I continued to chase. He rolled, at one point made it up onto all fours, but I rewarded his efforts with such a devastating kick to the ribs, he collapsed and scuttled sideways.
He kept his head down, protecting his face, but also making it hard to read his intent. Thus, he managed to surprise me when I lashed out again and his left hand came up lightning fast, grabbed my foot, and jerked hard.
I toppled back, landing with a crack on my right hip. But even gasping in pain, I had the presence of mind to kick with my other foot, dislodging my first leg from his hand. Now we were both on all fours on the frozen ground, scrambling around each other.
Tulip circled as well, no longer barking but whining and uncertain. I couldn’t risk looking at her or our surroundings. I should probably scream, call for help. We were just off the street. It was after 9 A.M.; even on the outskirts of the city no place is ever completely deserted.
But I couldn’t make a sound. My blood rushed in my ears, I could hear the hoarse sound of my own breath. But I couldn’t even whisper. My vocal cords were locked, frozen.
In the horror movies, the plucky victim always screams her terror. In real life, we are more likely to die in silence.
I got my feet under me at the same time he got his. I bounced up, fisted hands up, proper fighting stance finally established, just as my attacker squared off against me.
And I found myself staring into the weather-beaten face of my shooting instructor, J. T. Dillon.
“I GIVE YOU A C,” he said. He straightened, hands dropping to his side.
Still not entirely sure about things, I punched with my right, going for the side of his head. Just as quickly, J.T. blocked my shot with his left arm, then his hands were down again, passive at his side.
“Maybe a D,” he said roughly, his breathing no easier than mine. “You’re still alive, but only barely.”
Slowly, I straightened. “You attacked me as a training exercise?”
“Think of it as graduation.” He fingered his side, where I’d kicked him pretty hard, and winced. “Though, given my age, next time I’m going with a paper diploma.”
My hands were still up. I couldn’t drop them. Not yet. My breathing was too shallow. My throat hurt. I would be bruised in a matter of hours.
“Fuck you!” I said suddenly.
He studied me, eyes cool, inscrutable.
I hit him again. He blocked it again. So I really went for it. Punching, jabbing, and attacking until pretty soon we were chasing each other around in a circle again, him on the defensive this time, me powered with a rage I barely recognized. He had hurt me. I needed to hurt him back.
He’d almost killed me.
And I’d nearly let him.
It burned. My throat, my chest, my pride. All that training, all that practicing, and I’d still nearly died, taken out by a sixty-year-old ex-marine.
Tulip chased us. Not barking or whining. She had seen me spar before, and maybe she understood the situation better than I did. I don’t know. I chased my shooting coach and he let me. Dodging, blocking, recoiling, sometimes slapping back. Moving with a speed I didn’t know a silver-haired former marine sniper could still have.
Problem with hitting, really truly throwing a punch, is that it demands such an explosive release of energy. Even world heavyweight champions can only sustain the action for three minutes at a time.
Sooner versus later, my hands grew heavy. My lungs heaved for air, my shoulders and chest burned. My heart rate had spiked to the edge of nausea, and I no longer chased my opponent as much as I staggered after him, my rage still willing, the rest of me giving out.
J.T. ended the situation, by plopping down beneath a skeletal tree. I collapsed on the snow next to him. My face was beet red, covered in sweat from my exertions. The snow felt good, the gray sky a balm against my flushed cheeks.
Tulip came over, sat beside me, and whined uncertainly. I stroked her head. She licked my cheek. Then she wandered over to J.T. to repeat the ritual. Satisfied all was now well, she plopped between us, burrowing against my side for warmth. After another moment, J.T. got up, trotted over to my messenger bag, and returned it to me.
He sat back down and we passed another moment in silence.
“Why is my firearms instructor beating me up?” I asked finally.
He regarded me steadily. “Nothing wrong with training with a handgun,” he said curtly. “But odds are, you’ll never get off a shot. Or if you do, you’ll be panicked and overwhelmed with adrenaline. You’ll shoot wild till you run out of ammo. Then, you’re back where you started—up close and personal.”
