BOSTON SERGEANT DETECTIVE D. D. WARREN was on the case. And she was not happy about it.
This was unusual. A born workaholic, D.D. lived and breathed her job. Nothing made her happier than a high- profile homicide case that demanded endless nights of cold pizza as she and her squad racked up round-the-clock hours, targeting their prey.
Granted, she was a mother now, and baby Jack was proving as big an insomniac as his mom. Teething? Probably not at ten weeks. Colic? Maybe. It’s not like babies came with an instruction manual. D.D. had tried singing to him last night. He’d cried harder. Finally, she’d rocked and cried with him. They’d both fallen asleep around four; her alarm had woken her at six. But two hours of sleep wasn’t the reason D.D. was cranky.
True, her life had undergone another major sea change: Given the unexpected news that she was forty and pregnant, she’d decided to roll the dice toward domestic bliss and actually move in with the baby’s father. She’d sold her North End condo, said sayonara to the four pieces of furniture she’d managed to acquire over the years, and moved into Alex’s tiny suburban ranch. He’d graciously given her the entire closet. She was trying to stop hogging the covers. They both loved the nursery.
Alex was supportive, caring, and most importantly, as a crime scene expert who taught courses at the police academy, wise enough to allow her plenty of space to do her job. He’d spent the previous night taking his turn being up all hours with the baby, so Alex definitely wasn’t the reason she was cranky.
Granted, this was also her first major case after her eight-week maternity leave, but given the past two weeks of office paperwork, fieldwork seemed a great idea and definitely was not the reason she was cranky.
Frankly, she didn’t want to talk about it. She just wanted others to feel her pain.
D.D. pushed her way through the growing crowd of gawkers piling up on the sidewalk, then flashed her shield at the uniformed officer standing outside the crime scene tape. He dutifully entered her name and badge number in the murder book. Then she was ducking under the yellow tape and slipping on shoe booties and a hair net, before finally mounting the peeling wooden steps of the faded gray tenement building.
Scene was on the second floor. One-bedroom unit of the low-income housing project. Victim was a forty- something Caucasian male, which from what D.D. could tell, made him the only white guy in an eight-block radius. Apparently, he lived alone, and they’d only gotten the call when neighbors had complained of the smell.
D.D. hated tenement houses. If you could take despair, give it four walls, leaking ceilings, and very few windows, this is what it would look like. She hated the punk ass teenagers that eyed her boldly as she approached, already so grim they might as well piss off a Boston cop, because what else did they have to lose? She fretted over the shrunken, eighty-year-old grandmothers, forced to carry heavy bags of groceries up three flights of stairs to a bone-cold efficiency unit in the winter, or a 120-degree boiling kettle in the summer. She despaired over the packs of feral kids gazing distrustfully out of doorways, because at the ripe old ages of four, five, six, they’d already been taught to hate all authority figures.
Race relations in Boston. Inner-city socioeconomics. Label it whatever you wanted; tenement buildings stood as a constant reminder to D.D. of all the ways her job was still failing a significant portion of Boston’s population.
Guy here had been murdered. D.D. and her squad would investigate. D.D. and her squad would arrest the killer. And life for everyone in this building would suck just as much tomorrow as it did today.
Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren was cranky. But she did not want to talk about it.
D.D.’s squadmate, Neil, met her on the second-floor landing. The thirty-two-year-old lanky redhead used to work as an EMT before joining the BPD, and was their go-to man for all things gory. Currently, he was holding a handkerchief over his mouth and nose, which D.D. took as a bad sign.
He took one look at the expression on her face and recoiled slightly.
“The baby?” he asked tentatively.
“Not why I’m cranky,” she snapped.
He had to think about it. “Alex left you?”
“Oh for heaven’s sake…” She loved her squad and her squad loved her. But just working with her was enough for them to believe that Alex, who lived with her, must be a saint. “Not why I’m cranky.”
“You don’t have to go inside,” Neil ventured. “I mean, if you’re worried about the smell, or, or…” His voice trailed off. The warning look in her eyes was enough; he stopped talking.
“My parents are coming!” D.D. blurted out.
“You have parents?”
She rolled her eyes at him. “Florida,” she muttered. “They live in Florida. Where they play golf and bridge and do all the things old people do. They like being in Florida. I like them being in Florida. Just because I have a baby is no reason to mess with a good thing.”
Neil nodded, then waited. When it became clear she was done speaking, he leaned forward slightly. “Do they have names?”
“Patsy and Roy.”
“Oh. Well, that explains it. Can we talk about the murder vic now? Please.”
“Thought you’d never ask. What do we got?”
“Two GSWs to the head. Probably three to four days dead.”
D.D. raised a brow. “Bloated, gassy?” she asked, meaning the corpse.
“Well, been brutally cold, which helped,” Neil offered.
True. A four-day old corpse in the heat and humidity of August D.D. would’ve smelled a block away. As it was, standing three yards from the door of the apartment, she caught only the dull undertones of something rancid. Thank heavens for the mid-January deep freeze in Boston.
Then she thought of something. “What about the apartment’s heating unit?” she asked with a frown.
“Turned off.”
She arched a brow. “By the victim, or the killer?”
Neil shrugged, because of course he couldn’t know that yet, which didn’t mean he hadn’t wondered himself. D.D. often thought out loud, which, out of sheer self-preservation, her squad had learned not to take personally.
“Who’s here?” D.D. asked now, meaning the other investigators.
Neil rattled off several names. Their other squadmate, Phil, the family man. A couple of crime scene techs, latent prints, photographer, the ME’s office. Not too big a party, which D.D. preferred. Space was small, and extra officers, even so-called experts, had a tendency to mess things up. D.D. liked her crime scenes tight and controlled. Later, if things went wrong, that meant it would be on her head. But D.D. would rather shoulder the blame than ride herd on a bunch of uniforms.
“What else do I need to know?” she asked Neil.
“Won’t tell you,” Neil announced stubbornly.
She glanced at him, startled. Their other squadmate, Phil, was known to go toe-to-toe with her. Neil not so much.
“If I tell you and I’m wrong, you’re gonna be pissed,” Neil muttered, no longer looking at her. “I don’t tell you, and I’m right, you can feel good about yourself later-and take the credit.”
D.D. shook her head. Neil would be an excellent detective, if only he didn’t hide behind her and Phil so much. He seemed content to let them be the forward members of the crew, while he spent his days overseeing autopsies at the morgue.
She wondered if the medical examiner, Ben Whitley, was here. Neil and Ben had been dating for a little over a year now. Not an office romance, per se, but an industry one. Made D.D. uneasy about what might happen in the event of a breakup. On the other hand, given that she was forty, unwed, and now mother to a ten-week-old baby boy, she figured she wasn’t in any position to give personal advice.
Life happened. All you could do was ride the ride.
She sighed, pinched the bridge of her nose, and felt the full weight of her ride’s current sleeplessness. Jack had been snuggled into his carrier when she’d left him this morning. All wide blue eyes and fat red cheeks. When she’d kissed the top of his head, he’d waved his pudgy little fists at her.
Did a ten-week-old baby know enough to miss his mommy, because a ten-week mommy sure knew enough to miss her baby.
D.D. sighed one last time, squared her shoulders, and got on with it.
FIRST SCENT THAT HIT D.D.’S NOSTRILS WAS the overwhelmingly astringent odor of ammonia. She recoiled
