Live to Tell (16 page)

A cockroach crawled out, stopped for a second—she swore to God it was studying them—then went about its cockroach business, disappearing beneath another foul pile of refuse.

“I’m showering with bleach when I get home,” D.D. gritted out between clenched teeth.

“Eucalyptus oil,” Bobby informed her. “Pour it straight in the bath. Works every time.” He added primly, “And it makes for very soft skin.”

D.D. shook her head. She turned away from Mr. Dreadlocks and, feeling a bit hopeless about the whole damn thing, headed deeper into the house.

The woman had gone down in the kitchenette just off the family
room. The knife, bearing a black curved handle that matched the set in the wooden block on the counter, was still lodged in her back. This hadn’t been a clean kill. The grime-covered floor was further soiled with red streak marks from the woman trying to crawl forward on her elbows. She’d made it about four inches before succumbing to her injury.

The kitchen stank worse than the family room. D.D. noted rotting food in the sink, sour milk on the table, and mold growing up one corner wall. She’d seen some things in her time. She’d heard some things in her time. She still didn’t know how anyone could live like this.

Off the kitchen was the lone bathroom. Garbage overflowed the shower stall, including gallon jugs filled with yellow liquid. The toilet was clogged and didn’t appear to be working. That made D.D. eye the gallon jugs all over again, wishing she didn’t know what she now knew.

Leaving the kitchen area, they made it to the hallway. A kid, looked sixteen, seventeen, was spread-eagle outside the first bedroom door. He appeared to have been shot twice. First time in the upper leg. Second time was the money shot—a neat round hole one inch above his left eye.

Inside the bedroom, Alex was bent over the body of an adolescent girl. She was wearing shorts and a tank top. It appeared she’d been sleeping on the twin-sized bed. She’d tossed back the cover sheet, maybe hearing a noise in the hall. She’d just made it to sitting when the bullet caught her above her right eye. She’d fallen to the side, one of her hands still fisting the stained pink sheet.

This room was cleaner, D.D. noted. Impossibly small and cramped, but neater. The girl had painted the walls pink with swirls of green and blue. Her sanctuary, D.D. thought, and noted a pile of paperback novels stacked in the corner.

“Third child’s behind me,” Alex spoke up.

“Third child?”

“On the floor.”

D.D. and Bobby sidestepped their way to the foot of the bed. Sure enough, in the three feet between the twin bed and the outside wall was a small cushion, and on top of the cushion was a much younger
child, probably three or four. She had a tattered blanket clenched in her fingers and one thumb still popped in her mouth. She could’ve been sleeping, except for the blood on her left temple.

“Never woke up,” Alex said, his voice subdued, tense.

“So it would seem,” D.D. murmured. “Is that a dog bed? Is she sleeping on a
dog
bed?”

“Looks it,” Bobby said, his voice flat.

“And what the hell is going on with her arms and legs?” D.D. had managed to inch closer, noting a myriad of fresh red cuts and faded silvery scars crisscrossing the girl’s limbs. D.D. counted a dozen marks on one dirty leg alone. It looked as if someone had taken a razor to the child, and not just once.

“Please tell me someone had called child services,” she muttered. Then realized it didn’t matter. At least not anymore.

She and Bobby slid back out of this bedroom, made it around the teenage boy, and headed for the last room. It was only slightly larger than the first. A double bed was wedged against the wall. An old wooden cradle sat beside the bed.

Bobby stopped moving.

“I got it,” D.D. said. “I got it.”

She left him in the doorway, walked straight to the cradle, and looked in. She forced herself to take her time, to spend a good two to three minutes on it. She considered this a service to the dead. Don’t rush their last moments. Study them. Remember them. Honor them.

Then nail the son of a bitch who did it.

She returned to the doorway, her voice low, steadier than she would’ve thought. “Infant. Dead. Not shot. I’m guessing suffocated. There’s a pillow on its stomach.”

