Lisa Gardner: Hide

Not that he was complaining. Being the only state detective on a city team was awkward at best, filled with daily shots of resentment at worst. But such arrangements had precedent. D.D. declared him a source of "local knowledge" and, voila, hijacked him for her purposes. The fact that he was new and not embroiled in any major state investigations made the transition swift and relatively painless. One day he'd reported to the state offices, the next he was working out of a teeny tiny interrogation room in Roxbury, Mass. Such was the glamorous life of a detective.

From his perspective, it was a no-brainer: serving on a high-profile task force would add heft to his file. And having entered that underground chamber, having seen those six girls… It wasn't the kind of thing a cop walked away from. Better to work it than to just dream about it night after night.

Most of the other detectives seemed to feel the same. The case wasn't lacking for overtime hours. Bobby'd been at the BPD headquarters for nearly two days now. If people disappeared, it was simply to shower and shave. Food consisted of pickup pizza or take-out Chinese, consumed mostly at one's desk, or perhaps in a task-force meeting.

Not that real life magically went away. Detectives still had to attend to previously scheduled grand jury hearings, sudden developments in a current case. The arrival of an informant. The murder of a key witness. Other cases didn't stop just because a new and more shocking murder leapt into the fray.

Then there was family life. Last-minute calls to apologize for missing Junior's soccer game. Guys disappearing into interrogation rooms at eight p.m., trying to find a little privacy for the good-night phone call that would have to do in lieu of a kiss. Detective Roger Sinkus had a two-week-old baby. Detective Tony Rock's mother was in the intensive care unit, dying of heart failure.

High-profile homicide investigations were a dance, a complex work flow of officers fading in and out, of attending to critical tasks, of abandoning any others. Of single guys like Bobby staying until three a.m., so a new father like Roger could go home at one. Of everyone trying to push one case forward. Of no one getting what they needed.

And at the top of it all sat D.D. Warren. First big case for the newly minted sergeant. Bobby had a tendency to be cynical about these things, but even he was currently impressed.

For starters, she had managed to keep one of the most sensational crime scenes in Boston history under wraps for nearly forty-eight hours. No leaks from the BPD. No leaks from the OCME's office. No leaks from the DA. It was a miracle.

Second, while operating under the full onslaught of a dozen major TV personalities screaming for more information, ranting about the public's right to know, and alternately accusing the Boston police of covering up a major threat to public safety, she'd still managed to organize and launch a half-decent investigation.

First step in any homicide case, establish a time line. Unfortunately for the task force, a time line was usually generated by the victimology report, which included an estimated time of death. Forensic anthropology wasn't exactly an overnight kind of analysis, however. Plus, in Boston, the forensic anthropologist's position wasn't a full-time one, meaning one half-time expert, Christie Callahan, was now trying to handle six remains. Then you had the mummified condition of such remains, which no doubt demanded a whole slew of painstaking, methodical, and frighteningly expensive tests. All in all, they'd probably have the victimology report about the same time Detective Sinkus's new baby hit college.

D.D. had brought in a botanist from the Audubon Society to help them out. He'd studied the woodland brush, grass, and saplings that had taken root above the subterranean chamber. Best guess- thirty years' worth of overgrowth, give or take a decade.

Not the most precise time line in the world, but it got them started.

One three-person detective squad was now creating a list of missing Massachusetts girls, going back to 1965. Since records were only computerized from 1997 on, that meant manually skimming massive printouts of every single missing person from ' 65 to '97, identifying which of the cases were still unsolved and involved a female minor, then record those case-file numbers to be looked up separately on microfiche. Currently, the squad completed six years of missing persons every twenty-four hours. They were also consuming approximately one gallon of coffee every ninety minutes.

Of course, the Crime Stoppers hotline was also going insane. The public only knew that the remains of six females had been found on the site of the former Boston State Mental Hospital, and the scene appeared to be dated. That was still enough to have the crackpots out in force. Reports of strange nighttime lights coming from the property Rumors of a satanic cult in Mattapan. Two callers claimed to have been abducted by UFOs and had seen all six girls aboard the ship. (Really, what did they look like? What were they wearing? Did they give you their names?) Those callers had a tendency to hang up quick.

Other calls were more intriguing: girlfriends ratting out ex-boyfriends who had bragged of doing "something awful" at the former hospital site. Others were simply heartbreaking: parents, from all over the country, calling in to ask if the remains might be those of their missing child.

Every call generated a report, every report had to be followed up by a detective, including the monthly call from a woman in California who insisted that her ex-husband was the real Boston Strangler, mostly because she'd never liked him. It was taking five detectives to handle the load.

Which left D.D.'s squad, plus Bobby, with miscellaneous management tasks. Determining a list of "interview subjects" based on the various real estate developers and community projects active at the site. Trying to get a list of patients and administrators from a mental hospital that had shut down thirty years ago. Entering the crime-scene elements into VICAP, given the uniqueness of the subterranean pit.

Following up the resulting hit-Richard Umbrio-had become Bobby's project. He had pulled the microfiche of the original case file, including a decent collection of photos. He'd also put in a call to the lead detective, Franklin Miers, who'd retired to Fort Lauderdale eight years ago.

Now Bobby was sitting in the tiny interrogation room that served as his temporary office, studying a hand-sketched diagram of the pit that had once held twelve-year-old Catherine Gagnon.

According to Miers's notes, Catherine had been abducted while walking home from school. Umbrio had come upon Catherine when driving around the neighborhood and asked if she would help him look for a lost dog. She took the bait and that was that.

A hulking bear of a man even at the age of nineteen, Umbrio had no problem subduing the slightly built sixth-grader. He whisked her away to an underground chamber he had prepared in the woods, and that's when Catherine's real ordeal began. Nearly thirty days in an underground pit, where her only visitor was a rapist with a penchant for Wonder bread.

If hunters hadn't stumbled upon the pit, most likely Umbrio would've eventually killed her. Instead, Catherine survived, identified her attacker, and testified against him. Umbrio was whisked away to prison. Catherine was left to rebuild her life, the so-called Thanksgiving Miracle whose adult life wasn't so miraculous after all. Being held by a monster had definitely left its mark.

Miers's notes described a case that was shocking, but routine. Catherine was a credible witness, and evidence found in the pit-a metal chain-link ladder, a plastic bucket, the plywood cover-bore out her story

Umbrio did it. Umbrio went to prison. And two years ago, when Umbrio was mistakenly paroled from prison, he returned to stalking Catherine with the same homicidal zeal he had shown prior to his arrest.