Once, I was my mother’s daughter. Now, I am my daughter’s mother.
So I sleep well at night, tucked inside my husband’s solid embrace, sound in the knowledge that my daughter is safe in the room next door, with Mr. Smith curled up at her feet. I dream of Ree’s first day of kindergarten. I dream of my newborn baby’s first smile. I dream of dancing with my husband at our fiftieth wedding anniversary.
I am a wife and a mother.
I dream of my family.
| ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND DEDICATION |
As always, I’m indebted to the countless experts who patiently answered my pestering questions, as well as numerous family and friends who patiently tolerated my writer-like (cranky) ways. These are kind and brilliant people. I just type very fast for a living. Oh yeah, and they are very smart. I, on the other hand, have been known to make mistakes with the information they have tried so hard to drill into me.
First up, Rob Joss, Forensic Evaluator, who educated me on the ways and means of assessing risk factors for sexual predators. He also added the interesting insight that he’d rather evaluate sex offenders for criminal courts than evaluate parents for family court. After all, sex offenders are bad people on their best behavior, while divorcing parents are good people on their worst behavior.
Also, Katie Watkins, Executive Director, and Liz Kelley, Forensic Interviewer, of the Child Advocacy Center of Carroll County. These two women spend 24/7 working the kind of child sexual assault cases that would break mere mortals. The rest of us would like the world to be a better place. They are actively making it so.
To Carolyn Lucet, a licensed independent clinical social worker who specializes in the treatment of sex offenders. Thank you for opening my eyes to both sides of the story. As a parent, I started this novel echoing Sergeant D.D. Warren’s sentiments regarding sex offenders (not enough room in hell for all of them). I’ll confess, Carolyn helped me appreciate the value of rehabilitation, and that complex problems probably deserve a more complex answer than, Hang them all and let God sort it out.
To Theresa Meyers, Probation Officer, for offering insight into the role of one of the least understood law enforcement officers. A PO for more than eighteen years, who now has second-generation parolees, Theresa astutely observed that if we spent more on kids in the beginning, perhaps we wouldn’t have to spend so much on law enforcement later on. I couldn’t agree more.
To Wayne Rock, of the Boston Police Department, who previously assisted me with Alone, and kindly consented to another round of questions so I could be current for this latest D.D. Warren adventure. I appreciated the overview of proper search-and-seizure, rules for questioning suspects, and, of course, the nice tidbit on strategic use of trash night in the neighborhood. Thanks, Wayne!
To Keith Morgan, Computer Forensic Technician, whose insights into a hard drive’s lazy nature and guilty conscience were fascinating, if a bit troubling, to a non-techie such as myself. Keith wins the patience award, as it took me a few tries to get all of the material right. At least I hope I got it all right. Hey, all mistakes are mine, remember? That’s the joy of being a writer.
Rounding out the pros are: Jack McCabe, Principal; Jennifer Sawyer Norvell, Esquire, of Moss Shapiro; Liz Boardman, Laura Kelly, Tara Apperson, Mark Schieldrop, and Betty Cotter with the South County Independent; and finally, the Divas, who approved all Barbies, games, books, and movies enjoyed by four-year-old Ree in this novel. Never have I received so much advice from such adorable consultants, who were compensated entirely in Cheddar Bunnies.
In the fun but dangerous category Congratulations to Alicia Accardi, winner of the fifth annual Kill a Friend, Maim a Buddy. Alicia Accardi nominated Brenda J. Jones, “Brennie,” as the Lucky Stiff. According to Alicia, “Brenda’s had to fight for what she’s got, has overcome a lot, and still struggles every day, but has a heart as big as the whole outdoors, and would give you the shirt off her back.… She deserves to be immortalized.”
Also, Kelly Firth was our first-time winner of the Kill a Friend, Maim a Mate Sweepstakes, the international competition for literary immortality. Kelly nominated Joyce Daley, her mother, who just turned sixty-eight and loves reading crime thrillers. “She’s my mum and I wanted to show her how much I love her.… I have told her, I couldn’t contain myself, and she was absolutely thrilled.”
For those of you still hoping to get in on the action, never fear. Both contests run every year at www.LisaGardner.com. Check it out, and maybe you can nominate someone you love to die in my next novel.
In closing, my deepest appreciation to my husband, whose skills with his new ice cream maker made revisions to this book much more fun and fattening than they otherwise would’ve been; to my adorable daughter, who, yes, helped inspire Ree, while always being a True Original; to Sarah, for your constant care; to Mimi, who we still miss and wish the best; to my brilliant editor, Kate Miciak, who definitely improved this novel, even if I was very writer-like (cranky) about it at the time; and finally to my fabulous agent, Meg Ruley, and the rest of the team of the Jane Rotrosen Agency, for having just the right way with writer-like (cranky) authors.
