Catch Me

by Lisa Gardner

“Do you want to understand?”

  “Why do you keep asking me questions like that!”

  “Because from the first moment I arrived at the hospital, that’s what the doctors advised me to do. I was not to tell you what happened, but to give you love and support until one day, when you felt safe enough, you would remember on your own.

  “I’ve waited twenty years, Charlene, never knowing if this might be the week you’d suddenly bring it up or, worse, if this might be the day she would magically show up. It’s been a lonely vigil. Stressful, too. But I did it, because that’s what the doctor said. And I don’t have kids, Charlie. I don’t know what’s right or what’s wrong for an eight-year-old girl. The only attempt I had at child rearing was the years I spent trying to rein in my baby sister, and we both know how well that went.” My aunt’s voice broke off, the first tinge of bitterness I’d ever heard from her. Then I noticed a sheen in her eyes that had nothing to do with the lighting.

  I’d hurt her. I’d made my aunt cry.

  Immediately, I wanted to take it all back. I was sorry I’d brought up my mother. I was sorry I’d left New Hampshire. I’d do anything, say anything, return home. I just wanted my aunt to be happy. She was all I had, and I loved her.

  And in the next second, I realized how warped that was. How quickly I’d fallen back into the trap—appeasement at all costs. Loving too little and holding on too tight.

  Worst part was, my aunt didn’t even expect me to appease her. She simply sat there, shoulders squared, jaw set, awaiting my next question.

  “If my mother’s alive,” I ventured, “why hasn’t she ever contacted me?”

  “I don’t know.” She hesitated. “I always figured she would. If not in person, then by mail. Then later, when all this Internet and e-mail and Facebook nonsense started, I worried about that, too. But nothing that I’ve ever seen, or you’ve ever said.”

  “Nothing, not a single word from her,” I agreed, and took a moment to digest that.

  “Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant,” my aunt said again.

  “Did I hurt her?” I asked, and my fingers were unconsciously moving across my left side, the top of my thigh, the back of my hand. I couldn’t help myself.

  “We don’t know. When the EMTs arrived, they found you on the floor, seriously injured. In fact, they assumed you were dead.” My aunt spoke the words flatly, having obviously spent the past twenty years turning them over in her head. “There was no sign of your mother in the house.”

  “She ran away?”

  “The police put out an APB for her. Especially…after the other discoveries they made.” She paused, stared at me again. When I didn’t respond…“To date, they’ve never found her, and I would know if they did. There are charges pending against your mother, Charlene. Serious criminal charges. Which may be why she’s never appeared in person. I’m sure she knows I’d toss her sorry ass in jail the second she did.”

  I blinked, caught off guard by the vehemence in my aunt’s voice. It occurred to me that I’d spent most of my life fearing that one day I might turn into my crazy mother. Hence the need to forget, avoid, fail to confront. If I didn’t remember, I couldn’t feel. If I couldn’t feel, I couldn’t lose my mind. Now I wondered if perhaps I didn’t carry a trace of my resilient aunt. A woman who looked, who saw, who endured. A survivor.

  Given the date, I would like to be a survivor.

  “Do you remember getting your driver’s license?” my aunt asked suddenly.

  I was startled by the change in topic, nodding faintly.

  “You wanted your license to read Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant. And when you were told it couldn’t be done, you became upset.”

  “I thought it was stupid you could list only one middle name. That if it was supposed to be legal ID, it should carry my full legal name.”

  “No,” my aunt said.

  I frowned, stared at the floor. And I remembered suddenly, being at the DMV in Tamworth, where you had to go in person to get your first license. It should’ve been fun and exciting for a teenager, except I was red-faced, sweating, nearly panting from a pressure I couldn’t explain. My aunt was talking to me, murmuring something low and calm except I couldn’t hear her. My head was on fire, my skull threatening to explode into a thousand bits. I was going to cry, I was going to scream. I mustn’t cry, I mustn’t scream, so I fisted my hands into my eye sockets to hold in the pain. Then, when that didn’t work, I walked over to a wall and beat my head against it, as if that external force would drive out the internal agony. I pounded my forehead hard enough that two uniformed state troopers came running out with their hands on their holstered weapons.

  Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant. My driver’s license needed to read Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant. It hurt too much to have it any other way. To be anyone else.

  “I got sick,” I whispered. “I had to leave.”

  “I finally got you to the car,” my aunt filled in. “I drove you home, I put you to bed. Then I stayed awake all night, waiting for you to come back down, waiting for you to talk to me, to tell me what you remembered. But you didn’t. At seven A.M., you appeared in the kitchen and informed me that if you couldn’t have both names on your license, then you would accept Charlene Grant. You never spoke of it again.”

  “My headache went away,” I said simply. “I woke up.…It was just a driver’s license, I decided. Not my name. So it didn’t matter. I could…It would be okay.”

  My aunt smiled at me, but the expression was sad. She reached out, touching the back of my hand, where the thin white scars threaded through fresh purple bruises.

  “You’re a strong girl, Charlene. If you need to forget the past in order to find your future, I haven’t felt it was my place to mess with that. In fact, the doctor told me that forcing you to face things before you were ready would most likely do more harm than good. So I’ve held my council. I’ve kept my vigil. And I’d do it all over again, Charlene. Because I was not there when you needed me, and I’ll never forgive myself for that. But that’s my burden to bear, not yours.”

  “My legal name isn’t Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant,” I heard myself say.

  “That isn’t the name on your birth certificate.”

  “That’s why, at the DMV…It had nothing to do with middle names. It was the birth certificate. You showed it to me, and I became angry. Because there was no Rosalind, no Carter. And my head began to hurt. And my stomach…”

  My aunt didn’t say anything.

  “But I am Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant,” I tried again, weakly this time, lacking genuine conviction. “I…I feel it.”

  “It’s the name you chose for yourself. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  Then it came to me, the list I’d made for Detective Warren. The two names I’d felt compelled to record: Rosalind Grant, Carter Grant. Because it had felt right to write them down. To see them listed on a sheet of paper in a detective’s office.

  To finally get out what I had failed to tell the nurse.

  I looked at my aunt. And I felt the trapdoor suddenly yawn open in the deepest corner of my mind. There was darkness behind it. Ghosts and monsters and things that would make anyone scream in the middle of the night.

  Yet I took a step closer. Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant. Rosalind Grant. Carter Grant.

  “Baby crying,” I whispered.

  “I’m sorry, Charlene.”

  “I wanted to tell the nurse. I didn’t tell the nurse.”

  Another step. The floorboards of my mind, creaking in warning.

  “I was too young. I swear it. I was too young.”

  “Shhh.” My aunt was standing, her arms reaching toward my shoulders. At her feet, Tulip whined, rose to sitting. “It’s okay, Charlene. It wasn’t your fault. It was never your fault.”

  “I was just a kid myself!”

  “I know, honey, I know.”

  “Baby crying!” Except she wasn’t anymore. She was pale and still as marble. Blue-lipped as I strok
ed her cold cheek, tried to get her eyes to open, tried to make her flash that wide, beaming grin.

  Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant. Rosalind Grant. Carter Grant.

  My aunt’s arms were around my shoulders. Maybe her hands were even upon my throat. It didn’t matter anymore. I sagged into my aunt’s embrace. Dying wasn’t my greatest fear anymore. Remembering was.

  Baby crying, down the hall.

  First a little girl. Rosalind Grant.

  Then, later, a little boy. Carter Grant.

  Then…

  Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant.

  “Shhh,” my aunt murmured. “If I’d known, I would’ve come. Please believe me, Charlene. If I’d known, I would’ve come and taken all of you away.”

  Chapter 28

  “WE SHOULD ARREST HER. Immediately. Girl’s already squirrelly. If she figures out how close we are to identifying her as the shooter, she’ll bolt in a second.”

  D.D. sighed. She rubbed a throbbing spot on the back of her neck that had less to do with Detective O’s investigative zeal and more to do with the hours of sleep she didn’t get, followed by a breakfast with her parents she never should’ve scheduled. But other than that…

  She picked up her fourth cup of black coffee, eyed the way her hand performed the over-caffeinated mambo, and took a sip. “On what grounds?” she quizzed her eager young colleague.

