Catch Me

by Lisa Gardner

  I remembered Tulip this morning. Instead of being grateful for a warm bedroom, she’d simply been aggravated at being shut up. Some of us just weren’t meant for confinement. We’d rather take our chances out in the open.

  Twenty-one hours and counting.

  I re-snapped my black leather messenger bag, squared my shoulders, and headed in for my last shift.

  Chapter 32

  “NO DICE.”

  “What do you mean no dice? Check her bag, confiscate her weapon. Done.” It was eleven thirty P.M. D.D. was at home, feeding Jack his bedtime bottle. He was snug against her chest, a warm little bundle approximately the same size and shape as a hot water bottle, and they were rocking together. A cozy domestic scene, so of course, her cell phone had rung.

  “I confronted Charlene Grant the moment she walked in the door,” Grovesnor PD Lieutenant Dan Shepherd continued. “Said there’d been reports of her bringing a firearm to work and that was against department policy. She said I was mistaken; she’d brought a dog to work. It wouldn’t happen again.”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake!”

  “She let me inspect her bag. No sign of a twenty-two, Detective. Game over.”

  “And that’s what happens when you fuck up an interview,” D.D. murmured, more to herself than Shepherd. “Overplay your hand, spook the subject, walk away with nothing. I’m going to have ‘I Told You So’ tattooed backwards across Detective O’s forehead, so that in the future, when she’s about to question someone, she can first study herself in the mirror.”

  “Excuse me?” Shepherd said.

  “Just thinking out loud. Did you pull Charlene’s time cards?” Earlier in the day, when D.D. had called Shepherd about the possibility one of his civilian employees was carrying, she’d also asked him to check Charlene’s work schedule against the first two shootings. Douglas Antiholde had been shot January 9. They were still awaiting exact TOD on the second victim, Stephen Laurent, but probably somewhere around January 11 or 12.

  “Charlene pulled graveyard the ninth of January,” Shepherd reported now.

  “Eleven P.M. start?”

  “Yep. Eleven P.M. start, seven A.M. finish.”

  D.D. nodded against the phone receiver, adjusting Jack slightly in her arms for comfort. Antiholde had been shot late afternoon, early evening. Plenty of time for Charlene to have pulled the trigger and still been on time for work.

  “She also worked graveyard on Jan eleven, with OT that kept her till noon.”

  “She worked a thirteen-hour shift?”

  “Sixteen hours is the maximum.”

  “Gee, sounds like detective’s hours right there.”

  “Police dispatch is not for the faint at heart,” Shepherd commented. “Now Jan twelve was Charlene’s night off, which was another reason she probably worked so late.”

  “’Kay.” D.D. would have to follow up with the ME, Ben, to better pinpoint Laurent’s time of death. Given the location of the Grovesnor PD, earliest Charlene could’ve made it to Laurent’s neighborhood would’ve been one P.M., and that’d be pushing things.

  Meaning, the way these things went, Charlene had no alibi for the first victim and the third victim, but remained a maybe for victim number two.

  D.D. had pursued many suspects with less. She returned to the more pressing matter at hand. “You ever hear Charlene talk about bringing a gun to work?”

  “Of course not. I would’ve addressed the situation immediately.”

  “She talk much about her past, how she grew up?”

  “Detective, graveyard is a solo shift. Working alone by definition discourages idle chitchat.”

  “What about the other officers on duty?”

  “They’re paid to patrol, not hang at the station.”

  “What about breaks? Dinner break, lunch, whatever the hell you call a middle-of-the-night meal?” She started to build Charlene’s shift schedule in her head, looking for opportunities for the girl to, say, sneak out and commit homicide, without anyone noticing.

  “One thirty-minute meal break. Most brown bag it, eating in their patrol cars or, in Charlene’s case, at her desk.”

  “That’s it? Per eight hours?”

  “Two fifteens, which half our officers use to grab a smoke. Not Charlene, if memory serves. She’s the fitness buff.”

  “What if she has to pee?”

