Catch Me (49 page)

“O. Put the knife down. I’ll help you. Your sister will help you. We can make this right.”

My sister staring at D.D. My sister staring back down at me.

One moment. Twenty years in the making.

My sister raised the knife.

“I just want to stop hurting, Charlie. I just want peace.”

I screamed hoarsely from the floor. Detective Warren leapt over the coffee table.

As Abigail plunged the blade into her gut and ripped up. A startled look on her pale face. Then she rocked forward, pitching to her knees, before collapsing down.

Detective D. D. Warren’s voice, louder now, harsher, requesting
immediate medical personnel, calling for backup. I didn’t listen to her anymore. I didn’t care about her anymore.

I lay side by side on the floor with my baby sister. I found her hand in the dark.

“SisSis?” she whispered roughly.

“I love you, Abby.”

And she made a sound that was wet and ominous and filled with pain.

“Everyone has to die sometime,” I told my sister, in this last moment we had together. She clutched my hand tighter. I held hers right back. “Be brave, Abby. I love you. Be brave.”

I
BURIED MY SISTER NEXT TO OUR SIBLINGS,
baby Rosalind and baby Carter Grant. They don’t have large tombstones; just flat granite slabs, the best my aunt could afford for the two babies she buried twenty years ago, and the best I can afford for my sister now. But they are together, a sad trio, laid to rest with their grandparents in the two-hundred-year-old J-Town cemetery. Two plots remain. One for my aunt and one, when the time comes, for me.

Detective Warren found a private blog in my sister’s computer. She’d titled it, “Hello, My name is Abigail,” and within its long, creepy entries, she detailed the murders of my best friends, as well as her countless hours prowling the Internet, hunting down predators, seeking to aid kids in need.

She’d been right in the end. She saw monsters everywhere. And they overwhelmed her as a dark tide, which no amount of stalking and killing could keep at bay. It turned out, she’d shot and killed more than thirty-three suspected pedophiles, from Boston, to New York, to LA. The last three had been close together, only because the approaching January 21 anniversary date had forced her to restrict her hunting grounds to Boston. Until then, she’d been more careful to spread out the carnage. She was a cop, after all, and she used her knowledge wisely.

My friends Randi and Jackie never saw their own deaths coming. Randi opened her door to a female cop and discussed her ex-husband’s dealings over mugs of tea before the insulin finally kicked in and she lost consciousness. Jackie met a beautiful woman at a bar. Different story, same approach.

In the end, they probably never thought of me, had any idea that being my friend had signed their death warrants.

Should such a thing make me feel better or worse?

One of those questions I’ll never be able to answer.

Detective Warren ordered a DNA test on my mother’s remains, confirming once and for all the identity of the unclaimed body in Colorado. I didn’t fly out once the results were known. Christine Grant’s body can remain in some city morgue or potter’s field for all I care. I’m not claiming her, and I’m sure as hell not burying her next to Abigail, Rosalind, and Carter. Maybe that makes me harsh. Mental illness is a disease, probably deserving of some compassion.

Don’t know, don’t care. The police have closed their files. I don’t feel a need to open up any of my own.

Detective Warren also found my Taurus. 22 sitting on my sister’s nightstand. As it was legally registered to me, she returned it to the appropriate owner. Best I can tell, she had no grounds for conducting a ballistics test, which was why no one has ever matched my. 22 to slugs recovered from the apartment of another homicide victim, Stan Miller.

Should such a thing make me feel better or worse?

One of those questions I’ll never be able to answer.

My landlady, Frances, spent two weeks in the hospital recovering from a gunshot wound to the shoulder. Interestingly enough, her long-lost niece appeared during that time, and after a bit of debate, decided to move in to help Frances during her convalescence. Apparently, my landlady is an alcoholic, who’d taken up drinking to cope with the death of her husband and four-year-old son in an auto accident thirty years ago. She’d burned numerous family bridges, caused significant collateral damage. Some of the things she never told me during the conversations we never had.

But mortality is a great wake-up call. Fran had been willing to forgive and forget for years, and now, at last, so was her niece.