  Phil nodded with equal skepticism. He sat beside Neil, the whole team assembled to debrief from last night’s shooting and this morning’s ongoing discoveries. Murder investigations had a tendency to ebb and flow. This one was currently flowing. Hell, it was nearing flood stage.

  “Charlene Grant matches the description of the shooter,” O stated.

  Phil was already shaking his head. “At best, gives us grounds to bring her in for a lineup. But we can’t go around arresting all the females in Boston who have brown hair and blue eyes.”

  “She owns a twenty-two, same caliber as the murder weapon.”

  “As do thousands of people, probably in just this city block.”

  “Handwriting analysis,” O snapped, glancing at D.D. “Especially given the note within the note.”

  D.D. shrugged. “I dropped off Charlie’s handwritten list of two names plus the three crime scene notes with Ray Dembowski. He’s going to test the notes from the first two shootings this afternoon to see if they have the same hidden message, Catch Me. Then, he’ll analyze the lemon juice scrawl versus the ink script to determine if the same person wrote both messages on the sheets of paper. Finally, he’ll analyze the handwriting of both messages against Charlie’s list. But it’ll be at least Monday before he has a formal report for us, and he’s already complaining about feeling rushed.”

  “Motive, means, opportunity!” Detective O threw her hands up in the air. “Come on, I can’t be the only one who thinks Charlie’s guilty!”

  O had exchanged last night’s little black dress for a more sedate light blue Brooks Brothers button-up shirt. It was expertly tailored, perfect for the up-and-coming young detective. Would also look good on TV, D.D. thought, should camera crews catch her making a major arrest.

  “It’s not a matter of what we think,” D.D. said, less patient, more curt. “It’s a matter of what we can prove.”

  Neil spoke up. “I think we should arrest her.” He had a sullen look on his face, his carrot top mane uncustomarily smoothed down, his lanky shoulders rounded. He’d barely spoken since the meeting started, opting to stare at a fixed spot on the table instead.

  O pounced, having finally found an ally. “She’s a flight risk. If we spend too much time getting our ducks in a row, she’s bound to fly the coop.”

  “Which is why we generally don’t share our investigative strategies with our prime suspects,” Phil muttered.

  “How is she not going to figure it out?” O exclaimed. She pointed a finger at D.D. “She wants to call her in for a lineup. Think that won’t give our game away?”

  “I didn’t say call her in for a lineup,” D.D. corrected. “I said that’s all a matching physical description can do for us. Now, put that finger away before you hurt someone.”

  O glared at her, hand falling to her side. “What’s the alternative? Request a warrant to search her room or seize her twenty-two? Sure, we’ll gain some evidence. And boo hoo, she’ll be in Canada before we can snap on the handcuffs.”

  D.D. sighed. She looked at O, she looked at Neil. Finally, she turned to Phil. “Kids these days,” she murmured.

  The father of four nodded in agreement. He’d gotten to sleep last night, which thus far had made him the only sane person in the room. D.D. took a fortifying sip of coffee, and got to it.

  “Neil,” she announced, “when were you going to tell us you broke up with Ben?” Ben being the medical examiner, whom Neil would’ve encountered last night when accompanying the latest shooting victim to the morgue.

  “No one’s business,” her red-haired colleague mumbled.

  “Oh, but it is. Maybe your relationship wasn’t dipping the pen in the company’s well, but it was dipping in the company’s brother’s well. We work with the ME’s office. The end of your relationship has on-the-job consequences and you know it. So dish. What happened?”

  “We’re on a break.”

  Phil rolled his eyes. “Oh, good Lord—”

  “He says I’m too young,” Neil burst out. “He says I’m too green. I gotta go…sow wild oats or some such bullshit.”

  “Become a man?” D.D. suggested.

  “Fuck you!”

  “Won’t solve your problem. You are young, you are green. You’re also a very promising detective who spends way too much time hiding behind his partners. You want to grow up?”

  “Maybe.”

