The Detective D. D. Warren Series 5-Book Bundle

“Yeah. Written on the back window. That’s what got Dr. Rocco found; someone leaned closer to read the script.”

  “And it says?”

  “ ‘Boo.’ ”

  “Boo?”

  “Yeah, written in women’s lipstick.”

  “Women’s lipstick?”

  “Yep. And I’ll bet you anything that on Catherine Gagnon this is a particularly killer shade of red.”

  D.D. polished up her plate. Bobby grabbed the bill.

  “Copley’s gonna pay you a visit this afternoon,” D.D. mentioned.

  “Is he flirting, or do you think it’s true love?”

  “He says that yesterday you and the missus were spotted playing together at the Gardner Museum.”

  Bobby unfolded the bills from his money clip and started counting out ones.

  “It’s not good,” D.D. continued quietly, “to be seen with the dead man’s wife. Makes people talk.”

  He needed a ten. Didn’t have one. Settled on two fives.

  “She’s trouble,” D.D. said.

  Two singles should do it for the tip.

  “He was going to divorce her, you know, and take full custody of the kid. Sometimes, there’s a very fine line between being a destitute ex-wife and being a wealthy widow. Thursday night, Catherine Gagnon crossed that line. In this business, you have to wonder about that sort of thing.”

  Bobby finally glanced up. “Do you really think she could’ve set it up? Engineered a fight, arranged for her husband to have a gun, then manipulated everything so that he got shot and she didn’t?”

  D.D. didn’t say anything right away. When she finally spoke, he wished she hadn’t. “Did you know her, Bobby? Had you had any contact with her before the call? Even a casual acquaintance, a friend of a friend?”

  “No.”

  D.D. sat back, but her face was still troubled, her eyes watching. Bobby stood up, fumbling to get his money clip back in his pocket and now biting back a curse.

  “Bobby,” she said after a moment, and something in her voice stopped him. She had an expression on her face he’d never seen before. A certain grim curiosity. For a moment, it appeared she’d changed her mind, but then the question came out anyway, as if she simply had to know.

  “When you took the shot … was it difficult, Bobby? Seeing a real person, did it make you hesitate?”

  It would be easy to be offended, to give her a dirty look, then cut and run. But D.D. was a friend. A fellow cop from way back. And maybe, if he dug deep, Bobby understood her question even better than she did. It was the one thing every cop had to wonder. So much time spent in training, but when it came down to it, in the field, when it was your life, or worse, a fellow cop’s on the line …

  He gave it to her straight.

  “Honest to God,” he said quietly, “I didn’t feel a thing.”

  D.D.’s gaze fell to the floor. She wouldn’t look at him again. And he didn’t bother to be surprised anymore. Three days after the shooting, he was finally learning that that’s the way these things went.

  Bobby nodded at her one last time, and headed out the door.

  Chapter

  16

  Bobby had walked two blocks from the diner when the sleek, black Lincoln Town Car pulled alongside him. A darkened window purred down. Bobby took one look inside and cursed.

  “Don’t you have a hobby?” he asked Harris Reed, who was slowing down the sedan to match Bobby’s walking speed. A string of irritated honks promptly sounded from the traffic behind him.

  “Get in,” Harris said.

  “No.”

  “My employers would like to talk to you.”

  “Tell them to file another lawsuit.”

  “They’re very powerful people, Officer Dodge. The right conversation with them, and all your troubles could go away.”

  “How wonderfully patronizing of them.” He picked up his step. “Still walking.”

  Harris changed tactics. “Come on, Officer Dodge. You killed their son. Surely you can give them ten minutes of your time.”

  Bobby’s footsteps slowed. Harris braked the car. “That’s not fighting fair,” Bobby said with a scowl. He reluctantly opened the car door. Harris grinned like an asshole.

  The Gagnons were ensconced at the Hotel LeRoux, a new, high-end hotel across from the Public Garden. Apparently there were too many reporters at their multimillion-dollar Beacon Hill townhouse, so they’d been forced to retire here. Mrs. Gagnon, Bobby was informed, could barely eat or sleep. Judge Gagnon had booked a luxurious penthouse suite, with round-the-clock masseuse, to help ease her nerves.

