Live to Tell (Detective D.D. Warren, #4)(57)

“The younger girl was covered in some pretty nasty cuts,” Alex said quietly. “I saw scarring, too. Arms, legs, and around her face.”

“I’m assuming Phil will have some info from child services.” D.D. didn’t like thinking of the four-year-old either. There was something too pitiful—that poor scarred body, curled up on a dog bed. It made her pinch the bridge of her nose, as if that would wipe the image away.

“Holding up?” Alex asked quietly.

“Always.”

“Not offending, just offering.”

D.D. looked at him. “I’m good at my job.” It was important to her that he know that.

“I’ve noticed.”

“Don’t need a man to fix me. Don’t need a man to save me.”

“I’ve noticed.”

She grimaced. “I hate my f*cking pager.”

He smiled. “I love working at the Academy.”

“Not gonna give it up for all this glamour?” She spread her hands over their piles of notes and reports.

“No. Visiting the field is good. Don’t need to live here. ’Course, it helps me to be more understanding of a fellow investigator’s crazy schedule.”

“Nothing regular about this job,” D.D. agreed.

“Plans get made and unmade. Dinners could be prepared that sadly grow cold.”

“Very sadly,” she assured him.

“I’m good at my job,” he said.

“I’ve noticed.”

“Don’t need a woman to wait on me. Don’t need a woman to stroke my ego.”

“I’ve noticed.” She paused, regarding him more seriously. “So what do you want?”

“Let’s start with dinner.”

“Really?” She didn’t mean to sound disappointed.

“But I’m open to all possibilities,” he added hastily.

“Because I saw this ad—” D.D. realized what she was about to say, and broke off, mortified.

Alex grinned. “‘Cool chills, warm thrills’?”

She leaned closer. “I’m dying to know,” she admitted.

He leaned closer. “I’m dying to be of service.”

They both sighed. Heavily. Then leaned back, and returned to work.

“So,” D.D. said after a minute, clearing her throat, forcing herself to sound brisk. “Where are we at? We got a drug dealer, a welfare mom, a truant teen, a brainy preteen, and two unknowns. High-risk lifestyle. Isolated mother and kids. What are the odds that Hermes smoked too much dope, tried a new product, and went postal on his own family?”

“Don’t like the knife,” Alex remarked. “If he starts with the knife, he should end with the knife.”

“Maybe stabbing Audi was the impulse part. They got into a fight in the kitchen, he took it too far. Ishy saw him, started to run, and Hermes realized he’d better do damage control real quick. Hermes gets out his handgun and goes to town.”

“Then, once he realizes what he’s done …”

“Decides to finish it all. Suffocates his own baby, then lies down on the sofa and blows out his brains.”

“You’re wrong.”

D.D. and Alex looked up sharply. Neil had appeared in the doorway, his pale face so lit up his freckles glowed. “I got news, straight from the ME,” he burst out. “Hermes wasn’t shot. I mean, well, okay, he was shot. But it doesn’t matter, because at the time he was shot, he was already dead. Whole sofa scene—totally staged.”



There were moments D.D. didn’t like her job. The stress of working too many hours without a break. The tedium of poring over investigative reports. Her damn pager going off at precisely the wrong moment …

This moment, however, was not one of those moments. She, Alex, and Neil had taken over the conference room so they could spread out, and Neil was currently pacing up and down the length of the table, talking a mile a minute.

“Hermes Laraquette was hit with a Taser in the chest. Two jolts would be the ME’s guess, to judge by the twin set of burns. Most men would’ve gone down, but recovered. Laraquette’s lifestyle wasn’t exactly heart-healthy, however, so he never got up again.”

“Taser killed him?” D.D. reiterated.

“Taser caused a massive coronary event, which dropped him deader than a stone.”

D.D. was standing at the whiteboard, dry-erase marker in hand. With Neil’s affirmation of cause of death, she jotted down a fresh note. “Hang on. If a Taser was used in the attack, where’s the confetti?”

Tasers, which were illegal in Massachusetts, were supposed to discharge coded confetti with each stunning jolt. The code on the confetti could then be used to trace which Taser had been used in an attack—compensating for the fact that there was no bullet left behind for the police to trace. The confetti was a huge, fluttery mess, nearly impossible to clean up, especially given conditions at the Laraquette household.

“Don’t know,” Neil said. “But the ME is convinced it was a Taser. Has no doubts about the marks.”

D.D. frowned, decided to come back to the confetti. “Okay. So that gives us four instruments for attack: Taser, handgun, knife, pillow. What else did the ME have?”