Lisa Gardner - Live to Tell

“Ishy, in the hallway,” Alex said.

“Yeah. Now the subject has to move fast. Ishy’s raising the alarm, there are two other kids capable of bolting for the neighbors’. The subject’s gotta tamp down, or the whole scene will spiral out of control.”

“So the subject grabs a gun-”

“One he’s taken off Hermes?” D.D. questioned.

“Unregistered, so no way to determine,” Alex said. “But subject has a gun and now it’s quick and dirty business. Fumbles the first shot with Ishy, but makes it right with the second. Then hits the girls’ room. Boom. Boom. Kids are done. It’s down the hall to the last member of the family.”

D.D. nodded. “All right. But the last member of the Laraquette family is a five-month-old baby. Infants can’t talk or bear witness. Why kill the baby?”

Neil and Alex were both silent for a minute, contemplating the matter.

“He has to kill the baby,” Alex said at last. “Because it has to be the whole family. It’s a script, remember? The family must be dead and the father must appear to have done it. So the baby must die. Then Hermes must be moved to the sofa and posed accordingly. It’s what the killer does. What he needs.”

“Not a gangland hit,” D.D. said slowly. “Because in a gangland hit, the shooter would want to take credit. He’d want it known that he’d eliminated his rival’s entire family, to strike fear into the hearts of other up-and-coming drug dealers. Plus, he wouldn’t mess around with four different weapons. Too much fuss. This isn’t about revenge. This is something deeper, something more personal to the killer.”

“A reenactment,” Alex murmured.

D.D. frowned, uncomfortable, not sure why. “Hermes’s death screwed it up. He was supposed to be stunned unconscious. Then, when the rest of the family had been eliminated, the killer could return, move Hermes to the sofa, wrap Hermes’s fingers around the gun, and complete the final act in the story. But Hermes had a heart attack, breaking with the script, and giving us our first clue.”

Alex said suddenly, “Hermes had the gun on him.”

D.D. and Neil turned to him. “How do you figure?”

“Because the gun has to come from inside the home. It’s part of the pattern, and if you think about it, it works. At the Harrington residence, the subject eliminates Patrick first. Stuns him, we’ll assume for the sake of argument. Then the subject slips into the kitchen, grabs a knife, and goes to town. Finally, the staging takes place. Patrick gets moved, the subject locates the gun, performs the final act.”

“Patrick lived,” D.D. pointed out.

“The risk you take with a twenty-two,” Alex countered. “But the gun was registered to Patrick, remember? That’s all he owned, and I bet if we ask his neighbor Dexter, he’ll agree that Patrick was conscientious about handgun safety in a household with three kids. I bet he kept the twenty-two in a lockbox. So the killer had to wait to access it and use it. Hermes, on the other hand-”

“Probably had it stuffed in the waistband of his jeans,” D.D. finished for him. “Lucky he didn’t blow off his nuts.”

“Lucky he ate so much fast food, and suffered a heart attack.”

“So now all we have to do is find some kind of link between the Harringtons and the Laraquette-Solis family,” D.D. said. “And figure out why someone’s idea of fun is murdering entire families. Then we catch him. Preferably in time for the five o’clock news. Ideas?”

She looked at Alex, he looked at Neil. Neil looked back at her.

“Trace evidence,” Neil said finally, with a small shrug. “Hair, fiber, prints, some link between the two crime scenes.”

“Look for parking tickets,” Alex offered. “Subject had to come and go, and let’s face it, parking in the city is a bitch, especially during the summer months.”

“Footprints outside the windows.” Neil again, getting into the spirit of things. “Subject probably scoped out the place first.”

Alex’s turn: “Reinterview the neighbors. To pull off something this sophisticated, the perpetrator had to have reconned. Did any of them notice the same car driving around the block several times? Or a new face suddenly taking walks in the morning, only to disappear again? Guy had to get his intel somehow.”

D.D. wrote down the list, added two of her own: ballistics, in case the slugs bore any similar markings between the two scenes, and also the ME’s report on Patrick Harrington. If he had Taser burns on his chest, the scenes were linked. No doubt in her mind.

“Neil,” she said, tapping that last item, “get back to the ME for us, will you? Couple of days is too long to wait for Ben to reexamine Patrick. We need the ME’s report tomorrow morning at the latest, even if it’s only his preliminary opinion. But this matters. Matters a lot.”

Neil nodded, then there was a rap on the door. Phil stuck his head in.

“Miss me?” the third member of their squad asked. “I’ve been looking all over the damn place for you. What’s with the conference room?”

“More space,” D.D. said. “Neil caught a break from the ME. Turns out Hermes Laraquette actually died from a Taser, and the whole suicide-on-the-sofa thing was staged. Now we just gotta link the Harrington scene to the Laraquette-Solis scene and we’ll be able to prove we’re looking for a single predator who likes to reenact family annihilations. Why? What’d you do with your afternoon?”

“Tell me you love me.”

“Is this more or less than I love a medium rare cheeseburger?”

“Definitely more. I’ve linked the Harringtons to the Laraquette-Solis family. Remember the Laraquettes’ four-year-old girl with the cuts all over her limbs?”

D.D. nodded her head; not an easy thing to forget.

“Child services was called, and the girl was taken into temporary state care, and guess what? Mommy and Daddy aren’t the ones who hurt her. She does it to herself. A form of self-mutilation that has something to do with compulsion, depression, anxiety, yada yada yada. To make a long story short, the girl can’t stop slicing her own skin. Uses everything from sharpened twigs to paper clips to the tabs from Coke cans. Well, nine months ago, Tika got her hands on a disposable razor and starting working on her neck. By the time Mommy noticed, girl was covered in blood. Mom rushed her to the emergency room, where she was diagnosed as an immediate threat to herself and…” Phil paused a beat, waited for the drum roll.

D.D. connected the dots, just as Phil spoke the words out loud.

“And four-year-old Tika was admitted to the Pediatric Evaluation Clinic of Boston. Otherwise known as Ozzie Harrington’s former home-away-from-home.”

Am I a good mother?

In the months prior to our marriage unraveling, Michael claimed that my personal failings were holding Evan back. I refused to view my son and his issues objectively. I refused to consider that someone else-or perhaps, more specifically, somewhere else-would be in my son’s best interest.

By believing I was the only person who could help Evan, I was, in fact, guilty of the worst sort of hubris. I was arrogant, self-centered, and putting my needs as a mother above the needs of my son. I was also ignoring my husband and my daughter, fracturing the family I was supposed to nurture and protect.

To hear Michael describe it, Evan’s temper tantrums, violent acts, and chronic insomnia were all my fault. If I could just be a better mom, Evan would be a better child. Preferably one who was locked up somewhere, where parents could visit at their convenience and a younger sibling could forget he ever existed.

Stop being such a martyr, Michael kept saying. This isn’t about you. It’s about what’s best for him. Dammit, we have resources, he’d add, as if Evan were some sort of remodeling project that if we just threw enough money at would be done to our satisfaction.