  D.D. gave him a look.

  He straightened his spine. “Yes!”

  “Then let’s get you to the National Academy. It’ll get you more training and experience. Plus, being a smart guy with some promising detective skills, you might even like it.”

  “When?”

  “You’re gonna have to make some calls to figure that out. Preferably, before Phil and I are driven to beat you.”

  “Horgan will agree?”

  Cal Horgan was the deputy superintendent of homicide, who’d have to nominate Neil for the academy, as well as authorize the funds should Neil then be invited.

  “I’d use your nice voice,” D.D. advised.

  Neil pursed his lips, tapped on the tabletop a few times with his hand. “Okay.”

  D.D.’s turn to roll her eyes. “You’re welcome. Now, as long as you’re learning new skills, why don’t you accompany Phil to interview the family of the shooting victim.”

  They’d finally gotten an ID on their sixteen-year-old shooting victim/child molester. Barry Epsom. Formerly of Back Bay. Rich kid, one of four, they were told. Father a bigwig with Hancock Insurance, mother known to be a patron of the arts. Private school, where he hadn’t necessarily shined academically but also wasn’t known for causing trouble. Ironically enough, he had a reputation as a computer whiz kid.

  Family had already lawyered up. They were grieving, admitting nothing, and the mid-morning interview was doomed to be the kind of long, dragged out, dramatic affair that yielded no useful information but killed the rest of the day. Better to let the rookies cut their teeth on it.

  “Goal,” she informed Neil, and to a lesser extent Phil, because he knew his business, “is to be sympathetic, accuse their son of nothing, and get your hands on his electronics.” She eyed Phil, their own computer whiz, on the last part. “Smartphone was seized at the scene last night, but that still leaves computers, iPad, iPod, gaming systems—you’d be amazed where perverts hide their electronic data these days. Search warrant is broad and I want you to use it. We’ll let the forensic wizards manage this one—see if they can’t dig out exactly what Barry was doing online and, even better, how our vigilante shooter might have tracked him.”

  “Sixteen. Couldn’t be
a registered sex offender,” Neil spoke up, frowning.

  “No record,” D.D. confirmed. “Not even a sealed juvie file.”

  “Then how’d the shooter know—”

  “Charlene Grant,” O repeated promptly, “knew about his behavior because she’d already taken calls from his victims. Further proof our shooter has insider knowledge, say from her job as a comm officer with a local police department.”

  “Or our shooter baited him online,” Phil said neutrally. “Reached out to various registered users on the animal website. First one that sent her porn became the next target.”

  “Which is why your goal,” D.D. said to Neil and Phil, “is to seize all electronics. Our sixteen-year-old victim has several key differences from our first two victims. Young, not yet in the criminal justice system, etc., etc. Connect him to the first two victims, and we’ll finally answer some questions.”

  “Analyze his cell phone,” O said dryly. “Search the call log for the last time he called nine-one-one.”

  D.D. rolled her eyes at the sex crime detective’s one-track mind. “Which brings us to the next matter at hand—how to wrap up our current homicide investigation, by trapping Charlene Grant.”

  “Finally!”

  “Here’s the deal.” D.D. regarded Neil and O. “You’re both right: We’re dealing with a suspect who’s half-feral and probably will bolt at the first hint of suspicion. Which is why we have to proceed with caution. For example, we could request a warrant to seize her twenty-two on the grounds that she matches the general description of our shooter. Which, as O pointed out, would probably gain us the murder weapon but lose us the murderer as Charlene heads for the hills. Or, we can wait for her to show up for her eleven P.M. shift tonight at the Grovesnor PD, at which point they’ll seize it for us.”

  Detective O frowned, clearly trying to follow this logic. “She had her gun on her yesterday,” the detective murmured slowly, “when you called her in from work. Meaning, she must carry it with her at all times. Which would be—”

  “Against department policy,” D.D. finished for her. “Grovesnor PD has the right to seize her weapon, not to mention then authorize any tests they’d like, such as a ballistics test, to see if the rifling on Charlene’s Taurus matches the rifling on the six slugs recovered from three separate shootings.”