Catch Me (36 page)

“What kind of woman does such a thing?”

“A psychopath.” D.D. shrugged. “Munchausen’s by proxy is all about narcissism, a woman objectifying, then harming her own child in order to receive sympathy. Infanticide isn’t that much different. She would’ve viewed the pregnancies as inconvenient, maybe even considered an infant as a rival for attention. She acted accordingly.”

“What do you think,
Abigail
?” Detective O spoke up.

“What?”

Detective Warren frowned at O, then turned back to me. “You ever try to find your mom?”

“No.” I hesitated, fingered my side. “I, um, I assumed something bad had happened. I know I ended up in the hospital, seriously injured. Then my aunt arrived. I never saw my mother again and my aunt never brought it up. I assumed…I assumed maybe I’d done something to her.”

“Police received a nine-one-one summons to the residence. They found you, covered in blood. Further search turned up two plastic bins with human remains in the hall closet. A warrant was issued for your mom, but she was never arrested.”

“But you said you found her.”

“You said you’ve been talking to your aunt,” O interjected, demanding my attention. “She here, visiting? Or did you talk to her by phone?”

“She’s here—”

“Where?”

“My room—”

“When did she arrive?”

“This morning.”

“What about last night?”

“What about last night?”

“Where’d you go after speaking to us yesterday? You talk to your aunt, hang out with friends, take the dog for a walk?”

“I went home. I’d worked the night before and I hadn’t slept. I was exhausted.”

“Was your landlord home?” D.D. spoke up, swinging my attention back to her. “Did she see you coming or going, can she vouch for you?”

“I don’t know. Wait. No. I had Tulip, and Tulip’s not allowed inside, but it was too cold for her outside so I snuck her in the back door.”

“Meaning no one saw you come home.” Detective O’s turn.

“That would be sneaking.”

“What about this morning?” Detective Warren again.

“I left at four—”

“A.M.?”

“Couldn’t sleep. Used to working nights remember? I went to the gym.”

“So at four A.M., people saw you.” Detective O. “But not before that.”

“I don’t know!” I threw up my hands.

“Yes, you do. You were trying not to be seen and you were successful.” Detective Warren. “Ergo, no one saw you.”

“You said you knew where my mother was!”

“I do.”

“Where?”

“She ever call you Abigail?” Detective O.

“What? No. I’m Charlene. Charlie. Just because I added two names doesn’t mean I don’t know my own.”

Detective O arched a brow. “Oh, seems to me there’s plenty you don’t know.”

“I want to know where my mother is!”

“Colorado,” D.D. said.

“You have an address?”

D.D., watching me. “In a manner of speaking.”

“I want it.”

“Don’t worry, she’s not going anywhere.”

I paused, regarded both detectives more warily. “Is it a prison? Did they finally catch her?” Then a heartbeat later. “No, because if she’d been arrested, there would’ve been a trial and someone would’ve contacted me. I would’ve been a witness.” Another hesitation, the wheels of my brain churning. “Mental hospital? She cracked, finally revealed her inner lunatic, and they locked her up.”

“You think she’s crazy?” Detective O asked.

“She hurt me. She killed two babies. Of course she’s crazy!”

“You didn’t even remember. What does that make you?”

I drew up short, staring at the young detective. And in that moment, I finally got it. Detective O wasn’t spending this conversation horrified by my mother’s actions. She was horrified by me.

The girl who lived it and barely remembered it. The girl who at least got to roam through a house, while her baby sister and baby brother lived and died in a coat closet. The girl who then stole her dead siblings’ names.

I’d spent my whole life fearing I’d hurt my mom. Now I wished I could go back and do exactly that. Maybe if I’d done such a thing, I would’ve had at least one moment in my life worth remembering, one recollection that brought comfort.

“She’s dead,” Detective Warren stated now. “Listed as a Jane Doe in Boulder. It occurred to me that she probably adopted an alias after the night she stabbed you—”

“What?”

Both detectives paused, looked at me. I placed my hand on my side, eyes widening in comprehension.

Detective O spoke up first. “Seriously? You were stabbed, and you forgot that, too?”