“Boy or girl?” Bobby asked.

“Does it matter?”

“Boy or girl?” he snarled.

“Girl. Come on, Bobby. Out of the house.”

He followed her, because in a residence this small, there wasn’t much choice. Every step they took risked trampling a piece of evidence or, worse, one of the bodies. Better to get out, into the humid summer night.

By mutual consent, they paused outside the front door. Took a second to breathe in deep gulps of heavy, moist air. The noise had built at the end of the drive. Neighbors, reporters, busybodies. Nothing like an August crime scene to bring out a block party.

D.D. was disgusted. Enraged. Disheartened.

Some nights, this job was too hard.

“Male first, then the mother and kids?” Bobby asked.

She shook her head. “No assumptions. Wait for the crime-scene geeks to sort it out. Did you recognize Alex Wilson inside?”

Bobby shook his head.

“He teaches crime-scene management at the Academy and is shadowing our unit for the month. Smart guy. By morning, he’ll have something to report.”

“Is he single?” Bobby asked her.

“Bite me.”

“You started it.”

She gave him a look. “How?”

“You called him smart. And you never think men are smart.”

“Well, I once thought you were smart, so obviously my batting average isn’t perfect.”

“I miss you, too,” he assured her.

They both fell silent, once more contemplating the scene.

“So you think the male did it?” Bobby asked.

“We didn’t see any drugs.”

“Not in the house,” Bobby agreed. “What do you say we check around back?”

They checked around back, found a small wooden shack that looked a bit like an outhouse. Inside, bales of marijuana were stacked floor to ceiling.

“Hello, drug dealer,” Bobby murmured.

“Goodbye, gangland hit,” D.D. corrected.

“How do you figure?”

“When was the last time one dealer offed another dealer, only to leave behind the first dealer’s stash? If this was about drugs, no way these bales would still be sitting here.”

“Maybe the rival couldn’t find them.”

She shot him a look, then glanced pointedly at her watch. “We found them—in less than sixty seconds, I might add.”

Bobby pursed his lips. “If not a gangland hit, then what?”

D.D. was troubled. “I don’t know,” she acknowledged.

They both fell silent. “Your crime scene,” Bobby said finally. “My apologies.”

She looked at him, his steady gray eyes, the solid shoulders she had once let herself cry on. “My regret,” she said.

They walked back around the house.

Bobby exited down the drive.

D.D. returned to the scene.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

DANIELLE

Lucy started screaming shortly after midnight. The desperate, high-pitched shriek sent four of us bolting down the hall. We made the mistake of pouring into her room as one unit, and the sight of so many adults sent her into a fresh paroxysm of terror.

She attacked the window, beating it with her fists. When the shatterproof glass held, she whirled around and slammed herself into the neighboring wall. Her head whipped back. She cried out again, before careening across the room and pounding into the next wall. She still wore the oversized top, and it flapped around her bony knees like a giant green cape.

I put up a hand, gesturing for everyone to hold still. Technically, I wasn’t even on the clock. I’d logged out hours ago, but had never made it home. I’d debriefed with Karen, visited with Greg, caught up on some paperwork. I’d worked for thirty-six of the past forty-eight hours. Now I was tired, frazzled from Lucy’s escape, and wrung out from the detectives’ visit. After they’d left, I’d made the mistake of looking up the Dorchester murders on the Internet. I could picture
Ozzie inside that white-trimmed triple-decker. Patrick, Denise, Ozzie’s older brother and sister.

And that put my father’s voice back in my head.
“Oh Danny girl. My pretty, pretty Danny girl.”

Two and half days now. Sixty hours and counting.

“She’s disassociating,” Cecille, an MC, murmured beside me.

She was right. Lucy’s dark eyes held a glassy sheen and she was striking out at things only she could see. Her nightmare had carried her to the wasteland between sleeping and waking. She was reacting to our presence, but not really processing. Kids like this were nearly impossible to wake, and it almost always ended badly.

