by Lisa Gardner
The small Congregational church existed one block from our home. I walked by it every day to and from school. One day, I poked my head in. The second day, I took a seat. The third day, I found myself talking to the reverend.
Will God let you into Heaven, I wanted to know, if you were buried under the wrong name?
I talked to the reverend for a long time that afternoon. He had bottle-thick glasses. Sparse gray hair. A kind smile. When I got home, it was after six, my father was waiting, and there was no food on the table.
“Where were you?” he demanded.
“I got held late—”
“Do you know how worried I’ve been?”
“I missed the bus. I was talking to a teacher about a homework assignment. I’m … I had to walk all the way home. I didn’t want to bother you at work.” I was babbling, my cheeks flushed, not sounding anything like myself.
My father frowned at me for a long time. “You can always call me,” he said abruptly. “We’re in this together, kiddo.”
He ruffled my hair.
I missed my mother.
Then I walked into the kitchen and started the tuna casserole.
Lying, I’ve discovered, is as addictive as any drug. Next thing I knew, I’d told my father I’d joined the debate team. This, of course, gave me any number of afternoons I could spend at the church, listening to the choir practice, talking to the reverend, simply absorbing the space.
I’d always had long dark hair. My mother used to braid it for me when I was a child. As an adolescent, however, I had relegated it to an impenetrable curtain I let hang over my face. One day, I decided my hair was blocking the true beauty of the stained glass, so I walked to the corner barbershop and had it chopped off.
My father didn’t speak to me for a week.
And I discovered, sitting in my church, watching my neighbors come and go, that my oversize sweatshirts were too drab, my baggy jeans ill-fitting. I liked people in bright colors. I liked the way it brought attention to their faces and made you notice their smiles. These people looked happy. Normal. Loving. I bet there wasn’t a three-second delay every time someone asked them their name.
So I bought new clothes. For the debate team. And I started spending every Monday night at the soup kitchen—school requirement, I told my father. Everyone’s got to fulfill so many hours of community service. There happened to be a nice young man who also volunteered there. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Matt Fisher.
Matt took me to the movies. I don’t remember what was playing. I was aware of his hand on my shoulder, the sweaty feel of my own palms, the hitch to my breath. After the movies, we went for ice cream. It was raining. He held his coat over my head.
And then, tucked inside his cologne-scented jacket, he gave me my first kiss.
I floated home. Arms wrapped around my waist. Dreamy smile upon my face.
My father greeted me at the front door. Five suitcases loomed behind him.
“I know what you’ve been doing!” he declared.
“Shhhh,” I said, and put a finger to his lips. “Shhhh.”
I danced past my stunned father. I drifted into my tiny, windowless room. And for eight hours I lay on my bed and let myself be happy.
I still wonder about Matt Fisher sometimes. Is he married now? Has two-point-two kids? Does he ever tell stories about the craziest girl he ever knew? Kissed her one night. Never saw her again.
My father was gone when I got up in the morning. He returned around twelve, slapping the fake ID into my hand.
“And I don’t want to hear it about the names,” he said as I arched a brow at my new identity as Tanya Nelson, daughter of Michael. “Trying to get paperwork at a moment’s notice already set me back two grand.”
“But you picked the names.”
“They were all the guy could give me.”
“But you brought home the names,” I insisted.
“Fine, fine, whatever.”
He already had a suitcase in each hand. I stood firm, arms crossed, face implacable. “You picked the names, I pick the city.”
“Once we’re in the car.”
“Boston,” I said.
His eyes went wide. I could tell he wanted to argue. But rules are rules.
A family is a system.
When you have spent your life running from the Bad Thing, you have to wonder what it will feel like one day when it finally catches you. I guess my father never had to know.
The cops said he stepped off the curb and the speeding taxi killed him instantly. Sent his body soaring twenty feet through the air. His forehead connected with a metal lamppost, caving in his face.
