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I
T PLAYED OUT
like this: The police weren’t going to help me. Paranoid or not, my father had been right: Law enforcement is a system. It exists to aid victims, to catch perpetrators, and to advance key officers’ careers. Witnesses, sources—we were fodder along the way, disposable objects inevitably ground up by the huge, bureaucratic machine. I could sit by my phone all day, waiting for a call that would never come. Or I could find Dori Petracelli myself.

My desk was covered in a jumbled pile of fabric scraps, window-treatment sketchings, and client proposals, not an unusual state of affairs for an apartment that offered more ambience than square footage. I gathered the whole mess into my arms and shifted it to the alarmingly large pile tilting dangerously on the coffee table. Now I could see my target: my laptop computer. I booted it up and got to work.

First stop, the website for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. I was greeted with photos of three small children who had been declared missing in the past week. One boy, two girls. One was from Seattle, one from Chicago, the other from St. Louis. All cities where I used to live.

I wonder sometimes if this is what got my mother in the end. That no matter how much we ran, we still ended up running again. If you want to get technical about things, there’s no safe place to raise a child. Crime is universal, registered sex offenders live everywhere. I know; I check the databases.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children hosts its own search engine. I entered
female, Massachusetts,
and
missing within 25 years.
I clicked on the arrows to launch the search, then sat back and chewed on my thumbnail.

Bella came out from the tiny kitchenette, having just scarfed down her dinner. Now she regarded me reproachfully.
Run,
her gaze said.
Outside. Get a leash. Fun.

Bella was a seven-year-old purebred Australian shepherd, her leggy, athletic body a mottled mix of white splashed with patches of brown and blue. Like a lot of Australian shepherds, she had one blue eye, one brown. It gave her a perpetually quizzical look she liked to use to her advantage.

“One moment,” I told her.

She whined at me and, when that still didn’t work, flopped onto the floor in full doggy snit. I had received Bella in lieu of payment from a client four years ago. Bella had just destroyed the woman’s favorite pair of Jimmy Choo heels, and the woman had had enough of the dog’s high-strung behavior. Truthfully, Australian sheepdogs aren’t good apartment dogs. If you don’t keep them occupied, they do get in trouble.

But Bella and I did all right. Mostly because I liked to run and, even entering the middle-aged phase of a dog’s life, Bella thought nothing of whipping out a quick six miles.

I would have to take her out soon, or risk losing one of my favorite throw pillows or perhaps a beloved bolt of fabric. Bella always knew how to make her point.

The search was done. My computer screen filled with a scrolling column of bright, happy faces. School photos, close-ups from the family album. Photos of missing children always showed them happy. The whole point was to make you hurt worse.

Search results: fifteen.

I reached for the mouse and slowly worked my way down the column:
Anna, Gisela, Jennifer, Janeeka, Sandy, Katherine, Katie…

It was hard for me to look at the pictures. Even with my doubts about my father, I always wondered if I might have become one of them. If we hadn’t moved, if he hadn’t been so obsessed.

I thought again about the locket. Where had it come from? And why, oh why, had I given it to Dori?

Her name did not appear on the list. I allowed myself to exhale. Bella perked up, sensing the release in tension, the possibility of beginning our normal nightly routine.

But then I noticed the dates. None of these cases were older than ’97. Despite the open search parameters for time, the database must not go back that far. I chewed on my thumbnail again, debating options.

I could call the hotline, but that might raise too many questions. I preferred the anonymity of Internet searches. Well, at least the appearance of anonymity, since God knows the proliferation of spyware probably meant Big Brother, or at least a marketing mega-machine, was following my every move.

I knew another site to try. I didn’t go there as much. It made me sad.

I typed into my Internet search engine: www.doenetwork.org. And in two seconds, I was there.

The Doe Network deals primarily with old missing-persons cases, trying to match skeletalized remains found in one location with a missing-persons report that might have been filed in another jurisdiction. Its motto: “There is no time limit to solving a mystery.”

The thought gave me a chill as I sat, one hand now clasping the vial of my mother’s ashes, the other hand typing in the search parameter:
Massachusetts.

The very first hit sent me reeling. Three photos of the same boy, starting when he was ten, then age-progressed to twenty, then to thirty-five. He had gone missing in 1965 and was presumed dead. One minute he’d been playing in the yard, the next he was gone. A pedophile doing time in Connecticut claimed to have raped and murdered the child, but couldn’t remember where he’d buried the body. So the case remained open, the parents working as feverishly now to find their son’s remains as they must have once worked, forty years ago, to find their child.

I wondered what it was like for the parents to have to look at these age-progressed photos. To get that glimpse of who their son might have been, had the mom not gone inside to answer the phone or the father not rolled under the car to change the oil….

Fight, my father always told me. Seventy-four percent of abducted children who are murdered are killed within the first three hours. Survive those three hours. Don’t give the bastard a chance.

I was crying, I don’t know why. I never knew this little boy. Most likely, he died over forty years ago. But I could understand his terror. I felt it every time my father started one of his lectures or training exercises. Fight? When you are a fifty-pound child against a two-hundred-pound male, whatever in the world can you do that will honestly make a difference? My father may have had his illusions, but I have always been a realist.

If you are a child and someone wants to hurt you, chances are, you’ll wind up dead.

I moved to the next case: 1967. I looked at just the dates now; I didn’t want to see the pictures. It took me five more clicks. Then, November 12, 1982.

I was staring at Dori Petracelli. I was looking at her photo, age-progressed to thirty. I was reading the case study of what had happened to my best friend.

Then I went into the bathroom and vomited until I dry-heaved.