Now Lucy flung herself against another wall and started pounding her head.

“Ativan,” Ed stated across the room. He was an older MC, heavyset, balding. He liked to cook and the kids loved him for it.

“No shit,” I muttered back.

“I can get her.” Ed was already on the balls of his feet, preparing his heft for action. He was going to rush her, try to grab her in a bear hug. The feeling of being enveloped soothed some kids, helped bring them down. I knew immediately Lucy wasn’t that kind of kid.

“No!” I grabbed his arm, stalling him. “Touch her and she’ll go nuts.”

“She’s already nuts. We gotta get her sedated before she takes everyone with her. It’s nighttime, Danielle. You know what it’s like at night.”

I knew, but forcefully grabbing a child as damaged as Lucy … I couldn’t stomach it.

“Everyone out,” I ordered. “Just out. We’re not doing any good.”

Lucy was back at the window, banging futilely against the glass. There was a hopelessness to her actions that hurt to watch. As if she knew the glass wouldn’t break, as if she knew she couldn’t escape, but she had to try.

How long had she banged on the freezer door? How many hours and days had she spent, forced into a fetal position, feeling her arms and legs burn from the cramping muscles?

These kids were tougher than us. These kids were braver than us. That’s why we loved them so.

We backed out slowly, easing into the lit hallway, where the domino effects of Lucy’s outburst were already in motion. Kids were off their mattresses, looking wild-eyed as Lucy launched into a fresh series of shrieks. Jimmy raced by, arms outstretched as he reacted to the stress by making like an airplane and taking flight. Jorge and Benny were hot on his heels.

Verbal kids were chattering away. Nonverbal kids were curling into balls. Suicidal Aimee stood in the doorway, looking as if the world were ending, but then, she’d known it would. She disappeared, shuffling back into the darkness of her room, and Cecille swiftly followed her.

Lucy began to wail. A thin, anguished sound that built, then fell off, then rose to a crescendo all over again.

“Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop!” Jimmy yelled, roaring down the hallway, arms straight out, bathrobe flapping.

Lucy wailed louder.

“Stop, stop, stop!”
Benny and Jorge took up the chant.

“Midnight matinee,” Ed boomed over the growing uproar. “To the movie room. Popcorn for all.”

He started to herd dazed and distraught children away from Lucy’s room, toward the common area. I joined suit, gathering as many kids as possible as I worked my way to the medicine dispensary. I tried to appear as if I were merely walking fast when, really, I wanted to bolt.

The wails continued, a long heartbreaking ladder that made the adults pale, even as we pasted reassuring smiles upon our faces.

I found myself picturing my father. He was standing in my doorway, framed by a halo of hallway light.
“Oh Danny girl. My pretty, pretty Danny girl.”

The pitch of his last words matched Lucy’s wail perfectly. Songs for the dying.

I wanted Lucy to shut up. I needed her voice out of my head.

I finally reached the dispensary and grabbed the Ativan. Two more
kids went racing by. I snagged the first, then the second, got them to the movie room, where the MCs were getting it together now. A movie was on, audio blasting almost loud enough to drown out the ruckus down the hall.

Lucy screamed more frantically, and I bolted for the rest of my supplies. Having the proper sedative was only half the battle. The real problem would be administering it. Most kids, we talked through the process or even bribed. Lucy, however, didn’t have language skills.

She was a mystery to us, and she was a mystery now screaming so shrilly my head hurt. The windows should shatter. The building should implode from so much anguish.

“Oh Danny girl. My pretty, pretty Danny girl.”

I grabbed three pieces of cheese and a boombox and raced down the hall.

I walked straight into the room. Lucy was so beside herself, I figured it hardly mattered. She must’ve spotted me out of the corner of her eye, however, for she launched herself at me immediately, fingers curled into claws, gouging at my eyes.

She caught me in the shoulder. I staggered back, surprised, making a low, involuntary
oomph
under my breath.