The Detective D. D. Warren Series 5-Book Bundle

by Lisa Gardner

  D.D.’s eyes widened. “He’s going through all this, and he’s what, seven, eight years old?”

  “He’s going through all this, and yes, he’s eight. And we’re seeing more kids like him all the time. Parents think the worst thing that can happen to their five-year-old is cancer. They’re wrong; the worst thing that can happen to their five-year-old is mental illness. Cancer, the docs have tools available. Mental illness in prepubescents … There are so few drugs we can use, then the kids develop a tolerance, and by age eight we’re out of options. They require a lifetime regimen of anti-psychotic medication, except we don’t have anything left. One week we get them stabilized. The next they plunge back into the abyss.”

  “Is that what happened to Ozzie?” D.D. asked.

  Danielle picked up the case file, read briskly. “We took Ozzie off the aripiprazole. At which time he claimed ghosts were appearing in the windows of his room and ordering him to kill people. So we put him back on a very low dosage of aripiprazole, trying to minimize the side effects while still making some attempt at regulating his brain chemistry. In the short term, we noticed a positive change in behavior.”

  “In the short term,” D.D. repeated. “Meaning in the long term …?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  The nurse shook her head. “His parents discharged him. Against our advice. They had moved, gotten a new place. Denise said it was time to bring him home.”

  Alex held up a hand. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Ozzie reports ghosts are telling him to murder people, and they take him home?”

  “It happens.”

  D.D. leaned forward. “Tell me, Danielle. Forget the file for a second. It’s you and me, trying to understand what happened to one boy. What made you think Ozzie had hurt someone? Why were you so certain this story had an unhappy ending? Why did he leave?”

  Danielle didn’t answer right away. Her jaw worked. Then, just as D.D. was starting to lose hope …

  “Denise found a spiritual healer,” the nurse expelled curtly. “A shaman who promised to make Ozzie all better. No chemicals. No crazy drugs. He was going to heal Ozzie by bringing him into the light.”

  “Say what?”

  “Exactly. This is a boy with severe psychoses. And she’s gonna cure him by bringing him to ‘an expert in negative and positive energies’? We tried to get her to reconsider, but her mind was set. We hadn’t helped her son, so she’d found someone who could.”

  “I don’t think it took,” Alex said.

  “Why? Your turn. What happened?”

  “We don’t know. But the family’s dead.”

  “The family? The whole family?” Danielle’s face paled. The nurse blinked, looking shaky, then almost panic-stricken. In the next instant, she blinked again, and her features smoothed to glass. “The news,” she murmured. “The family from Dorchester. I caught a snippet, just on the radio. That was Ozzie?”

  “That was someone,” D.D. corrected.

  “I thought the father did it. That’s what the reporter implied.”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  Danielle looked down at the table, shaking her head. “Goddammit. We told them. We warned Denise … You have to … Andrew Lightfoot. That’s who you need to see. You want to know what happened to Ozzie Harrington, go ask Andrew Lightfoot. That arrogant son of a bitch.”

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  At 10:37 p.m., Patrick Harrington died. The news pissed D.D. off. It probably didn’t do wonders for him either.

  She was at her desk. Not returning Chip’s phone call. Not exploring fine dining with Alex. It was Friday night, and she was doing what she inevitably did with her evenings, working her way through a stack of reports, trying to make sense of what had happened one evening in Dorchester that had now left five dead.

  Physical evidence aside, D.D. liked the kid for it. She didn’t know why. The troubled history, the psychotic episodes, his penchant for beating squirrels to death, then licking their blood off his hands. If she got to pick her perp, she was going with Ozzie Harrington. In fact, she’d had a brilliant flash of insight regarding Patrick Harrington’s last word. What if he hadn’t been saying “hussy,” as the ER nurse had assumed? What if he’d been saying “Ozzie” instead?

  Not an accusation against his wife, but a last-gasp effort to name the guilty party.