I thought of my encounter with Stan Miller. J.T. had just summarized it quite nicely. Stan and I had both fired wildly. And the situation had ended up close and personal.
“Have you ever killed anyone?” I asked.
“I’ve done my share of damage.”
“How did it feel?”
“Never as good as I wanted it to.”
We sat in silence again. I stroked Tulip’s head.
“Am I going to die on the twenty-first?” I asked at last. A stupid question, but maybe that’s what life came down to. Stupid questions in waning hours where we stood on the tracks, watching the locomotive bear down on us and wondering how bad it was gonna hurt.
“Maybe,” J.T. said. He looked at me again. “Who beat you? Mother, father, boyfriend?”
I didn’t answer right away. I stroked Tulip’s silky brown ears. “Mother,” I said finally. “Munchausen’s by proxy.”
First time I’d said the words out loud. Aunt Nancy and I had never discussed it. And I’d never told Randi or Jackie. Never even mentioned my mother to them, or where I’d lived before the mountains or any of the days, weeks, months that had existed before I became my aunt’s niece instead of my mother’s daughter.
But I told J. T. Dillon, because physically hitting someone is like that. It forms a bond. Sex, violence, death. All intimate in their own way. Another thing I hadn’t known until the past year.
“You didn’t defend yourself,” J.T. said curtly. “You didn’t fight for you.”
“Eventually I did.”
“No. I kicked your dog. You fought for your dog.”
“She’s a good dog.”
He stared at me. “You gotta get her out of your head,” he said abruptly.
I stiffened, still stroking Tulip’s ears, but feeling myself pull away.
“Mean it,” J.T. said. “You gotta hit for you. You gotta take that rage and shame and silence, and turn it into a weapon. You gotta know, Charlie, you gotta well and truly know it’s not okay to be hurt. You don’t deserve to be punished. Someone attacks you, stop accepting, start fighting back.”
“I’m trying.”
“Bullshit! You hesitate. You go to some place in your head where you’re conditioned to hang out until the punishment stops. Look, I can train you to shoot. Dick can train you to hit. But neither one of us can untrain you to stop playing victim in your own life. You gotta do that. You gotta care.”
I flushed, felt like a little girl chastised for not doing my homework. I didn’t want to be passive. I wanted to be a badass. And yet, when his hands had closed around my throat…When he’d attacked me from behind…
I’d felt like I deserved it. I’d been bad and I deserved my punishment. Conditioned response of abused children everywhere. We all grew up, but none of us ever got away.
“Dying for someone is easy,” J.T. murmured now, as if reading my mind. “Living for yourself, that’s hard. But you gotta do it, Charlie. Honor yourself. Defend yourself. Fight for yourself.”
I nodded finally, tucking Tulip closer to my body to help keep her warm.
“Are we going shooting now?” I asked.
“In a minute.”
He was opening my bag, withdrawing my Taurus. The. 22 looked tiny in his large callused palm, his long fingers better suited for his explosive. 45 than my peashooter. He sniffed at it, looked at me.
“Never
put away a gun dirty,” he said.
“Figured I’d clean it after our session.”
“Never put away a gun dirty.”
“Okay.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Good, ’cause I don’t want to know.”
He handed me the Taurus. We both rose to standing.
“She gonna be okay walking?” He gestured to Tulip.
“If we keep her moving. She needs a coat. Maybe later today.”
“Do that. Dog that’s worth fighting for deserves a sweater.”
J.T. started walking; Tulip and I fell in step beside him. It was a mile and a half to his house, tucked away on three acres of land. Perfect for a man with a shooting range in his backyard. Perfect for a man—and his wife—who didn’t much care for company.
“She still alive?” he asked as he walked.
