He was right. D.D. didn’t like it either.
“Dogs could’ve run off,” Neil suggested. “Spooked by the shooting. Being blind and all, maybe they’re hunkered down under someone’s front porch, hiding.”
“And the sixteen-year-old?” D.D. asked.
Once again, no one had an answer.
“All right.” D.D. looked around the space. Still assessing. Still trying to understand. “Eight times out of ten in a case like this, it’s a domestic situation gone wrong. The father-figure murders the wife and kids, then shoots himself. Given the three shots to the chest, however, I think we can safely rule out Charlie Boyd as a suicide.”
The detectives nodded.
“In the ninth instance, it’s a stranger crime. Say, a perpetrator caught breaking and entering, shoots the family to cover his tracks. But nothing appears missing.”
“Plus, no sign of forced entry,” Phil added. “Responding officers discovered the front door unlocked, same with the rear entrance. Though the neighbors claim they never saw anyone exiting the property after the sound of gunshots. So it’s a good bet that even if the shooter entered through the front, he exited through the back.”
“Drugs?” D.D. asked. “Any rumors, evidence that Charlie Boyd or Juanita Baez were into illegal activities?”
“Juanita has a history of DUIs, and court-mandated rehab five years back. Alcohol,” Neil said. “Charlie Boyd’s record is clean.”
“No hidden stash of drugs or cash,” Carol added. “Also, no alcohol in the kitchen, which would indicate Juanita was still on the wagon.”
D.D. sighed, glanced at her watch again. Time to make a decision.
“There is another scenario,” she said. “Not as common, but it happens. Whole family is murdered; teenage daughter goes missing. Sometimes, that means the daughter is the target—the perpetrator murders the family so he can kidnap the girl.”
“And other times?” Neil asked.
“The daughter is the perpetrator,” D.D. said bluntly. “Abused, pissed off, doesn’t really matter. But the girl decides the only solution is to kill them all and run away.”
Unbidden, their gazes turned to the sad remains of Lola and Manny Baez, the older girl still cradling her younger brother’s lifeless form.
Phil, father of four, cleared his throat roughly. D.D. understood.
“Either way,” she stated quietly, “the key to this puzzle is Roxanna Baez. We find her, we get our answers. Issue the Amber Alert. Then prepare for the madness. Case like this, the media is gonna go insane!”
Chapter 2
BRIGHT SUNNY MORNING, BEAUTIFUL FALL day. One of those days in Boston, where people sat at outdoor cafés, or lounged along the Charles, or gazed adoringly at their kids playing in the park.
I never mastered the art of lounging, even before what happened to me . . . happened. So I ran. Down streets, side alleys, until I hit the Charles River and the dedicated trails. Unlike my fellow joggers, I never wore earbuds or listened to music. Sound is one of your first lines of defense. The sound of a car careening out of control as you step off the curb at an intersection. The sound of heavy footsteps closing in too fast, too focused behind you.
That night, I hadn’t been wearing headphones. Instead, I’d been lost to the drunken ramblings of my mind.
I always wore a fanny pack when I exercised. Water bottle. Sunscreen. Pocketknife. PowerBar. Handcuff picks. And, finally, a palm-sized spray bottle of my own pepper spray concoction—Massachusetts regulated the purchase of Mace and I’m the kind of girl who appreciates her privacy, so instead, I’d invented my own high-test concoction. No, Officer, I’m not carrying Mace. What do you mean my attacker just went blind? Huh. Then I hope his publicly appointed defender knows how to prepare his reports in braille.
It’s possible my sense of humor was darker than most.
Back to running. Back to thinking while nonthinking, focusing on the impact of my feet, slap-slap-slapping against the running trail. The strong pump of my arms moving in rhythm with my legs. My breathing slow, efficient, ready for the next hill, next mile, next anything.
Running was one of the only activities that soothed my squirrel brain and dimmed my hypervigilance enough to give me any hope of general introspection. Four hundred and seventy-two days, plus six years later, who was I?
Once, I’d been a girl who’d loved foxes. I’d grown up on my mom’s organic farm in the wilds of Maine, running along deer paths in the woods, picking sun-warmed blueberries straight from the bush, and heckling my older brother, Darwin, who even back then had hated everything about small-town life other than my mother and me.
Except then I’d gone off to college in Boston. Young, na?ve, all big-city dreams and not a single tangible goal. Had I even picked a major? College had been about getting out and getting away, not because I hadn’t loved my mom or her farm or the fox kits born each spring, but because I’d been eighteen, and when you’re eighteen, clearly you can’t want what you already have. Definitely, you gotta try for whatever is behind that other door over there.
Foolish.
I’d been beautiful. My mom still has photos from those days. In each image, I radiate that sort of outdoorsy L.L.Bean wholesomeness people associate with Maine. Long, straight blond hair. Clear gray eyes fixed directly ahead, the corners of my mouth just curving up, like I’m laughing at some joke only I can hear. I didn’t have a problem making friends or getting a date to the prom or surviving any of those high school rituals that left less-beautiful girls poring over copies of Carrie.
I was happy.
That’s what I noticed most when I looked at those pictures now. I saw a girl who really did believe she could be whatever she wanted to be, have whatever she wanted to have. I saw a person who was naturally, abundantly happy.
I didn’t know how my mom could bear to keep such reminders now.
Because that girl disappeared seven and a half years ago. Dancing drunk on a beach in Florida during spring break. Four hundred and seventy-two days later, what my family got back was me.
One of the most surreal aspects of returning home was the ensuing media frenzy. The real world was disorienting enough without having TV producers, Hollywood agents, and entertainment lawyers camped out on my mom’s front step. Each demanding immediate and exclusive rights. Each swearing he or she was the only one who could do my story justice.
Then there were the promises of money. Life-changing sums, millions of dollars that could all be mine. I just had to share every nitty-gritty detail of my abduction at the hands of Jacob Ness, the more lurid, the better.
I honestly couldn’t fathom it. People wanted to read all the gory descriptions of my victimization at the hands of a serial rapist and murderer? They wanted to know exactly what it was like to live in a coffin-sized box, only to be pulled out to discover what waited for you on the other side was even worse?
“Don’t think of it that way,” the first TV producer had told me. “It’s not the victimization that’s the selling point. It’s your story. You, the survivor. How you did it. That’s what viewers want to understand.”
I wasn’t convinced back then, and I remained unconvinced now. Seemed to me, for everyone who showed up at the Colosseum to see the gladiator win so many centuries ago, equal numbers came to watch him lose. It’s simply human nature.