Authors: Lisa Gardner
“I don’t like to hate,” Tess said simply. “Not my father, not my ex-husband. I held on to the rage as long as I needed it to do what I needed to do. Then, I let it go. I look at my children. I feel how much I love them. I feel how much they love
me.
And that makes me feel better instead.”
“I love my dog,” I said, automatically bending to pat Tulip’s head. “And she’s not even my dog.”
“Sounds like a country-western song. You’re welcome to stay here, Charlie, for as long as you need.”
I nodded, then straightened, adjusting my messenger bag, fiddling with my grip on Tulip’s leash. “Good-bye, Tess,” I said.
She wasn’t surprised. “Good-bye, Charlie.”
Tulip and I stepped off the front porch, and even though Tulip whined a little, neither of us looked back.
I
T TOOK
T
ULIP AND ME
twenty minutes to walk through the light snowfall to an area busy enough to hail a cab. Then another twenty minutes for the cab to deliver us to the BPD headquarters in Roxbury. The driver wasn’t happy to transport a dog, so I had to tip him five bucks extra, and that quickly, I was broke.
Let me tell you, a girl doesn’t work police dispatch for the money.
I thought of Officer Mackereth, felt myself flush, and reminded myself sternly I didn’t work at police dispatch for that either.
To enter HQ, I had to go through security. The first officer, a mountain of a black man, got a little excited about my. 22. I showed my license to carry, but he remained skeptical. Leave it to Massachusetts to create a gun policy so paranoid that even when you took the proper legal steps no one believed you.
Of course, I’m not sure what legal steps were taken to secure my
gun permit. J.T. had done it for me, given the stringent standards. Probably called in a few favors. I never asked, unanswered questions being the whole key to my relationships.
“What do you do for a living?” the BPD officer asked me now.
“Comm officer, Grovesnor PD.”
“Oh.” His massive shoulders came down. He gave me a grudging measure of respect. Officers liked dispatch operators. We took care of them, and they knew it.
He kept my gun, handing me a tag. “You can claim it on your way out. Same with the dog.”
“You can’t take my dog.”
Officer Beefy got puffy again. “Honey, my house, my rules.” He jerked his thumb toward the glass door. “Dog goes outside; say pretty please, and I’ll keep an eye on it.”
Having now gone twenty-four hours without sleep, I didn’t take this news well.
“Look, your detective invited me here,” I informed him, beyond caring if he was three times my height and four times my weight. “This is my dog, and I’m not tying her outside in this weather or in this neighborhood. If Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren wants to see me, then she gets both of us. That’s the deal.”
“Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren?” The officer’s dark face broke into a broad grin. “Ha, good luck with that.” He motioned to the desk sergeant, sitting on the other side of the security scanner, “Got a visitor, with dog, for Detective Warren.”
“With dog?” the desk sergeant called back.
“She sniffs out doughnuts,” I informed the sergeant. “Took years of training.”
“Sounds like a Detective Warren dog,” the sergeant drawled. Tulip and I were finally allowed into the lobby, where we roamed the enormous glass-and-steel space while waiting for our date to arrive.
Urban police stations should be dingy, with yellow-stained drop ceilings and tiny barred windows, I thought crabbily. Not modern art monstrosities, boasting cavernous lobbies filled with glass and gray winter sky, let alone the wafting odor of coffee and fresh baked goods. Rather helplessly, Tulip and I followed the tempting scents to
the open doors of the building’s cafeteria. I hadn’t eaten in twelve hours, and neither had Tulip, but being out of cash limited our options. As it was, Tulip and I would have to muscle our way onto the T if we wanted to get home.
D. D. Warren finally appeared at the other end of the lobby. I recognized her by the bounce in her curly blond hair and the laserlike quality of her crystalline blue eyes. She spotted me, then Tulip, and zeroed in.
“What happened to you?” she demanded. Guess I was starting to bruise.
“Boxing.”
“Aren’t you supposed to wear gloves?” She pointed to my hands, where the knuckles on both pinky fingers had turned bright purple.
“I will remind my attacker of that on the twenty-first,” I assured her.
“And the bruises around your neck?”
“Hey, you should see the other guy.”