  Harris was chatty about his employers. How the Gagnons were originally from Georgia, so don’t be surprised by their Southern accent. Mrs. Gagnon had been a real, genuine debutante, complete with satin dress and bouffant hair, when she’d met James Gagnon back in ’62. The money came from her side, actually. But the judge was an ambitious law student even back then. Her family had approved the match and her daddy was preparing to set up Jimmy at his own law firm.

  Sadly, Maryanne’s entire family—mother, father, younger sister—died in a fiery car crash a week before the wedding. Needless to say, Maryanne had been devastated. In an attempt to comfort his shattered fiancée, Jimmy had whisked her away from the state. They’d moved to Boston, tied the knot in a small civil ceremony, and made a fresh start.

  In the good-news department, they’d gotten pregnant right away. In the bad-news department, their baby, the original James Jr., was born sickly. The infant had died in a matter of months, and James and Maryanne had returned to Georgia for one more funeral, burying their son in the family plot in Atlanta.

  Two years later, young Jimmy had arrived, and James and Maryanne hadn’t looked back since.

  Bobby thought it was creepy they’d name the second child the same as the first. The first boy was Junior, the second, Jimmy, Harris told him. Bobby still thought it was creepy.

  Entering the penthouse suite, Bobby’s first thought was that the Gagnons knew how to make an impression. The space boasted Italian marble floors, expensive antiques, and a vast bank of windows draped in enough silk to exhaust a worm farm. The high-end hotel suite provided the perfect backdrop for its high-end occupants.

  Maryanne Gagnon appeared to be in her mid-sixties, trim but slightly stoop-shouldered, with tight-set platinum blonde hair that was now more platinum than blonde. She wore a triple strand of knuckle-sized pearls around her neck and a rock the size of a golf ball on her finger. Sitting in some dainty French provincial chair in a cream-colored silk pantsuit, she nearly blended in with the draperies behind her.

  In contrast, Judge Gagnon dominated the space. He stood slightly behind his wife’s right shoulder, tall, in a single-breasted black suit that probably cost more than Bobby made in a month. His hair had turned the color of slate with age, but his eyes remained bright, his jaw square, and his mouth hard. You could picture this man ruling a courthouse. You could imagine this man ruling the country.

  Bobby had a flash of insight: Weak-willed Jimmy Gagnon had most likely taken after his mother, not his father.

  “You don’t look that big,” Maryanne Gagnon spoke up first, surprising all of them. She turned her head to look up at her husband, and Bobby saw her hands trembling on her lap. “Didn’t you think he’d be somehow … bigger?” she asked the judge.

  James squeezed his wife’s shoulder and there was something about that quiet display of support that unnerved Bobby more than the clothes, the room, the perfectly posed sitting. He studied the marble floor, the zigzag patterns of gray and rose veins.

  “Would you like something to drink?” James offered from across the room. “Maybe a cup of coffee?”

  “No.”

  “Anything to eat?”

  “I don’t plan on staying that long.”

  James seemed to accept that. He gestured to a nearby sofa. “Please have a seat.”

  Bobby didn’t really want to do that either, but he crossed to the cream-colored so
fa, sitting gingerly on the edge and fisting his hands on his lap. In contrast to the Gagnons’ perfectly groomed appearance, he wore old jeans, a dark blue turtleneck, and an old gray sweatshirt. He’d crawled from his bed in the middle of the night to view a crime scene, not face grieving parents. Which, of course, the Gagnons had known when they’d sent Harris to pick him up.

  “Harris tells us you’ve met with Catherine.” James again. Bobby had a feeling it was his show. Maryanne wasn’t even looking at Bobby anymore. Bobby realized after another moment that the woman was crying soundlessly. Her face, carefully angled away, was covered in a glaze of tears.

  “Officer Dodge?”

