“Think of it this way,” D.D. explained. “One killer, but two different crime sprees, driven by two different sets of needs. What Abigail did to Randi and Jackie, what she has in store for Charlene, is more intimate, more ritualized for her. She’s both seeking to punish the older sister who abandoned her and to exorcise a lifetime of taking her mother’s abuse with this ultimate method of seizing power. The pedophile shootings, on the other hand, are almost everyday stress management. Another case she can’t close. Another incident of a kid getting abused by a registered sex offender who just moved in down the hall…O accused Charlene of over-identifying with the victims, of hating to feel powerless. In hindsight, I think that was her way of telling us about herself. She also over-identifies with the victims, and two years on the job, she’s tired of feeling helpless.”
“What about the notes? Everyone has to die sometime…”
“According to Charlene Grant, that was an expression of their mother’s. A family mantra, so to speak. What’s more interesting, I think, is the note within the note, the secret message written in lemon juice—Catch Me. At first, I thought that might be some sort of taunt by the shooter. Now I wonder if it wasn’t a plea. Abigail wrote Everyone has to die sometime. While Detective O added, Catch Me. Two notes representing the two sides of her nature.”
“Good cop, bad cop,” Neil finished darkly.
“Exactly,” D.D. answered. To think of all the times she and O had sat alone in this very office, poring over those carefully executed notes, the handwriting analysis, witness statements. O had never given anything away. The level of compartmentalization necessary for that degree of subterfuge was just plain scary.
It also fit the expert’s profile of the note writer perfectly: someone rigid, anal-retentive, type A.
First thing D.D. had done, once she’d gotten off the phone with Charlene, was to run to Detective O’s desk and gather up three samples of the investigator’s handwriting. She’d laid them out on a cleared table, side by side with the three notes from the pedophile shootings. The handwriting wasn’t a dead-on match, at least not to D.D.’s untrained eye. O’s “natural” script was neat and precise, but hardly contained letters with flat bottoms and perfectly proportioned size. Maybe she’d written the notes for the shootings using a ruler, maybe even a stencil, to further obfuscate matters. Given that the notes all said the same thing, it would be easy enough to perfect those two sentences, a mere seven words, by practicing them over and over again.
But some of the author’s personality had still come through. Controlling, determined, psychopathic.
“The witness to the third shooting,” D.D. said now, “called this afternoon. The boy’s mother said he’d realized that the shooter’s eyes weren’t really demonic, but special contact lenses meant to look like blue cat eyes. They found a picture in a Halloween catalogue and dropped it by an hour ago as a visual aid.”
She pulled out the torn catalogue page, placed it before Neil and Phil. “I’m guessing O wore the contacts so she would better match Charlene’s general description of brown hair, blue eyes—”
“But why cat eyes?” Phil asked, shuddering slightly as he took in the array of creepy contacts.
“Does that freak you out?”
“Yes.”
“Exactly. Remember, O not only wanted the shooter to match Charlene’s physical description, but she also had to disguise her own appearance. I mean, just an hour later, she personally stood in front of this boy. She had on makeup then, her hair piled in big curls, a nice dress, wide trench coat. I remember thinking at the time she must’ve come from a date. But I think she was just trying to soften all the lines. The boy had seen a thin, gaunt-faced woman with tight hair and scary eyes. Then in real life, O did her best to appear the opposite.”
“But she’s not thin or gaunt,” Neil countered.
“Maybe she wears padding under her clothes.” D.D. looked down at her own chest, definitely no longer what it used to be during pregnancy. “Not that I would know anything about that.”