Lisa Gardner - Hide

"Have finally located Jill Cochran, former head nurse," Sinkus reported. "I'm told she has most of the records, etc., from the closed institute. She's cataloging them, archiving them, I don't know. Doing whatever it is you do to insane-asylum paperwork. I'm meeting with her in the morning to follow up on Mr. Schmidt."

"Basic background check on Schmidt?" D.D. inquired.

"Nothing came up. So either Adam's been a very good boy since his Boston State Mental days, or he's been much smarter about not getting caught. My spidey sense is not tingly, however. I like Eola better."

D.D. merely gave him a look.

Sinkus threw up his hands in defense. "I know, I know, a good investigator leaves no stone unturned. I'm turning, I'm turning, I'm turning."

Sinkus, apparently, was a little punchy from lack of sleep. He sat down. Detective Tony Rock took over the hot seat, reporting on the latest activity on the Crime Stoppers hotline.

"What can I tell you?" the gravelly voiced detective rumbled, looking exhausted, sounding exhausted, and no doubt feeling as good as he looked and sounded. "We're averaging thirty-five calls an hour, most of which fall into three basic categories: a little bit crazy, a lot crazy, and too sad for words. The a little and a lot crazy categories are about what you'd expect-aliens did it; men in white suits; if you really want to be safe in this world, you need to wear tin foil on your head.

"The too sad for words, well, they're too sad for words. Parents. Grandparents. Siblings. All with missing family members. We got a woman yesterday who's seventy-five. Her younger sister has been missing since 1942. She heard the remains were skeletal, thought she might get lucky. When I told her we didn't believe the remains were that old, she started to cry. She's spent sixty-five years waiting for her baby sister to come home. Tells me she can't stop now; she made her parents a promise. Life is just plain shitty sometimes."

Rock squeezed the bridge of his nose, blinked, forged on. "So, I got a list of seventeen missing females, all of whom vanished between 1970 and 1990. Some of these girls are local. One's as far away as California. I got as much information from the families as possible for identification purposes. Including jewelry, clothing, dental work, bone fractures, and/or favorite toys-you know, in case we can match anything against the 'personal tokens' attached to each of the remains. I'm passing the info along to Christie Callahan. Otherwise, that's it for me."

He took a seat, the air seeming to leave his body until he collapsed, more than sat, in the folding metal chair. The man did not look good, and they lost a moment, staring at him and wondering who would be the first to say something.

"What?" he barked.

"You sure-" D.D. began.

"Can't fix my mom," Rock shot back. "Might as well find the fucker who murdered six girls."

There wasn't much anyone could add to that, so they moved on.

"All right," D.D. declared briskly, "we got one prime suspect of above-average intelligence and financial resources, one still-worth-looking-at suspect who was a former employee, and a list of seventeen missing girls from the Crime Stoppers hotline. Plus, there may be a link to an abduction two years before any of these six girls disappeared. Who else wants to join the show? Jerry?"

Sergeant McGahagin had been in charge of culling unsolved BPD missing-persons cases involving female minors for the past thirty years. His team had developed a list of twenty-six cases from Massachusetts. They had now started on the broader New England area.

He was skimming the copy of Tony Rock's report from Crime Stoppers, identifying five overlapping names between the two lists.

"What I need next," McGahagin stated heavily, "is a victimology report. If Callahan can give me a physical description of the remains, there's a chance I can make a match with an unsolved case. Then we could go to work on making a positive ID, which in turn would give us a time line for the mass grave. Bada bing, bada boom."

McGahagin stared at D.D. expectantly

She returned his look levelly "What the hell do you want me to do, Jerry? Pull six victimology reports out of my ass?"

"Come on, it's been four fucking days, D.D. How can we still know nothing about the six remains?"

"It's called wet mummification," D.D. shot back hotly. "And nobody's ever dealt with it in New England before."

"Then with all due respect to Christie, call someone who has."

"She did."

"What?" McGahagin appeared startled. Investigators made requests for resources, experts, forensic tests all the time. That didn't mean the powers-that-be granted them. "Christie is getting reinforcements?"

"Tomorrow, I'm told. Some hotshot from Ireland who specializes in this shit and is curious to see a 'modern' example. The DA sprung for the dough-apparently the Crime Stoppers hotline isn't the only one going insane. The entire city is flooding the governor's office with hysterical complaints that a serial killer is loose and going to murder their daughters next. Which reminds me, the governor would like us to solve this case, mmm, about five minutes ago."

D.D. rolled her eyes. The rest of the detectives managed a few chuckles.

"Seriously, folks," D.D. resumed speaking. "Christie is trying. We're all trying. She believes she needs one more week. So we can sit on our hands and whine, or, here's a thought, conduct some good old-fashioned police work."

She returned her attention to McGahagin. "You said you had a list of twenty-six missing females from Massachusetts? Twenty-six seems like a lot to me."

"As Tony said, it's a shitty world."

"You graph 'em? Do we have, say, a cluster of activity around certain dates?"

"Seventy-nine to eighty-two was not a good time to be a young female in Boston."

"How bad?"

"Nine cases in four years, all unsolved."

"Age parameters?"

"Zero to eighteen."

D.D. considered him. "And if you narrow the age range to, say, between five years old and fifteen?"

"Drops it to seven."

"Names?"

He did the honors, including Dori Petracelli.

"Locations?"

"All over. Southie, Lawrence, Salem, Waltham, Woburn, Marlborough, Peabody If we make the assumption same subject was responsible for six of the seven cases…"

"By all means, let's assume away."

"You're talking someone with a vehicle, for one," McGahagin considered. "Someone who knows his way around the state, is comfortable blending in in a lot of different places. Maybe a utility worker, a repair person. Someone smart. Organized. Ritualized in his approach."

"Time line fits Eola," Sinkus commented. "Released in '78, doesn't have anything better to do…"

"Except," D.D. murmured, "incidents wind down in '82. Eola wouldn't have any reason to stop. Eola could theoretically go on forever. Which, frankly, would be true of any perpetrator. Predators don't magically just wake up one day and repent. Something happened. Other events, influences, must have interceded. Which brings us to"-her gaze shifted, found Bobby-"Russell Granger."

Bobby sighed, tilted back his chair. He'd been so busy since returning to HQ he hadn't had time to piss, let alone prepare notes. He had all eyes on him now, the city guys sizing up the state game. He did the best he could off the top of his head.

"According to police reports, Russell Granger first reported a Peeping Tom at his Arlington home in August of 1982. This set in motion a chain of events that culminated with Russell packing up his family and disappearing two months later, ostensibly to protect his seven-year-old daughter, Annabelle. So at first blush, we have a targeted victim-Annabelle Granger-and her poor, beleaguered father. Except…"

"Except," D.D. agreed.

Bobby held up a finger. "One," he said briskly, "Catherine Gagnon, who was abducted in 1980, recognized a photo of Russell Granger. Except Gagnon knew him as an FBI agent who interviewed her twice in the hospital after her rescue. That would be November of 1980, almost two years before the Peeping Tom report Russell Granger would file in Arlington."