Catch Me (31 page)

“Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren,” D.D. said to introduce herself. It sounded as if they’d already met O.

“Jennifer Germaine.” The woman nodded, as she didn’t have a free hand to offer. She nudged her son, but he didn’t look up. “My son, Jesse,” she said after another moment.

“How are you doing, Jesse?” D.D. asked.

The boy didn’t answer.

“Fair enough,” she agreed. “I’m not having the best night either.”

He turned slightly, stared at her with a wary expression.

“I’m supposed to be having dinner with my mother. She came all the way from Florida to see me. But I had to leave. She’s not very happy with me. It doesn’t feel good, to have my mom not very happy with me.”

Jesse’s lower lip trembled.

“But I also know she understands,” D.D. continued. “It’s the cool thing about moms. They always love us, huh?”

Jennifer’s arm tightened around her son. He pressed himself harder against her side.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, his voice coming out hoarse and raspy. Maybe from crying now, or screaming earlier.

“Why are you sorry?” D.D. asked, keeping her voice conversational.

“I was a bad boy.”

“Why do you say that?” Open-ended questions. That was the deal with kids—can’t imply, can’t lead, can only ask open-ended questions.

“Stranger Danger. Don’t talk to strangers online. Don’t meet strangers. Don’t go away with strangers. My mommy told me. I’m sorry, Mommy. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

The little boy started to cry. His mother stroked his hair, then leaned over his head, murmuring low words of comfort.

“Thank you for returning to the library tonight,” D.D. said.

The boy looked up slightly.

“That was quick thinking. You had to find your way back through the city streets, which I personally find very confusing at night. But you did. You found your mother, you notified the police. Very brave of you. Have you ever walked the city alone, Jesse?”

The boy shook his head.

“Then kudos. You kept a cool head. Bet your mom’s pretty proud of you for that.”

Jennifer nodded against the top of her son’s head.

“I need you to be brave for me now, Jesse. Just a little bit longer, okay? Just relax, snuggled up next to your mom, and think about a couple of things for me.”

The little boy nodded, just slightly.

“Can you tell us what happened tonight, Jesse? In your own words. Take your time.”

Jesse didn’t start talking right away. His mother bent over again. “Jenny and Jesse against the world,” D.D. heard her whisper to him. “Remember, Jenny and Jesse against the world. Hold my hand. We can do this.”

The little boy took his mother’s hand. Then, he began to speak.

It was a pretty straightforward tale. A sixteen-year-old boy named Barry spent his afternoons gaming online as a pink poodle. He racked up points, he gained attention. He sent out e-mails to other gamers, offering friendship and help.

Jesse had taken the bait.

He’d assumed he had nothing to fear from a poodle, a meeting in a public library, and a rendezvous with a presumed girl. And so it
went, right up to the second Jesse found himself standing in a back alley, too scared to run, too shocked to scream.

He couldn’t tell them much about the woman. Her arrival had startled him. Her gun had terrified him. Mostly, he remembered her eyes. Bright, bright blue eyes.

“Crazy eyes,” Jesse breathed softly. “Creepy, like blue cat eyes.” He looked up at them. “I think she’s an alien or maybe a robot or a monster. She…she hurt him. And…and I was happy.”

His gaze dropped again, and he buried himself suddenly, tightly, into his mother’s embrace.

“I’m sorry,” the little boy moaned, voice muffled against his mother’s coat. “I was bad. And there was this noise, and he’s dead. And I was bad and I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Mommy, I won’t ever do it again. I promise, I promise, I promise.”

D.D. looked away. She didn’t know what hurt worse, the boy’s obvious pain, or his mother’s, as she put her other arm around him and rocked him against her, trying to soothe, clearly knowing it wasn’t enough.

“I would like to take him home,” the woman said. “It’s late.” She added as an afterthought, “He has school tomorrow.”

Then her face suddenly crumpled, as if understanding for the first time that school in the morning probably wasn’t going to happen. That tonight had been bigger than that. That this was one of those things that would take more than a good night’s sleep to recover from.

Detective O stepped forward to explain about the interview with the forensic specialist, which needed to happen sooner versus later, as children’s memories were highly pliable.