I didn’t need clarification to know who he was asking about. “No,” I heard myself say, another rare admission, a memory barely known and definitely never explored. But if I really thought about it…of course my mother was dead. It stood to reason that if she were still alive, she would’ve contacted me by now. Written a letter from prison or whatever mental institute she was living in. Dropped by the first moment she was released. That’s the whole point of Munchausen’s by proxy—the perpetrator considers herself the victim. It’s all about her—she doesn’t just need sympathy, support, understanding. She deserves it. But I’d never heard from my mother since waking up in the upstate New York hospital. Not a phone call, not a letter, not a peep.
There had been some kind of final confrontation. I’d lived, and my mother…
“Drinker?” J.T. asked.
“No.”
“Drug abuser?”
“Crazy. Just plain crazy.”
“Glad she’s dead then,” J.T. said. “Now get over her.”
“Sure,” I promised him. “Might as well.” I glanced at my watch. “Fifty-eight hours to go,” I muttered. Both of us started to jog.
Chapter 20
“QUINCY.”
“This is Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren, Boston PD. I’m calling regarding the criminal profile you developed for Charlene Grant. The January twenty-first homicides. As in two murders down, maybe a third to go, which I’d personally like to avoid. Boston’s homicide rate is high enough, thank you.”
“Detective,” retired FBI profiler Pierce Quincy greeted her crisply. “Spoke to my daughter last night. She apprised me of your investigation. Sounds like you have a plan, something involving social media?”
“Seems worth trying. I understand you studied both the first and second crime scene.”
“Prepared the first report for Jackie Knowles. Wrote the second for Charlene, after Jackie’s murder.”
D.D. hadn’t thought of that. “Sorry,” she murmured, not sure what else to say to the retired profiler.
“Crime scene analysis is easier,” Quincy replied simply, “when you don’t know the victim. Therefore, I must add caveats to my second report. It is probably not as objective as the first.”
“Let’s start with the first murder, the Providence scene,” D.D. decided. “My impression from your report, and the lead investigator, Roan Griffin, is that the perpetrator is someone with a high-degree of self-control, advanced communication skills, above average intelligence, and a good deal of manual strength.”
“Agreed.”
“Male or female?”
“Statistics would argue male. Lack of sexual assault, however, complicates the analysis.”
“Gut feel?”
“Can’t get one from the Providence murder. However, factoring in the Atlanta homicide, where the victim was last seen with a woman, I lean toward a female perpetrator. It would explain the willingness of both women to open their doors, even the thorough cleanup afterward. Granted, many serial killers can be meticulous in their ability to sanitize a crime scene, but few think to tend the sofa cushions.”
“Tend the sofa cushions?” D.D. asked.
“They appeared recently fluffed. A distinctly feminine touch.”
“Fluffed? How can you tell that?”
“Can’t, not definitively. But according to Jackie’s neighbor, Ms. Knowles had a tendency to toss the decorative pillows to one side of the love seat and sit on the other. When the police arrived at the scene, however, the accent pillows were perfectly positioned. In fact, the lower cushions and back cushions of the love seat were smoothed out and neatly squared. As one detective observed, it appeared as if no one had ever sat on the furniture. It was fluffed.”
“But Jackie might have done it,” D.D. countered. “You know, tidying up in case she brought up a ‘guest’ that night.”
“True. I’m offering a theory based on supposition, not fact.”
“Well, at least you’re honest,” D.D. informed him.
She thought the profiler might have laughed, but the moment was brief.
“We need to stir the pot,” D.D. said abruptly. “We have two days before January twenty-first. I’ve got Charlene Grant running around Boston, hiding from everyone she knows and currently armed with a twenty-two semiauto—”
“She has a handgun?”
“Legally registered.”
“Won’t help her.”
“Based on supposition or fact?”
“Both. First two victims never fought back. If they didn’t rip off their own fingernails trying to claw away a pair of hands choking them to death, what makes Charlene think she’ll get off a single shot?”
