Catch Me

Chapter 30

“OH YEAH, she’ll never guess we’re onto her after that conversation. Subtle. Smooth. Confidence-building. I bet Charlene’s headed home right now to make us both friendship bracelets. What do you think?” D.D. snapped.

Detective O scowled, pulled out a chair at the conference table, and dropped into it. “She’s guilty. You know she’s guilty. Did you see her face? ‘Tell me you’re not a killer, Charlene.’ She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t do it!”

“Crap, we’re going to have to assign a patrol car to watch her. Course, we don’t have any proof she’s a suspect, let alone the budget for a patrol officer. Double crap.” D.D. also pulled out a chair, took a seat. The manila file was in front of her. She didn’t open it. She’d studied the crime scene photos at 5 A.M., her first night away from baby Jack.

Interestingly enough, it was not the tiny skeletons that had bothered her. The finger bones the size of grains of rice. The unfused cranial plates of the little boy, collapsed into a heap like a pile of yellowed rose petals.

The girl had mummified slightly, delicate skin shrink-wrapping her tiny frame, keeping her bones more intact. At first glance, the remains appeared to be a macabre doll, complete with long dark hair. It was only upon closer inspection you realized this had once been a real baby, twelve to eighteen months old, who’d probably sat up, crawled, taken a first step.

No, it wasn’t the impossible tiny corpses that had gotten to D.D. It was the blankets. Pale pink with dark pink polka dots for her, dark blue teddy bears against a light blue background for him. First Christine Grant had murdered her children. Then she’d wrapped them up in their own baby blankets. There was something fundamentally maternal about that gesture.

Something…incredibly fucked up.

One P.M. D.D. was feeling the weight of a long night. She didn’t want to open that file again. She just wanted to go home to Jack and hold her baby close.

She pushed the folder away, pinched the bridge of her nose, and tried to figure out what to do next.

“I think she’s Abigail,” Detective O said.

D.D. opened her eyes, peering at the sex crimes detective blearily. “Say what?”

“Sybil. Wasn’t that the case? A girl so horribly and ritualistically abused by her mother that she developed multiple personalities to protect herself.”

D.D. stared at her.

“Sounds like Charlene was horribly and ritualistically abused. Maybe same thing happened, except with a twist-she didn’t just adopt the names of her dead siblings, she adopted a personality for each of them, as well. So, say, this Abigail she was telling us about-”

“The baby with brown eyes…”

“In real life, yes. But then Charlene’s mother killed it, and Charlene…absorbed…Abigail instead. Protector personality. Charlene isn’t killing sex offenders. Abigail is. Hence a brown-haired, blue-eyed shooter, running around Boston murdering sex offenders, while introducing herself as Abigail. Oh, oh, oh. And the notes within the notes. Maybe tightly wound Abigail, the protector personality, is the one writing everyone has to die sometime, in the perfectly formed script, while Charlene, some little piece of her who knows killing is wrong, quickly scrawls the second message, catch me. A plea for help. One note with two different messages, representing two different personalities.”

D.D. stared at the young detective. She frowned. Then she stared some more. “I think we just fell into a Lifetime movie.”

Detective O shrugged. “Most fiction starts with a kernel of truth. Dissociative identity disorder is a recognized and diagnosable psychiatric illness. Besides, do you have any other explanation for the note within the note, let alone a Charlie clone running around Boston shooting pedophiles, then introducing herself as Abigail?”

Come to think of it. “No. I’ll tell you what, why don’t you call Charlene and ask if she’ll kindly return to HQ for a mental health eval? Given how much she currently likes you…”

“Playing nice wasn’t working,” O insisted stiffly.

“Really? When’d you try it?”

“Oh please, this from the Queen of Bitch.”

“Queen of Bitch?”

“Hey, I’d take it as a compliment.”

“Hey, I do. But fact remains, our strategy walking into this meeting was to not spook the suspect. As co-interviewers, we’re supposed to back each other up, not screw each other over.”

“It worked,” Detective O declared flatly. “She’s starting to break. You heard her-no alibi for last night’s shooting. And hell yes, she feels helpless and wants to rescue other kids and the cops can’t do enough, etc., etc. She wants to tell us. Now it’s just a matter of bringing her to the point where it feels better to tell us exactly what she did than to keep it bottled up inside.”

“Maybe,” D.D. muttered, less convinced. She picked up a pencil, tapped its eraser on the polished surface of the maple wood table. “If Charlie’s past makes her a killer,” she mused out loud, “then what else in her past makes her a target?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we have two investigations leading us to one subject: Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant. Just to keep things confusing, she appears to be the perpetrator of one series of crimes, while being the potential victim of another series of crimes. She shoots pedophiles, while counting down the days to her own murder. There’s a crazy kind of logic there, but I still can’t decipher it.”

“Her past may not have anything to do with her friends’ murders.”

D.D. arched a brow. “You mean she just naturally attracts psychopaths? First her mother, then a random stranger who decided to murder the ones she loves?”

O shrugged. “Sure the mom’s dead?”

“The twin Rosalind and Carter tattoos seem a slam dunk. I mean, there could be other deceased Jane Does of the same approximate age and description. Perhaps even deceased Jane Does with the same pineapple-shaped birthmark. But a deceased Jane Doe of the same approximate age, description, birthmark, and tattoo honoring two dead babies…”

“All right, all right. The mom’s dead. Well, think about what Charlene said: How did her mother wind up so crazy when everyone else in the family appears so normal? Except, if Charlene’s running around Boston shooting sex offenders to death, she’s not really that normal, is she?”

“Meaning, maybe neither is the aunt?” D.D. murmured.

“Once you’ve established two homicidal maniacs in the family, what’s a third? Though it makes you wonder what they talk about at family reunions.”

“I once read about a family with two serial killer brothers. And here was the kicker-they murdered independently of one another. Two separate homicidal rampages.”

“Several cases of cousins operating as killing teams. So definitely something to be said for pruning certain family trees.”

“You gonna look up the aunt?” D.D. asked, pushing back in her chair.

“I’ll background the aunt. Given that she’s in town, timing seems right for a face-to-face interview. What are you going to do?”

“Go home. Get some sleep.” D.D. paused. She wanted to be present for the aunt’s interview. Then again, she could barely keep her eyes open, and she was hitting the point of nonsensical cranky that was more hurtful than helpful. She’d advised her unit that this investigation was a marathon not a sprint. Perhaps she should take her own advice. Interesting.

Not to mention that tomorrow was the twenty-first. Game day. Definitely, she wanted to be fresh for game day.

“I’ll sleep a couple of hours first, then pick up Jack from day care,” D.D. determined out loud.

“Coming back to the office?” O asked.

“Maybe after dinner. We might have something from the handwriting expert by then. Plus a report from Neil and Phil on their visit with our third victim’s family. Oh, and I’ll follow up with Grovesnor PD, make sure they get Charlene’s handgun. One thing’s for certain.” D.D. rose to standing, glancing at her watch. “For Charlene Grant there’s not much time left.”

“No,” O agreed. “There certainly isn’t.”