I had my chin up. “Can’t change everything.”
“You’re training, boxing, running, shooting. Preparing to make your last stand. But you’re going to send the dog away.”
“Yes.”
“And maybe you looked me up, but it was never with the mind-set of asking for help before the twenty-first. Not to mention, you’re a woman with a target on your back who hasn’t asked her own officers for assistance.”
I didn’t say anything, just returned her steely blue stare.
“Can’t figure you out, Charlene,” she drawled at last. “You trying to live January twenty-one? Or are you trying to die?”
“I don’t want to die.”
“But do you want to live?”
I remained silent. D.D.’s gaze dropped to my scarred hand, and in those fine white lines, I figured she read the answer.
Earlier today, Tess had said that adults could change, that children grew up. But some things in life were very hard to transform. For example, taking the little girl who’d once stood there passively while her mother ironed her fingertips and training her how to throw a punch. Or taking the same little girl, who’d willfully chewed and swallowed a shattered lightbulb, and teaching her how to pull the trigger.
I was trying to move forward. Some days were certainly better than others. But in the end, I’d only had 363 days as a fighter. I’d experienced far more as the victim, the child who did whatever her mother wanted her to do, because that was the price of love, and that little girl had lived too little and loved too hard and lost too much.
“Names please,” Detective Warren said, and gestured to the blank piece of paper.
I took my time, mostly because my hands were shaking. I formed each letter carefully, wanting the result to be neat and legible. I wrote two names, following an instinct I couldn’t explain, but that felt right.
I took one last moment, to study my carefully printed letters.
Then, I handed over the piece of paper.
I collected my dog.
I collected my gun.
Three P.M. Thursday afternoon. Fifty-three hours and counting.
Tulip and I headed out into the city’s stark, snow-frosted landscape.
Chapter 22
DETECTIVE O WAITED until Charlene had exited the homicide unit, then she returned to D.D.’s office, closed the door, and collapsed in the desk chair across from her.
“Could we really be that lucky?” she asked, her voice incredulous. “I mean, is it just me, or is Charlene Grant a perfect fit for our shooter?”
“Don’t know if it’s luck,” D.D. mused, frowning. “Remember, I first encountered her outside the second homicide. When I ran her down, she claimed she was checking me out to handle her own case. But maybe that was just fast thinking on her part. She offered up her own troubled history to distract me from the fact she was loitering outside an active crime scene.”
“What’s with her hands and throat? Looks like she’s been mugged—”
“Training.”
“So she really thinks someone will try to kill her on the twenty-first?”
“Randi Menke and Jackie Knowles really are dead.”
Detective O paused. Then her eyes widened. “Motivation. Think about it. Charlene’s police dispatch. She takes the calls, she hears these kids. Maybe she wants to help them, but she’s not sure how. In the meantime, she’s boxing, shooting—”
“Gaining skills.”
“And, even more importantly, counting down to her own death. Meaning, at a certain point, what does she have to lose?”
D.D. stilled, regarded the other detective. “Charlene decides to do something with the limited time she feels she has left. Maybe right some past wrongs, given a history of child abuse.”
“She’s saving other kids,” O continued. “Doing what she no doubt wishes someone had done for her, when she was that age, and Mommy Dearest was pulling out the insulin.”