  “She declares code ten-six, takes a comfort break.”

  “But if she’s the only one on duty, who covers the phone?”

  “Working supervisor, generally a uniformed sergeant.”

  “So there is someone else who works with her at night.”

  “True. But the sergeant sits in the main station, whereas the comm center is its own enclosed space, basically a former closet now bristling with monitors, phones, and radios.”

  “Would you know if she left the comm center? For example, had clocked in, but left the station?”

  “Not possible.”

  “Why? According to you, she and the sergeant can’t even see each other.”

  “But they hear each other. Charlene backs up all patrol officers. Meaning, they not only check in with her during their shifts, but she checks in with them if she hasn’t heard them on the airwaves. Calls out their patrol number, makes sure each officer is accounted for. Nine twenty-six to dispatch, nine twenty-six to dispatch, that sort of thing. How long has it been since your patrol days, Detective?”

  “A while.”

  “Airwaves are never quiet. Even on graveyard, Charlene’s job is to be talking and listening. And our headsets aren’t so cutting edge she can wear them out into the parking lot and still get reception, let alone down the street.”

  “So when Charlene’s on the job, she’s on the job.”

  “Exactly.”

  D.D. pursed her lips, considering. Made sense, and didn’t destroy their case one way or another.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Shepherd spoke up now.

  “Sure.”

  “Why are you investigating our comm officer? I mean, I don’t have the opportunity to work with Charlie directly, but I can tell you, she’s good. She’s reliable, trustworthy, takes care of our officers. We like her.”

  “From what she says, none of you even know her.”

  “Graveyard isn’t for social butterflies.”

  “You background her?”

  “Course.”

  “Anything stand out?”

  “She had a good recommendation from Colorado—”

  “What?”

  “Arvada, Colorado. Her first dispatch job.”

  D.D. felt a chill. “How close is Arvada to Boulder?”

  “Hell if I know. I’m from Revere.”

  D.D. pursed her lips, mind racing. Charlene’s dead mother, the unidentified body found in Boulder. Charlene, hearing that news today, never even mentioning she’d lived in the same state. What were the odds of that?

  Not to mention that in the past ten years, Charlene’s mother and two best friends had all died. Meaning one woman had left behind a trail of three dead bodies across multiple states. Seemed to D.D. that it was pretty risky to know Charlene Grant these days. Heightened your odds of meeting an untimely demise, and even worse, given Charlene’s fickle powers of recollection, she wouldn’t remember you afterward.

  You can both know things and not know things, Charlene had said. Coping mechanism for the childhood-challenged.

  Multiple personalities, each remembering only its individual piece of the puzzle, Detective O had countered. Explaining Charlene’s spotty memory, conflicting notes within notes, the girl’s seeming ability to mourn some murders while committing others.

  D.D. turned over both Charlene’s statements and O’s theory in her head, not liking either of them.

  “I want that gun,” she murmured in frustration.

  “Sorry, Detective. Did my best.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” D.D. asked a couple of more questions, talked a little shop, and then, when she had
nothing else to show for her efforts, ended the call.

  Jack was asleep, bottle lying to one side of his swaddled form. She rose from the rocking chair, placed the empty bottle on the coffee table, and took a moment to hold her son close.

  She cleared her head of the case. She let go of Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant and pedophile shooters and BFF murderers.

  She held her baby. She inhaled the sweet scents of formula and talcum powder and newborn innocence. She watched her son’s little chest rise and fall. Admired the scrunched up lines of his face, his ten perfect little fingers curled into two loose fists.

  She marveled at the tiny miracle that was her child.

  Then she kissed him gently on his puckered forehead, tucked him into his bassinet, and grabbed herself a glass of water just in time for her cell to ring again.

  She checked the display. Detective O. She answered it.

  “Self-fulfilling prophecies,” D.D. stated by way of greeting. “First you labeled your own suspect feral, then you spooked her into bolting. Congratulations. Charlene came to work and didn’t bring her twenty-two.”

  “Yes she did!” O’s voice came out triumphantly.

