Hide (Detective D.D. Warren, #2)(15)

Now Bobby was sitting in the tiny interrogation room that served as his temporary office, studying a hand-sketched diagram of the pit that had once held twelve-year-old Catherine Gagnon.

According to Miers's notes, Catherine had been abducted while walking home from school. Umbrio had come upon Catherine when driving around the neighborhood and asked if she would help him look for a lost dog. She took the bait and that was that.

A hulking bear of a man even at the age of nineteen, Umbrio had no problem subduing the slightly built sixth-grader. He whisked her away to an underground chamber he had prepared in the woods, and that's when Catherine's real ordeal began. Nearly thirty days in an underground pit, where her only visitor was a rapist with a penchant for Wonder bread.

If hunters hadn't stumbled upon the pit, most likely Umbrio would've eventually killed her. Instead, Catherine survived, identified her attacker, and testified against him. Umbrio was whisked away to prison. Catherine was left to rebuild her life, the so-called Thanksgiving Miracle whose adult life wasn't so miraculous after all. Being held by a monster had definitely left its mark.

Miers's notes described a case that was shocking, but routine. Catherine was a credible witness, and evidence found in the pit—a metal chain-link ladder, a plastic bucket, the plywood cover—bore out her story

Umbrio did it. Umbrio went to prison. And two years ago, when Umbrio was mistakenly paroled from prison, he returned to stalking Catherine with the same homicidal zeal he had shown prior to his arrest.

In short, Umbrio was a murderous, monstrous freak of nature, quite capable of killing six girls and interring their bodies on the grounds of an abandoned mental institute.

Except Umbrio was safe behind bars by the end of 1980. And according to Annabelle Granger, she didn't receive the locket found on Unidentified Mummified Remains #1 until 1982. Which meant… ?

Forty-eight hours into a critical investigation, Bobby didn't have any answers, but he was developing a fascinating list of questions.

D.D. finally returned from escorting Annabelle out of the building. She yanked out a chair and plopped down like a puppet whose strings had just been cut. "Jesus f*cking Christ," she said.

"Funny, I was thinking the exact same thing."

She ran a hand through her tangled hair. "I gotta get a cup of coffee. No, wait, I drink any more java, I'm gonna start pissing Colombians. I need something to eat. A sandwich. Rare roast beef on rye. With Swiss cheese and one of those really big, no-messing-around dill pickles. And a bag of potato chips."

"You've given this some thought." Bobby set down the diagram. D.D. might look like a supermodel, but she ate like a trucker. When she and Bobby had been dating—back in their rookie days, ten years and God knows how many major career moves ago—Bobby had learned quickly that D.D.'s idea of foreplay generally included an all-you-can-eat buffet.

He felt that little pang again, a longing for good old days that had only become good by virtue of distant memory and encroaching loneliness.

"Lunch is the only thing I have to look forward to today," D.D. said.

"Too bad. Your chance of getting a decent roast beef sandwich around here is about one in ten."

"I know. Even lunch is a goddamn pipe dream."

Her shoulders sagged. Bobby let her have a moment. Truth was, he was reeling a bit himself. As of this morning, he'd managed to convince himself that any resemblance between the mental hospital site and Richard Umbrio's work was mere happenstance. Then Annabelle Granger. In D.D.'s words, Jesus f*cking Christ.

"Are you going to make me say it?" she asked at last.

"Yep."

"It doesn't make any sense."

"Yep."

"I mean, okay, there's a resemblance. Lots of people look alike. Don't they say every person in the world has an unknown twin?"

[page]Bobby just stared at her.

She exhaled heavily, then sat herself up, leaning into the table, her favorite thinking pose: "Let's go through it from the top."

"I'm game."

"Richard Umbrio used an underground pit; our subject used an underground pit," D.D. started off.

"Umbrio's pit was four by six, and by all appearances, a manually enlarged sinkhole," Bobby supplied, gesturing to the diagram decorating the top of the table. "Our subject used a six-by-ten chamber, complete with wooden reinforcements."

"So, same but different."

"Same but different," Bobby concurred.

"Except for the 'supplies'—the ladder, plywood cover, plastic five-gallon bucket."

"Exactly the same," Bobby agreed.

She puffed out a breath, swishing up her bangs. "Maybe the logical provisions for an underground chamber?"

"Possible."

"Now, the metal folding chair and shelves…"

"Different."

"More sophisticated," D.D. amended out loud. "Bigger chamber, more furniture."

"Which brings us to the next key difference…"

"Richard Umbrio kidnapped one known victim, twelve-year-old Catherine Gagnon. Our subject kidnapped six victims, all young females."

"Need more information for proper analysis," Bobby said immediately "One, we don't know if the six victims were abducted at once—which is somewhat doubtful—or individually over a span of time. Are the girls related? Family members, religious affiliation, daddies all worked for the Mafia? Did their time in the chamber overlap? Or were they even kept alive down there? That's an assumption we're making based on the Catherine Gagnon case. But maybe the space only operated as a burial chamber. A place where the subject could come… be with them. A viewing gallery We don't know yet what floated this guy's boat. We can guess, but we don't know."