I was twenty-two. Finally done slogging through an endless procession of schools. I worked at Starbucks. I walked a lot. I saved up money for a sewing machine. I started my own business, making custom-designed window treatments and matching throw pillows.
I liked Boston. Returning to the city of my youth had not left me paralyzed with fear. Quite the opposite, in fact. I felt safe amid the constantly moving masses. I enjoyed strolling through the Public Garden, window-shopping on Newbury Street. I even liked the return of fall, where the days became oak-scented and the nights cool. I found an impossibly small apartment in the North End where I could walk to Mike’s and eat fresh cannolis any time I wanted. I hung curtains. I got a dog. I even learned to cook corn tamales. While at night I stood at my barred fifth-story window, cradling my mother’s ashes in the palm of my hand and watching the nameless strangers pass below.
I told myself I was an adult now. I told myself I had nothing left to fear. My father had directed my past. But I owned my future and I would not spend it running anymore. I had picked Boston for a reason, and I was here to stay.
Then one day it all came together. I picked up the Boston Herald and read it on the front page: Twenty-five years later, I’d finally been found dead.
Phone ringing.
He rolled over. Grabbed a pillow. Stuffed it over his ear.
Phone ringing.
He threw down the pillow, yanked up the covers instead.
Phone ringing.
Groan. He grudgingly peeled open one eye. Two thirty-two a.m. “Frickin’, frickin’, frickin …” He slapped out a hand, fumbled with the receiver, and dragged the phone to his ear. “What?”
“Cheerful as always, I see.”
Bobby Dodge, Massachusetts’s newest state police detective, groaned louder. “It’s only my second day. You can’t tell me I’m being called out my second day. Hey.” His brain cells belatedly kicked to life. “Wait a sec—”
“Know the former mental hospital in Mattapan?” Boston Detective D.D. Warren asked over the line.
“Why?”
“Got a scene.”
“You mean BPD has a scene. Good for you. I’m going back to sleep.”
“Be here in thirty.”
“D.D.…” Bobby dragged himself to sitting, awake now in spite of himself and not feeling amused. He and D.D. went way back, but two-thirty in the morning was two-thirty in the morning. “You and your friends want to harass a rookie, pick on your own department. I’m too old for this shit.”
“You need to see this,” she said simply.
“See what?”
“Thirty minutes, Bobby. Don’t turn on the radio. Don’t listen to the scanner. I need you to view it clean slate.” There was a pause. More quietly, she added, “Bobby, keep it tight. This one’s gonna be ugly.” And then she was gone.
Bobby Dodge was no stranger to being called out of bed. He’d served nearly eight years as a police sniper with the Massachusetts State Police Special Tactics and Operations Team, on call twenty-four/seven, and inevitably activated most weekends and major holidays. Hadn’t bothered him at the time. He’d enjoyed the challenge, thrived on being part of an elite team.
Two years ago, however, his career had derailed. Bobby hadn’t just been called out to a scene; he’d shot a man. The department ultimately declared it justifiable use of deadly force, b
ut nothing had felt the same. Six months ago, when he submitted his resignation from the STOP team, no one had argued. And more recently, when he’d passed the detectives’ exam, everyone had been in agreement: Bobby’s career could use a fresh start.
So here he was, a two-day-old Homicide detective, already assigned half a dozen active but not urgent cases, just enough to get his feet wet. Once he proved he wasn’t a complete and utter moron, they might actually let him lead an investigation. Or he could always hope to catch a case, be the lucky on-call suit who was roused out of bed for a major incident. Detectives liked to joke that homicides only occurred at 3:05 a.m. or 4:50 p.m. You know, just in time for the day shift to start early and last all night.
Midnight phone calls were definitely part of the job. Except those phone calls should be coming from another state police officer, not a Boston detective.
Bobby frowned again, trying to puzzle this one out. As a general rule, Boston detectives loathed inviting state suits to their parties. Furthermore, if a BPD detective honestly did think she might need state expertise, her commanding officer would contact Bobby’s commanding officer, with everyone operating with all the openness and trust you would expect from such an arranged marriage.
