Alone (Detective D.D. Warren, #1)(28)

“Would it be easier if she were ugly?” Harris asked. “I imagine it has to be disconcerting to meet the wife of the man you killed and already be fantasizing about f*cking her.”

“Get to the point.”

“You've been asking questions, Officer Dodge. As long as you're asking questions, I thought you should hear all of the answers. May I?”

Bobby didn't protest; the investigator launched into his spiel.

“She was working at the perfume counter in Filene's,” Harris began. “Did she tell you that? Yes, the fine, beautiful Mrs. Gagnon was a perfume spritzer for a living. She'd not only flunked out of college, but she had no marketable skills to her name. She peddled perfumes and lived in a rat-infested apartment in East Boston, wearing the same dress every other day. Until she met Jimmy, of course.”

“Was Jimmy eighteen?”

“Actually, he was twenty-seven at the time.”

“Then he was a big boy. He knew what he was doing.”

“You would think so,” Harris agreed mildly. “But with a woman like Catherine, looks can be deceiving.”

“She's the devil in angel's clothing, yada, yada, yada. Get on with it.”

“Jimmy Gagnon was a bit of a playboy. I'm sure you've heard stories. He was a good-looking man, fun-loving, free-spirited, and of course, extremely generous. Lots of women had come and gone in Jimmy's life. His parents, I confess, were actually starting to worry a little, wonder if he'd ever settle down. Then he met Catherine. He grinned, she spritzed, and the rest, as they say, was history.

“My employers, James and Maryanne, were delighted at first. Catherine seemed lovely, quiet, perhaps even a little shy. Then, of course, Jimmy told them all about her tragic life.”

“Some sadness,” Bobby muttered.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing.”

“You should look up Catherine's name sometime. See 1980, any listings under Thanksgiving Miracle. That's what they called Catherine back then. After she'd been kidnapped by a pedophile and held as his personal sex slave for twenty-eight days in some pit he'd dug in the ground. Hunters found her by accident. Otherwise, God knows what would've happened to her.

“Jimmy found this story riveting. You had to see Catherine six years ago, when they first met. A little too thin, hollow-eyed, in a threadbare dress. She was not only beautiful, she was tragic, a regular damsel in distress. She told Jimmy he was the only chance at happiness she'd ever had, and Jimmy ate it up, hook, line and sinker. In a matter of months they were engaged, then married. Catherine Gagnon came, she saw, and she conquered.”

They'd already covered one city block and were rapidly eating up the second.

“So Jimmy gained a beautiful wife and Catherine gained a bank account.” Bobby shrugged. “Sounds like half the marriages of the rich and famous. What's the problem?”

“Their son. Catherine and Jimmy had Nathan just a year later, and Catherine literally had a nervous breakdown. Frankly, she just couldn't cut it as a mother. And for the first time, James and Maryanne grew afraid. Not just of what Catherine was doing to Jimmy, but of what she might do to Nathan.”

Harris abruptly switched gears. “Catherine was only twelve years old when Richard Umbrio snatched her off the street. I used to be a cop, you know, worked homicide in Baltimore. No matter how many cases you've seen, child kidnappings are the worst. Here's this poor girl, just walking home from school. Next thing she knows, she's being yanked into a car, probably screaming at the top of her lungs, but nobody hearing a thing. And Richard wasn't a small guy, not one of those sissy-looking child molesters you often see, the type who have to victimize children because they obviously couldn't handle anyone their own size. No—at the tender age of twenty, Richard Umbrio was six foot four, weighed two hundred twenty pounds. His neighbors were already in the habit of crossing to the other side of the street just so they didn't have to make eye contact with him. Catherine, on the other hand, probably weighed eighty pounds. What was a little girl like her gonna do against a guy like him? Let me be the first to say, there isn't a hell big enough for some of the *s we have walking here on earth.

“Richard took her out to the woods not far from his house. Set her up underground, where he could visit her as much as he liked and no one would hear a thing. She got a coffee can to use as a toilet, a jug of water, and a loaf of bread. That was it. No flashlight, no cot, no blanket to keep her warm. He kept her down there like an animal. And then for nearly a month, he did to her whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted.

“You have to wonder what that level of systematic abuse does to a child. You have to wonder how she must have felt. Left alone in the dark for long periods of time, then to finally have companionship in the form of a serial rapist. Makes you mad just to think about it, doesn't it?”

Bobby still didn't reply, but his jaw had gone tight and his hands were fisted at his sides. He had a feeling Harris hadn't gotten to the bad part yet. This was merely foreplay; Harris was still warming up.

“Maybe Catherine got lucky when she was found,” the investigator said now. “Or maybe not. How does a person really recover from something like that? Is it ever possible for a girl to put all that behind her, to return to normal?”

Harris waited a heartbeat. Then he announced, “Catherine stopped sleeping the minute Nathan was born. Jimmy would find her pacing the house, frantically turning on lights. He'd bring her to bed, she'd spring out the other side. He'd turn off lights, she'd hunt them down again, including the one in the oven. And it wasn't just her strange compulsions. When she went to pick Nathan up, she'd hold him stiffly, away from her body. The more the baby screamed, the more she carried him around like a soup can she didn't know where to set down. The third day, Jimmy found her standing over the crib, holding a pillow. When Jimmy asked her what she was doing, she said Nathan had told her he was tired and needed to sleep. Jimmy called his parents, panicked. The Gagnons agreed he shouldn't leave Nathan alone with Catherine anymore, and they went to work finding a nanny.