Love You More: A Novel (32 page)

“Will the snow be an issue?”

“Nope. Heat makes scent rise, cold keeps it lower to the ground. As handlers, we adjust our search strategy accordingly. From our dogs’ perspectives, however, scent is scent.”

“How about time frame?”

“If the terrain’s not too difficult, dogs should be able to work two hours, then they’ll need a twenty-minute break. Depends on the conditions, of course.”

“How many dogs are you going to bring?”

“Three. Quizo’s the best, but they’re all SAR dogs.”

“Wait—I thought Quizo was the only cadaver dog.”

“Not anymore. As of two years ago, all our dogs are trained for live, cadaver, and water. We start with live searches first, as that’s the easiest to teach a puppy. But once the dogs master that, we train them for cadaver recovery, then, water searches.”

“Do I want to know how you train for cadaver?” D.D. asked.

Murray laughed. “Actually, we’re lucky. The ME, Ben—”

“I know Ben.”

“He’s a big supporter. We give him tennis balls to place inside the body bags. Once the scent of decomp has transferred to the tennis balls, he seals them in airtight containers for us. That’s what we use to train. It’s a good compromise, as the fine state of Massachusetts frowns on private ownership of cadavers, and I don’t believe in synthetic ‘cadaver scent.’ Best scientists in the world agree that decomp is one of the most complicated scents on earth. God knows what the dogs are honing in on, meaning man shouldn’t tamper with it.”

“Okay,” D.D. said.

“Do you anticipate a water search?” Murray asked, “because that poses a couple of challenges this time of year. We take the dogs out in boats, of course, but given the temperatures, I’d still want them in special insulated gear in case they fall in.”

“Your dogs work in boats?”

“Yep. Catch the scent in the current of water, just like the drift of the wind. Quizo has found bodies in water a hundred feet deep. It does seem like voodoo, which again, is why I don’t like synthetic scent. Dogs are too damn smart to train by lab experiment. Do you anticipate water?”

“Can’t rule anything out,” D.D. said honestly.

“Then we’ll bring full gear. You said search area was probably within an hour drive of Boston?”

“Best guess.”

“Then I’ll bring my book of Mass. topographic maps. Topography is
everything
when working scents.”

“Okay,” D.D. said again.

“Is the ME or a forensic anthropologist gonna be on-site?”

“Why?”

“Sometimes the dogs hit on other remains. Good to have someone there who can make the call right away that it’s human.”

“These remains … less than forty-eight hours old,” D.D. said. “In below freezing conditions.”

A moment of silence. “Well, guess that rules out the anthropologist,” Murray said. “See you in ninety.”

Murray hung up. D.D. went to work on assembling the rest of the team.

28

T
uesday, twelve p.m. I stood shackled in the processing area of the Suffolk County Jail. No sheriff’s van parked in the garage this time. Instead, a Boston detective’s Crown Vic had rolled into the secured loading bay. Despite myself, I was impressed. I had assumed the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department would be in charge of transport. I wonder how many heads had rolled and markers had been called in to place me in Detective D. D. Warren’s custody.

She got out of the car first. Derisive glance flicked my way, then she approached the command center, handing over paperwork to the waiting COs. Detective Bobby Dodge had opened the passenger’s door. He came around the vehicle toward me, his face impossible to read. Still waters that ran deep.

No pedestrian clothes for my road trip. Instead, my previously issued pants and top had been replaced with the traditional orange prison jumpsuit, marking my status for the world to see. I’d asked for a coat, hat, and gloves. I’d been granted none of the above. Apparently, the sheriff’s department worried less about frostbite and more about escape. I would be shackled for the full length of my sojourn
into society. I would also be under direct supervision of a law enforcement officer at all times.

I didn’t fight these conditions. I was tense enough as it was. Keyed up for the afternoon events to come, while simultaneously crashing from the morning’s misadventures. I kept my gaze forward and my head down.

The key to any strategy is not to overplay your hand.

Bobby arrived at my side. The female CO who’d been standing guard relinquished my arm. He seized it, leading me back to the Crown Vic.

D.D. had finished the paperwork. She arrived at the cruiser, staring at me balefully as Bobby opened the back door and I struggled to slide gracefully into the backseat with my hands and legs tied. I tilted back too far, got stuck like a beetle with its legs in the air. Bobby had to reach down, place one hand on my hip, and shove me over.

D.D. shook her head, then took her place behind the steering wheel.

Another minute and the massive garage door slowly creaked up. We backed up, onto the streets of Boston.

I turned my face to the gray March sky and blinked my eyes against the light.

Looks like snow
, I thought, but didn’t say a word.

D.D.
drove to the nearby hospital parking lot. There, a dozen other vehicles, from white SUVS to black-and-white police cruisers were waiting. She pulled in and they formed a line behind us. D.D. looked at me in the rearview mirror.

“Start talking,” she said.

“I’d like a coffee.”

“Fuck you.”

I smiled then, couldn’t help myself. I had become my husband, with a Good Tessa and a Bad Tessa. Good Tessa had saved Kim Watters’s life. Good Tessa had fought off evil attacking inmates and had felt, for just one moment, like a proud member of law enforcement.

Bad Tessa wore prison orange and sat in the back of a police cruiser. Bad Tessa … Well, for Bad Tessa, the day was very young.

“Search dogs?” I asked.

“
Cadaver
dogs,” D.D. emphasized.

I smiled again, but it was sad this time, and for a second, I felt my composure crack. A yawning emptiness bloomed inside. All the things I had lost. And more I could still lose.