Later, twenty, forty, fifty minutes, I didn’t know anymore, I had the leash in one hand, the Taser in the other. Bella danced around my feet, practically tripping me in her haste to get downstairs.

I clipped the leash to her collar. And we ran. We ran and we ran and we ran.

By the time we returned home, a good hour and a half later, I thought I had composed myself. I felt cold, even clinical. I still had my family’s luggage. I would start packing immediately.

But then I turned on the news.

B
OBBY ARRIVED HOME
shortly after nine p.m., a man on a mission: He had approximately forty minutes to shower, eat, chug a Coke, then return to Roxbury. Unfortunately, South Boston parking had other ideas. He worked an eight-block radius around his triple-decker before getting pissed off and parking up on the curb. A Boston cop would take great personal delight in ticketing a state trooper, so he was living dangerously.

A pleasant surprise: One of his tenants, Mrs. Higgins, had left him a plate of cookies. “Saw the news. Keep up your strength,” her note said.

Bobby couldn’t argue with that, so he started his dinner by eating a lemon square. Then three more as he sorted through the pile of mail scattered on his floor, picking out key envelopes bearing bills, rent checks, leaving the rest.

One more lemon square for the road, chewing without even tasting anymore, he headed down the long narrow hallway to his bedroom at the back of the unit. He unbuttoned his shirt with one hand, emptied his pants pockets with the other. Then shrugged out of his shirt, kicked off his pants, and hit the tiny blue-tiled bathroom in beige dress socks and tighty whities. He got the shower going to full roar. One of the best things he still remembered from his tactical team days—coming home to a long, hot shower.

He stood under the scalding spray for endless minutes. Inhaling the steam, letting it sink into his pores, wishing, as he always did, that it would wash the horror away.

His brain was a spin cycle of overactive images. Those six little girls, mummified faces pressed against clear plastic garbage bags. Old photographs of twelve-year-old Catherine, her pale face hollowed out by hunger, her eyes giant black pupils from spending a month alone in the dark.

And, of course, the other image he was forced to see, would probably be seeing for the rest of his life: the look on Catherine’s husband’s face, Jimmy Gagnon’s face, right before the bullet from Bobby’s rifle shattered his skull.

Two years later, Bobby still dreamed about the shooting four or five nights a week. He figured someday it would become three times a week. Then twice a week. Then maybe, if he was lucky, he would get down to three or four times a month.

He’d done counseling, of course. Still met with his old LT, who served as his mentor. Even attended a meeting or two of other officers who’d been involved in critical incidents. But from what he could tell, none of that made much difference. Taking a man’s life changed you, plain and simple.

You still had to get up each morning and put on your pants one leg at a time like everyone else.

And some days were good, and some days were bad, and then there were a whole lotta other days in between that really weren’t anything at all. Just existence. Just getting the job done. Maybe D.D. was right. Maybe there were two Bobby Dodges: the one who lived before the shooting and the one who lived after. Maybe, inevitably, that’s how these things worked.

Bobby ran the shower till the water turned cold. Toweling off, he glanced at his watch. He had a whole minute left for dinner. Microwave chicken, it was.

He stuck two Tyson chicken breasts into the microwave, then retreated to the steamy bathroom and attacked his face with a razor.

Now officially five minutes late, he threw on fresh clothes, popped open a Coke, stuck two piping-hot chicken breasts onto a paper plate, and made his first critical mistake: He sat down.

Three minutes later, he was asleep on his sofa, chicken falling to the floor, paper plate crumpled on his lap. Four hours of sleep in the past fifty-six will do that to a man.

H
E JERKED AWAKE,
dazed and disoriented, sometime later. His hands lashed out. He was looking for his rifle. Jesus Christ, he needed his rifle! Jimmy Gagnon was coming, clawing at him with skeletal hands.

Bobby sprang off his sofa before the last of the image swept from his mind. He found himself standing in the middle of his own apartment, pointing a greasy paper plate at his TV as if he were packing heat. His heart thundering in his chest.

Anxiety dream.

He counted forward to ten, then slowly back down to one. He repeated the ritual three times until his pulse eased to normal.

He set down the crumpled plate. Retrieved the two chicken breasts from the floor. His stomach growled. Thirty-second rule, he decided, and ate with his bare hands.

First time Bobby had met Catherine Gagnon, he’d been a sniper called out to the scene of a domestic barricade—report of an armed husband, holding his wife and child at gunpoint. Bobby had taken up position across from the Gagnon residence, surveying the situation through his rifle scope, when he’d spotted Jimmy, standing at the foot of the bed, waving a handgun, and yelling so forcefully that Bobby could see the tendons roping the man’s neck. Then Catherine came into view, clutching her four-year-old son against her chest. She’d had her hands clasped over Nathan’s ears, his face turned into her, as if trying to shield him from the worst.

The situation went from bad to worse. Jimmy had grabbed his child from Catherine’s arms. Had pushed the boy across the room, away from what was going to happen next. Then he had leveled the gun at his wife’s head.

Bobby had read Catherine’s lips in the magnified world of his Leupold scope.

“What now, Jimmy? What’s left?”

Jimmy suddenly smiled, and in that smile, Bobby had known exactly what was going to happen next.

Jimmy Gagnon’s finger tightened on the trigger. And fifty yards away, in the darkened bedroom of a neighbor’s townhouse, Bobby Dodge had blown him away.

In the shooting’s aftermath, there was no doubt that Bobby made some mistakes. He’d started drinking, for one. Then he’d met Catherine in person, at a local museum. That had probably been his most self-destructive act. Catherine Gagnon was beautiful, she was sexy, she was the grateful widow of the abusive husband Bobby had just sent to an early grave.