“Question becomes,” O said, “how’d their cover get blown? I mean, online, they’re gonna appear like any other user, an excited kid. Except someone figured out who they were and what they were doing.”
“Victim in common?” D.D. guessed. “Someone who knows the victim?”
She was thinking of the forensic handwriting expert she’d talked to last night, Dembowski’s theory that their shooter was an anal-retentive female. D.D. didn’t say anything, however. She didn’t want to contaminate the investigation with an assumption, and apparently graphology itself was riddled with assumptions, not to mention the assumption that the person who left the note was the same person who shot Stephen Laurent. Which brought her to another question. She regarded Detective O.
“You read the crime scene report of the first shooting, Antiholde?”
“Yep, late last night.”
Ah, the good old days, when work didn’t shut off at five.
“Any documentation of a note from the shooter?” D.D. asked.
“What do you mean?”
“When I left the Stephen Laurent scene, I found a note on my car. I’m wondering if it was from the shooter.”
Ellen O frowned. “What’d the note say?”
“Everyone has to die sometime. Be brave.”
“Oh. Oh, oh oh. Hang on. Wait here.”
O dashed off. D.D. sat there, wondering what was up. Sixty seconds later, O was back with some crime scene photos. One showed the victim, Douglas Antiholde. Another showed a close-up of the contents of his pants pocket, including loose change, a paper clip, and a crumpled piece of torn yellow legal pad paper that had been smoothed out enough to read: Everyone has to die sometime. Be brave.
Writing was script, with a flattened bottom, every letter precisely shaped.
“I’ll be damned,” D.D. murmured.
“Serial shooter, targeting pedophiles,” Detective O declared triumphantly. “I’m in!”
“Are you ever,” said D.D. “And good luck with that. Good luck to us all.”
Chapter 9
I DREAMED OF MY MOTHER.
She stood at the counter in a tiny brown-and-gold kitchen, curtain of dark hair obscuring her pinched face as she crooned to herself. “Sugar and spice and everything nice, that’s what little girls are made of.”
In my dream, I was three years old, crammed into a high chair meant for a baby, my back plastered to the sticky vinyl seat, while a white plastic strap, splattered with dried eggs and fuzzy oatmeal, jammed into my tummy hard enough to hurt.
I wanted out. I whimpered, whined, fussed, and fidgeted. If I could just get my quick little hands on the buckles, I could escape. But I’d done that before. I had a memory of getting out, so she’d changed the straps, and now the buckles were in the back of the sticky seat and I was trapped and uncomfortable, and even though I was hungry, I didn’t want to be there anymore.
My mother had a lightbulb in her hand. She’d taken it from the chipped white lamp in the family room. Unscrewed it, while singing softly to herself.
“Sugar and spice and everything nice, that’s what little girls are made of.”
My mother placed the lightbulb in a blue plastic bowl, picked up a large metal spoon, and slammed down hard. A faint tinkling sound. The older me, the real me, and not the trapped three-year-old version of me, understood the sound was the lightbulb shattering.
The three-year-old trapped me simply watched with big blue eyes as my mother ground the lightbulb, all the while singing, singing, singing.
Then, she looked up at me and smiled.
Next to the bowl was a jar of peanut butter. Now my mother unscrewed the lid. Now she scooped out a big spoonful. Now she placed the peanut butter in the blue plastic bowl with the shattered lightbulb. And stirred.
“Sugar and spice and everything nice,” my mother declared. “That’s what little girls are made of.”