“I was in the hospital. They’d removed my appendix, some other…things. I remember the doctors talking.” I shrugged, feeling my inadequacy again, the depths of my self-imposed stupidity. “I understood that I’d been cut open, then stitched back up.” I shrugged again. “When you’re eight years old, does it really matter why?”

Detective O shook her head.

D.D. cleared her throat. “According to the police report, there was some kind of altercation in the house. You ended up stabbed. Your mother must have fled, because apparently you’re the one who dialed nine-one-one.”

That intrigued me, given my line of work. Again, a person can know and not know all at the same time.

“Doctors were able to patch you up, but your mother was never found. Now, given your mother’s history of moving, I figured she left the area immediately. Only way she could stay beneath the radar that long was if she adopted an alias. So I started with neighboring states and worked my way out, looking for a woman of the same approximate age and description as your mother, including a pineapple-shaped birthmark on her right buttock. Thanks to a federal initiative, descriptions of unidentified remains have been recently compiled into a national database. I found a match in Colorado. Of course, you should submit a DNA sample to be sure, but in addition to the birthmark, the body has two distinct tattoos: the name Rosalind and the name Carter, both scripted above the left breast.”

“I hate her.” The words left my mouth before I could catch them. Once said, however, I didn’t take them back. “How dare she? First she kills her babies, then she tattoos their names above her heart? As if she
loved
them? As if she deserves to keep them close to her?”

I was out of the chair, pacing the conference room. My hands were fisted, I wanted a heavy bag. I wanted to punch my fist through the drywall. With any luck, I’d find a wooden stud and shatter my wrist. At this stage, I’d welcome the physical pain.

“How did she die?”

“Unknown. Body had been dead for a bit before being found, making an official ruling on cause of death difficult. According to the note from the coroner’s office, however, most likely cause of death was complications from advanced alcoholism, for example, liver failure.”

“Did it hurt? Did she suffer? Were her last moments terrible and filled with agonizing pain?”

Detective O’s eyes had widened. She stared at me as if transfixed, then leaned forward. “You’re angry.”

“Damn right!”

“Feeling helpless?”

“’Cause I didn’t get to kill her first!”

“Wishing you could change the past? Maybe go back. Would you save your sister and brother this time?”

“Yes!”

“Maybe you could save other kids. Make sure they never have to suffer the way you and your siblings did.”

“It wasn’t right. She hurt me, she suffocated them, and no one helped us. No one did a damn thing!”

“How did you know they were suffocated?” Detective Warren asked.

“I mean, I’m assuming. That’s how women normally do these things, right?”

Detective O picked up the beat. “The police failed you.”

“Yes.”

“’Course, you work with the cops now. You know that in most situations, their hands are tied.”

“Yes.”

“I mean the calls you must get, night after night. Little boys getting beaten by their fathers, little girls molested by their caretakers. What can you do, what can anyone do? Take down their name and number. Hey, little kid, your life is a living hell, let me take a message for you. Bet by the time you go home at night, you’re all fired up, itching for action. Bet you’re thinking you’re not a cop, your hands aren’t tied. You can shoot, you can hit, you can run. You can make a difference.”

Too late, I saw the trap looming. Too late, I stopped talking. Backpedaled furiously in my mind, trying to remember exactly what they’d asked and I’d answered. But, of course, I had a terrible memory and it was too little too late.

Detective O kept charging, full steam ahead. “When did you first make the decision that at least one scumbag deserved to die? How’d you pick the target? A call you took personally, a case that caught
your attention? Maybe shop talk, a couple of officers, debriefing from a situation they’d encountered on duty. How little they could do, and how much it sucked, and you listened and you
remembered.
You knew what you didn’t want to know…your mother’s house, the containers in the closet, the way no one helped you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“How did it feel afterward, knowing you
finally
saved a child. Must have been quite the rush. You can tell us about it you know. I mean, we’re detectives, but we’re people, too. We get what you’re doing, why it must be done.”

I pulled myself together, chin up, shoulders back. Detective O’s eyes were probing. I forced myself to meet her stare.

“You don’t know me.”

“Oh, but I do. The question is, how well do you know yourself?”

