Live to Tell (Detective D.D. Warren, #4)(33)

“Akathisia?”

“Ozzie complained that it felt like little people were inside his skin, crunching his bones. That’s akathisia. He also started suffering from perseverative thoughts.”

“Perseverative thoughts?” D.D.

“It’s like OCD, except with thinking. He’d get a notion in his head, I want a red car, and then he couldn’t get it back out. He’d spend six, seven hours saying over and over again, I want a red car, I want a red car, I want a red car. Now substitute red rum for red car, and you can see the danger of perseverative thoughts.”

D.D.’s eyes widened. “He’s going through all this, and he’s what, seven, eight years old?”

“He’s going through all this, and yes, he’s eight. And we’re seeing more kids like him all the time. Parents think the worst thing that can happen to their five-year-old is cancer. They’re wrong; the worst thing that can happen to their five-year-old is mental illness. Cancer, the docs have tools available. Mental illness in prepubescents … There are so few drugs we can use, then the kids develop a tolerance, and by age eight we’re out of options. They require a lifetime regimen of anti-psychotic medication, except we don’t have anything left. One week we get them stabilized. The next they plunge back into the abyss.”

“Is that what happened to Ozzie?” D.D. asked.

Danielle picked up the case file, read briskly. “We took Ozzie off the aripiprazole. At which time he claimed ghosts were appearing in the windows of his room and ordering him to kill people. So we put him back on a very low dosage of aripiprazole, trying to minimize the side effects while still making some attempt at regulating his brain chemistry. In the short term, we noticed a positive change in behavior.”

“In the short term,” D.D. repeated. “Meaning in the long term …?”

“We don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

The nurse shook her head. “His parents discharged him. Against our advice. They had moved, gotten a new place. Denise said it was time to bring him home.”

Alex held up a hand. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Ozzie reports ghosts are telling him to murder people, and they take him home?”

“It happens.”

D.D. leaned forward. “Tell me, Danielle. Forget the file for a second. It’s you and me, trying to understand what happened to one boy. What made you think Ozzie had hurt someone? Why were you so certain this story had an unhappy ending? Why did he leave?”

Danielle didn’t answer right away. Her jaw worked. Then, just as D.D. was starting to lose hope …

“Denise found a spiritual healer,” the nurse expelled curtly. “A shaman who promised to make Ozzie all better. No chemicals. No crazy drugs. He was going to heal Ozzie by bringing him into the light.”

“Say what?”

“Exactly. This is a boy with severe psychoses. And she’s gonna cure him by bringing him to ‘an expert in negative and positive energies’? We tried to get her to reconsider, but her mind was set. We hadn’t helped her son, so she’d found someone who could.”

“I don’t think it took,” Alex said.

“Why? Your turn. What happened?”

“We don’t know. But the family’s dead.”

“The family? The whole family?” Danielle’s face paled. The nurse blinked, looking shaky, then almost panic-stricken. In the next instant, she blinked again, and her features smoothed to glass. “The news,” she murmured. “The family from Dorchester. I caught a snippet, just on the radio. That was Ozzie?”

“That was someone,” D.D. corrected.

“I thought the father did it. That’s what the reporter implied.”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

Danielle looked down at the table, shaking her head. “Goddammit. We told them. We warned Denise … You have to … Andrew Lightfoot. That’s who you need to see. You want to know what happened to Ozzie Harrington, go ask Andrew Lightfoot. That arrogant son of a bitch.”





| CHAPTER

TWELVE





At 10:37 p.m., Patrick Harrington died. The news pissed D.D. off. It probably didn’t do wonders for him either.

She was at her desk. Not returning Chip’s phone call. Not exploring fine dining with Alex. It was Friday night, and she was doing what she inevitably did with her evenings, working her way through a stack of reports, trying to make sense of what had happened one evening in Dorchester that had now left five dead.

Physical evidence aside, D.D. liked the kid for it. She didn’t know why. The troubled history, the psychotic episodes, his penchant for beating squirrels to death, then licking their blood off his hands. If she got to pick her perp, she was going with Ozzie Harrington. In fact, she’d had a brilliant flash of insight regarding Patrick Harrington’s last word. What if he hadn’t been saying “hussy,” as the ER nurse had assumed? What if he’d been saying “Ozzie” instead?

Not an accusation against his wife, but a last-gasp effort to name the guilty party.

It all sounded good to her, until she went over the crime scene again. Fact: Whoever delivered the killing blows was most likely taller than five six. Fact: Ozzie could hardly slash his own throat in his sister’s bedroom, then carry himself to the screened-in porch. Fact: According to psychiatric nurse Danielle Burton, Ozzie’s first psychotic break had involved overall destruction. The Harrington crime scene, on the other hand, was methodical in nature. This wasn’t a kid going berserk. This was someone systematically hunting down individual members of an entire family.