by Lisa Gardner
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 head.
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. Once 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.
Detective Rock sat down. Detective Sinkus took the floor.
“So, uh, I thought I should have a handout. But when I looked at everything I had to share, it was fifty pages of names, and I thought, hell, no one here has time to read fifty pages of names, so I didn’t bother.”
“Thank God,” someone said.
“Appreciate it,” another detective commented.
The deputy superintendent cleared his throat in the corner. They immediately shut up.
Sinkus shrugged. “Look, my job’s to assemble a preliminary list of interview subjects. We’re talking contractors, neighbors, former lunatic-asylum workers, and known offenders in the area, going back thirty years. List? It’s a goddamn phone book. Not saying we can’t work it”—he glanced hastily at the deputy superintendent—“I’m just saying we’d have to quadruple the Boston police force to make a dent in this sucker. Basically, without more information to narrow down the suspect pool, like, say, a definitive time line, I don’t think the current task is manageable. Honest to God, this is one area where we need the victimology report.”
“Well, we don’t have it,” D.D. said flatly, “so try again.”
“Knew you’d say that,” Sinkus mumbled with a sigh. He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Okay, so I had an idea.”
“Spit it out.”
“I got an appointment tomorrow to interview George Robbards, former clerk at the Mattapan station. He processed all the incident reports from ’72 to ’98. I figure if there’s anyone who might have a bead on the area—and probably a good recollection of what activities, or what people, cops were talking about, even if they didn’t have enough to file on—it would be him.”
D.D. was actually stunned into silence. “Well, hell, Roger, that’s a brilliant idea.”
He smiled sheepishly, hands still in his pockets. “Honestly, it was my wife’s. Good news about having a newborn, my wife’s always awake now when I go home, so what the hell, we talk. She remembered me saying once that the clerks are the real brains of any police station. We all come and go. The clerks stay forever.”
That was true. A cop spent maybe three or four years at a single station. The police clerks, on the other hand, might serve for decades.
“Okay,” D.D. said briskly. “I like it. Those are the kinds of ideas we need. In fact, I’ll even forgive your lack of paperwork right now, as long as you deliver a transcript of tomorrow’s interview the second it’s completed. I’ve heard good things about Robbards. And given that six bodies in one location implies a subject who operated in the area for years, yeah, I’d like to hear Robbards’s thoughts. Interesting.”
&nbs
p; D.D. picked up her copies of the reports. Pounded them into a neat pile.
“Okay, people. So this is where we’re at: We’re manning a machine-gun investigation, spraying the area with bullets and hoping like hell we’ll hit something. I know it’s tiring, it’s messy, it’s painful, but this is why we get paid the big bucks. Now, we have”—she glanced at her watch again—“seven hours and counting. So go forth, discover something brilliant, and report back by oh-seven-hundred. First person who tells me something we can use in the press briefing gets to go home to sleep.”
She started to push back from the table, half rising out of her chair. But then, at the last moment, she paused, regarded them more gravely.
“We all saw those girls,” she said gruffly. “What happened to them…” She shook her head, unable to continue, and around the table, guys looked away uncomfortably. Homicide detectives saw a lot of shit, but the cases that involved children always touched a nerve.
D.D. cleared her throat. “I want to send them home. It’s been thirty years. That’s too long. That’s…too sad for all of us. So let’s do this, okay? I know everyone’s tired, everyone’s stressed. But we gotta push ahead. We’re gonna make this happen. We’re gonna get these girls home to their families. And then we’re gonna stalk the son of a bitch who did this to the bitter ends of the earth, and nail his ass to the floor. Sound like a plan? I thought as much.”
D.D. pushed away from the table, strode for the door.
A full minute passed in silence. Then one by one the detectives headed back to work.
BOBBY CAUGHT D.D. in her office. She was hunched over her computer screen, skimming a list of names with a pencil clenched in her fist. She was flying down the list so fast, Bobby wasn’t sure she could honestly be reading anything. Maybe she just wanted to look busy, in case someone, such as him, wandered by.