“I’m leaving.” I grabbed my messenger bag.

“Running away.”

“Got a warrant?”

“Avoiding. Fleeing. Doing what you do best.”

“I was just a kid.”

“So how did you know they were suffocated?”

I blinked, hands clutching the straps of my messenger bag, still poised for flight, except suddenly Detective O wasn’t talking to me anymore. She was talking to D.D.

“I’ve studied Munchausen’s by proxy. Never encountered a case where the mother abused one child for attention, while secretly killing others. However, in several instances, the mom made a big fuss over being pregnant. Milked it for attention. Then, when the babies were born, suffocated them in the middle of the night, and claimed crib death. Oh, the drama, the outpouring of public support, the endless supply of neighborly casseroles. You could see how it would work with someone of that psychological makeup. How they’d even feel compelled to do it again and again.

“But never heard of a Munchausen’s mom resorting to secret infanticide. Where’s the fix, outpouring of public support, the emotional satisfaction? Makes me wonder what else Charlene fails to remember. What else she might have done.”

“I would never—”

“Look me in the eye, Charlene.” Detective O, suddenly rounding the table, walking closer. “Look me in the eye and tell me you’re not a killer.”

I opened my mouth. I closed my mouth. I opened my mouth again, and a word came out, but it wasn’t what I expected.

“Abigail,” I whispered.

“What about Abigail?”

“Abigail,” I repeated mournfully. And my hand came up. I reached out, as if to touch someone who wasn’t even there.

“Charlene—” Detective Warren began.

But I didn’t wait to hear anymore. They didn’t have a warrant. They couldn’t arrest me, they couldn’t hold me.

In the back of my mind, I realized this might be the last chance I ever had.

One year of intense training later, I sized up my opponents. Then I turned and fled.

“O
H YEAH,
she’ll never guess we’re onto her after that conversation. Subtle. Smooth. Confidence-building. I bet Charlene’s headed home right now to make us both friendship bracelets. What do you think?” D.D. snapped.

Detective O scowled, pulled out a chair at the conference table, and dropped into it. “She’s guilty. You know she’s guilty. Did you see her face? ‘Tell me you’re not a killer, Charlene.’ She couldn’t do it.
She couldn’t do it!
”

“Crap, we’re going to have to assign a patrol car to watch her. Course, we don’t have any proof she’s a suspect, let alone the budget for a patrol officer. Double crap.” D.D. also pulled out a chair, took a seat. The manila file was in front of her. She didn’t open it. She’d studied the crime scene photos at 5 A.M., her first night away from baby Jack.

Interestingly enough, it was not the tiny skeletons that had bothered her. The finger bones the size of grains of rice. The unfused cranial plates of the little boy, collapsed into a heap like a pile of yellowed rose petals.

The girl had mummified slightly, delicate skin shrink-wrapping her tiny frame, keeping her bones more intact. At first glance, the remains appeared to be a macabre doll, complete with long dark hair. It was only upon closer inspection you realized this had once been a real baby, twelve to eighteen months old, who’d probably sat up, crawled, taken a first step.

No, it wasn’t the impossible tiny corpses that had gotten to D.D. It was the blankets. Pale pink with dark pink polka dots for her,
dark blue teddy bears against a light blue background for him. First Christine Grant had murdered her children. Then she’d wrapped them up in their own baby blankets. There was something fundamentally maternal about that gesture.

Something…incredibly fucked up.

One
P.M.
D.D. was feeling the weight of a long night. She didn’t want to open that file again. She just wanted to go home to Jack and hold her baby close.

She pushed the folder away, pinched the bridge of her nose, and tried to figure out what to do next.

“I think she’s Abigail,” Detective O said.

D.D. opened her eyes, peering at the sex crimes detective blearily. “Say what?”

“Sybil. Wasn’t that the case? A girl so horribly and ritualistically abused by her mother that she developed multiple personalities to protect herself.”

D.D. stared at her.

“Sounds like Charlene was horribly and ritualistically abused. Maybe same thing happened, except with a twist—she didn’t just adopt the names of her dead siblings, she adopted a personality for each of them, as well. So, say, this Abigail she was telling us about—”