Catch Me (Detective D.D. Warren, #6)(58)

He stared at me. “You gotta get her out of your head,” he said abruptly.

I stiffened, still stroking Tulip’s ears, but feeling myself pull away.

“Mean it,” J.T. said. “You gotta hit for you. You gotta take that rage and shame and silence, and turn it into a weapon. You gotta know, Charlie, you gotta well and truly know it’s not okay to be hurt. You don’t deserve to be punished. Someone attacks you, stop accepting, start fighting back.”

“I’m trying.”

“Bullshit! You hesitate. You go to some place in your head where you’re conditioned to hang out until the punishment stops. Look, I can train you to shoot. Dick can train you to hit. But neither one of us can untrain you to stop playing victim in your own life. You gotta do that. You gotta care.”

I flushed, felt like a little girl chastised for not doing my homework. I didn’t want to be passive. I wanted to be a badass. And yet, when his hands had closed around my throat…When he’d attacked me from behind…

I’d felt like I deserved it. I’d been bad and I deserved my punishment. Conditioned response of abused children everywhere. We all grew up, but none of us ever got away.

“Dying for someone is easy,” J.T. murmured now, as if reading my mind. “Living for yourself, that’s hard. But you gotta do it, Charlie. Honor yourself. Defend yourself. Fight for yourself.”

I nodded finally, tucking Tulip closer to my body to help keep her warm.

“Are we going shooting now?” I asked.

“In a minute.”

He was opening my bag, withdrawing my Taurus. The. 22 looked tiny in his large callused palm, his long fingers better suited for his explosive. 45 than my peashooter. He sniffed at it, looked at me.

“Never put away a gun dirty,” he said.

“Figured I’d clean it after our session.”

“Never put away a gun dirty.”

“Okay.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Good, ’cause I don’t want to know.”

He handed me the Taurus. We both rose to standing.

“She gonna be okay walking?” He gestured to Tulip.

“If we keep her moving. She needs a coat. Maybe later today.”

“Do that. Dog that’s worth fighting for deserves a sweater.”

J.T. started walking; Tulip and I fell in step beside him. It was a mile and a half to his house, tucked away on three acres of land. Perfect for a man with a shooting range in his backyard. Perfect for a man—and his wife—who didn’t much care for company.

“She still alive?” he asked as he walked.

I didn’t need clarification to know who he was asking about. “No,” I heard myself say, another rare admission, a memory barely known and definitely never explored. But if I really thought about it…of course my mother was dead. It stood to reason that if she were still alive, she would’ve contacted me by now. Written a letter from prison or whatever mental institute she was living in. Dropped by the first moment she was released. That’s the whole point of Munchausen’s by proxy—the perpetrator considers herself the victim. It’s all about her—she doesn’t just need sympathy, support, understanding. She deserves it. But I’d never heard from my mother since waking up in the upstate New York hospital. Not a phone call, not a letter, not a peep.

There had been some kind of final confrontation. I’d lived, and my mother…

“Drinker?” J.T. asked.

“No.”

“Drug abuser?”

“Crazy. Just plain crazy.”

“Glad she’s dead then,” J.T. said. “Now get over her.”

“Sure,” I promised him. “Might as well.” I glanced at my watch. “Fifty-eight hours to go,” I muttered. Both of us started to jog.





Chapter 20


“QUINCY.”

“This is Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren, Boston PD. I’m calling regarding the criminal profile you developed for Charlene Grant. The January twenty-first homicides. As in two murders down, maybe a third to go, which I’d personally like to avoid. Boston’s homicide rate is high enough, thank you.”

“Detective,” retired FBI profiler Pierce Quincy greeted her crisply. “Spoke to my daughter last night. She apprised me of your investigation. Sounds like you have a plan, something involving social media?”

“Seems worth trying. I understand you studied both the first and second crime scene.”

“Prepared the first report for Jackie Knowles. Wrote the second for Charlene, after Jackie’s murder.”

D.D. hadn’t thought of that. “Sorry,” she murmured, not sure what else to say to the retired profiler.

“Crime scene analysis is easier,” Quincy replied simply, “when you don’t know the victim. Therefore, I must add caveats to my second report. It is probably not as objective as the first.”

“Let’s start with the first murder, the Providence scene,” D.D. decided. “My impression from your report, and the lead investigator, Roan Griffin, is that the perpetrator is someone with a high-degree of self-control, advanced communication skills, above average intelligence, and a good deal of manual strength.”