  D.D. paused, took another sip of water, tried to figure out what she’d just missed. “How do you know?”

  “I followed her.”

  “You followed Charlene Grant?”

  “Waited in the parking lot of the Grovesnor PD actually. That way, if they were able to confiscate her weapon, I could deliver it immediately for ballistics testing.”

  “At eleven P.M. Friday night?”

  “I made a call in advance, got Jon Cassir, the firearms expert, to agree to stay.”

  D.D. frowned again. The heavy-handedness of O’s approach irked her, made her want to cut the younger investigator down to size. Then she had to catch herself. O had been smart to plan ahead. Nothing wrong with an aggressive strategy when pursuing a serial shooter. In fact, there had been a time when D.D. would’ve thought to do exactly that.

  Instead of leaving HQ to return to her baby. And saying she’d be back after dinner, except Alex was clearly exhausted from the past few nights, and she’d been tired from her all-nighter, let alone her breakfast with her parents, and tending Jack had seemed a better idea than driving all the way back to Roxbury. She could work from home, then call her parents to smooth things over. Right.

  “So I’m at the station,” O was saying, “and I saw Charlene walking down the street from the T stop. Then a patrol officer got out of his cruiser and approached her. I thought maybe he was a friend at first, but she dropped into a fighter’s stance and he had his hand on his sidearm. Looked like he was going to take her bag by force, and she wasn’t going to let him. Then, just as abruptly, he walked away. At which point, she took her semiauto out of her bag, wrapped it in a scarf, and buried it in a snowbank.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. So, naturally, the second Charlene disappeared into the station, I unburied her Taurus twenty-two and drove it straight to the lab. I’m here now. Cassir hopes to have results by morning.”

  D.D. wasn’t sure what to make of this sudden turn in events. “We have six slugs recovered from three shootings. Are all six in good enough shape for matching?”

  “No, but Cassir has usable slugs from the second and third shooting. The first shooting, Antholde, is trickier. Both slugs flattened out, ricocheting around the victim’s skull, so it’s probably inconclusive.”

  “But we got the notes, tying all three shootings together. So if we can match the rifling on Charlene’s twenty-two with the markings on even one of the recovered slugs…” D.D. thought out loud.

  “Exactly.”

  D.D. nodded. O had done good work. And it was wrong of D.D. to feel resentful. At this stage of her life, her job was to be supportive, the experienced cop mentoring the less experienced cop. Passing the baton, so to speak. In other words, growing old.

  “You interview the aunt?” D.D. asked.

  “Not yet. Been a little busy outsmarting Charlie. But aren’t you glad I did?”

  Busy, D.D. agreed with. The obsessive nature of O’s approach, on the other hand, worried her a little.

  “You returning to Grovesnor PD?” D.D. probed now.

  “Why?”

  “You’ve already taken things this far.”

  O didn’t reply, which D.D. took as answer enough.

  “You want to see Charlie leave at the end of her shift, don’t you? Dig around in the snow, searching for her own weapon.”

  O didn’t say anything.

  “She believes she needs that gun for self-defense in a matter of hours,” D.D. stated. “What do you think she’ll do when it’s gone?”

  “If she’s smart,” O said flatly. “She’ll turn herself in. We can protect her—we’ll throw her in jail. Trust me, whoever killed her BFFs will never think to look for her there.”

  “Your first arrest?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Is it difficult, as a sex crimes detective, to consider arresting a citizen who may be doing some of the work for you?”

  “Have more faith in the sex crimes unit. We can do our own work just fine.”

  Given how many pedophiles D.D. hadn’t had sufficient evidence to arrest in her career, she wasn’t sure she agreed. But she finished her glass of water, then returned to the business at hand.

  “Facebook posts?” she asked.

  “Over a thousand friends,” O reported. “Lots of hits from Atlanta and Providence, family, friends of the victims. I can’t vet each poster—we’d need at least half a dozen bodies to manage that workload. So I’ve been skimming for odd posts, out-of-place comments. Only person of interest thus far has been Randi’s ex.”

