Catch Me (Detective D.D. Warren, #6)(7)

Frankly, she didn’t want to talk about it. She just wanted others to feel her pain.

D.D. pushed her way through the growing crowd of gawkers piling up on the sidewalk, then flashed her shield at the uniformed officer standing outside the crime scene tape. He dutifully entered her name and badge number in the murder book. Then she was ducking under the yellow tape and slipping on shoe booties and a hair net, before finally mounting the peeling wooden steps of the faded gray tenement building.

Scene was on the second floor. One-bedroom unit of the low-income housing project. Victim was a forty-something Caucasian male, which from what D.D. could tell, made him the only white guy in an eight-block radius. Apparently, he lived alone, and they’d only gotten the call when neighbors had complained of the smell.

D.D. hated tenement houses. If you could take despair, give it four walls, leaking ceilings, and very few windows, this is what it would look like. She hated the punk ass teenagers that eyed her boldly as she approached, already so grim they might as well piss off a Boston cop, because what else did they have to lose? She fretted over the shrunken, eighty-year-old grandmothers, forced to carry heavy bags of groceries up three flights of stairs to a bone-cold efficiency unit in the winter, or a 120-degree boiling kettle in the summer. She despaired over the packs of feral kids gazing distrustfully out of doorways, because at the ripe old ages of four, five, six, they’d already been taught to hate all authority figures.

Race relations in Boston. Inner-city socioeconomics. Label it whatever you wanted; tenement buildings stood as a constant reminder to D.D. of all the ways her job was still failing a significant portion of Boston’s population.

Guy here had been murdered. D.D. and her squad would investigate. D.D. and her squad would arrest the killer. And life for everyone in this building would suck just as much tomorrow as it did today.

Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren was cranky. But she did not want to talk about it.

D.D.’s squadmate, Neil, met her on the second-floor landing. The thirty-two-year-old lanky redhead used to work as an EMT before joining the BPD, and was their go-to man for all things gory. Currently, he was holding a handkerchief over his mouth and nose, which D.D. took as a bad sign.

He took one look at the expression on her face and recoiled slightly.

“The baby?” he asked tentatively.

“Not why I’m cranky,” she snapped.

He had to think about it. “Alex left you?”

“Oh for heaven’s sake…” She loved her squad and her squad loved her. But just working with her was enough for them to believe that Alex, who lived with her, must be a saint. “Not why I’m cranky.”

“You don’t have to go inside,” Neil ventured. “I mean, if you’re worried about the smell, or, or…” His voice trailed off. The warning look in her eyes was enough; he stopped talking.

“My parents are coming!” D.D. blurted out.

“You have parents?”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Florida,” she muttered. “They live in Florida. Where they play golf and bridge and do all the things old people do. They like being in Florida. I like them being in Florida. Just because I have a baby is no reason to mess with a good thing.”

Neil nodded, then waited. When it became clear she was done speaking, he leaned forward slightly. “Do they have names?”

“Patsy and Roy.”

“Oh. Well, that explains it. Can we talk about the murder vic now? Please.”

“Thought you’d never ask. What do we got?”

“Two GSWs to the head. Probably three to four days dead.”

D.D. raised a brow. “Bloated, gassy?” she asked, meaning the corpse.

“Well, been brutally cold, which helped,” Neil offered.

True. A four-day old corpse in the heat and humidity of August D.D. would’ve smelled a block away. As it was, standing three yards from the door of the apartment, she caught only the dull undertones of something rancid. Thank heavens for the mid-January deep freeze in Boston.

Then she thought of something. “What about the apartment’s heating unit?” she asked with a frown.

“Turned off.”

She arched a brow. “By the victim, or the killer?”

Neil shrugged, because of course he couldn’t know that yet, which didn’t mean he hadn’t wondered himself. D.D. often thought out loud, which, out of sheer self-preservation, her squad had learned not to take personally.

“Who’s here?” D.D. asked now, meaning the other investigators.

Neil rattled off several names. Their other squadmate, Phil, the family man. A couple of crime scene techs, latent prints, photographer, the ME’s office. Not too big a party, which D.D. preferred. Space was small, and extra officers, even so-called experts, had a tendency to mess things up. D.D. liked her crime scenes tight and controlled. Later, if things went wrong, that meant it would be on her head. But D.D. would rather shoulder the blame than ride herd on a bunch of uniforms.

“What else do I need to know?” she asked Neil.

“Won’t tell you,” Neil announced stubbornly.

She glanced at him, startled. Their other squadmate, Phil, was known to go toe-to-toe with her. Neil not so much.

“If I tell you and I’m wrong, you’re gonna be pissed,” Neil muttered, no longer looking at her. “I don’t tell you, and I’m right, you can feel good about yourself later—and take the credit.”