But D.D. had called him directly. Which led Bobby to theorize, as he dragged on his pants, struggled into a long-sleeved shirt, and splashed water on his face, that D.D. wasn’t looking for state help. She was looking for his help.
And that made Bobby suspicious.
Last stop in front of his dresser now, operating by the glow of the night-light. He found his detective’s shield, his pager, his Glock. 40, and—the weapon prized most highly by the working detective—his Sony mini-recorder. Bobby glanced at his watch.
D.D. had wanted him there in thirty. He’d make it in twenty-five. Which gave him five extra minutes to figure out what the hell was going on.
Mattapan was a straight shot down I-93 from Bobby’s triple-decker in South Boston. Three to five a.m. were probably the only two hours a day 93 wasn’t a bloated snake of vehicles, so Bobby made good time.
He took the Granite Avenue exit and headed left down Gallivan Boulevard, merging onto Morton Street. He pulled up next to an old Chevy at a stoplight. The two occupants, young black males, gave his Crown Vic a knowing look. They pinned him with their best dead-man’s stare. Bobby responded with a cheery wave of his own. The instant the light turned green, the kids made a hard right and sped away in disgust.
Just another glorious moment in community policing.
Strip malls gave way to housing. Bobby passed side streets choked with rows of triple-deckers, each building looking more tired and dilapidated than the last. Huge sections of Boston had been revitalized in the past few years, housing projects giving way to luxury condos on the waterfront. Abandoned wharfs becoming convention centers. The whole city being strategically and cosmetically rearranged to fit the vagaries of the Big Dig.
Some neighborhoods had won. Mattapan obviously had not.
Another light. Bobby slowed, glanced at his watch. Eight minutes to ETA. He swung his car left, looping around Mt. Hope Cemetery. From this angle, he could peer out his side window as the enormous no-man’s-land that was Boston State Mental Hospital finally came into view.
At one hundred and seventy acres of lushly wooded inner-city green space, the Boston State Mental Hospital was currently the most hotly contested development site in the state. It was also, as former home to a century-old lunatic asylum, one of the spookiest damn places around.
Two dilapidated brick buildings perched on top of the hill, winking down at the population with windows gone crazy with shattered glass. Huge overgrown oaks and beeches clawed at the night sky, bare limbs forming silhouettes of gnarled hands.
Story went that the hospital was built in the middle of forested grounds to provide a “serene” setting for the patients. Several decades of overcrowded buildings, strange midnight screams, and two violent murders later, the locals still talked of lights that randomly came on the middle of the ruins, of spine-tingling moans that whispered from beneath the crumbling piles of brick, of flickering silhouettes spotted among the trees.
So far, none of the tales had frightened off the developers. The Audubon Society had secured one corner of the property, turning it into a popular nature preserve. Major construction was currently under way on a brand-new lab for UMass, while Mattapan buzzed with rumors of public housing, or maybe a new high school.
Progress happened. Even to haunted mental institutions.
Bobby turned around the far corner of the cemetery and finally spotted the party. There, in the left-hand corner of the site: Giant beams of light burst through the skeletal beech trees, pushing against the dense, moonless night. More lights, tiny pinpricks of red and blue, zigzagging through the trees as additional police cars sped up the winding road toward one corner of the property. He waited to see the outline of the former hospital, a relatively small, three-story ruin, come into view, but the patrol cars veered away, heading deeper into the woods instead.
D.D. hadn’t been lying. BPD had a scene, and judging by the traffic, it was a big one.
Bobby finished his loop of the cemetery. One minute to ETA, he passed through the yawning black gate and headed for the ruins on the hill.
He came to the first patrol officer almost immediately. The BPD cop was standing in the middle of the road, wearing an orange safety vest and armed with a high-beam flashlight. Kid looked barely old enough to shave. He arranged his face into a fine scowl, however, as he scrutinized Bobby’s shield, then grunted suspiciously when he realized Bobby was with the state police.