I know all about such things, having finally had that long overdue heart-to-heart with my aunt, as I spent six weeks bedside in her hospital room. My aunt took two to the shoulder. First week was
touch and go. Gave me plenty of time to hold her hand, and sort through my own tangled emotions.

My aunt saved me by sacrificing my sister. The first few days, I couldn’t move beyond that thought. I wanted to be grateful, but I was also angry. How could Aunt Nancy have left her own niece, a young girl, with a woman who’d already killed two babies, let alone tortured her other niece? It seemed too cold, too cruel.

Then it bothered me. My aunt was practical, but never callous.

Day five, I made a call to old friends in the Arvada dispatch center. They put me in touch with a couple of veteran officers in Boulder. Sure enough, my aunt hadn’t told the entire story. Sure, she’d tracked down her sister. Flown to Colorado, confronted Christine, been shocked to discover Abigail’s existence. And maybe, faced with my mother’s terms, she’d appeared to capitulate to her demands.

But my aunt hadn’t just walked way. She’d gone straight from her sister’s ratty apartment to the Boulder police. Apparently, it took a few hours to arrange a face-to-face with a detective, then a bit more time as the police made arrangements with the tactical unit as well as family services. But within five or six hours, the police had raided my mother’s apartment, intent on arresting a wanted murderer and rescuing a young child.

Unfortunately, as my aunt later confided, sister knows sister. Christine had never believed for a moment that her older, dutiful sibling would simply walk away. So while my aunt had been summoning the cavalry, Christine had packed her bags, rounded up Abigail, and disappeared once more into thin air.

Abigail never got to see my aunt’s return, or the tactical raid that had been put together for her benefit. She just followed her mother to yet another town, her last impression of her aunt being the older woman who’d left her.

My aunt had tried, my aunt had failed. And she hadn’t told my sister the full story during those dark hours in Cambridge because she hadn’t been trying to explain herself. She’d been trying to draw Abigail’s attention so that I could get away.

All these years later, my aunt was still prepared to sacrifice her life for me.

I guess you could say she is as different from her sister as I am from mine.

Of course, there are other consequences from January 21. I haven’t spoken to Tom since. Apparently, you can steal a man’s truck, but beating him unconscious is much harder to overlook. I understand, of course. Deceit and general mayhem is no basis for a relationship.

I miss him, though. One of those things, I often tell myself, feeling lonely, feeling blue. Different time, different place…

Maybe someday soon, I’ll drop him a note:
I’m still a train wreck, if you’re still interested.

You never know.

In the meantime, I’ve moved back to J-Town. Returned to the mountains, my aunt, the community where everyone knows my name. Tulip approves. She lives a happy life as a B&B dog now. Welcomes guests, chases squirrels, comes and goes as often as she pleases.

I’m also helping out at the B&B, working the busy weekends while my aunt continues her recovery. During the week, turns out my own little town needed a dispatch officer. I work graveyard, Tuesday through Friday. And don’t let the small town fool you. Just the other night, someone stole a golf cart and ran amok on the course, dumping bleach in zigzag patterns across the greens. However, my brave caller and ninety-year-old witness helped crack the case, based on the baked pineapple pieces left behind.

I still run. Still box. And sometimes, after a long stretch of sleepless nights, I’ll head out to the range and make happy with some targets.

But I’m trying for a kinder, gentler life now. I remember my sister and thirty-three murders that didn’t do a thing to make her feel safer. I think of Stan Miller and my own choices along the way.

Not just insanity is genetic, you know.

Violence is, too.

I have vowed to make the best of this second shot at life. I will follow the straight and narrow, I remind myself, as I take certain calls. I will color within the lines, I think, as another child cries in my ear. I will not overstep the bounds of morality, I tell myself, as yet another hysterical woman sobs for help.

I wonder how long my resolution will last.

Another one of those questions I can’t answer.

Yet.

I
T TOOK
D.D.
SEVERAL WEEKS,
not to mention several favors, to get the report she desired. When she finally had it, read it, processed it, she nodded in satisfaction. And then, because it didn’t mean much, couldn’t mean much, she locked it away in a file and went home to her two favorite men.

