“Offer it to her? Please, she won’t even return my phone calls. She called me once, told me her side of the story. She’s not so interested in our side of things. I’m thinking she doesn’t trust us much. Which may or may not have something to do with the fact that it’s one of Boston’s own officers who’s trying to kill her.”
“That’s why you didn’t pull the arrest warrant for her,” Phil said. “You still want her picked up, off the streets.”
“I think that’s safest for her, yes.”
“But no news.”
“Nada. The girl’s holed up good.”
“Hopefully,” Phil commented, “O’s thinking the same.”
“All right,” D.D. tapped the table. “Next up, I gotta meet with Horgan to secure permission to request a search warrant for Detective O’s apartment. Neil, I’ll need you to execute that warrant. Phil, I want you to continue to dig into O’s past. Anything we can learn about her—friends, hobbies, pets, food allergies—anything that might give us some insight to what she’s doing and how she might be doing it. I want time lines and facts, boom, boom, boom, including a list of all known firearms registered in her name. While you do that, I’m going to speak with her commanding officer.”
“More background?” Phil said.
“I’m working a hunch.”
“Care to share?”
She eyed him for a second. “Actually, I’ll go one better and give you the credit since you’re the one who got the ball rolling. Remember when I was going through the tox screen reports on Randi and Jackie earlier today, and I couldn’t find evidence of any drugs in their systems, and yet the only thing that makes sense is that they were drugged?”
He nodded.
“You said I needed to start thinking about drugs that didn’t leave a pharmaceutical fingerprint. Ones not covered in the tox screen.”
Phil thought about it. “Pretty smart of me. Did I mention which drug that might be?”
“No, but O did.” D.D. drummed her fingers. Of all the pieces of the puzzle, this one bothered her the most. That she had sat, shoulder to shoulder with a fellow investigator, and remained unsuspecting, even as O had leaked tiny insights into her homicidal game. Had she been reaching out, in her own way, another version of Catch Me? Or had she been simply taunting an older, more experienced detective, who should’ve known better?
“O told me about a case she’d worked as a sex crime detective: the evil stepdad was drugging his twin stepdaughters with insulin. Their blood sugar would crash, rendering them nearly comatose and unable to resist. Later, he’d bring their blood sugar levels back up by administering frosting.
“Insulin,” D.D. said softly. “Available over the counter. Easy to administer, just a quick prick to the back of the victim’s arm, into the subcutaneous fat. Within fifteen to twenty minutes, the victim would be rendered unconscious and O could do whatever she wanted. And there’d be nothing they could do to stop her.”
Neil stared at her. “Insulin,” he repeated. “Yep, that would do it.”
D.D. rose to standing. “We need to locate Detective O,” D.D. stated firmly. “And we need to find Charlene Grant. It’s three forty-three on January twenty-first, gentlemen. Abigail is once again on the hunt. And no amount of boxing or running is going to save Charlie, if Abigail, and her insulin, finds her first.”
Chapter 41