Jesse’s mom shook her head, clearly becoming as overwhelmed and shell-shocked as her son.

D.D. reached out and squeezed the woman’s hand. “Just another hour,” she said encouragingly to the woman. “Then you can both go home. And tomorrow will be better than today, and the next day will be better than that. It will get better.”

The woman looked at her. “I love him so much.”

“I know.”

“I would do anything for him. I would give my life for him. I was
just looking up a school assignment. Fifteen minutes we’d be apart. We’d done it before and he’s at that age. He doesn’t always want his mother around anymore. And I want him to feel strong. I want him to feel safe.”

“I know.”

“I would do anything for him.”

“The interview will help,” D.D. assured her. “I know it sounds scary, but telling his story will allow Jesse to own it. It will become less and less something that happened to him, and more and more something he can narrate, take control over. We’ve seen it with other kids. Talking helps them. Holding it inside, not so good.”

Jenny sighed, rested her cheek on top of her son’s head. “Jenny and Jesse against the world,” she murmured.

“You’re a good mom.”

“I should’ve done more.”

“Story of a mother’s life.”

“Do you have a child?”

“Ten weeks old, already the love of my life.”

“What would you do?”

“I hope I never have to find out.”

“Please…”

D.D. hesitated, then answered as honestly as she could: “I would try to help him find his strength. The bad part already happened. Now it’s about helping Jesse find his way to the other side. Where he’s no longer the victim, but the one in control. Where he can feel strong. Where he can feel safe.”

The woman stared at her, seemed to be studying her face. “We’ll go to headquarters,” she said at last. “We’ll meet with the interview…expert.”

“We’ll have a victim’s advocate meet you there as well,” D.D. told her. “There are resources for you and your son. Please don’t be afraid to use them.”

D.D. handed over her card, then straightened, jamming her freezing cold gloved hands back into her coat pockets.

“Thank you for your help, Jesse,” D.D. said. “I appreciate you answering my questions.”

The boy didn’t look up, didn’t respond.

She said to his mother: “Take care of your son.”

“Oh, I will, Detective. I will.”

D.D. stepped away, heading over to O. She’d just paused beside the sex crimes detective when a startled cry went up. Both investigators turned to see a uniformed officer waving for them furiously from the first patrol car.

“Detectives,” he called. “Quick! You gotta see this!”

D.D. and O exchanged glances, then made their way precariously down the icy sidewalk. The uniformed patrol officer had the passenger-side door open and was gesturing inside excitedly.

“On the dashboard,” he said urgently. “Don’t move it. I’d just set it there, you know, to deliver to the evidence room later. Course, I got the heat running, then when I looked in…”

It appeared to be the shooter’s note, now encased in clear plastic. A full sheet, the letters scripted in the familiar precisely formed, elegantly rounded letters. Except, as D.D. looked closer, she suddenly spotted other letters so small and jumbled together, they first appeared as a blemish or blur.

She looked up abruptly, glancing at the uniformed officer. “Did you touch this, mess with it in any way?”

She stood back, allowed O to take a look.

“No, no, no,” Officer Piotrow assured her hastily. “It’s the heat. When I saw that something seemed to have happened, I picked up the note, and I’ll be damned if the letters didn’t immediately disappear. But then I set the paper back down on the hot dash…”

D.D. felt her heart quicken.

“I think it’s lemon juice,” the officer was saying. “My kid did this experiment once in grade school. You can write secret notes with lemon juice—the words will disappear when the lemon juice dries, but reappear when you hold the note over a hot lightbulb. I think my dash is the lightbulb.”

“A note within a note,” Detective O murmured, still leaning over the paper. “Different penmanship.”

“Different sentiment,” D.D. replied tersely, chewing her lower lip.

The first note,
Everyone dies sometime. Be brave
, was scrawled in the usual large rounded script.

In contrast, the hidden message was much smaller, jumbled letters hastily scrawled and crammed into a space smaller than a dime.

An order. A taunt. Or maybe even a plea:

Two simple words:
Catch Me
.

H
ELLO.
My name is Abigail.

Don’t worry, we’ve met.

Trust me, and I will take care of you.

Don’t you trust me?

Hello. My name is Abigail.

I
T FELT GOOD TO HIT.

