Catch Me (Detective D.D. Warren, #6)(68)

“What’s with her hands and throat? Looks like she’s been mugged—”

“Training.”

“So she really thinks someone will try to kill her on the twenty-first?”

“Randi Menke and Jackie Knowles really are dead.”

Detective O paused. Then her eyes widened. “Motivation. Think about it. Charlene’s police dispatch. She takes the calls, she hears these kids. Maybe she wants to help them, but she’s not sure how. In the meantime, she’s boxing, shooting—”

“Gaining skills.”

“And, even more importantly, counting down to her own death. Meaning, at a certain point, what does she have to lose?”

D.D. stilled, regarded the other detective. “Charlene decides to do something with the limited time she feels she has left. Maybe right some past wrongs, given a history of child abuse.”

“She’s saving other kids,” O continued. “Doing what she no doubt wishes someone had done for her, when she was that age, and Mommy Dearest was pulling out the insulin.”

“Insulin?”

“Oh, other case I worked. Evil stepfather, actually. A diabetic. Came up with the idea to inject his beautiful twin stepdaughters with insulin. Their blood sugar would crash, rendering them semi-comatose, he’d do what he was going to do, then squirt spray cans of frosting into their mouths to bring their blood sugar back up. Later, after he’d perfected his technique, he’d leave cans of frosting out on the counter just to mess with their heads.”

D.D. stared at her. “Your job sucks.”

“No,” the young detective said seriously. “The cases suck. My job, putting evil stepfather away for twenty years and ensuring those little girls will never be hurt again, pretty much f*cking rocks. Which you, of all people, I’d think would understand.”

“Touché. So, back to the matters at hand. Motivation. Means. Opportunity. Yeah, Charlie looks pretty good as a vigilante killer right now.” D.D. glanced down at the piece of paper in her hand, unfolding it and holding it out to Detective O. “Handwriting, however, is not a perfect match.”

“No flat edge,” O agreed, taking the paper. “Then again, she had to execute her penmanship with both of us watching. Girl’s not stupid. If she did write the other notes, you’d think she’d take some steps to make her handwriting look different.”

“She wrote in print here, not cursive like the notes, but check it out, the letters are neat in appearance, carefully formed.” D.D. turned toward one stack of paperwork on her desk. She couldn’t help glancing at her watch, simultaneously aware of the amount of work she still had to do and of her parents’ flight landing in a matter of hours. She rifled through the pile of papers until she found what she was looking for, scanned copies of both notes left at the shootings.

Everyone has to die sometime. Be brave.

She pulled the copies, placing them on the blue-gray carpeted floor between her and O. O positioned Charlene’s recent writing exhibit between the other two sheets, and both peered down.

“Rosalind Grant,” O read. “Carter Grant. Who are they?”

“Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant,” D.D. recited Charlene’s full name. “Maybe her middle names are in honor of her mother and father?”

“I thought she wasn’t going to give us her parents’ names.”

“Must be my charm.”

“Look at the n,” Detective O said after another minute. “First in the note writer’s cursive ‘everyone’ then in Charlie’s printed ‘Grant.’ Looks similar to me.”

D.D. shrugged. “Looks like an n.”

“Top arch is nice and round. The lines going up the left side of the letter and down the right side are almost exactly parallel. You write an n. See how rounded your top is and how perfectly parallel your sides are.”

For the sake of argument, D.D. gave it a try, first in cursive, then in print. Either way, her n looked dreadful. Like an upside down v. No neatly arched top, no nicely parallel sides, just a tiny, shuttered-up scrawl.

“You write like a doctor,” O declared.

“In my family, that’s a compliment.” D.D. automatically snuck a glance at her watch again. “Okay, Charlene’s n is certainly closer to the note writer’s n than mine. Now, if only those were grounds for arrest.”

“You could have the handwriting expert write up an analysis—”

“Which he’s already said won’t be admissible in court, given that graphology is considered a pseudoscience.”

“This isn’t graphology. Theorizing that the letter writer is anal-retentive is graphology. This is straightforward forensic analysis of penmanship, author of letter A most likely also wrote exhibit B.”

“But he needs multiple exhibits. Still,” D.D. amended herself, “I’ll make a copy of Charlene’s names, get him started. Might take a couple of days, however, for him to do his thing. In the meantime, we need something more tangible.”

“A smoking gun.”

“Which ironically, we just handed back to her.”

“What?”

“Her twenty-two. We had it in custody downstairs.”

“Really?”

“Really. But still can’t run a ballistics test without probable cause. I tell you those constitutional rights are making our job more difficult every day.” D.D. continued to stare down at the notes, frowning.