Catch Me (Detective D.D. Warren, #6)(99)

Not to mention that in the past ten years, Charlene’s mother and two best friends had all died. Meaning one woman had left behind a trail of three dead bodies across multiple states. Seemed to D.D. that it was pretty risky to know Charlene Grant these days. Heightened your odds of meeting an untimely demise, and even worse, given Charlene’s fickle powers of recollection, she wouldn’t remember you afterward.

You can both know things and not know things, Charlene had said. Coping mechanism for the childhood-challenged.

Multiple personalities, each remembering only its individual piece of the puzzle, Detective O had countered. Explaining Charlene’s spotty memory, conflicting notes within notes, the girl’s seeming ability to mourn some murders while committing others.

D.D. turned over both Charlene’s statements and O’s theory in her head, not liking either of them.

“I want that gun,” she murmured in frustration.

“Sorry, Detective. Did my best.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” D.D. asked a couple of more questions, talked a little shop, and then, when she had nothing else to show for her efforts, ended the call.

Jack was asleep, bottle lying to one side of his swaddled form. She rose from the rocking chair, placed the empty bottle on the coffee table, and took a moment to hold her son close.

She cleared her head of the case. She let go of Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant and pedophile shooters and BFF murderers.

She held her baby. She inhaled the sweet scents of formula and talcum powder and newborn innocence. She watched her son’s little chest rise and fall. Admired the scrunched up lines of his face, his ten perfect little fingers curled into two loose fists.

She marveled at the tiny miracle that was her child.

Then she kissed him gently on his puckered forehead, tucked him into his bassinet, and grabbed herself a glass of water just in time for her cell to ring again.

She checked the display. Detective O. She answered it.

“Self-fulfilling prophecies,” D.D. stated by way of greeting. “First you labeled your own suspect feral, then you spooked her into bolting. Congratulations. Charlene came to work and didn’t bring her twenty-two.”

“Yes she did!” O’s voice came out triumphantly.

D.D. paused, took another sip of water, tried to figure out what she’d just missed. “How do you know?”

“I followed her.”

“You followed Charlene Grant?”

“Waited in the parking lot of the Grovesnor PD actually. That way, if they were able to confiscate her weapon, I could deliver it immediately for ballistics testing.”

“At eleven P.M. Friday night?”

“I made a call in advance, got Jon Cassir, the firearms expert, to agree to stay.”

D.D. frowned again. The heavy-handedness of O’s approach irked her, made her want to cut the younger investigator down to size. Then she had to catch herself. O had been smart to plan ahead. Nothing wrong with an aggressive strategy when pursuing a serial shooter. In fact, there had been a time when D.D. would’ve thought to do exactly that.

Instead of leaving HQ to return to her baby. And saying she’d be back after dinner, except Alex was clearly exhausted from the past few nights, and she’d been tired from her all-nighter, let alone her breakfast with her parents, and tending Jack had seemed a better idea than driving all the way back to Roxbury. She could work from home, then call her parents to smooth things over. Right.

“So I’m at the station,” O was saying, “and I saw Charlene walking down the street from the T stop. Then a patrol officer got out of his cruiser and approached her. I thought maybe he was a friend at first, but she dropped into a fighter’s stance and he had his hand on his sidearm. Looked like he was going to take her bag by force, and she wasn’t going to let him. Then, just as abruptly, he walked away. At which point, she took her semiauto out of her bag, wrapped it in a scarf, and buried it in a snowbank.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. So, naturally, the second Charlene disappeared into the station, I unburied her Taurus twenty-two and drove it straight to the lab. I’m here now. Cassir hopes to have results by morning.”

D.D. wasn’t sure what to make of this sudden turn in events. “We have six slugs recovered from three shootings. Are all six in good enough shape for matching?”

“No, but Cassir has usable slugs from the second and third shooting. The first shooting, Antholde, is trickier. Both slugs flattened out, ricocheting around the victim’s skull, so it’s probably inconclusive.”

“But we got the notes, tying all three shootings together. So if we can match the rifling on Charlene’s twenty-two with the markings on even one of the recovered slugs…” D.D. thought out loud.

“Exactly.”

D.D. nodded. O had done good work. And it was wrong of D.D. to feel resentful. At this stage of her life, her job was to be supportive, the experienced cop mentoring the less experienced cop. Passing the baton, so to speak. In other words, growing old.

“You interview the aunt?” D.D. asked.

“Not yet. Been a little busy outsmarting Charlie. But aren’t you glad I did?”

Busy, D.D. agreed with. The obsessive nature of O’s approach, on the other hand, worried her a little.

“You returning to Grovesnor PD?” D.D. probed now.