you-can-eat buffet.
He felt that little pang again, a longing for good old days that had only become good by virtue of distant memory and encroaching loneliness.
“Lunch is the only thing I have to look forward to today,” D.D. said.
“Too bad. Your chance of getting a decent roast beef sandwich around here is about one in ten.”
“I know. Even lunch is a goddamn pipe dream.”
Her shoulders sagged. Bobby let her have a moment. Truth was, he was reeling a bit himself. As of this morning, he’d managed to convince himself that any resemblance between the mental hospital site and Richard Umbrio’s work was mere happenstance. Then Annabelle Granger. In D.D.’s words, Jesus fucking Christ.
“Are you going to make me say it?” she asked at last.
“Yep.”
“It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Yep.”
“I mean, okay, there’s a resemblance. Lots of people look alike. Don’t they say every person in the world has an unknown twin?”
Bobby just stared at her.
She exhaled heavily, then sat herself up, leaning into the table, her favorite thinking pose: “Let’s go through it from the top.”
“I’m game.”
“Richard Umbrio used an underground pit; our subject used an underground pit,” D.D. started off.
“Umbrio’s pit was four by six, and by all appearances, a manually enlarged sinkhole,” Bobby supplied, gesturing to the diagram decorating the top of the table. “Our subject used a six-by-ten chamber, complete with wooden reinforcements.”
“So, same but different.”
“Same but different,” Bobby concurred.
“Except for the ‘supplies’—the ladder, plywood cover, plastic five-gallon bucket.”
“Exactly the same,” Bobby agreed.
She puffed out a breath, swishing up her bangs. “Maybe the logical provisions for an underground chamber?”
“Possible.”
“Now, the metal folding chair and shelves…”
“Different.”
“More sophisticated,” D.D. amended out loud. “Bigger chamber, more furniture.”
“Which brings us to the next key difference…”
“Richard Umbrio kidnapped one known victim, twelve-year-old Catherine Gagnon. Our subject kidnapped six victims, all young females.”
“Need more information for proper analysis,” Bobby said immediately. “One, we don’t know if the six victims were abducted at once—which is somewhat doubtful—or individually over a span of time. Are the girls related? Family members, religious affiliation, daddies all worked for the Mafia? Did their time in the chamber overlap? Or were they even kept alive down there? That’s an assumption we’re making based on the Catherine Gagnon case. But maybe the space only operated as a burial chamber. A place where the subject could come…be with them. A viewing gallery. We don’t know yet what floated this guy’s boat. We can guess, but we don’t know.”
D.D. nodded slowly. “Except, then you have Annabelle Granger.”
“Yeah, well, except.”
“My God, she looks exactly like her. I’m not crazy, right? Annabelle could be Catherine Gagnon’s twin.”
“She could be Catherine’s twin.”
“And what are the chances of that? Two women who look so much alike, growing up in the same city, both becoming targets of madmen who favor kidnapping young girls and sticking them in underground pits.”
“This is where we make the left turn into the Twilight Zone,” Bobby agreed.
D.D. sat back. Her stomach growled. She rubbed it absently. “What do you think of her story?”
Bobby sighed, sat back himself, clasping his hands behind his head. His favorite thinking pose. “Can’t decide.”
“Seems pretty far-fetched.”
“But richly detailed.”
D.D. snorted. “She flubbed half the details.”
“All the more realistic,” Bobby countered. “You wouldn’t expect a perfect list of dates and names from someone who’d been just a kid.”
“Think the father knew something?”
“You mean, did he sense his daughter had been targeted somehow and that’s why they fled?” Bobby shrugged. “Don’t know, but this is where life gets tricky: If something was going on in Arlington in the fall of ’82, it definitely wasn’t Richard Umbrio. He was arrested without bail at the end of ’80, tried in ’81, and began his stint at Walpole by January ’82. Meaning the threat would have to be from elsewhere.”
“Troubling. Any chance Catherine was wrong about Umbrio? It was someone else who grabbed her? I mean, yeah, she ID’d him, but she was only a twelve-year-old kid.”
“Subsequent events would appear to rule that out, let alone the corresponding pile of physical evidence.”
“Bummer.”
Bobby shook his head, equally frustrated. “It’s hard without the father to interview,” he said abruptly. “Annabelle just can’t—or won’t—tell us enough.”
“Rather convenient that both parents are dead,” D.D. muttered darkly. She slanted him a look. “ ’Course, we could ask Umbrio, but conveniently enough, he’s dead, too.”
Bobby knew better than to take that bait. “I’m sure Annabelle Granger doesn’t find it so convenient that her parents are deceased. Sounded to me as if she wouldn’t mind questioning her father some more herself.”
“You got the list of cities and aliases?” D.D. asked abruptly. “Look ’em up. See what you can find. It’s a good detective exercise.”
“Gee, thanks, Teach.”
D.D. rose out of her chair, their little conference apparently over. At the doorway, however, she paused.
“Have you heard from her yet?”
No need to define who. “No.”
“Think she’ll call?”
“As long as we keep calling the scene a grave, probably not. But the minute the media finally figures out it was an underground chamber…”
D.D. nodded. “You’ll let me know.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
&
nbsp; “Robert Dodge—”
“You want an official phone call with Catherine Gagnon, you pick up the phone. I’m not your lackey.”
His tone was level, but his gaze was hard. D.D. took the rebuke about as gracefully as he’d expected. She stiffened in the doorway, features frosting over.
“I never had a problem with the shooting, Bobby,” she said curtly. “Myself, a lot of officers out there, we respected that you did your job, and we understood that sometimes this job really sucks. It’s not the shooting, Bobby. It’s your attitude since then.”
Her knuckles rapped the doorjamb. “Police work is about trust. You’re either in or out. Think about that, Bobby.”
She gave him one last pointed look, then she was gone.
I FELL IN love with a coffee mug when I was nine years old. It was sold in the little convenience store next to my elementary school where I sometimes used my milk money to buy candy after class. The mug was pink, hand-painted with flowers, butterflies, and a little orange-striped kitten. It came in a variety of names. I wanted Annabelle.
The mug cost $3.99, roughly two weeks’ worth of chocolate/milk money. I never questioned the sacrifice.
I had to wait another agonizing week, until a Thursday when my mother announced she had errands to run and might be late picking me up. I spent the day jittery, barely able to focus, a warrior about to launch her first mission.
Two thirty-five the school bell rang. Kids who didn’t ride the bus congregated at the front of the brick building, like clusters of flowers. I’d been at this school six months. I didn’t belong to any of the groups, so no one cared when I slipped away. Those were the days before you had to sign kids in and out. Before parent volunteers stood guard after hours. Before Amber Alerts. In those days, only my father seemed obsessed with all the things that could happen to a little girl.
In the store, I picked out the mug carefully. Carried it all the way to the register using two hands. I counted out $3.99 in quarters, fingers fumbling the coins with my urgency.
