D.D. HAD A TEXT FROM HOME. With a photo. She desperately wanted to unlock her screen and view it. Photo of Dog? Photo of Alex and Jack with Dog? Photo of anything at all from home? Because she could use a slice of family right now. A moment to remember the good things in life.
But first things first. She got on the phone with Neil. She and Phil liked to tease Boston’s youngest detective about his bright red hair and perpetually youthful features, calling him the Richie Cunningham of homicide detectives. In truth, Neil had matured nicely over the past few years. With the addition of Carol Manley to the squad, he was no longer the rookie, and had taken the lead on more investigative angles. If D.D. felt like a proud mama, then Phil was a positively beaming papa.
“Any more major findings from the Boyd-Baez residence?” D.D. asked Neil now.
“Nothing that stands out.”
“Interviews with the neighbors?”
“Everyone agrees that they seemed like a normal family. No loud arguments, parties. No strangers coming and going at odd hours. Sounds like Juanita was a good cook, while Charlie was known to help with small fix-it jobs around the neighborhood. Everyone liked them, though no one seems to have known them that well. Juanita and the kids only moved in during the past year.”
“Anyone see the shooter walk into the home shortly before nine A.M.?”
“No.”
“What about images from security cameras on the street behind the Boyd-Baez place? We know the shooter jumped the fence. He or she disabled the video cameras on that building, but surely there are some other systems on the block.”
“And yet . . . no.”
“Really? This is a densely populated area. Whatever happened to Big Brother’s always watching?” D.D. asked crankily.
“Not on that block,” Neil informed her. “I’ve been digging into the family finances. So far, it all appears pretty straightforward. Monthly paychecks in, monthly expenses out. No major deposits or withdrawals. Limited credit card activity. They weren’t living high on the hog, but they were getting by.”
“What about cash transactions? Anything that might indicate illegal activities, drugs?”
“Charlie’s contracting seems to be a mix of working as a sub on bigger jobs, with some smaller, independent projects on the side. For many of those he probably was paid in cash. But again, no unexplained deposits or high-end purchases—say, jewelry, electronics, designer shoes—favored by drug lords to launder their profits. And we didn’t find a safe in the house or hidey-hole under the bed. Not even a wad of bills in the freezer.”
“So on a scale of one to ten, the odds of Charlie or Juanita being closet drug dealers . . . ?” D.D. prompted.
“I’d score them a three, and only that high because clearly something was going on sinister enough to lead to a quadruple murder. But Carol and I have scoured the residence from top to bottom at this point; no sign of drug paraphernalia. Just”—D.D. heard a faint wobble in Neil’s voice—“a normal family living a normal life in a normal home.”
D.D. didn’t speak right away. She knew what he meant. Neil wasn’t married with kids—in fact, he was a gay man who’d grown up in a family of Irish Catholic drunks—and yet the domestic cases always hit hard. A father figure gunned down while still sitting on his sofa; a mom shot to death in her own kitchen. And the kids . . . D.D. still couldn’t think about the kids.
“Ben completed a cursory exam of the bodies at the scene,” Neil was saying now, referring to Ben Whitely, Boston’s ME and one of Neil’s former lovers. “No sign of obvious needle marks on Juanita or Charlie. Of course Ben issued his usual caveat—”
“Nothing is final till he can complete his exam back at the lab,” D.D. intoned.
“Exactly.”
“What about Lola Baez?” D.D. asked.
For the first time, she heard surprise in Neil’s voice. “The thirteen-year-old? What about her?”
“There’s a rumor Lola Baez was part of a gang. Possibly dealing drugs. Possibly using drugs. We’re not sure.”
Silence as Neil contemplated the matter. “Ben will run a tox screen—that’s SOP for cases like this. If you really want to be thorough, however, I can ask him to run a segmented analysis of Lola Baez’s hair. That would not only tell us conclusively if she was doing drugs, but an approximate timeline for when she started—or ended, for that matter.”
D.D. was impressed. “Excellent. And a timeline is exactly what we need. In the last year, things changed for this family. Juanita met Charlie, then moved herself and her kids into his house in Brighton. Which, it sounds like, also returned her children to some unfinished business from their time in a nearby foster home. The more tightly we can reconstruct the past few months of the family’s lives, the better.”
“Got it,” Neil assured her.
“Anything else I should know?” D.D. asked. Because Neil was a leader in his own right now, and she was proud of him for it.
“Found a life insurance policy on Charlie,” Neil reported. “Twenty thousand. Beneficiary is Juanita. At this point, you’re basically talking enough money to cover funeral expenses.”
Times four, D.D. thought.
“House is in Charlie’s name,” Neil continued. “No sign of a will, meaning most likely the real estate will end up in probate. All in all . . .”
“Not a lot of financial motive to kill off Charlie the contractor. All right.” D.D. chewed her lower lip. As lead investigator, she had only so many resources at her disposal. After the initial callout, she’d focused the detectives and patrol officers in the immediate vicinity of the Boyd-Baez residence. But now, over seven hours later, with a fresh shooting and a possible sighting of Roxanna in the area around the coffee shop, it felt that their geography had changed. And based on what they’d learned about the family, probably their line of questioning, as well.
“I want you to focus on the kids,” D.D. told Neil. “You take Lola, give Manny Baez to Carol. Forget additional interviews with neighbors. Hit schools, teachers, best friends, worst enemies. In particular, I need to know everything about the year the kids were in state care. I’m headed to the foster home where Lola and Roxanna were placed. But what about Lola’s teacher, classmates from that year? Friends she kept, friends she dumped? I don’t know. But it sounds like Juanita Baez suspected Lola had been abused in foster care. She was working with a lawyer on a possible lawsuit.”
“Interesting,” Neil said.
“Anyone you approach, find out if Juanita talked to them, as well. I want to retrace her investigative steps, so to speak. Clearly she was stirring the pot. So who did she spook?”
“You think she might have been on to something. People who’d have incentive to cover up the initial crime, not to mention avoid the financial and PR disaster of a major trial.”
“Exactly. Which brings us to Roxanna Baez. It sounds like she was afraid of something. For herself, her sister, we’re not sure, but the past couple of weeks, something had her on edge. Oh, which reminds me, I should probably tell you about our newest player in this mess: Flora Dane.”
“What?” No mistaking the surprise in Neil’s voice now.
“She approached Phil and me earlier today. Apparently, she’s started some support group for survivors. And Roxanna Baez is their newest member.”
“What?” Neil said again, sounding even more surprised.
“It’s possible Flora is going to help us find Roxy. At least, I signed her up as my CI.”
“You’re crazy,” Neil said flatly. Which was a testament to just how long he and D.D. had worked together. Plenty of her fellow detectives thought she was obsessive and insane; very few called her on it.