  It all sounded good to her, until she went over the crime scene again. Fact: Whoever delivered the killing blows was most likely taller than five six. Fact: Ozzie could hardly slash his own throat in his sister’s bedroom, then carry himself to the screened-in porch. Fact: According to psychiatric nurse Danielle Burton, Ozzie’s first psychotic break had involved overall destruction. The Harrington crime scene, on the other hand, was methodical in nature. This wasn’t a kid going berserk. This was someone systematically hunting down individual members of an entire family.

  Which brought her back to Patrick Harrington. He was a do-gooder. Trying to move his family to a better neighborhood. Trying to save a troubled kid. Trying to succeed at a second marriage with a blended family. Then he lost his job. Then he got behind in his renovations. Then his adopted son started taking out neighborhood rodents. Maybe the pressure mounted, the growing chasm between what life was supposed to be and what it was actually becoming.

  Can’t save the world? Then he’ll leave it—and take his innocent darlings with him.

  D.D. could buy that logic. A grand jury could buy that logic. Except Phil and Alex had swept through the upper two floors of the Harringtons’ home, and as far as they were concerned, Patrick was only days away from completion. Following that revelation, they’d searched the Boston Globe, and sure enough, Patrick had placed a rental ad, which had started running just this morning. So the guy finally makes arrangements to rent out the top two floors of his triple-decker, then decides, Fuck it, I won’t even give it one weekend for a potential renter to materialize, I’ll just kill everyone tonight.

  Impulsive crime, Alex kept telling her. Impulsive crime.

  D.D. wasn’t sure about that. She’d just worked her way through eight different character testimonies, and each and every one of them agreed Patrick was a stand-up sort of guy. How did a man leap from steady father figure to impulsive family annihilator in five minutes or less?

  Dammit, she wanted a pepperoni pizza.

  Actually, she wanted sex. On her desk would do nicely. Just sweep the papers aside. Toss the files on the floor. Strip off her jeans, rip off Alex’s starched blue shirt, and go to town. He struck her as the kind of guy who would be both patient and intense. She’d like patient and intense. She’d like strong male fingers gripping her ass. She’d like the sensation of a hard-muscled body pounding into hers.

  She’d like one moment when she was not Sergeant D.D. Warren, Supercop, but a woman instead.

  Is this what a biological clock did to a female? Fried her brain cells, ruined her work ethic, made her stupid?

  She was not getting married. She was not having children. She was not going to have sex in her office. So she might as well read the fucking case reports, because this was her life. This was what she had left. Five dead in Dorchester and no one alive to tell the tale.

  She made it ten more minutes, then said Screw it and headed home. Time for a cold shower, reheated Chinese food, and a good night’s sleep.

  D.D. was just pulling onto I-93 when her cell phone rang.

  She grabbed it impatiently, barked out a greeting.

  It was Phil; he didn’t sound good. “We got another one.”

  “Another what?”

  “Family. Dead. The male with a bullet between his eyes. Get over here, D.D. And bring your Vicks.”

  D.D. was not a fan of vapor rub or scented cotton balls when working a crime scene. Some of the guys rubbed lemon juice on their hands, then cupped their palms over their noses. Others chewed half a pack of spearmint gum—swore that overwhelming their taste buds limited their
olfactory senses.

  D.D. was old-fashioned. She believed to effectively work a scene, you needed all your senses, including smell.

  She regretted her high standards the second she walked through the door.

  “What the fuck is that?” she snapped, one hand immediately covering her nose and mouth, the other swatting at a fly.

  Alex Wilson was standing in the cramped family room. Rather heroically, he held out his handkerchief. Her eyes were watering, but she waved him off.

  “Jesus Christ,” she muttered. She remained standing in the doorway, trying to get her bearings while controlling her gag reflex.

  Place looked like a dump. The floor at her feet swam in garbage. She saw grease-stained cheeseburger wrappers, empty containers of McDonald’s fries, wads of tissues, and—heaven help her—a soiled diaper. Then the diaper moved and the world’s fattest cockroach streaked across the dirt-brown carpet before disappearing beneath an open pizza box dotted with green-colored pepperoni.