All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.…

“You should’ve found her,” I murmured. “I was counting on you to find her.”

“Where?”
D.D. snapped.

“Route two. Westbound, toward Lexington.”

D.D. drove.

W
e know about Trooper Lyons,” D.D. said curtly, talking from the front seat. We’d taken Route 2 past Arlington, exchanging urban jungle for suburban pipe dreams. Next up, the old money of Lexington and Concord, to be followed by the quaint, country charm of Harvard, Mass.

“What do you know?” I asked. I was genuinely curious.

“That he beat you up, in order to substantiate your claim of spousal abuse.”

“Have you ever hit a girl?” I asked Detective Dodge.

Bobby Dodge twisted in his seat. “Tell me about the hit man, Tessa. Find out how much I’m willing to believe.”

“Can’t.”

“Can’t?”

I leaned forward, best I could with my hands tied. “I’m going to kill him,” I said somberly. “And it’s not nice to speak ill of the dead.”

“Oh please,” D.D. interjected crossly. “You sound like a Looney Tune.”

“Well, I have taken some blows to the head.”

The eye roll again. “You’re no more crazy than I’m kindhearted,” D.D. snapped. “We know all about you, Tessa. The gambling-addicted
husband who cleaned out your savings accounts. The horny teenage brother of your best friend, who figured he might get lucky one night. You seem to have a history of attracting the wrong men, then shooting them.”

I didn’t say anything. The good detective did have a way of cutting to the heart of the matter.

“But why your daughter?” she asked relentlessly. “Trust me, I don’t fault you for plugging Brian with three in the chest. But what the hell made you turn on your own kid?”

“What did Shane have to say?” I asked.

D.D. frowned at me. “You mean before or after your loser friend tried to deck me?”

I whistled low. “See, this is what happens. You hit your first woman, and it gets easier after that.”

“Were you and Brian arguing?” Bobby spoke up now. “Maybe the fight turned physical. Sophie got in the way.”

“I reported for duty Friday night,” I said, looking out the window. Fewer houses, more woods. We were getting close. “I haven’t seen my daughter alive since.”

“So Brian did it? Why not just blame him? Why cover it up, concoct such an elaborate story?”

“Shane didn’t believe me. If he couldn’t, then who would?”

Red-painted apple stand, off to the left. Empty now, but sold the best glasses of cider in the fall. We had come here just seven months ago, drinking apple cider, going on a hay ride, then visiting the pumpkin patch. Is that what had brought me back, Saturday afternoon when my heart had been pounding and the daylight fading and I
had
felt like a Looney Tune, crazed by grief and panic and sheer desperation? I’d had to move, fast, fast, fast. Less thinking. More doing.

Which had brought me here, to the place of our last family outing before Brian shipped out for the fall. One of my last happy memories.

Sophie had loved this apple stand. She’d consumed three cups of cider and then, hopped up on fermented sugar, had run laps in the pumpkin patch before picking out not one pumpkin, but three. A daddy pumpkin, a mommy pumpkin, and a girl pumpkin, she’d declared. A whole entire pumpkin
family
.

“Can we, Mommy? Can we can we can we? Please, please, please.”

“Sure, sweetheart, you’re absolutely right. It would be a shame to separate them. Let’s save the whole family.”

“Yippee! Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, we’re gonna buy a pumpkin family! Yippee!”

“Turn right up ahead,” I murmured.

“Right?” D.D. braked hard, made the turn.

“Quarter mile up, next left, onto a rural road.…”

“Three pumpkins?” Brian shaking his head at me. “Softy.”

“You bought her the donuts to go with the cider.”

“So three donuts equals three pumpkins?”

“Apparently.”

“Okay, but dibs on carving the daddy pumpkin …”

“The tree! Turn here. Left, left. Now, thirty yards, road on the right.”

“Sure you couldn’t have drawn a map?” D.D. scowled at me.

“I’m sure.”

D.D. turned right onto the smaller, rural road, tires spinning on the hardpacked snow. Behind us, one, two, three, four cars labored to follow suit, then a couple of white SUVs, then the line of police cruisers.

Definitely going to snow
, I decided.

But I didn’t mind anymore. Civilization was long gone. This was the land of skeletal trees, frozen ponds, and white barren fields. The kind of place lots of things could happen before the general population noticed. The kind of place a desperate woman might use for her last stand.

Bad Tessa, rising.

“We’re here,” I said.

And Detective D. D. Warren, heaven help her, pulled over.

“Get out,” she said crossly.

I smiled. I couldn’t help myself. I looked the fine detective in the eye and I said, “Words I’ve been waiting to hear all day.”

29

I
don’t want her walking the woods!” D.D. was arguing with Bobby ten minutes later, off to one side of the stacked-up vehicles. “Her job was to get us here. Now her job is done, and our job is beginning.”

“The canine team wants her help,” Bobby countered. “There’s no wind, meaning it’ll be hard for the dogs to catch the open cone of the scent.”

D.D. stared at him blankly.

“Scent,” he tried again, forming a triangular shape with his hands, “radiates from the target in the shape of an expanding cone. For the dog to catch the scent, it has to be downwind, in the opening of the cone, or the dog can be two feet from the target and still miss it.”

“When did you learn about dogs?” D.D. demanded.

“Thirty seconds ago, when I asked Nelson and Cassondra what they needed us to do. They’re concerned about the conditions. Terrain’s flat, which I guess is good, but it’s open, which is more complicated—”