Catch Me (Detective D.D. Warren, #6)(10)

“But the photos?”

“All boys, all under the age of twelve, mostly black, but other ethnicities as well. I’d say he selected his victims based on opportunity, rather than race.”

“Son of a bitch!” D.D. exclaimed. “He’s a pedophile. Set up shop right in the middle of his target population—unloved, unsupervised, highly vulnerable kids. Gets their attention when he’s walking his puppy, then invites them up for a cookie, chips, a bottle of beer. Son of a bitch.”

“D.D.”

She glared at the dead guy, the twin holes in his forehead, the melted wax face. “Kid struck back,” she muttered, then considered the carefully wiped down surfaces. “Or maybe a parent or an older sibling or a friend. Someone got wise, then he got dead. Good.”

“D.D.”

“What?”

“It gets better.”

“What’s better than one less pervert in the city?”

Phil came walking out of the bedroom, snapping off his gloves. “You tell her yet?” he asked Neil.

“Tell me what?”

“You were on maternity leave,” Phil said, as if that explained everything.

“Tell me what!”

“Not one less pervert in the city,” Neil said happily. “Mr. Wanna See My Puppy over there makes two.”


PHIL AND NEIL HAD TO WALK HER THROUGH IT. It was four weeks back, meaning Jack had been six weeks old, a plump little form that spent his days curled up on her chest, feeling like a hot water bottle except fragile and in need of constant diligence, so she’d spent hours just sitting in the rocking chair with him, counting fingers and toes and touching the impossibly soft wisps of hair that cradled his skull—so she’d definitely not been watching the news, because she’d been being with her baby in a way she’d never been in any moment before. Totally. Completely. Without word or thought or interest in anything else. Alex would come home from work each day, glance at her and Jack in the rocking chair and smile at her in a way no man had ever smiled at her before. Then she’d get a strange feeling in her chest. Of belonging. Of being. Contentment maybe.

For her eight weeks of maternity leave, she’d reveled in it.

So, four weeks prior, D.D. had been nesting with her baby in Waltham, while a level 3 sex offender had been shot in his apartment near the Suffolk County hospital. Not in his kitchen, Phil was quick to add. In the entry. As if he’d answered the door, and boom. Double tap from a. 22, expertly placed.

No witnesses, though a couple of neighbors reported having seen a young man, maybe a teenage boy, loitering about. Further search of the vic’s home had revealed pornographic videotapes as well as an extensive collection of photos on the vic’s computers, all showing boys and girl between the ages of six and twelve involved in various sex acts.

Just owning the computer was a violation of the victim’s, Douglas Antiholde’s, parole, so investigators felt it was safe to assume the vic had gone off the straight and narrow and was back in the business of destroying young lives.

“Leads?” D.D. asked now.

Phil shrugged. “If you see a white male between the age of sixteen and twenty-five in a dark winter coat with a navy blue knit cap, let us know.”

“Bet the hotline’s ringing off the phone with that one.”

“Please, the neighbors are just doing the happy dance he’s dead. No love lost there, and that was before they heard what was on his computer.”

D.D. pursed her lips. “Did he have a puppy?”

Phil shook his head.

“We’ll have to cross-reference the photos of the victims,” she mused out loud, and immediately felt something inside her recoil. To go from Jack to those images…

She hesitated. Beside her, Phil, father of four, appeared equally queasy.

Neil spoke up. “I’ll do it.”

Phil and D.D. looked at him.

“It’s not like I want to,” he said, shrugging awkwardly. “But I don’t have kids. And both of you…So, you know, it’d probably be easier for me to study them. ’Sides, I handle the bodies all the time. How much harder can this be?”

“Way harder,” Phil said immediately. “Dead people…worst has already happened. These kids…”

Neil shrugged again. “Somebody’s gotta do it, right? Better me than you.”

Phil nodded slowly. “I think he’s growing up nicely,” he told D.D.

“Obviously we’ve raised him right,” she concurred.

Neil rolled his eyes at both of them. “Since it’s my first time through, any advice?”

“Don’t just look at the people,” D.D. informed him. “Cross-referencing the victims is step one, but you also want to examine the backgrounds of each photo—look for patterns in curtains, carpets, bedding. Sometimes, it’s not the who that matches, it’s the where. Either one gives us a link between our dead pervs. When you’re done, we’ll send the photos to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, where they have trained experts who will do the same thing all over again, except comparing them against a national database. They also have some facial recognition software, which helps them get the job done.”

Neil looked at her.

“We gotta get you to the National Academy,” she informed her younger partner, as she did at least once every six months. The National Academy was a ten-week course in advanced police training offered at Quantico, considered de rigueur for any up and coming cop. When D.D. had attended, she’d spent an entire day with the folks at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which not only helped her understand the resources they had to offer for local law enforcement agencies such as the BPD, but also made her grateful she was a city detective and not a criminologist swimming against the tide to rescue sexually abused children.