Catch Me (Detective D.D. Warren, #6)(111)

“Gotta get back in the cruiser. Report in. You know that as well as anyone.”

“Fucking dispatch,” I said.

“Couple of hours, I promise to be back,” he said.

“Couple of hours, I promise to be still alive,” I said.

He nodded, looked at me, and then…

He left.

I locked the door behind him. Then I stood there and wondered which one of us would be made a liar first.

Six and a half hours. No gun. No dog. No home court advantage.

Screw it all. I started rifling kitchen drawers, until I found the standard junk drawer. Duct tape, ballpoint pen, four D batteries, fishing wire, twisty ties, hammer, spare change.

I prepared for war.





Chapter 38


D.D. RETURNED TO HQ and took over a conference room. Then, starting on the left-hand perimeter of the eight-person table, she laid out crime scene reports. First Randi Menke. Next Jackie Knowles. In the middle of the table, in a long row, she placed four eight-by-eleven crime scene photos from each homicide, like a string of place mats.

Then she stepped back and stared.

Neil came in, said something about a witness she needed to call back. She grunted. He left.

Phil came in, said something about everyone going for lunch. She grunted. He left.

She stared some more.

She thought of Abigail. A long-lost baby? A splintered personality? A fragment of Charlene Grant’s fickle memory? It didn’t matter what Abigail was, D.D. decided. It mattered who she was.

Abigail. Brown hair, blue eyes, willing to introduce herself to a witness after cold-bloodedly killing a child molester. Connected in some manner to Charlene Grant. Connected therefore to the BFF murders as well? The central link, the missing piece of a puzzle. The reason January twenty-one mattered, happened at all.

Abigail.

D.D. stared at the Randi Menke and Jackie Knowles crime scene photos. And the more she stared, and the more she thought, the more she knew she was on the right track. Abigail had done this. The crime scene photos positively reeked of Abigail.

Feminine, Quincy had called the homicides. The neat and tidy rooms, the fluffed pillows, the spotless floors. Both victims could be sleeping, sprawled awkwardly to be sure, but their faces were not horrified, their necks not broken by brute force, their limbs not skewed painfully.

Even in the close-ups, the bruising around each of their throats was minimal, almost delicate. The killer had applied just enough pressure to get the job done.

And the victims had not fought back, not offered up even token resistance.

What had Abigail known, what had Abigail done that enabled her to kill two grown women so precisely, so neatly, so…gently?

Not a crime of violence. D.D. paused, moved to the whiteboard, wrote that down. Whatever drove Abigail to kill, it wasn’t bloodlust or savagery. She didn’t hate her victims. She didn’t torture, maim, or inflict any postmortem damage.

She got in, got the job done, and cleaned up afterward. Almost clinical in nature.

Not personal. D.D. added this line next to the whiteboard.

Abigail killed both of these women, but it wasn’t personal to her. If so, she would’ve been compelled to perform such classic dehumanizing touches as slashing their faces, or maybe attacking their hands or cutting off their hair. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, a killer who was driven by an overwhelming compulsion to murder often felt shame or remorse afterward and covered the victim’s body, particularly the victim’s face, as if to hide what she had done. But no on both counts. No anger, no shame. Clinical.

Abigail had killed two women because it had needed to be done. She’d kept it relatively painless. Performed her ritual simply and expediently. Then she’d cleaned up. Perhaps also a matter of business—covering her tracks. Or maybe the first sign of remorse, D.D. thought. An apology woman to woman. Sorry I had to kill you, but here, I did the dishes, righted the sofa cushions, mopped the floor.

Motivation, that’s what D.D. needed. If it wasn’t personal, why had Abigail done it? Financial gain? According to Quincy’s reports, nobody gained substantially from either death. Personal gain—bumping off a rival for a man’s affection, competition in the workplace, the cheerleader that just took your daughter’s slot? Again, no one thing tied together Randi Menke and Jackie Knowles. They certainly weren’t rivals for a man’s attention, they didn’t share the same job, they didn’t even live in the same state. They were just Charlene’s friends, and even that connection was dated.

D.D. frowned. Made a note in a fresh column. Frowned some more.

Decided to attack the problem from a different angle.

Forget the why for a moment. How? How did one female—and D.D. was certain now the killer was female, had to be female, as Quincy had predicted—how did one female so effortlessly murder another?

Physically larger and stronger? Even then, someone choked you, you fought, you struggled, you clawed at hands with your fingernails, you kicked back with your feet, you jabbed with your elbows. Even if the rooms had been cleaned up afterward, there would be massive physical evidence left behind on each murder victim. Contusions, lacerations, postmortem bruising.

There should have been hair and fiber tangled in each victim’s clothing; skin cells, even blood samples recovered from beneath each victim’s fingernails. And the bruises could be just as helpful. D.D. had seen them in the shape of the perpetrator’s ring, imprints from belt buckles, even the shape of one woman’s barrette clearly indented into the cheek of her rival after a particularly vicious catfight.