Catch Me

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“How did it feel afterward, knowing you finally saved a child. Must have been quite the rush. You can tell us about it you know. I mean, we’re detectives, but we’re people, too. We get what you’re doing, why it must be done.”

I pulled myself together, chin up, shoulders back. Detective O’s eyes were probing. I forced myself to meet her stare.

“You don’t know me.”

“Oh, but I do. The question is, how well do you know yourself?”

“I’m leaving.” I grabbed my messenger bag.

“Running away.”

“Got a warrant?”

“Avoiding. Fleeing. Doing what you do best.”

“I was just a kid.”

“So how did you know they were suffocated?”

I blinked, hands clutching the straps of my messenger bag, still poised for flight, except suddenly Detective O wasn’t talking to me anymore. She was talking to D.D.

“I’ve studied Munchausen’s by proxy. Never encountered a case where the mother abused one child for attention, while secretly killing others. However, in several instances, the mom made a big fuss over being pregnant. Milked it for attention. Then, when the babies were born, suffocated them in the middle of the night, and claimed crib death. Oh, the drama, the outpouring of public support, the endless supply of neighborly casseroles. You could see how it would work with someone of that psychological makeup. How they’d even feel compelled to do it again and again.

“But never heard of a Munchausen’s mom resorting to secret infanticide. Where’s the fix, outpouring of public support, the emotional satisfaction? Makes me wonder what else Charlene fails to remember. What else she might have done.”

“I would never-”

“Look me in the eye, Charlene.” Detective O, suddenly rounding the table, walking closer. “Look me in the eye and tell me you’re not a killer.”

I opened my mouth. I closed my mouth. I opened my mouth again, and a word came out, but it wasn’t what I expected.

“Abigail,” I whispered.

“What about Abigail?”

“Abigail,” I repeated mournfully. And my hand came up. I reached out, as if to touch someone who wasn’t even there.

“Charlene-” Detective Warren began.

But I didn’t wait to hear anymore. They didn’t have a warrant. They couldn’t arrest me, they couldn’t hold me.

In the back of my mind, I realized this might be the last chance I ever had.

One year of intense training later, I sized up my opponents. Then I turned and fled.

Chapter 30

“OH YEAH, she’ll never guess we’re onto her after that conversation. Subtle. Smooth. Confidence-building. I bet Charlene’s headed home right now to make us both friendship bracelets. What do you think?” D.D. snapped.

Detective O scowled, pulled out a chair at the conference table, and dropped into it. “She’s guilty. You know she’s guilty. Did you see her face? ‘Tell me you’re not a killer, Charlene.’ She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t do it!”

“Crap, we’re going to have to assign a patrol car to watch her. Course, we don’t have any proof she’s a suspect, let alone the budget for a patrol officer. Double crap.” D.D. also pulled out a chair, took a seat. The manila file was in front of her. She didn’t open it. She’d studied the crime scene photos at 5 A.M., her first night away from baby Jack.

Interestingly enough, it was not the tiny skeletons that had bothered her. The finger bones the size of grains of rice. The unfused cranial plates of the little boy, collapsed into a heap like a pile of yellowed rose petals.

The girl had mummified slightly, delicate skin shrink-wrapping her tiny frame, keeping her bones more intact. At first glance, the remains appeared to be a macabre doll, complete with long dark hair. It was only upon closer inspection you realized this had once been a real baby, twelve to eighteen months old, who’d probably sat up, crawled, taken a first step.

No, it wasn’t the impossible tiny corpses that had gotten to D.D. It was the blankets. Pale pink with dark pink polka dots for her, dark blue teddy bears against a light blue background for him. First Christine Grant had murdered her children. Then she’d wrapped them up in their own baby blankets. There was something fundamentally maternal about that gesture.

Something…incredibly fucked up.

One P.M. D.D. was feeling the weight of a long night. She didn’t want to open that file again. She just wanted to go home to Jack and hold her baby close.

She pushed the folder away, pinched the bridge of her nose, and tried to figure out what to do next.

“I think she’s Abigail,” Detective O said.

D.D. opened her eyes, peering at the sex crimes detective blearily. “Say what?”

“Sybil. Wasn’t that the case? A girl so horribly and ritualistically abused by her mother that she developed multiple personalities to protect herself.”

D.D. stared at her.

“Sounds like Charlene was horribly and ritualistically abused. Maybe same thing happened, except with a twist-she didn’t just adopt the names of her dead siblings, she adopted a personality for each of them, as well. So, say, this Abigail she was telling us about-”

“The baby with brown eyes…”

“In real life, yes. But then Charlene’s mother killed it, and Charlene…absorbed…Abigail instead. Protector personality. Charlene isn’t killing sex offenders. Abigail is. Hence a brown-haired, blue-eyed shooter, running around Boston murdering sex offenders, while introducing herself as Abigail. Oh, oh, oh. And the notes within the notes. Maybe tightly wound Abigail, the protector personality, is the one writing everyone has to die sometime, in the perfectly formed script, while Charlene, some little piece of her who knows killing is wrong, quickly scrawls the second message, catch me. A plea for help. One note with two different messages, representing two different personalities.”

D.D. stared at the young detective. She frowned. Then she stared some more. “I think we just fell into a Lifetime movie.”

Detective O shrugged. “Most fiction starts with a kernel of truth. Dissociative identity disorder is a recognized and diagnosable psychiatric illness. Besides, do you have any other explanation for the note within the note, let alone a Charlie clone running around Boston shooting pedophiles, then introducing herself as Abigail?”

Come to think of it. “No. I’ll tell you what, why don’t you call Charlene and ask if she’ll kindly return to HQ for a mental health eval? Given how much she currently likes you…”

“Playing nice wasn’t working,” O insisted stiffly.

“Really? When’d you try it?”

“Oh please, this from the Queen of Bitch.”

“Queen of Bitch?”

“Hey, I’d take it as a compliment.”

“Hey, I do. But fact remains, our strategy walking into this meeting was to not spook the suspect. As co-interviewers, we’re supposed to back each other up, not screw each other over.”

“It worked,” Detective O declared flatly. “She’s starting to break. You heard her-no alibi for last night’s