Live to Tell is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Lisa Gardner, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gardner, Lisa.
Live to tell : a detective D.D. Warren novel / Lisa Gardner.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90769-8
I. Title.
PS3557.A7132L58 2010
813′.54—dc22 2010003473
www.bantamdell.com
v3.0_r1
Contents
Master - Table of Contents
Live to Tell
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Part 1 - Thursday
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Part 2 - Friday
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Part 3 - Saturday
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Part 4 - Sunday
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Part 5 - Monday
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Epilogue
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
DANIELLE
I d
on’t remember that night much anymore. In the beginning, it seems like you’ll never forget. But time is a nebulous thing, especially for a child. And year by year, bit by bit, details started to fade from my memory. Coping skills, Dr. Frank assured me. The natural evolution of my psyche starting to heal. Nothing to feel guilty about.
But of course, I do.
I remember waking up to a scream. Maybe my mother’s, but according to the police report, most likely my sister’s. It was dark in my room. I was disoriented, couldn’t see. And there was a smell in the air. That’s what I remember most clearly after all these years. A smoky odor I thought might be from a fire, but was actually cordite, drifting down the hall.
More noises. Things I could hear but not see: pounding footsteps, the thud of a body falling down the stairs. Then my father’s voice, booming from outside my bedroom door.
“Oh Danny girl. My pretty, pretty Danny girl.”
My door opened. A bright glowing rectangle amidst a field of black. My father’s shadow, looming in the doorway.
“Danny girl,” he sang more brightly. “My pretty, pretty Danny girl.”
Then he tapped the gun against his forehead and pulled the trigger.
I’m not sure what happened immediately after that. Did I get out of bed? Did I dial 911? Did I try to revive my mother, or maybe stop the blood pouring from my sister’s shattered head or my brother’s broken body?
I remember another man walking into my room. He spoke in a soothing voice, told me everything was okay now, I was safe. He picked me up in his arms, though I was nine years old and too big to be treated like a baby. He told me to close my eyes. He told me not to look.
I nodded against his shoulder, but of course I kept my eyes open.
I had to see. I had to record. I had to remember. It is the duty of the lone survivor.
According to the police report, my father was drunk that night. He’d consumed at least a fifth of whiskey before loading his service revolver. He’d lost his job with the sheriff’s department the week before—after being reprimanded twice for showing up for work in a less-than-sober state. Sheriff Wayne, the man who carried me out of the house, had hoped the termination would force my father to clean up his act, maybe join AA. I guess my father had other ideas.
He started in the bedroom, catching my mother next to her bed. Then he moved on to my thirteen-year-old sister, who’d stuck her head out of her room, probably to see what was going on. My eleven-year-old brother also appeared in the hallway. He tried to run for it. My father shot him in the back, and Johnny fell down the stairs. It wasn’t a clean shot and it took Johnny a while to die.
I don’t remember this, of course. But I read the official report on my eighteenth birthday.
I was looking for an answer that I’ve never found.
My father killed my entire family except me. Did that mean he loved me the most, or hated me the most?
“What do you think?” Dr. Frank always replied.
I think this is the story of my life.
I wish I could tell you the color of my mother’s eyes. I know logically they were blue, because after my family died, I went to live with Aunt Helen, my mother’s sister. Aunt Helen’s are blue, and judging by the photos I have left, she and my mother were spitting images of each other.
Except that’s the problem. Aunt Helen looks so much like my mother that over the years, she’s become my mother. I see Aunt Helen’s eyes in my mind. I hear her voice, feel her hands tucking me in at night. And I ache because I want my mother back. But she’s gone from me, my traitorous memory killing her more effectively than my father did, so that I was driven to look up police reports and crime-scene photos, and now the only image I have of my mom is a curiously slack face staring up at the camera with a hole in the middle of her forehead.
I have photos of Natalie and Johnny and me sitting on a porch, our arms around one another. We look very happy, but I can’t remember anymore if my siblings teased me or tolerated me. Did they ever guess that one night they would die, while I would get to live? Did they ever imagine, on that sunny afternoon, that none of their dreams would come true?
“Survivor’s guilt,” Dr. Frank would remind me gently. “None of this is your fault.”
The story of my life.
Aunt Helen did right by me. She was over forty and childless, a corporate lawyer married to her job, when I came to live with her. She had a one-bedroom condo in downtown Boston, so for the first year, I slept on the couch. That was okay, because for the first year, I didn’t sleep anyway, so she and I would stay up all night, watching reruns of I Love Lucy, and trying not to think of what had happened one week ago, then one month ago, then one year ago.
