Hide (Detective D.D. Warren, #2)(21)

Turned out, for good reason.

To this day, D.D. contended that Catherine Gagnon was one of the most dangerous females ever to live in Boston, a woman who had most likely (though they lacked solid evidence) set up her own husband to be killed. And to this day, whenever Bobby thought of her, he mostly saw a desperate mother trying to protect her small child.

A person could be both noble and callous. Self-sacrificing and self-absorbed. Genuinely caring. And a stone-cold killer.

D.D. had the luxury of hating Catherine. Bobby understood her too well.

Now Bobby threw away the paper plate, crumpled the Coke can, tossed it in the recycling bin. He was just gathering up his car keys, mentally steeling himself for what would probably be a very expensive parking ticket, when his phone rang.

He glanced at caller ID, then at the clock. Eleven-fifteen p.m. He understood what had happened before he ever picked up the receiver.

"Catherine," he said calmly

"Why the hell didn't you tell me?" she exploded hysterically.

Which was how Bobby learned that the media had finally discovered the truth.




[page]
Chapter 9


ALL RIGHT, PEOPLE," D.D. Warren said crisply, passing around the latest reports. "We have approximately"—she glanced at her watch—"seven hours, twenty-seven minutes for damage control. The big guys upstairs are in agreement that at oh-eight-hundred, we're giving our first press conference. So, for God's sake, give me some progress to report or we're all going to look like *s."

Bobby, who was trying to slip discreetly into the conference room, caught the tail end of her statement, just as D.D.'s gaze swung up and spotted his late entrance. She scowled at him, looking even more exhausted and ragged than the last time he'd seen her. If he'd caught six hours of sleep in the past two and a half days, D.D. had snagged about three. She also appeared nervous. He scanned the room, then spotted the deputy superintendent, head honcho of Homicide, sitting in the corner. That would do it.

"Nice of you to join us, Detective Dodge," D.D. drawled for the room's benefit. "I thought you were grabbing dinner, not six hours at a spa."

He gave the best apology a cop could make. "I brought lemon squares."

He placed the last of Mrs. Higgins's homemade treasures in the middle of the table. The other detectives pounced. Eating baked goods trumped needling the state guy any day of the week.

"So, as I was saying," D.D. continued, slapping away hands until she could snag a cookie for herself, "we need news. Jerry?"

Sergeant McGahagin, head of the three-man squad in charge of compiling the list of missing girls, looked up from the table. Rather hastily, he brushed powdered sugar off his report, fingers shaking so hard from his two-day caffeine binge, he actually missed the single sheet of paper the first three times. McGahagin settled for reading the executive summary where it lay on the table.

"We got twelve names of missing females under the age of eighteen unsolved from '65 to '83; six names from '97 to '05; and, of course, fourteen years to go in between," he spat out as one rapid-fire sentence, eyes blinking furiously "I could use two more bodies to help scan lists if anyone finds himself with free time. 'Course we also need the forensic anthropologist's report for cross-reference. And then you gotta wonder if the bodies are all from Mass. or do we need to broaden out to the greater New England area—Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine. Really hard to do, you know, without a victim profile; I don't even know if we're barking up the right tree, that's all I have to report."

D.D. stared at him. "Jesus, Jerry. Lay off the coffee for an hour, will you? You're gonna need a blood transfusion the rate you're going."

"Can't," he said, twitching. "Will get a headache."

"Can you even hear through the ringing in your ears?"

"Huh?"

"Oh boy" D.D. sighed, stared out at the wider table. "Well, Jerry has a point. Hard to know how good any of our research is going without the victimology report. I spoke with Christie Callahan two hours ago. Bad news is, we probably get to wait at least two weeks."

The detectives groaned. D.D. held up her hand. "I know, I know. You guys think you're overloaded? She's even more screwed than we are. She's got six mummified remains that all have to be processed properly, and not even a brilliant—and might I add charming—task force to assist. Of course, she's also doing this by the book. Which means the remains first had to be fumigated for prints. Then they had to be sent to Mass General for X-rays, and are just now returning to her lab.

"Apparently, wet mummification is its own peculiar thing. It occurs naturally in the peat bogs of Europe, and there've been a few cases in Florida. But this is a first for New England, meaning Christie is learning as she goes. She's guessing three or four days to process each mummy Given six mummies, you do the math."

"Can she give us results one at a time, as she gets each corpse processed?" Detective Sinkus asked. He was the one with the new baby, which probably explained the state of his clothing.

"She's considering it. There's archaeological protocol, or some shit like that, which argues for treating the remains as a group. Individually, we may not see what is implied by the group as a whole."