  “I’ve met Catherine,” Bobby heard himself say. His gaze was still on Maryanne. He wanted to say something. I’m sorry. He didn’t suffer. Hey, at least you still have your grandson.…

  Bobby’d been a fool to come here. He saw that now. James Gagnon had run a sucker play, and Bobby had walked right into it.

  “Did you know my daughter-in-law before the shooting?” James was prodding.

  Bobby forced his gaze back to the older man. Seemed like everyone was asking that question these days. Firmly, he said, “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I keep track of the people I meet.”

  James merely arched a brow. “What did you see that night? The night Jimmy died?”

  Bobby’s gaze flickered to Maryanne, then back to her husband. “If we’re going to talk about this, I don’t think she should be in the room.”

  “Maryanne?” James said softly to his wife, and she once more looked up at him. Seconds before, she’d been crying. Now Maryanne seemed to draw herself up, to find a reserve of strength. She took her husband’s hand. They turned toward Bobby as a united front.

  “I would like to know,” Maryanne drawled softly. “He’s my son. I was there for his birth. I should know of his death.”

  She was brilliant, Bobby thought. In four sentences or less, she had cut out his heart.

  “I was called out to a domestic barricade situation,” he said as evenly as he could. “A woman had called nine-one-one saying her husband had a gun, and the sound of gunshots had been reported by the neighbors. Upon taking up position across the street, I spied the subject—”

  “Jimmy,” the judge corrected.

  “The subject,” Bobby held his ground, “pacing the floor of the master bedroom in an agitated manner. After a moment, I determined that he was armed with a nine-millimeter handgun.”

  “Loaded?” James again.

  “I could not make that determination, but previous reports of shots fired would seem to indicate the gun was loaded.”

  “Safety on or off ?”

  “I could not make that determination, but again previous reports of shots fired would seem to indicate the manual safety was off.”

  “But he could’ve put the safety on.”

  “Possible.”

  “He could have never fired the shots at all. You didn’t witness him firing his weapon, did you?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t witness him loading the gun?”

  “No.”

  “I see,” the judge said, and for the first time, Bobby saw. This was the preliminary, just a brief taste of what would happen to him when things went to trial. How the good judge was prepared to show that he, Robert G. Dodge, had committed murder on Thursday, November 11, 2004, when he shot the poor, unsuspecting victim, beloved son James Gagnon, Jr.

  It would be a war of words, and the judge had all the big ones on his side.

  “So what exactly did you see?” the judge was asking now.

  “After a brief interval—”

  “How long? One minute, five minutes? Half an hour?”

  “After approximately seven minutes, I saw a female subject—”

  “Catherine.”

  “—and a child come into view. The woman was holding the child, a young boy. Then the female subject and the male subject,” Bobby said emphatically, “proceeded to argue.”

  “About what?”

  “I had no audio of the scene.”

  “So you have no idea what they said to one another? Perhaps Catherine was threatening Jimmy.”

  “With what?”

  The judge changed his tack. “Or she was verbally abusing him.”

  Bobby shrugged.

  “Did she know you were there?” the judge pushed.

  “I don’t know.”

  “There were spotlights, an ambulance arriving at the scene, police cruisers coming and going. Isn’t it likely that she noticed this level of activity?”

  “She was up on the fourth floor, above street level. When I first arrived, it appeared that she and the child were hunkered down behind the bed. I’m not sure what it’s realistic to assume she knew and didn’t know.”

  “But you said she placed a call to nine-one-one herself.”

  “That’s what I was told.”

  “So therefore, she expected some sort of response.”

  “Response in the past has been two uniformed officers knocking at her front door.”

  “I know, Officer Dodge. That’s why I find it so interesting that this time, she made certain to mention that Jimmy had a gun. A weapon made it an automatic SWAT call, didn’t it?”

  “But he did have a gun. I saw it myself.”

  “Did you? Are you sure it was a real gun? Couldn’t it have been a model, or maybe one of Nathan’s toys? Why, it could’ve been one of those fancy cigar lighters in the shape of a revolver.”

  “Sir, I’ve viewed over a hundred pistols of various makes and models in the past ten years. I know a real gun when I see it. And it was a genuine Beretta 9000s that the techs recovered from the scene.”

