Lisa Gardner - Catch Me

“Wait.” I straightened, promptly whacked my head on the underside of the dash. “A string of shootings? Child molesters? What?”

“Yeah, exactly. Because I know for a fact we didn’t seize your weapon last night. Shepherd checked your bag-you were clear.”

I didn’t speak anymore, just listened.

“Which made me wonder,” Tom continued, “how the Boston PD managed to have matched slugs to your handgun. So I called the lab-”

“You called the lab?”

“Sure. I shoot with the head ballistics tech, Jon Cassir, a couple of times a month. So I asked him about it, you know, cop to cop, talking shop. And he said yeah, he’d spent all night shooting into the drum in order to run a ballistics test in a high profile case. Couldn’t pull any prints, though, given the checked rubber grip.”

“Rubber grip?” I was more confused than ever.

Tom slowed the cruiser slightly, blinker on. He tapped the brakes, paused at an intersection. I ducked down again, prayed for invisibility. Then he turned right, accelerating steadily, but killing his light bar, slowing his pace. He seemed to have a specific destination in mind, but I didn’t know where.

“I checked your bag one night,” he said now.

“You rifled through my messenger bag?”

“You took a ten-six. I happened to be looking for you. You weren’t there, but your bag was. So I looked inside.”

“You invaded my-”

“Be grateful, Charlie. I saw your peashooter. Nice piece, I remember thinking, especially the rosewood grip. So if you’re carrying a twenty-two with a rosewood grip that we definitely didn’t seize last night, why does Boston PD have a twenty-two with a rubberized grip they clearly believe belongs to you and, better yet, ties you to a string of shootings?”

“Why’d you check my bag?”

“History of being attracted to train wrecks, remember?”

“But you didn’t report me.”

“Hadn’t made up my mind yet. Your turn. Spill.”

I was silent for a moment, chewing the inside of my lower lip. “I don’t know,” I said at last. “I didn’t shoot three sex offenders. I own one handgun, which I hid after our…conversation…last night. Except, I just looked for it ten minutes ago and it was gone. So maybe the Boston cops have it, except according to you, it’s a totally different handgun they’ve matched to the shootings-though, given the arrest warrant, they don’t know that yet.” I frowned, turned the matter over in my head, frowned again. “I don’t get it.”

Cruiser had slowed some more. Tom put on the blinker, turning left. “Who’d you piss off?”

“I don’t know anyone well enough to be a friend or an enemy. I’ve kept to myself for the past year. I think you can attest to the general state of my warmth and fuzziness.”

Tom grunted in agreement. “Someone seems to think you’re a killer. Or,” he caught himself, “someone wants others to think you’re a killer. Because that’s what this is, right? A classic frame-up. Someone has submitted a gun, claiming it’s yours, that’s now been matched to three homicides.”

“But it’s not my Taurus. My license,” I started, then stopped. My license to carry included only the class of gun I was permitted to own, no detailed description of a specific firearm, such as a. 22 with a rosewood versus checked rubber grip. “It’s not my gun,” I repeated more firmly. “And my firearms instructor, J. T. Dillon, can testify on my behalf. He’s trained me for the past year on my Taurus; he knows what it looks like.”

Tom grunted. “Well, at least you got the first witness for the defense.”

I understood his point. With time and effort, I could argue the Boston PD were wrong; whatever. 22 had been submitted in my name wasn’t mine. But in the meantime, they’d already issued a warrant for my arrest. Meaning first I’d be tossed in jail. Later, it would be sorted out.

I didn’t have later. Not given that today was D-day, January 21. The day I’d spent a year training for. I was supposed to greet my killer, armed and ready for battle. Now, after twenty minutes or less, I was defenseless and on the run from the law.

But how? But who?

Slowly but surely, my brain kicked to life. “A cop submitted the real murder weapon. Only way there could be a match, right? Joe Blow can’t show up at the Boston PD lab and say here’s Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant’s gun. Please conduct the following test.”

“Bingo.”

“But thinking ahead, the same cop also seized my real Taurus semiauto. So I couldn’t quickly produce it, head straight to HQ with my own twenty-two, saying hey, there’s been a mistake.”

“Maybe.”

“I don’t understand,” I said again, and I hated how weak I sounded, how confused.

“Who all knows you have a twenty-two? I do. What about other cops in our department, or Boston PD?”

“I’ve been working with Boston Detective D. D. Warren and this other detective, O. Both of them know about my Taurus. Detective D.D. had promised to look into the murders of my friends, see what she could find out for today. And O’s been building some Facebook page, trying to bait the killer…”

My voice trailed off. Except last time I’d been there, they’d asked me lots of questions that had little to do with the death of my friends. They’d drilled me on my mother, my childhood, my dead siblings. O, in particular, had cycled back to my feelings of “frustration and helplessness.” How I of all people knew how much children out there suffered and how little the police could do to help.

Unless, of course, I was running all over town assassinating pedophiles.

They thought I did it. Of course. And I hadn’t denied anything, because I wasn’t exactly guilt free. Different crime, same blood on my hands.

But how did I go from being suspected by two detectives to being framed by at least one of them? And which one?

Then I got it. I knew exactly what had happened. I stared at Tom. “Detective O,” I said. “She did this. Oh my God, she fucking framed me for her own crimes.”

Tom eyed me from the driver’s seat of the parked car, his expression already skeptical. “Why?”

“You said it yourself. Cops were joking that instead of arresting the shooter, you should give her a badge. Maybe that’s because the pedophile shooter already has a badge. A frustrated sex crimes detective. You know, the young, earnest rookie learning the hard way she can’t always make her case, save the victim, catch her man. But she can, in the cover of night, shoot him down.”

Tom frowned, but didn’t immediately call me crazy. “This job can be frustrating,” he allowed. “But why involve you? Like you said, you got a couple of witnesses, myself included, who can testify that you carry a Taurus with a rosewood grip, not a checkered grip. Meaning, sooner or later, you’ll talk your way out of this, and then Detective O will be left looking like a bad cop at best, or exposed as the real shooter at worst.”

It came to me. “Because I don’t have sooner or later. As she well knows, I’m doomed to die today. Hell, I’m perfect. We even look a bit alike, except, well, she’s pretty. But you know, brown hair, general height. She knows I have a twenty-two, has even asked me about it. Just yesterday, she spent an entire interrogation positioning me in the eyes of her fellow officer D. D. Warren as a slightly crazy woman with a dubious memory and traumatizing past. Perfect vigilante killer. Best of all,” I glanced at my watch, “in roughly eight hours, I’ll be in no position to argue my innocence. Dead and presumed guilty. What more could a vigilante cop want in a fall guy?”

Tom frowned again, but nodded slightly. He popped open his door. “Stay,” he ordered.