“You look happy,” Alex said, when she walked through the door.

“Because I was right.”

“Ah. Generally does the trick.”

“Got back a ballistics report. Confirmed what I had suspected: Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant might not have shot those three pedophiles, but she did commit a murder.”

Alex spooned pale mush into Jack’s mouth. They were trying out baby’s first food: rice cereal. So far, it looked very attractive on Jack’s ruddy cheeks.

“When will you arrest her?”

“Not anytime soon.”

Alex tried an airplane noise. Jack wasn’t buying it, so D.D. took over. She still wore one of her favorite tailored black suit jackets but was feeling lucky.

Alex sat back, eyed her curiously. He’d had the day off, spending it with Jack. Hence the new food, splattered kitchen, general state of disaster.

“Not arresting people generally doesn’t make you happy,” he said now.

D.D. sucked in her cheeks, making a fishy face. Jack imitated,
puckering his little lips into an O, and she got the first spoonful of white mush successfully delivered. Like a pro, she thought, and went for mouthful number two. “Legal standing of ballistics report is highly debatable. Did I really have probable cause to test a legally registered firearm owned by someone who wasn’t a suspect in that particular case? Not to mention, said firearm was seized from the apartment of a cop, who turned out to be a murderer who’d already tried to frame Charlie for three other shootings. Meaning my chain of custody is crap, meaning my report is crap.”

She made a giant happy O. Jack giggled. Spoonful number two. She shoots, she scores.

“And yet you’re happy?”

“Because I knew it. When O and I interviewed Charlie the first time, the girl looked guilty as hell. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t because she was running around Boston shooting pedophiles. But I knew she’d been running around the city doing something.”

“What was the something?”

“Having a shoot-out with a lovely gentleman named Stan Miller. Known as the neighborhood bully. Security guard, wife beater, allegedly had a thing for hammers. He was found impaled on a collapsed fire escape about seven weeks ago. Quite dead, apartment shot to pieces, wife and two kids nowhere to be found. Still missing, as a matter of fact. I’d look harder, but based on neighborhood scuttlebutt, their disappearance is probably in their own best interest.”

“But he died of fire escape, not GSW.”

“Another tricky detail should I pursue a case. Can only prove a person with Charlie Grant’s gun shot at Stan Miller, not that a person with Charlie Grant’s gun killed Stan Miller.”

“And yet you’re happy.”

Baby Jack was giggly. Baby Jack blew rice cereal all over the high chair and half of D.D.’s face. And yet she was still happy. She sat back, stirring rice cereal, waiting for the next chance to use it.

She eyed her partner.

“I like knowing things. I like knowing what Charlie Grant did, and it’s possible I dropped her a note, because I like letting her know
that I know what she did. Girl’s a vigilante. She should know a Boston homicide cop is staring over her shoulder. It’s good for her.”

“Ah. You’re torturing her. Now I see why you’re happy.”

“I’m monitoring her. Will help keep her honest, and I like to think at least some part of her will appreciate that.”

Baby Jack stopped blowing zerberts. D.D. reverted to more fishy faces and scored, in rapid succession, two more bites of rice cereal.

“So, I’m thinking September,” she said casually.

Alex eyed her. “Vacation? Getaway.” He closed his eyes, swallowed hard. “We really are going to see your parents.”

“Not if I can help it. But my guess is, they’d come here. Can’t miss their only daughter’s wedding.”

She looked up at him. He opened his eyes, startled, maybe even bemused. Her heart was pounding. She’d figured that might happen, but the depth of her own nervousness surprised her.

“Wedding?” he asked.

“The fall. With all the leaves turning on the trees. I think that would be pretty.”

“Am I involved?”

“I thought I’d be the one in white…okay, ivory, and you’d be the one in the monkey suit.”

He nodded slowly. “Should I ask how you arrived at this decision, or just jam the ring on your finger before you change your mind?”

“Well, it might take us a couple a weeks to find the ring…”

“Shut up,” Alex said. Then, “Stay right there.” He pushed back his chair rather awkwardly, then staggered out of the room, while D.D. sat there, still holding rice cereal, with bits of baby spittle across her cheek.