  The judge scowled, obviously not liking this answer, but was swift to regroup. “Officer Dodge, did my son actually pull the trigger Thursday night?”

  “No, sir. I shot him first.”

  Maryanne moaned and sank deeper into her chair. In contrast, James nearly grinned. He started pacing, his footsteps ringing against the marble floor, while his finger waggled in the air.

  “In truth, you don’t really know much about what was going on in that room Thursday night, do you, Officer Dodge? You don’t know if Jimmy had a loaded gun. You don’t know if he had the safety on or off. Why, for all you know, Catherine started the argument that night. Catherine may have even threatened to harm Nathan. Why, for all you know, Jimmy went into the family safe and got out that gun only as a last resort—so he could fight for the life of his child. Couldn’t that well be the case?”

  “You would have to ask Catherine.”

  “Ask Catherine? Invite my daughter-in-law to lie? How many cases are you called out to a year, Officer Dodge?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe twenty.”

  “Ever fire your weapon before?”

  “No.”

  “And the average length of engagement for those call-outs?”

  “Three hours.”

  “I see. So on average, you’re deployed twenty times a year for three hours each episode, and you’ve managed in all that time to never fire your weapon. On Thursday night, however, you showed up and shot my son in less than fifteen minutes. What made Thursday night so different? What made you so convinced that you had no choice but to kill my son?”

  “He was going to pull the trigger.”

  “How did you know, Officer Dodge?”

  “Because I saw it on his face! He was going to shoot his wife!”

  “His face, Officer Dodge? Did you really see it on his face, or were you thinking of someone else’s?”

  In Bobby’s heightened state of agitation, it took him a moment to get it. When he finally did, the world abruptly stopped for him. He suffered a little out-of-body experience, where he suddenly drifted back and became aware of the whole sordid scene. Himself, sitting on the edge of the silk-covered sofa, half leaning forward, his hands fisted on his knees. Maryanne, slumped deep into a
cream-colored chair, lost in her grief. And Judge Gagnon, finger still punctuating the air with a prosecutorial flourish, a triumphant gleam in his eyes.

  Harris, Bobby thought abruptly. Where the hell was Harris?

  He turned and found the man lounging in a dark wooden chair in the foyer. Harris delivered a two-fingered salute: he didn’t even bother to hide his smugness. Of course he’d dug up the information. That’s how this game worked. The Gagnons paid, Harris dug, and the Gagnons got whatever they wanted.

  For the first time, Bobby began to truly understand how helpless Catherine Gagnon must have felt.

  “If there’s a trial, it’s going to come out,” Judge Gagnon was saying now. “This kind of thing always does.”

  “What do you want?”

  “She’s the reason Jimmy is dead,” James said. There was no need to define she. “Acknowledge it. She cajoled you into firing.”

  “I’ll say no such thing.”

  “Fine then. Revisionist history. You showed up, you heard my son and his wife arguing, but it was obvious she started it. She was threatening Jimmy. Better yet, she was finally admitting what she was doing to Nathan. Jimmy simply couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “No one in their right mind will believe I heard all that while sitting in another house fifty yards away.”

  “Let me worry about that. She murdered my son, Officer Dodge. As good as if she pulled the trigger herself. There is no way I’m going to stand by and let that woman harm my grandson too. Help me, and I’ll let your little lawsuit slide. Resist, and I’ll sue you until you’re a broken old man with no career, no home, no dignity, no self. Consult any lawyer. I can do it. All it takes is money and time.” James spread his hands. “Frankly, I have plenty of both.”

  Bobby rose off the sofa. “We’re through here.”

  “You have until tomorrow. Just say the word and the lawsuit is gone and Harris’s little research project is ‘forgotten.’ After five p.m., however, you’ll find I’m no longer as forgiving.”

  Bobby headed for the door. He’d just gotten his hand on the brass knob when Maryanne’s soft voice stopped him.

  “He was a good boy.”

  Bobby took a deep breath. He turned around, asking as gently as he could, “Ma’am?”