Catch Me (Detective D.D. Warren, #6)(49)

I didn’t disconnect my caller. It had been a relatively quiet shift, the police scanner filled with chatter about one major crime, already being handled, with no other emergencies coming down the pike. And I understood, like a lot of dispatch operators who sat alone in darkened comm centers at 2 A.M., that sometimes people just needed to talk.

So I let my caller talk. I learned the name of her nine-month-old baby girl, Moesha. I learned that the baby’s father worked graveyard for a janitorial service company. I learned that my caller, nineteen-year-old Simone, was still hoping to get her GED and wanted to be a vet tech someday. She’d been excited to get pregnant, still held out dreams of getting married. But her baby daughter cried most nights and it was getting tough, and now the baby’s dad was being a jerk and Simone just wanted to go shopping with her friends, but she didn’t have any money and her boyfriend said she was too fat to buy new clothes and why didn’t she wait till she lost all the baby weight, and yo, when might that be?

Simone talked. Simone cried. Simone talked some more.

I sat and listened and stroked Tulip’s head.

Simone talked herself down. Call ended. Screen went blank.

I sat in the dark, smoothing Tulip’s floppy ears.

“Baby’s crying,” I whispered to Tulip.

She gazed up at me.

“Down the hall.”

Tulip placed her head in my lap.

“I screwed up, Tulip. All those years ago, in my mother’s house…I failed that baby. And that’s why I don’t think about my mother anymore. I don’t want to remember. Not that it matters anymore, does it? Too little, too late.”

Tulip nosed my hand.

I smiled down at her, stroked her head. “Funny, I’ve spent a whole year planning, preparing, and strategizing for my last stand. And in the end, I’m probably gonna die just like everyone else—filled with a list of unfinished business.”

Tulip whined softly. I leaned down, put my arms around her neck.

“I’m going to send you up north,” I promised her. “You’ll get to live with my aunt Nancy, become a B-and-B dog. And the mountains are beautiful and filled with paths to run and squirrels to chase and rivers to swim. You’ll like it up there. I certainly did.”

I held her closer. “Remember me,” I whispered.

Tulip sighed heavily.

I knew exactly how she felt.


DOOR OPENED SHORTLY THEREAFTER. A dark figure appeared, backlit by the hall light, and it jolted me from my chair. I sprang up, into an automatic pugilist stance, while my desk chair flew across the tiny space.

Officer Mackereth flipped on the light.

“You always work in the dark?” he asked gruffly. He was dressed in his uniform, duty belt clasped around his waist. I’d checked the roster when I started my shift, so I knew he was working tonight. I also knew he’d been called in earlier, along with a dozen other officers, to help handle a homicide in the Red Groves housing project. Dead black male, skewered on a collapsed fire escape of a tenement housing building. Messy scene, according to the radio chatter. The crime scene techs had finally used blowtorches to sever the metal rods in Stan Miller’s body from the fire escape. Then the ME had hauled away the corpse, still shish-kebabbed, in an extra large ambulance the city had recently purchased for transporting extra large patients.

I dropped my hands to my side, flexed my fingers. I wanted to move farther away, but the desk kept me in place. The single-person comm center was strictly utilitarian. Seven feet wide, seven feet deep. The PD’s handicap-accessible unisex bathroom was larger.

Beside me, Tulip perked up. She trotted over to Officer Mackereth, sat before him, and presented her head.

He bent over, scratched her neck. Then, in a move that probably surprised him as much as me, he squatted down and gave Tulip a hug. She licked his cheek.

“At least one of you likes me,” he said.

Under the wash of fluorescent lights, I could see the heavy lines in his face. The price one paid for working death scenes. Would he dream of Stan Miller’s body later this morning? How much would it surprise him to know I’d be having that nightmare, too?

“Tough night,” I commented now, staying next to my console.

“At least no other calls,” Officer Mackereth said.

“Pretty quiet.”

“Figures. We got every uniform buzzing around the Red Groves scene, so of course nothing else comes in.”

“How’s Red Groves?” I stared at my monitor, as if I should be checking it.

Tom shrugged. “Scene’s secured. Body’s bagged and tagged. Neighbors are furious and fearful. The usual.”

“Any witnesses?” I asked. Casually.

“Only three or four dozen—”

“Really?”

Officer Mackereth blew out a huff of breath, stood up. “Hell, we had so many gawkers saying so many different things, who the hell knows? Half of them claimed the vic was yelling at his wife, then must’ve gone to storm down the fire escape, but it collapsed. Others swear there was a shoot-out at the OK Corral, probably drug dealers, maybe Russian Mafia—”

“Russian Mafia?”

“Not likely. Someone sure as hell shot up the apartment, though. Bullet holes everywhere. We’re still looking for the family. Wife, two kids. One of the neighbors saw them leaving earlier in the evening. I’m hoping for their sakes, that’s true.”