Detective O scowled, pulled out a chair at the conference table, and dropped into it. “She’s guilty. You know she’s guilty. Did you see her face? ‘Tell me you’re not a killer, Charlene.’ She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t do it!”
“Crap, we’re going to have to assign a patrol car to watch her. Course, we don’t have any proof she’s a suspect, let alone the budget for a patrol officer. Double crap.” D.D. also pulled out a chair, took a seat. The manila file was in front of her. She didn’t open it. She’d studied the crime scene photos at 5 A.M., her first night away from baby Jack.
Interestingly enough, it was not the tiny skeletons that had bothered her. The finger bones the size of grains of rice. The unfused cranial plates of the little boy, collapsed into a heap like a pile of yellowed rose petals.
The girl had mummified slightly, delicate skin shrink-wrapping her tiny frame, keeping her bones more intact. At first glance, the remains appeared to be a macabre doll, complete with long dark hair. It was only upon closer inspection you realized this had once been a real baby, twelve to eighteen months old, who’d probably sat up, crawled, taken a first step.
No, it wasn’t the impossible tiny corpses that had gotten to D.D. It was the blankets. Pale pink with dark pink polka dots for her, dark blue teddy bears against a light blue background for him. First Christine Grant had murdered her children. Then she’d wrapped them up in their own baby blankets. There was something fundamentally maternal about that gesture.
Something…incredibly fucked up.
One P.M. D.D. was feeling the weight of a long night. She didn’t want to open that file again. She just wanted to go home to Jack and hold her baby close.
She pushed the folder away, pinched the bridge of her nose, and tried to figure out what to do next.
“I think she’s Abigail,” Detective O said.
D.D. opened her eyes, peering at the sex crimes detective blearily. “Say what?”
“Sybil. Wasn’t that the case? A girl so horribly and ritualistically abused by her mother that she developed multiple personalities to protect herself.”
D.D. stared at her.
“Sounds like Charlene was horribly and ritualistically abused. Maybe same thing happened, except with a twist—she didn’t just adopt the names of her dead siblings, she adopted a personality for each of them, as well. So, say, this Abigail she was telling us about—”
“The baby with brown eyes…”
“In real life, yes. But then Charlene’s mother killed it, and Charlene…absorbed…Abigail instead. Protector personality. Charlene isn’t killing sex offenders. Abigail is. Hence a brown-haired, blue-eyed shooter, running around Boston murdering sex offenders, while introducing herself as Abigail. Oh, oh, oh. And the notes within the notes. Maybe tightly wound Abigail, the protector personality, is the one writing everyone has to die sometime, in the perfectly formed script, while Charlene, some little piece of her who knows killing is wrong, quickly scrawls the second message, catch me. A plea for help. One note with two different messages, representing two different personalities.”
D.D. stared at the young detective. She frowned. Then she stared some more. “I think we just fell into a Lifetime movie.”
Detective O shrugged. “Most fiction starts with a kernel of truth. Dissociative identity disorder is a recognized and diagnosable psychiatric illness. Besides, do you have any other explanation for the note within the note, let alone a Charlie clone running around Boston shooting pedophiles, then introducing herself as Abigail?”
Come to think of it. “No. I’ll tell you what, why don’t you call Charlene and ask if she’ll kindly return to HQ for a mental health eval? Given how much she currently likes you…”
“Playing nice wasn’t working,” O insisted stiffly.
“Really? When’d you try it?”
“Oh please, this from the Queen of Bitch.”
“Queen of Bitch?”
“Hey, I’d take it as a compliment.”