It’s a kind of countdown, except you never get any closer to a destination. Each day sucks as much as the one before. You simply start to accept the general suckiness.
Aunt Helen found Dr. Frank for me. She enrolled me in a private school where the small class size meant I got constant supervision and lots of one-on-one care. I couldn’t read the first two years. I couldn’t process letters, couldn’t remember how to count. I got out of bed each day, and that took so much energy, I couldn’t do much else. I didn’t make friends. I didn’t look teachers in the eye.
I sat, day after day, trying so hard to remember each detail, my mother’s eyes, my sister’s scream, my brother’s goofy grin, I had no room in my head for anything else.
Then one day when I was walking down the street, I saw a man lean over and kiss his little girl on top of the head. A random moment of fatherly tenderness. His daughter looked up at him, and her round little face lit into a million-watt smile.
And my heart broke, just like that.
I started to cry, sobbing incoherently through the streets of Boston as I stumbled my way back to my aunt’s condo. When she came home four hours later, I was still weeping on the leather sofa. So she joined me. We spent an entire week crying together on the couch, with Gilligan’s Island playing in the backdrop.
“The rat bastard,” she said when we’d finally finished weeping. “That fucking, fucking rat bastard.”
And I wondered if she hated my father for slaughtering her sister, or for saddling her with an unwanted child.
The story of my life.
I survived. And even if I don’t always remember, I do live, the survivor’s ultimate responsibility.
I grew up. I went to college. I became a pediatric psych nurse. Now I spend my days at a locked-down pediatric psych ward in Boston, working with the six-year-old boy who’s already hearing voices, the eight-year-old girl who self-mutilates, the twelve-year-old big brother who absolutely, positively can’t be left alone with his younger siblings.
We’re an acute care facility. We don’t fix these kids. We stabilize them, using proper medications, a nurturing environment, and whatever other tricks we can pull out of our sleeves. Then we observe. We try to figure out what makes each child tick, and we write up recommendations for the next set of experts who will ultimately deal with these kids, either at a residential program, or a long-term-care institution, or a supervised return to the home environment.
Some of our kids make progress. They become the best person they can be, a triumph by anyone’s definition. Some of our children commit suicide. Others commit murder. They become that headline you’ve read in the paper: “Troubled Youth Opens Fire”; “Older Brother Slaughters Entire Family.” And people die, whether they had anything to do with it or not.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I took this job to save lost children like me. Or perhaps, even more heroically, I took this job to avert tragedies like the one that happened to my family.
I understand what you’re thinking.
But you don’t know me yet.
CHAPTER
ONE
Thursday night, Sergeant Detective D.D. Warren was out on a date. It wasn’t the worst date she’d ever been on. It wasn’t the best date she’d ever been on. It was, however, th
e only date she’d been on in quite some time, so unless Chip the accountant turned out to be a total loser, she planned on taking him home for a rigorous session of balance-the-ledger.
So far, they’d made it through half a loaf of bread soaked in olive oil, and half a cow seared medium rare. Chip had managed not to talk about the prime rib bleeding all over her plate or her need to sop up juices with yet another slice of bread. Most men were taken aback by her appetite. They needed to joke uncomfortably about her ability to tuck away plate after plate of food. Then they felt the need to joke even more uncomfortably that, of course, none of it showed on her girlish figure.
Yeah, yeah, she had the appetite of a sumo wrestler but the build of a cover girl. She was nearly forty, for God’s sake, and well aware by now of her freakish metabolism. She certainly didn’t need any soft-middled desk jockey pointing it out. Food was her passion. Mostly because her job with Boston PD’s homicide unit didn’t leave much time for sex.
She polished off the prime rib, went to work on the twice-baked potato. Chip was a forensic accountant. They’d been set up by the wife of a friend of a guy in the unit. Yep, it made that much sense to D.D. as well. But here she was, sitting in a coveted booth at the Hilltop Steakhouse, and really, Chip was all right. Little doughy in the middle, little bald on top, but funny. D.D. liked funny. When he smiled, the corners of his deep brown eyes crinkled and that was good enough for her.
She was having meat and potatoes for dinner and, if all went as planned, Chip for dessert.
So, of course, her pager went off.
She scowled, shoved it to the back of her waistband, as if that would make a difference.
“What’s that?” Chip asked, catching the chime.
“Birth control,” she muttered.
Chip blushed to the roots of his receding brown hair, then in the next minute grinned with such self-deprecating power she nearly went weak in the knees.