Live to Tell (Detective D.D. Warren, #4)(65)

Was she angry after our last confrontation? Fearful, defiant?

Lucy turned away from the glass. Slowly, she meandered and twirled her way toward me. At the last minute, as I felt myself tense, she held out her hand, pale fingers extended. She dangled a tiny ball of string, something she’d fashioned from rolling together loose carpet fibers. A homemade cat toy.

I hesitated. She jiggled it again.

I accepted her gift, closing my fist around it as she swooped away, long pale limbs flashing silver in the moonbeams.

I tucked her peace offering into my pocket and returned to Sergeant Warren.



I’d just entered the classroom when I realized I had forgotten my water. I returned to the kitchenette to fetch a glass, and Greg found me. Benny and Jimmy still couldn’t settle. I poured out doses of Benadryl for the two kids. Greg took the Benadryl, then I headed back to the classroom, where the look on Sergeant Warren’s face told me I still didn’t have water.

I returned to the kitchenette again, this time finding a glass and banging on the tap. The other detective, LeBlanc, poked his head out of the Admin area. Copier had run out of paper.

I reloaded the copier, glancing at the records he’d already duplicated. I offered to carry the copies to the classroom, but he refused. I shrugged, and since he appeared done with Tika’s original file, I took that for myself to use as a reference.

I made it all the way to the classroom; then, right outside the door, I realized I’d left my water glass sitting next to the copier. Back to Admin I went, grabbing my water, and making it to the classroom with everything in hand.

Sergeant Warren glanced at her watch as I took a seat. She was flanked on either side by a detective.

“Always take you fifteen minutes to grab a drink?” she asked me.

“Oh, sometimes it takes twenty. Tonight I was lucky; I only got interrupted four or five times. Don’t worry, someone will need something shortly.”

“Crazy night,” the detective on her left commented. I recognized him from the first visit. George Clooney playing the role of a Boston cop.

“Birthday party,” I said. “Does it every time.”

“Birthday party?” he asked.

“Priscilla turned ten. We had a celebration for her after dinner. The kids made cupcakes; we hung streamers, handed out party hats. The kids got very excited, which, for our crowd, has consequences.”

“Then why have the party?” Sergeant Warren asked, with a frown. I could see this woman running the Gestapo. She’d be good at it.

“Because most of these kids have never been to a birthday party,” I explained. “They’re either too poor or too emotionally disturbed or too unloved to ever be so lucky. They’re still kids, though, and kids should get to have a party.”

“Now they’ll be up all night, torturing you and one another?”

I regarded the cops steadily. “Priscilla has brain damage from being shaken as a baby; it impairs her ability to process numbers. Tonight, however, she counted out ten candles and jammed them all onto one cupcake. Speaking for the staff, we don’t care if the kids spend the rest of the night tearing this place apart. It’s worth it for that moment.”

Sergeant Warren studied me. I couldn’t tell if my words had affected her or not. Then again, this was a woman who spent her time rolling over dead bodies so she could note their faces. She probably could take me at poker.

“And Tika Solis? She have a party?”

“I don’t know.” I started to open the file. Sergeant Warren reached across the table and slapped it shut.

“No. Off the top of your head. What do you remember about her?”

“I don’t.”

“What do you mean you don’t?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t. Name’s not ringing any bells.”

“You remembered Ozzie Harrington,” she said crossly.

“I worked with Ozzie one-on-one over the course of many months. Of course I remember him.”

“But not Tika?”

“Can’t even bring her face to mind.”

The sergeant continued to stare at me, as if I were holding something back. “Girl liked to cut herself. That jog your memory?”

I shook my head. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

“Please, a little girl who self-mutilates? That doesn’t stand out in your mind?”

“We have two of those cases right now, so no, it doesn’t.”

“Two?”

I pulled the file out of her grasp. “Children are direct, Sergeant. Sometimes, they can’t verbalize their emotions, but that doesn’t mean they’re not attempting to communicate. A child who hates the world will act hateful. And a child who hurts inside will externalize that pain, cutting her arms, legs, wrists, in order to show you her ache.”

“Tika was three when she was admitted here. That’s not exactly a teenager brooding over the poems of Sylvia Plath,” the sergeant countered skeptically.

“Three?” Three was young for slicing and dicing. Not unheard-of, but young. My turn to frown. “When was she admitted?”

Sergeant stared at me. “Around the same time as Ozzie Harrington.”

I searched my memory banks, trying to bring a whole cluster of kids into focus. The dynamics of the kids impacted the milieu as much as anything. Who were the kids we’d had with Ozzie? What was the dynamic? We’d been so busy for the past year. More and more kids, each with a case file more horrific than the last … “Wait a second. Tiny little thing? From Mattapan?”