“Yep. It’s called lifestyle,” D.D. informed her gravely. “Forty years later, I’ve decided to give it a chance. So don’t fuck with me. Look me in the eye, and tell me why you kept your name.”
“I want to go home.” And the way the girl said it, D.D. understood she didn’t mean to a rented room in Cambridge. She meant her town, her people. She meant the place she had belonged in the days before her childhood friends had started dying.
She meant a place that D.D. herself was just starting to identify, and that spooked her a little, made her shiver, because there was a plaintive tone there, a longing that D.D., with three minutes to go, understood.
“You want the killer to find you.”
“I can’t go home until he does.”
“Has he made contact? Notes, phone calls, any kind of warning or threat?”
The girl shook her head. “I understand,” she said, almost kindly, “that there’s nothing you can do. No threat, no assault, no murder, means no crime, means no jurisdiction. I’m just a fairy tale you’re listening to today.”
“You should change your name,” D.D. said. “Or at least tell your story to your own officers. You’re dispatch. You have their backs, they’ll watch yours.”
“It will be someone I know, someone I trust,” Charlie said, and shook her head.
“Ah, but the Grovesnor PD didn’t know your friends. No link, making them your safest bet.”
But, for whatever reason, Charlie still seemed unconvinced. Just because you were paranoid, D.D. thought, didn’t mean they weren’t out to get you.
She glanced at her watch. Three minutes were up. Interview was over. Time for the new and improved D. D. Warren to report home. She stood.
“Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant, what kind of firearm do you carry?”
The girl regarded her mutely.
D.D. returned the stare.
“I carry a Taurus twenty-two LR pistol,” the girl supplied crisply. “I train with J. T. Dillon at the Massachusetts Rifle Association in Woburn.”
“Yeah? How good a shot?”
“I can hit bull’s-eye at fifty feet.”
“Sounds like you’d be really good at a double tap to the forehead.”
“Risky target,” the girl replied levelly. “Center mass is a better bet.”
D.D. digested this, still not sure what she thought of the girl’s presence outside an active homicide scene, and still not liking all her answers to D.D.’s questions. But seeing as gawking at crime scenes still wasn’t considered a criminal offense…
D.D. pushed away from the table. “All right. We’re done.” D.D. paused a beat. “For now.”
The girl blinked a few times. “Meaning?”
“Go home. Take care of yourself. Avoid future crime scenes.”
“Including my own?” Charlie smiled wanly, then rose to standing. “You can’t help me.”
“You were right before. No crime, no jurisdiction.”
“I keep my room spotless. I plan on bleaching the floors, walls, sheets the night before. Know that, on the twenty-second, when there is a crime, when you do have jurisdiction, or can consult with the detective that does. Anything found at the scene is from him. Plus, check my nails. I’ve been growing them out, and you better believe, blood, hair, skin, I’ll be going for all the DNA I can get. I won’t give up. Remember that, on the twenty-second. I’ve been preparing, planning, and strategizing. He catches me, I’m not going down without a fight.”
D.D. stared at the girl. She believed her. At least this much was true.
“I’m gonna die trying,” Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant informed her. “Remember that, Detective Warren. After that…it’s up to you.”
Chapter 4
“MOMMY, I’M HOME!” The boy burst through the front door of the apartment, tossing his Red Sox backpack to the left, while kicking his snowy boots to the right. Navy blue snow coat he dropped dead ahead, then amused himself by leaping over it in his stocking feet. He landed with a satisfying thump, then flipped his hat into the air. He didn’t wait to see where it landed, but bolted to the kitchen for a snack.