Live to Tell (Detective D.D. Warren, #4)(71)

“Maybe someone burst her bubble. Or the delusion slipped away. You said she was volatile, dangerously unpredictable.”

“She’d never shown any signs of suicide before.”

“That’s not true,” Karen protested. “She’d already demonstrated a need for self-mutilation, as well as debasement.” She turned to Sergeant Warren. “First day she was here, Lucy cut her arm and used the blood to draw patterns on the wall. The child did terrible things, because terrible things had been done to her. I don’t think we can say with any degree of certainty what she was, or was not, capable of.”

“She didn’t kill herself!” I insisted again, angry now and realizing how much I needed that rage. “She wouldn’t do that. Someone helped her get out. That’s the only way you can explain her getting through two sets of locked doors. Someone helped her. First time was yesterday, maybe as a trial run, then again tonight. Face it, the unit was hopping, we were short-staffed, and then the police suddenly appeared. Plenty of distractions, providing the perfect opportunity for someone to harm her. That’s what happened.”

“Someone,” Sergeant Warren drawled, looking right at me.

“I was only gone five to ten minutes—”

“Eighteen. I timed you.”

“I was with your own detective for part of that—”

“About two minutes, he says.”

“That’s not enough time to smuggle a child out of the unit and get down to radiology and back.”

“But someone did. You just said so.”

“Not me—someone,” I snapped. “Someone else, someone.”

“Really? Because I thought Lucy didn’t trust anyone else but you. So who could that someone-else someone be?”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Gave up. Fuck if I knew.

Lucy, dancing in the moonlight. Lucy, swinging from the ceiling.

Then, out of the blue: my mother, with a single bullet hole in the center of her forehead.

“I’ll take care of this, Danny. Go to bed. I will take care of everything.”

“Oh Danny girl. My pretty, pretty Danny girl…”

“Do you need to sit down?” Karen asked me gently.

I shook my head.

“How about a glass of water? Greg, fetch Danielle a glass of water.” Karen found my right hand, cradling my fingers between her palms. But I snatched my hand back, held it against my chest. I didn’t want to be touched right now. I wanted to feel the rage, let it flood me like a river.

“Tika and Ozzie,” I stated, looking at Karen. “Ask Sergeant Warren about Tika and Ozzie.”

D.D. explained. Karen went chalky white.

“But … but … that doesn’t make any sense,” she protested feebly. “We can’t be the common denominator between two murdered families. We don’t make home visits. We work with the child, but hardly know anything about the family. Where they live, what they do … that’s not us….”

“But you have that information,” Sergeant Warren said. A statement, not a question.

“In the files, yes.”

“And didn’t I see some poster in the lobby about an open-door policy? Parents can visit the floor anytime they want?”

“Parents are invited to visit their child whenever they want. That still doesn’t mean we know them. Their time on the floor is a small slice of their overall universe, assuming they visit at all. Most of them don’t.”

“The Harringtons?” Sergeant Warren pressed.

Karen fidgeted with her glasses, adjusting and readjusting them on her face. “Ozzie’s parents, right? The mother, she came several times. Stayed over in the beginning, then came once or twice a week after that.”

“What about the rest of the family?”

“I have no memory of them. A shame, too. Parents seem to feel they’ll traumatize their other children by bringing them to an acute-care unit, when really, it’s good for all the children to see one another and reaffirm that each is doing okay.”

D.D.’s eyes narrowed. “And Tika’s family?”

Karen shook her head, bewildered. “Greg?” she asked.

He’d just returned with a tray bearing four cups of water. He handed me one, then Karen, then offered one to Sergeant Warren, who passed.

“Tika?” he repeated. “Little girl, ’bout a year ago? Cutter?”

“That’s the one,” Warren assured him. “I understand you worked with her.”

He nodded. “Cute little thing. Had a wicked sense of humor if you could get her to open up. But yeah, she had some self-esteem issues, depression, anxiety. Maybe even suffered sexual abuse, though she never disclosed.”

“What was her family like?” Sergeant Warren wanted to know.

“Never visited.”

“Never?”

“Never. Tika’s file described the mother as ‘disengaged.’ We never experienced anything different.”

“And our records show them living in Mattapan,” I spoke up, remembering the exchange between Sergeant Warren and the George Clooney detective. “We wouldn’t know they’d moved; our involvement was over and done.”

“Not so hard to look up,” Sergeant Warren said with a shrug.