  “Isn’t he serving time in Club Fed?”

  “Where apparently they have Internet access, because yes, he was one of the first friends. Posted RIP and the murder date.”

  “Asshole.”

  “I can stir the pot if you want…post ‘At least Randi is free from her rat bastard husband,’ something like that.”

  “Do it. Be good to see what he says. Also, can you monitor any posts from Colorado?”

  O wanted to know why. D.D. explained that Charlie had once worked in Arvada.

  “When did the mother die again?” O asked excitedly.

  “Eight years ago. Have to put together an exact time line and geography, but I believe that covers Charlene’s stint with the Arvada dispatch center.”

  “How’d she die?”

  “Coroner’s guess was natural causes, liver failure caused by long-term alcohol abuse, but the body had been lying in situ for some time before discovery. Makes establishing cause of death more art, less science.”

  “Suffocation,” O said. “Pillow to the face, that’s what I would’ve done.”

  “Kill the mom the same way she once murdered her babies? But coroner would be able to determine evidence of asphyxia: petechial hemorrhages.”

  “Not if decomp was advanced enough. Like you said, more art, less science.”

  “You think Charlene did it?” It was a genuine question. The coincidence of the mom dying in Colorado the same time Charlene worked there bothered D.D. And yet…“Charlie asked all the right questions when we interviewed her. Never assumed her mother was dead, asking about prison first, then a mental institute, then finally death. She even inquired about how her mother died, meaning, if Charlie did do it—tracked her mother down in Boulder, paid her a visit, pressed a pillow against her face for a full five minutes while her mother kicked and fought and struggled—she’s one hell of an actress.”

  Detective O was quiet for a moment. “You still like her.”

  “Like has nothing to do with it. I’m just thinking out loud. Good detectives argue. It’s the fun part of our job.”

  “She grew up with a killer. Maybe watched her mother suffocate two babies. Maybe did it herself—”

  “Big assumption.”

  “Still, ritualisti
cally abused. Think of the bonding that never took place. Lack of empathy. The free spirits of the world would have you believe a little bit of love eases all pain. Cops know better.”

  “She claims to have loved Rosalind.”

  “Didn’t make a difference. Maybe it was even baby Rosalind’s death that put her over the edge. She blew up. Fought violently with her mom, would’ve killed her if the mom hadn’t stabbed her first.”

  “Another big assumption.”

  “Mom exited stage right, Charlie went to the mountains of New Hampshire. New house, new rules, new stability. Maybe it worked for a bit. Until her friends scattered, and poor old Charlie was once more all alone. Maybe she decided to track her mother down, finish old business.”

  “Would really like a witness, any proof at all that Charlie even knew her mom lived in Boulder.”

  “Seize her computer.”

  “She doesn’t have one.”

  “Bet her aunt does. Bet it’s in New Hampshire. Get it, pore through old docs. There’s an e-mail somewhere, an Internet search. Always is in this day and age. Plus, bet she still has access to a computer, maybe checks out one of the laptops at the Boston Public Library and uses it to hunt pedophiles, before returning it to the help desk. Nobody lives totally off the grid, and everyone leaves tracks, as you were explaining to Neil today. We just gotta keep digging. Maybe eight years ago Charlie searched for her mom, Charlie found her mom, Charlie killed her mom. And it felt good. Justice done.”

  D.D. couldn’t argue with that; the death of Charlie’s mom did appear to be justice done. And she certainly hoped everyone on the Internet left tracks. She’d talked to Phil right before dinner, and he and Neil had seized eight separate electronic items from Barry’s bedroom. They now hoped the techies found lots of tracks, including ones that tied Barry to two other pedophiles, as well as revealing how one blue-eyed “demon,” in the words of their witness, tracked him down.

  “So, Charlene Grant killed her own mother,” D.D. filled in now, “and liked the feeling so much, she decided to wait eight years, then systematically hunt down Boston sex offenders for more righteous kills?”