“Legally speaking, I’m not sure you want that.”
“True.”
She stared at me a minute longer, as if trying to figure out just what kind of crazy she was dealing with today.
Then she surprised me. “Nice dog.” She held out her hand for Tulip. “I like dogs for women. One of the best lines of self-defense. Better than guns. Guns can be taken and used against you. Not a good dog.”
I shook my head. Should’ve known the detective would have a point.
“I don’t plan on having Tulip around on the twenty-first,” I informed D.D. “I’m sending her to live with my aunt.”
“Then you’re an idiot.”
“I prefer the term responsible adult.”
“Martyr.”
“Considerate friend.”
“Self-sacrificing fool.”
“Self-sufficient fighter.”
“Idiot,” Detective Warren said again.
“Are we done yet?”
“I don’t know. I find that now that I have a newborn, I appreciate adult conversation more. Want coffee?”
“Who’s buying?”
She eyed me, eyed my dog. I categorized D. D. Warren along with J. T. Dillon and his wife, Tess; like them, D.D. didn’t just look, she saw.
“Come on, my treat.”
Tulip and I followed D.D. into the cafeteria. I selected a roasted chicken sandwich for me, bread and cheese for Tulip. Then I added two cookies, a bag of chips, a cup of coffee, and a bottle of water. The detective didn’t say a word, just paid the bill.
She led us back to the desk sergeant, who gave me another look, then handed the detective my tagged. 22.
“She had this in her bag. Licensed to carry,” he informed her.
“Tattletale,” I mouthed at him.
D.D. glanced at me.
“Nothing,” I said.
She sniffed my gun. “Recently cleaned.”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Why am I helping you again?”
“I pay taxes.”
“In that case…” D.D. handed the desk sergeant my beautiful nickel-plated Taurus with its rich rosewood grip. “It’s legal, so when she’s on her way out, she can have it back.”
The desk sergeant took my gun, handed me a visitor’s pass. I snubbed my nose at him.
It’s possible I’d gone a little too long without sleep.
We went upstairs to the homicide unit, where D.D. turned on her computer and I stopped breathing for the second time that day.
R
ANDI’S PICTURE CAME UP FIRST.
Her beautiful wheat blond hair blown out straight, one side tucked behind her right ear, long bangs swinging gracefully down the other side, drawing attention to huge, doe brown eyes. She was sitting next to a planter of pink petunias,
maybe on her front porch in Providence, because I didn’t recognize the backdrop. But I felt the weight of her large, soft smile. The familiar gesture of her fingertips, brushing across the strand of pearls above the neckline of a dove gray cashmere sweater.
Her grandmother’s pearls, gifted to her on her sixteenth birthday by her parents. Jackie and I had oohed and ahhed over them. We weren’t pearl people, but we understood how much Randi loved them. We knew that she’d wear them every day, whether entertaining or gardening or grocery shopping, and look perfect doing so. And if Jackie was jealous her best friend had received such an extravagant necklace, she didn’t show it. And if I was jealous my best friend had inherited a family piece from a grandmother who’d known and loved her, I didn’t show it. We were happy she was happy.
Randi had glowed that day. She’d opened that box, and her normally quiet face lit up until she appeared even more lustrous than the pearls.
I couldn’t help it. I reached out. Touched the image on the flat monitor, as if I could still feel the warmth of my friend’s skin, feel the indent of her dimple, hear her call my name.
Charlie, Charlie, Charlie! Look at this! Can you believe it? My grandmother’s pearls. Oh, Charlie. Aren’t they beautiful?
The words came out before I could stop them. “I failed her.”
D. D. Warren was watching me. Looking and seeing. “Why do you say that?”
“I was the glue. That was my job. Jackie organized us, Randi energized us, and I…I held us together. Through petty fights and minor squabbles and all the ways three girls can become two against one. We were better together. I appreciated that. So it was my job to keep us on track, reminding us even when it was difficult that three was better than two which was better than one. Except then we turned eighteen and drifted apart.”
“Why?” D.D. asked the question flatly. As if she already understood the answer mattered, was the real reason I now couldn’t let my friends go.
I took my eyes off my friend’s picture. I studied the detective and
I started to understand the real meaning of being tough. The trait shared by Detective Warren and my firearms instructor J.T. and his wife, Tess.