“Sure you got the right place?” Kid asked.
“Dunno. I plugged ‘crime scene’ into MapQuest and this is what it spit out.”
Kid regarded him blankly. Bobby sighed. “Got a personal invite from Detective Warren. If you got a problem, take it up with her.”
“You mean Sergeant Warren?”
“Sergeant? Well, well, well.”
Kid slapped Bobby’s creds back into his hand. Bobby headed up the hill.
The first abandoned building appeared on his left, multipaned windows winking back twin reflections of his headlights. The brick structure sagged on its foundation, front doors padlocked shut, roof disintegrated from the inside out.
Bobby took a right, passing a second structure, which was smaller, and in even greater disrepair. Cars were stacking up roadside now, parked bumper-to-bumper as detectives’ vehicles, ME’s van, and crime-scene technicians all vied for space.
The spotlights beckoned farther out, however. A distant glow in the shrouded woods. Bobby could just hear the hum of the generator, brought in on the crime-scene van to power the party. Apparently, he had a hike ahead of him.
He parked in an overgrown field next to three patrol cars. Grabbed a flashlight, paper, and pen. Then, on second thought, a warmer jacket.
The November night was cool, down in the forties, and frosted with a light mist. No one was around, but the beam of his flashlight illuminated the trampled path blazed by the death investigators who’d come before him. His boots made heavy tromping sounds as he went.
He could still hear the generator, but no voices yet. He ducked beneath some bushes, feeling the earth grow marshy beneath his feet before firming up again. He passed a small clearing, noticed a refuse pile—rotting wood, bricks, some plastic buckets. Illegal dumping had been a problem on the ground for years, but most of that was by the fence line. This was too deep in. Probably leftovers from the asylum itself, or maybe one of the recent building projects. Old, new, he couldn’t tell in this kind of light.
Noise grew louder, the hum of the generator building to a dull roar. He ducked his head into the collar of his jacket, shielding his ears. As a ten-year veteran patrol officer, Bobby had attended his fair share of crime scenes. He knew the noise. He knew the smell.
But this was his first scene as a bona fide detective. He thought that’s why it
felt so different. Then he cleared another line of trees and came to an abrupt halt.
Guys. Everywhere. Most in suits, probably fifteen, eighteen detectives and easily a dozen uniforms. Then there were the men with the graying hair in the thick woolen overcoats. Senior officers, most of whom Bobby recognized from various retirement parties for other big guns. He spotted a photographer, four crime-scene techs. Finally a lone female—if memory served she was an ADA, Assistant District Attorney.
A lot of people, particularly given Boston’s long-standing policy of demanding a written report from anyone who entered a crime scene. That had a tendency to keep gawking patrol officers out and, even more important, the brass away.
But everyone was here tonight, pacing small circles in the glow of the blazing spotlights, stomping their feet for warmth. Ground zero appeared to be the blue awning erected toward the back of the clearing. But from this angle Bobby still couldn’t see any signs of remains or evidence of a crime scene even beneath the protective cover of the tarp.
He saw a field, a tent, and a lot of very quiet death investigators.
It made the hairs rise up on the back of his neck.
A rustling sound came from his left. Bobby turned to see two people entering the clearing from a second path. At front was a middle-aged woman in full Tyvek, followed by a younger man, her assistant. Bobby recognized the woman immediately. Christie Callahan from the OCME—Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Callahan was the designated forensic anthropologist.
“Ah shit.”
More movement. D.D. had magically emerged from beneath the blue awning. Bobby’s gaze went from her pale, carefully composed features to her Tyvek-covered clothes to the inky darkness behind her.
“Ah shit,” he muttered again, but it was too late.
D.D. headed straight for him.
“Thanks for coming,” she said. They shared an awkward moment, both of them trying to figure out if they should shake hands, peck cheeks, something. D.D. finally stuck her hands behind her and that settled matters. They would be professional acquaintances.
