Live to Tell (Detective D.D. Warren, #4)(2)

I sat, day after day, trying so hard to remember each detail, my mother’s eyes, my sister’s scream, my brother’s goofy grin, I had no room in my head for anything else.

Then one day when I was walking down the street, I saw a man lean over and kiss his little girl on top of the head. A random moment of fatherly tenderness. His daughter looked up at him, and her round little face lit into a million-watt smile.

And my heart broke, just like that.

I started to cry, sobbing incoherently through the streets of Boston as I stumbled my way back to my aunt’s condo. When she came home four hours later, I was still weeping on the leather sofa. So she joined me. We spent an entire week crying together on the couch, with Gilligan’s Island playing in the backdrop.

“The rat bastard,” she said when we’d finally finished weeping. “That f*cking, f*cking rat bastard.”

And I wondered if she hated my father for slaughtering her sister, or for saddling her with an unwanted child.

The story of my life.



I survived. And even if I don’t always remember, I do live, the survivor’s ultimate responsibility.

I grew up. I went to college. I became a pediatric psych nurse. Now I spend my days at a locked-down pediatric psych ward in Boston, working with the six-year-old boy who’s already hearing voices, the eight-year-old girl who self-mutilates, the twelve-year-old big brother who absolutely, positively can’t be left alone with his younger siblings.

We’re an acute care facility. We don’t fix these kids. We stabilize them, using proper medications, a nurturing environment, and whatever other tricks we can pull out of our sleeves. Then we observe. We try to figure out what makes each child tick, and we write up recommendations for the next set of experts who will ultimately deal with these kids, either at a residential program, or a long-term-care institution, or a supervised return to the home environment.

Some of our kids make progress. They become the best person they can be, a triumph by anyone’s definition. Some of our children commit suicide. Others commit murder. They become that headline you’ve read in the paper: “Troubled Youth Opens Fire”; “Older Brother Slaughters Entire Family.” And people die, whether they had anything to do with it or not.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I took this job to save lost children like me. Or perhaps, even more heroically, I took this job to avert tragedies like the one that happened to my family.

I understand what you’re thinking.

But you don’t know me yet.





| CHAPTER

ONE





Thursday night, Sergeant Detective D.D. Warren was out on a date. It wasn’t the worst date she’d ever been on. It wasn’t the best date she’d ever been on. It was, however, the only date she’d been on in quite some time, so unless Chip the accountant turned out to be a total loser, she planned on taking him home for a rigorous session of balance-the-ledger.

So far, they’d made it through half a loaf of bread soaked in olive oil, and half a cow seared medium rare. Chip had managed not to talk about the prime rib bleeding all over her plate or her need to sop up juices with yet another slice of bread. Most men were taken aback by her appetite. They needed to joke uncomfortably about her ability to tuck away plate after plate of food. Then they felt the need to joke even more uncomfortably that, of course, none of it showed on her girlish figure.

Yeah, yeah, she had the appetite of a sumo wrestler but the build of a cover girl. She was nearly forty, for God’s sake, and well aware by now of her freakish metabolism. She certainly didn’t need any soft-middled desk jockey pointing it out. Food was her passion. Mostly because her job with Boston PD’s homicide unit didn’t leave much time for sex.

She polished off the prime rib, went to work on the twice-baked potato. Chip was a forensic accountant. They’d been set up by the wife of a friend of a guy in the unit. Yep, it made that much sense to D.D. as well. But here she was, sitting in a coveted booth at the Hilltop Steakhouse, and really, Chip was all right. Little doughy in the middle, little bald on top, but funny. D.D. liked funny. When he smiled, the corners of his deep brown eyes crinkled and that was good enough for her.

She was having meat and potatoes for dinner and, if all went as planned, Chip for dessert.

So, of course, her pager went off.

She scowled, shoved it to the back of her waistband, as if that would make a difference.

“What’s that?” Chip asked, catching the chime.

“Birth control,” she muttered.

Chip blushed to the roots of his receding brown hair, then in the next minute grinned with such self-deprecating power she nearly went weak in the knees.

Better be good, D.D. thought. Better be a f*cking massacre, or I’ll be damned if I’m giving up my night.

But then she read the call and was sorry she’d ever thought such a thing.

Chip the funny accountant got a kiss on the cheek.

Then Sergeant Detective D.D. Warren hit the road.



D.D. had been a Boston PD detective for nearly twelve years now. She’d started out investigating traffic fatalities and drug-related homicides before graduating to such major media events as the discovery of six mummified corpses in an underground chamber; then, more recently, the disappearance of a beautiful young schoolteacher from South Boston. Her bosses liked to put her in front of the camera. Nothing like a pretty blonde detective to mix things up.