  “Son of a bitch.” D.D. was back out the door, off the front steps, and over the edge of the property, where she willed herself not to puke in front of the crime-scene team or, heaven help her, the local news. Her eyes swam with tears. It took several gulping breaths of rain-swept August air to calm her stomach.

  She had just straightened, turning toward the house to debate round two, when she spotted Bobby Dodge ducking beneath the yellow crime-scene tape at the end of the drive. Given a choice between tap-dancing with a cockroach or tangling with a Massachusetts State Police detective, she headed straight for the state cop. Who also happened to be her former lover. Who also now happened to be a happily married man.

  “My crime scene,” D.D. stated by way of greeting.

  “My apologies,” Bobby replied easily. They went too far back for him to ever be seriously insulted. D.D. found that annoying. The rain three hours ago had finally brought the August heat down into the eighties. It was still muggy, and Bobby had his sports jacket slung over his right arm, revealing a dark blue short-sleeved shirt embroidered with the gold insignia of the state police.

  “Why are you here?” D.D. demanded.

  “I was in the neighborhood?” He grinned at her. He was cute when he grinned and he knew it.

  “Don’t you have a baby to tend to, or something like that?”

  “Carina Lillian,” he said immediately, already fishing into his back pocket for the photo. “Nine pounds thirteen ounces. Isn’t she beautiful?”

  He moved closer to one of the outdoor floodlights, holding the wallet-sized photo beneath the glow. D.D. registered fat red cheeks, narrow little eyes, and a distinctly pointed head.

  “She looks just like you,” D.D. assured him.

  “Vaginal birth,” he said proudly.

  And thanks to those two words, D.D. thought, she would never have sex again. “Annabelle?” she asked, referring to Bobby’s wife.

  “Doing great. Breast-feeding like a champ and getting Carina settled onto a nice schedule. Whole family’s great. And you?”

  “I’m not breast-feeding like a champ.”

  “Someone’s loss,” Bobby told her.

  “Why are you at my crime scene?”

  “We have an interest.”

  “Ah, but I have jurisdiction.”

  “Which is why I thought we could walk through it together.”

  “Please—you were hoping I wasn’t here yet, and you could wander through at your leisure.”

  “From plan A to plan B,” Bobby agreed.

  “Tell me about your interest.”

  “Marijuana,” he said.

  “Dealing?”

  “And importing, we believe.”

  She frowned, studying him. “You think this is some kind of gangland hit?”

  He shrugged. “I was hoping to walk through the scene to see if it feels like some kind of gangland hit.”

  “Whole family, you know.”

  “That’s what I was told.”

  “Lot of bodies for marijuana wars,” D.D. said. “Meth, okay. Heroin, sure. But the dope dealers …”

  “Don’t like to get so bonged up, I know.” Inside joke. Cops. They had to have something to laugh about.

  “All right,” D.D. conceded. “You can join the party. But I still think this is my scene.”

  “Then you still have my apologies.”

  D.D. made it all the way into the family room this time. Alex was no longer there, but had left an array of yellow evidence placards in his wake. D.D. held her hand over her nose and breathed shallowly through her mouth. Her gag reflex started to kick in, so she pinched her forearm as hard as she could. The pain overrode the smell. Lucky her.

  Beside her, Bobby had gone quiet. He used to be a police sniper, and his ability to retreat, to be both in the moment and outside of the moment, had always appealed to D.D. Now she could feel the coiled tension in him. He was appalled but, like any good cop, focusing his rage.

  In the middle of the cockroach-infested family room sat a brown-and-gold plaid couch. And in the middle of the brown-and-gold plaid couch sprawled a dead white male, duded up as a wannabe Rastafarian, complete with a rainbow knit hat. D.D. put his age in the late twenties, early thirties. He sported a dozen tremendously long dreadlocks, two large sightless brown eyes, and one small bullet hole, center of his forehead. His right arm was flung off the sofa, toward the floor. Beneath his dangling fingers, on top of a paper bag filled with God knows what, rested a snub-nosed handgun. Looked like a twenty-two to D.D.

  “Not much blood,” Bobby commented.

  “Probably soaked into the sofa,” D.D. muttered.