They looked at life without blinders. They had the confidence to not dodge the blow, but stand there and take the hit.
“I was embarrassed,” I told the detective quietly. “I let us fall apart, because I didn’t just love Jackie and Randi, I knew that I loved them more than they loved me. So I never told them about my mother. If I had, then maybe Randi would’ve told us about her abusive husband. And Jackie and I would’ve helped her and we would’ve stood together, instead of scattering and dying apart. But I couldn’t tell them about my mom. I loved them so much, I couldn’t risk them thinking less of me.”
Detective Warren leaned forward, peered at me intently. “What should you have told them about your mother, Charlene?”
I held up my left hand. The fresh boxing bruises stood out starkly, bright purple kisses on the webbing between some of my fingers. But there were other markings as well, a patchwork of thin white scars zigzagging across my skin. They became more obvious in the summer, when I had a tan, than during the winter when, like most New Englanders, my skin was bone white. But I knew D.D. would spot the pale, spidery lines.
I murmured, “I think other people’s mothers don’t break bottles over the back of their little girls’ hands, so they can take their children to the emergency room and have the cute male intern tweeze out the broken glass. I think other people’s mothers don’t hold a hot iron to their daughters’ fingertips, so they can return to the same ER three days later, when the cute male intern said he’d be working again.”
“How old were you?”
“Young enough to go along, old enough to know better.”
“And this was in New Hampshire?”
“Upstate New York. That’s where I lived before my mother died. At which time, Social Services tracked down my aunt and asked her to take me. That’s how I met Jackie and Randi, first day of school. We sat side by side. And just like that, we were best friends. We did
everything together—played, studied, worked, rebelled. Except then we turned eighteen, and they had dreams and I didn’t. So I let them go. And I didn’t call or check up or be the kind of friend I should’ve been, because I didn’t want them to know just how much I missed them. I was embarrassed, that all these years later I still loved them more than they loved me. And now…And now…”
I couldn’t get the words out. I just sat there and touched the digital image of my best friend who I’d never see again.
I should’ve told Randi everything. I should’ve told Jackie. I’d hoarded my secrets as a child, then Jackie and Randi had hoarded their secrets as adults. Randi had never told us about her abusive husband. And Jackie never confided in us that she was gay. I only learned that during the police investigation, when Pierce Quincy, the profiler Jackie had hired, let it drop, and I’d sat there stone-faced, willing no expression to show, because of course I would know such a thing about my best friend. Of course one best friend would feel comfortable enough to share such a personal revelation with another best friend.
The thin white scars on the back of my hand were the least of my concerns. It was the internal wounds that hurt me. My world had always been too small, first just me and my mother, then me and my aunt, then Randi Jackie Charlie. I’d always had too little. I’d always loved too hard. And I’d always lost too much.
Baby, crying down the hall.
I guess I’d had her, too, a baby I’d known I needed to protect. But I hadn’t, and now, I couldn’t even remember her name. So much for life without blinders. Twenty-eight years old and still taking daily dips in denial.
I didn’t want to be at police headquarters anymore. I wanted to go home to the mountains. I wanted to walk into my aunt’s house, throw my arms around her, and cry like a child.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I loved them and I failed and I just can’t do it anymore. It is too
hard
to walk through this life alone.
There was a knock on the door. Detective Warren and I both looked up. A woman stood in the doorway, wearing a cinnamon red sweater that showed off wavy locks of stunning reddish brown hair
and an even more stunningly curved figure. A TV show cop, I thought instantly. The kind that solved the case, won the male lead, and celebrated both events with a new pair of Jimmy Choos.
I looked down at my nearly flat chest, then fingered my plain brown hair yanked back into a plain brown ponytail, and immediately felt self-conscious.
“Show her?” asked the woman.
“Just started. Come in. Detective O, this is Charlene Grant. Charlene, Detective O. She set up the page, being our resident Facebook expert.”
Detective O and I shook hands. She appeared to be about my age, which surprised me. Then I peered into her brown eyes and met a gaze as flat and frank as D. D. Warren’s. Cop eyes. Must be one of the requirements to graduate from the academy.