I liked the satisfying thwack of my gloved fist making hard contact with the heavy bag. I liked the feel of my front leg pivoting, my hips rotating, and my shoulder rolling as I snapped my entire body behind the blow. Jab, jab, jab, uppercut, roundhouse, feint left, left hook downstairs, left hook upstairs, second roundhouse, V-step right, jab left, punch right, dodge low, uppercut, repeat. Hit, move, hit harder, move faster. Hit.

Four thirty A.M. Pitch-black outside. Brutally cold. Definitely night, not day. All over the city, sane, well-adjusted people were snug in their beds, sound asleep.

I stood alone in the middle of a twenty-four-hour gym in Cambridge and pounded the crap out of the heavy bag. I’d been at it a bit. Long enough that my long brown hair was plastered to my head, I’d soaked through my quick-dry gym clothes, and my arms and legs were glazed in sweat. When I landed a particularly forceful blow, perspiration sprayed from my arms onto the blue mat.

I’m not a pretty girl—my figure is too gaunt, my face too harsh these days. But I’m strong, and in the wall of mirrors across from me, I took pride in the muscles rippling across my shoulders, the curve of my biceps, the fierce look on my face. If there were men in the gym right now, working their way through their own regimens, they’d feel a need to comment. Make light of my sweaty form, raise a brow at my go-for-broke style, ask me what his name was and what he did to make me so angry.

Even better reason for me to arrive at four in the morning, running from uneasy dreams and a screwed-up internal clock that wasn’t used to sleeping at night anyway.

Alone, I could hit as hard as I wanted to for as long as I wanted.

Alone, I didn’t have to apologize for being me.

Girls get a raw deal, I think. When boys brawl, tumble, tackle, it’s all boys will be boys. A little girl lashes out, and immediately it’s “Hands are for holding, hands are for hugging.”

Boys are encouraged to grow strong, to inspect their scrawny arms and thin chests for the first sign of muscular bulk. Girls, by the time they’re eight, are already overanalyzing their waistlines, worrying about the dreaded muffin top. We have no concept of gaining muscle, just an enduring aversion to gaining fat.

Girls are complimented on beauty, flexibility, and grace. But what about the upper body strength it takes to scramble up a tree, or the core muscles involved in swinging across the monkey bars? Young girls perform natural feats of strength on parks and playgrounds all across the country. Parents rarely comment, however, and eventually girls spend more and more time trying to look pretty, which does earn them praise.

Until recently, I wasn’t any different.

I had to learn my aggression the hard way. Through practice and repetition and painful reinforcement. By experiencing the cracking neck pain that follows an uppercut to the chin, or the immediate eye-welling sensation of taking a fist to the nose. Pain, I discovered, was fleeting. While the satisfaction of standing my ground, then retaliating fiercely, lasted all afternoon.

I had to learn to go deep inside myself, to a tiny place that had managed to survive all those years with my mother, a place where I could finally stop apologizing and start fighting back.

Around the fourth month of boxing, I happened to catch my reflection in the mirror. I noticed lines in my shoulders, curves on my back. Muscles. From fifty push-ups every morning and every night. From jump roping and heavy bag intervals and speed bag drills. From tripling my daily intake of protein, because for all of my philosophizing, boys are different than girls. They start with more
muscle mass, add to it more efficiently, and retain it more effortlessly. Meaning if I wanted to bulk up, I had to eat, eat, eat. Egg whites and chicken sausage, six ounces of boneless chicken breast, six ounces of fish, protein shakes supplemented with peanut butter, plain Greek yogurt supplemented with protein powder.

Eventually my boxing coach moved me on to “tire work.” Big heavy tractor tires. I sledgehammered them, flipped them, jumped on top of them. By the six-month mark, I’d both leaned down and filled out. People stared at my arms when I went out in public. Teenage boys took notice of the way I moved, granted me more space on a crowded subway. Men looked me in the eye with a bit more respect.

And I liked it. Physical pain is nothing, I’ve realized. It’s letting go of your fear, finding your rage, and feeling strong that make the difference.

Unless it’s 2 A.M., and you’re dreaming of a baby who couldn’t have existed, or your homicidal mother who certainly did, or Stan Miller and the iron spikes protruding from his bloody chest.