Catch Me (Detective D.D. Warren, #6)(15)

“So what do you want?” D.D. asked finally.

Charlie blinked. Stared at D.D., held her coffee cup again. “What do you mean?”

“You came to me, remember? Lurked outside an active crime scene. Why?”

The girl hesitated. Her gaze flickered away.

D.D. took a swig of water. She enjoyed obvious liars. Made her job easier.

“I wanted to see you,” Charlie said at last.

“How’d you know where I’d be?”

“Police scanner. I’m a dispatch officer, right? I hear all the calls come in. Heard about the shooting, gambled you’d be there.”

“Why?”

“Because I Googled you.”

“Excuse me?”

“I Googled you. I searched for homicide detectives in Boston and your name was the one that kept coming up. You helped rescue the state trooper’s little girl, solve the string of family annihilations, find the missing wife in South Boston. I did some research, and…” The girl pushed away her coffee mug, looked up at D.D., and shrugged. “I don’t know what’s going to happen in four days. I guess, I just want to meet the person who might handle my murder. And I want you to meet me because maybe that will help. Maybe, having met me, you’ll try harder. And that will finally catch him. Someone has to.”

“Won’t be me,” D.D. said.

“Why not?”

“You rent a place in Cambridge, right? Not my jurisdiction.”

“Oh.” Apparently, Charlie hadn’t known this. “Perhaps I won’t be murdered there.”

“Your friends were. In their own homes, right?”

“It’s not really my house,” the girl said. “I just rent a room.”

“Semantics. Your profiler describes these murders as an intimate crime, right? Not stranger-to-stranger. Known perpetrator to known victim.”

“Yes.”

“So he’ll strike where you feel comfortable. That’s part of the process, the methodology. Sneaking up on you on the subway won’t do it for him. You gotta see him coming. You gotta welcome him with a smile. It’s part of the drill.”

“Then I guess I won’t go home on the twenty-first.”

D.D. was curious despite herself. “So you left your town, came to the big city. Figured it was easier to get lost here, maybe hide in a crowd?”

The girl nodded. “And I run, and lift weights and box and train with firearms. I’m not defenseless.”

“Licensed to carry?” D.D. asked sharply.

“Yes.”

“How’d you manage that?” Unlike other states, where it was legal to have a gun in one’s vehicle, home, or business, Massachusetts required a gun license to even possess a firearm. A license to carry was one step above that, granting the person permission to carry the firearm outside his or her home or business. The license usually required some kind of underlying reason—the person seeking the license worked in security, was a business owner who routinely carried large amounts of cash, that sort of thing. Being young and paranoid probably wasn’t a check mark on the form, D.D. guessed.

The girl, however, had her jaw set in a stubborn line. “I’m legal,” she said, and folded her hands in front of her.

D.D. continued to regard her levelly. “All right. You’re legally armed and training to be dangerous. But you kept your name, Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant. Why take all those steps and not change your name?”

Girl looked away. “I have to work. And the only experience I have is in dispatch, which means I have to pass a background check. Even if I invented a new identity, I don’t know how to create one that would stand up to that level of scrutiny.”

“No.”

The girl startled, look up at her sharply.

“Come on, don’t waste my time. You lie about one thing, then I gotta worry about you lying about other things and for the record,” D.D. glanced at her watch, “you have only three minutes left, so let’s not waste it on games.”

“I have only three minutes left?”

“Yep. It’s called lifestyle,” D.D. informed her gravely. “Forty years later, I’ve decided to give it a chance. So don’t f*ck with me. Look me in the eye, and tell me why you kept your name.”

“I want to go home.” And the way the girl said it, D.D. understood she didn’t mean to a rented room in Cambridge. She meant her town, her people. She meant the place she had belonged in the days before her childhood friends had started dying.

She meant a place that D.D. herself was just starting to identify, and that spooked her a little, made her shiver, because there was a plaintive tone there, a longing that D.D., with three minutes to go, understood.

“You want the killer to find you.”

“I can’t go home until he does.”

“Has he made contact? Notes, phone calls, any kind of warning or threat?”

The girl shook her head. “I understand,” she said, almost kindly, “that there’s nothing you can do. No threat, no assault, no murder, means no crime, means no jurisdiction. I’m just a fairy tale you’re listening to today.”

“You should change your name,” D.D. said. “Or at least tell your story to your own officers. You’re dispatch. You have their backs, they’ll watch yours.”