Lisa Gardner - Live to Tell

D.D. knew she was in trouble when she woke up to a commercial for a sexual lubricant. According to the ad, the man used one lubricant for a cool tingle, the woman used another for a warming thrill, and then, when they got together…

D.D. wanted to know. Hell, she needed to know.

She spent several minutes, standing half-naked in her family room, staring at the TV screen as if it would repeat the commercial. Except this time, it would be her and, say, Alex Wilson in that rumpled bed. She’d be wearing one of his silk ties. He’d be wearing nothing at all.

Ah dammit.

Life sucked.

D.D. climbed aboard her treadmill, banged out three seven-minute miles, then downed two shots of espresso and went to work.

She pulled into HQ by eight-thirty, bearing a dozen donuts. Most of her squad were too health-conscious to eat donuts. That was okay. In her current mood, she’d be good for half the batch. She started with a Boston crème, poured a fresh cup of coffee, à la homicide unit, and got serious.

By nine a.m. Saturday morning, she had her squad plus Alex in her tiny office. They had approximately thirty minutes to hash out the past forty-eight hours, then she needed to report to the deputy superintendent. Given last night’s crime scene, did they have two independent incidents of mass murder? Or did they have one much larger, more horrifying crime? Option A meant two cases handled by two squads. Option B would involve the formal creation of a taskforce.

D.D. handed out large coffees, gestured to the half-empty box of pastries, then assumed the position beside the blank dry-erase board. Alex sat in front of her. Given that it was Saturday, he wore khaki pants and a rich blue golf shirt. The shirt emphasized the deep color of his eyes. The pants draped fit, athletic legs.

Then there were his hands, with those long, callused fingers resting upon his knees…

“What happened to all the donuts?” Phil spoke up.

“Bite me,” D.D. said. She returned to the whiteboard. “Victimology,” she announced. “We got the Harringtons in Dorchester…”

“White, working-class Christians,” Phil summarized. He’d found a maple frosted, and was chewing contentedly.

“School, employment, church, social clubs, prior address?”

Phil rattled off a geographic profile of the Harringtons’ known activities and organizations. D.D. dutifully wrote down each answer, then drew a line down the middle of the whiteboard to create a second column. “Okay, now we have the Laraquette-Solis clan.”

“White, low-income drug dealers,” Phil provided.

Alex spoke up. “Four children, four different fathers.”

“Long history with child services.” Phil again.

“Long history with immigration,” Neil, their third squadmate, countered from the back. Neil’s skin held the ghostly pallor of someone who spent too much time under fluorescent bulbs. Given that he’d spent the past two days at the ME’s office, overseeing the Harrington autopsies, and now there were now six more dead… Neil used to be an EMT. Made him the best man for the job.

“Turns out that Hermes Laraquette was from Barbados,” Neil continued now. He glanced at his notes. “Hermes was a Redleg-some small white underclass that descended from indentured servants, criminals, etc. INS has been looking for him, which is one case file they can now close.”

“School, employment, church, social clubs, prior address?” D.D. prompted.

This list was thin. The Laraquette-Solis clan lived across Boston, in Jamaica Plains. They were not known for their community involvement or their social consciousness. The family had moved into the neighborhood six months ago, and while Hermes liked to saunter around in his rainbow knit hat, the woman and kids were rarely seen outside.

D.D. couldn’t imagine it. How could anyone stay inside with that smell?

She studied the list under the Harrington name, then the list under the Laraquette name. Nothing leapt out at her.

“Enemies?” she prodded.

No one could think of any enemies for the Harringtons. The Laraquettes, on the other hand… They’d need days to research that list, given Hermes’s drug dealings. D.D. filled in TBD, for “to be determined.”

“So,” she declared briskly, “according to our lists, there’s no obvious overlap between the Harringtons’ world and the Laraquettes’. From a logical perspective, how could these two families know each other?”

“ Mission work, maybe,” Alex spoke up, “if the Harringtons’ church does anything with low-income families. Or their own volunteer efforts.”

“Worth checking,” D.D. agreed. “The Harringtons are do-gooders and the Laraquettes could use some good done. Other connections?”

“The kids,” Neil suggested. “Teenage boys are close in age. Maybe knew each other from sporting activities, summer camps, that kind of thing.”

D.D. wrote it down.

“Foster families, troubled kids,” Phil continued, brainstorming. “Harringtons adopted Ozzie, who we know passed through a variety of households before reaching them.”

“You’re thinking the Laraquettes once fostered Ozzie?” D.D. was dubious. “I’d think it would be the other way around-child services looking to place the Laraquette children to get them the hell out of that house.”

“That, too,” Phil agreed. “Again, we know the Harringtons had an interest in at-risk kids, and we know the Laraquette kids were at risk.”

“All right, from that perspective, I can buy it. We’ll call social services. They always love to hear from us. Other possibilities?”

The group was quiet, so D.D. made a few notes, then cleared the whiteboard and set them up for discussion number two: crime scenes.

Neil, the autopsy guru, led the way. “ME confirmed that the mother, Denise Harrington; the older son, Jacob; and the younger son, Oswald, all died of a single knife wound. Of note, there are no hesitation marks on any of the wounds.”

“Christ,” Phil muttered, the lone family man in the room.

“The girl, Molly, suffered a knife wound to the upper left arm. Cause of death, however, was manual asphyxiation. Fractured hyoid bone, which indicates a perpetrator of considerable manual strength.”

“Like a nine-year-old boy?” D.D. spoke up.

Neil gave her a look. “Not likely.” He glanced back down at his notes. “As for the father, Patrick Harrington, ME hasn’t gotten to him yet. According to the doctor’s report, however, he died due to complications from a gunshot wound-swelling of the brain.”

“Okay. So three stabbed, one strangled, one shot. Kind of original right there. Most family annihilators have a singular approach, don’t they?” D.D. looked to Alex for an answer.

He nodded. “Traditional approaches include shooting, drugging, and/or carbon monoxide poisoning. Sometimes, you see a case where the father figure drugs the family first, presumably to limit their suffering, then shoots them. If we look at teenage family annihilators-the abused son seeking retribution-methodology expands to bludgeoning and/or arson. I haven’t heard of a case where a single attacker switches weapons as he/she goes along.”

“Single attacker,” D.D. picked up. “Let’s talk about the number of perpetrators for a second. What about cases where the adolescent child has a partner in crime, like the daughter and her boyfriend who kill her family so they can be together. Or wasn’t there a case where a daughter and her lesbian lover murdered her grandparents so they could be together? Stuff like that.”

“When a teenager is the instigator of family annihilation,” Alex said, “there are instances of partner involvement. In those cases, however, both partners murder the offending family members, then escape together. Not kill the family, plus the adolescent instigator, and then the partner gets away.”