  She noticed that a wadded-up tissue about three feet away was starting to move. She wondered how many rules of Crime Scene 101 she’d violate if she pulled out her Glock and went after whatever was under the tissue.

  A cockroach crawled out, stopped for a second—she swore to God it was studying them—then went about its cockroach business, disappearing beneath another foul pile of refuse.

  “I’m showering with bleach when I get home,” D.D. gritted out between clenched teeth.

  “Eucalyptus oil,” Bobby informed her. “Pour it straight in the bath. Works every time.” He added primly, “And it makes for very soft skin.”

  D.D. shook her head. She turned away from Mr. Dreadlocks and, feeling a bit hopeless about the whole damn thing, headed deeper into the house.

  The woman had gone down in the kitchenette just off the family room. The knife, bearing a black curved handle that matched the set in the wooden block on the counter, was still lodged in her back. This hadn’t been a clean kill. The grime-covered floor was further soiled with red streak marks from the woman trying to crawl forward on her elbows. She’d made it about four inches before succumbing to her injury.

  The kitchen stank worse than the family room. D.D. noted rotting food in the sink, sour milk on the table, and mold growing up one corner wall. She’d seen some things in her time. She’d heard some things in her time. She still didn’t know how anyone could live like this.

  Off the kitchen was the lone bathroom. Garbage overflowed the shower stall, including gallon jugs filled with yellow liquid. The toilet was clogged and didn’t appear to be working. That made D.D. eye the gallon jugs all over again, wishing she didn’t know what she now knew.

  Leaving the kitchen area, they made it to the hallway. A kid, looked sixteen, seventeen, was spread-eagle outside the first bedroom door. He appeared to have been shot twice. First time in the upper leg. Second time was the money shot—a neat round hole one inch above his left eye.

  Inside the bedroom, Alex was bent over the body of an adolescent girl. She was wearing shorts and a tank top. It appeared she’d been sleeping on the twin-sized bed. She’d tossed back the cover sheet, maybe hearing a noise in the hall. She’d just made it to sitting when the bullet caught her above her right eye. She’d fallen to the side, one of her hands still fisting the stained pink sheet.

  This room was cleaner,
D.D. noted. Impossibly small and cramped, but neater. The girl had painted the walls pink with swirls of green and blue. Her sanctuary, D.D. thought, and noted a pile of paperback novels stacked in the corner.

  “Third child’s behind me,” Alex spoke up.

  “Third child?”

  “On the floor.”

  D.D. and Bobby sidestepped their way to the foot of the bed. Sure enough, in the three feet between the twin bed and the outside wall was a small cushion, and on top of the cushion was a much younger child, probably three or four. She had a tattered blanket clenched in her fingers and one thumb still popped in her mouth. She could’ve been sleeping, except for the blood on her left temple.

  “Never woke up,” Alex said, his voice subdued, tense.

  “So it would seem,” D.D. murmured. “Is that a dog bed? Is she sleeping on a dog bed?”

  “Looks it,” Bobby said, his voice flat.

  “And what the hell is going on with her arms and legs?” D.D. had managed to inch closer, noting a myriad of fresh red cuts and faded silvery scars crisscrossing the girl’s limbs. D.D. counted a dozen marks on one dirty leg alone. It looked as if someone had taken a razor to the child, and not just once.

  “Please tell me someone had called child services,” she muttered. Then realized it didn’t matter. At least not anymore.

  She and Bobby slid back out of this bedroom, made it around the teenage boy, and headed for the last room. It was only slightly larger than the first. A double bed was wedged against the wall. An old wooden cradle sat beside the bed.

  Bobby stopped moving.

  “I got it,” D.D. said. “I got it.”

  She left him in the doorway, walked straight to the cradle, and looked in. She forced herself to take her time, to spend a good two to three minutes on it. She considered this a service to the dead. Don’t rush their last moments. Study them. Remember them. Honor them.

  Then nail the son of a bitch who did it.

  She returned to the doorway, her voice low, steadier than she would’ve thought. “Infant. Dead. Not shot. I’m guessing suffocated. There’s a pillow on its stomach.”