D.D. swallowed hard, not liking that image. “Maybe they did fight back. The perpetrator cleaned up their hands afterward, after fluffing the pillows, of course.”
“Randi had perfectly manicured nails of above average length. Not a single one was broken. What are the odds of that?”
“Tox screen?” D.D. asked.
“Negative for drugs.”
“Could they have been attacked in their sleep?”
“Possible, but lack of oxygen should have bolted them awake, triggering fight or flight. By all accounts, both were capable of fighting.”
“Then how do you explain the lack of self-defense wounds?”
“I can’t.”
D.D. sighed again. “At least you’re honest,” she repeated.
“Sadly, that’s not helping either one of us. Or, on the twenty-first, Charlene Grant. Has there been any contact?” Quincy asked abruptly. “A note to Charlene, anything?”
“No.”
“Unusual,” he commented. “Very, actually, for a repeat offender to duplicate a pattern so precisely. Most killers describe murder as a physical sensation, releasing a chemical in the brain similar to a runner’s high. The first kill is generally impulsive and anxiety-inducing. But after the dust settles, the killer forgets the fear, remembers the buzz, and begins to yearn again. Next kill cycle may take a bit, but over time, the need for the physiological release that accompanies each murder becomes the overriding drive, shortening the kill cycle, leading to more frenzy, less organization, less control. The killer may try to combat the cycle by turning to alcohol and/or drugs as a substitute for the homicidal high, but it rarely works. On the other hand, it does assist law enforcement efforts as the killer begins to disintegrate, making more and more mistakes.”
“Judging by that logic, this killer is still at the infancy of the kill cycle, if he or she can make it a full year between each victim?” D.D. guessed.
“Technically speaking, this killer isn’t yet a serial killer. Takes three. At this point, we have a repeat offender whose pattern is almost technical in nature. More ritualized assassin than serial predator.”
“Maybe because the murderer is a female. She’s not driven by bloodlust, but something else.”
“It’s the something else we need to understand. If we could identify the why, then perhaps that would reveal the who.”
“All right.” D.D. was game. “Why Randi Menke? Why Jackie Knowles? W
hat do they have in common?”
“Both single women living in urban environments. Same age. Both grew up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, with friends and family in common. More specifically, both were best friends of Charlene Grant.”
“Which Charlene takes to mean that she’s the next victim. Are you as sure of that? Maybe this has something to do with Randi and Jackie. Not Charlie at all.”
“Possible,” Quincy agreed. “With only two murders, we lack enough data points to draw meaningful conclusions. The fact that Randi and Jackie happened to know each other could still be completely random; they knew they knew each other, but the killer did not.”
“I don’t like random,” D.D. said. “I know it happens, but it still hasn’t made a believer out of me.”
“That would make two of us,” Quincy agreed. “So, we’ll make our first assumption: Randi and Jackie share a common link that led to their deaths. Now, in adulthood, they didn’t really. They lived in two different states, separated by nearly a thousand miles. Randi lived in a posh area of Providence, divorced from an abusive husband, worked as a receptionist at a wellness center. Jackie lived in the suburbs of Atlanta, single, lesbian, corporate workaholic. Not so much in common.”
“Wait a minute,” D.D. interjected. “What about the abusive husband? Did Jackie know, perhaps intervene on behalf of her friend, Randi, which might have put Jackie in the doc’s sights?”
“Negative. According to Jackie herself, she never knew Randi was having domestic issues until after Randi’s murder. Apparently, Randi had never confided in her friends.”
“She isolated herself,” D.D. murmured, recognizing the pattern of so many beaten wives.
“In adulthood, the three friends had drifted apart,” Quincy stated. “Meaning, in order to find the common link between Randi and Jackie, you must go back approximately ten years, to when they grew up together in the same small town, attending the same tiny school. And during that time, they were not defined as Randi and Jackie, but as Randi, Jackie, and Charlie. Apparently, the locals often referred to them by a single moniker, Randi Jackie Charlie.”