Chapter 3
CALLIE
Her mood is sour when she gets to the station in the morning and gets worse by the minute.
The younger guys suppress smirks when she addresses them.
She stops by the breakroom to find Jenna’s record printed out on the table and her mug shot stabbed to the corkboard.
Someone has written MOMMY DEAREST in black Sharpie above Jenna’s head.
And now, in that spaced-out stare, and in between the lines of Jenna’s many infractions, Callie sees it: this Baby Doe story, unspoken and yet bearing down on everything.
According to Collins, they released Jenna at shift change, asked if she wanted to call anyone for a ride. But Jenna had said no thanks and simply walked out the door in her socked feet. Christ.
She pours herself a cup of coffee and studies a flyer behind Della’s reception desk, asking for volunteers to work the dunking booth at the Cranberry Festival.
Frank used to do it every year, he told her, with a note of expectation in his voice.
Wouldn’t they all love that? She can practically feel the surge of water up her nose, the wooziness that would overtake her as the guys on the squad lined up to take aim, plunging her into the tank again and again and again. No thanks.
She takes another sip from her mug, waits for the scorch of the heat and the first hit of caffeine to sharpen her bleary, swirling thoughts.
Robbins approaches her from behind—she can smell him before she sees him: the Axe body spray that makes her throat itch, and under that, a whiff of cordite and mud.
Some of the guys go hunting in the mornings before work, when the ducks feed at dawn.
It seems like an awful way to start the day, hunkered down in a blind, watching the dark stars of birds fall from the sky.
Robbins clears his throat. “Got something for you, Hauser.”
“What’s that?” She says, aiming for nonchalance, but she knows this can’t be anything good. The last time Robbins had something for her it was deer jerky that he had killed and dried himself.
He holds out a file. “Heard you were looking for this one.”
She sets her coffee down on the nearest desk, flips the folder open, aware that Collins and Latour are watching from across the room.
“Maybe a big shot like you can finally help us simple Pineys sort this one out.”
Dread takes the form of an ache in her molars, a tightness in her solar plexus. But she won’t let them see that. Just takes a breath and flips through the file as though it’s nothing. Meaningless as a traffic stop report.
The crime scene photos are arranged on top, even though it is standard for the report to come first. Her guts twist. Heat surges in her chest. She forces herself to take a sip of her coffee, swallows it against the knot in her throat, a double burn.
She picks up one of the photos. Robbins, Collins, and Latour stand in a half circle behind her, their arms crossed. She can practically see the cartoon thought bubbles over their heads. We’ll just see what this lady detective can handle.
She rolls her shoulders, exhales. You dare me to look, I’ll look, you stupid motherfuckers. I’ll look harder and longer than any of you.
She lets her eyes skim the images, wills herself not to feel. A skill she learned as a child, honed on patrol. Senses on, emotions off. Assess first. Act next. React later.
She touches the edges of the pictures with her fingertips to make it seem like she is trying to see better, trying to look closer at rather than away from.
But her old tricks aren’t working today.
She’s not seeing the photos as a cop. She’s seeing them as her mother, sixteen years old, a watch cap pulled down over her ears and a sack of newspapers heavy on her shoulder.
A sick mother at home and a father working two jobs to pay the hospital bills.
She has to speak. Has to show them she’s not rattled. Even though she is angry. Even though she feels she is going to be sick.
She clears her throat. “I’m assuming the state agencies stepped in at some point?”
“Someone from Major Crimes was involved for a bit. But you know how those guys are.”
“Sure,” she says. Those guys. Her former colleagues. She holds up a picture from the back of the stack. A scatter of beads, amber spheres bright against the dirt. Half of them still lined up on a broken string, the others yellow against the pale sandy soil.
“What’s this?”
“Found near the scene.”
“Huh. We know who it belongs to?”
“Nah.”
A small note in the report: The broken bracelet was recovered five yards from where Jenna found Baby Doe. The metal clasp is connected but the string is snapped, as though someone had pulled it off.
Robbins breaks the silence. “Good luck, Hauser. Maybe a woman’s intuition is just what this one needs.”
“Well it sure as hell doesn’t help that you all have been scratching your balls for three decades on an unsolved homicide.”
There’s a slight flutter in her fingers as she closes the file. “And it’s Chief,” she says. “Or do you need to be written up for insubordination to help you remember?”
“No,” Robbins says, his eyes bright with rage. “Chief.” The word comes out ugly. Spat out like a piece of gristle from between his teeth.
She tucks the file under her arm and takes it to her office, sits with it in her lap before she works up the nerve to open it again.
From the forensics report: Cause of death was exposure.
The baby was born alive but a few hours old at most when she died.
She googles the medical examiner who did the report—maybe she could get more info, the report shockingly sparse—but the first hit is an obituary from ten years ago.
No crime scene technician support, the scene secured by local cops with backup from the State Police an hour later.
1991, so the case predates the CODIS database that can be used to connect DNA profiles to crime scenes and chances are slim that someone went back to it and entered the DNA into the records.
Maybe there’s a sample somewhere that the labs can work with, though chances are it’s degraded down to nothing.
Stuff from the ’90s kept in the worst conditions, exposed to unmitigated humidity and roiling heat.
DNA technology was more like alchemy to most people back then, and only the most well-funded departments invested in it, for the biggest cases.
The pretty, white prom queens. The bankers bludgeoned to death in dark corners of Central Park, signet rings ripped from their pinkies.
Alone, she turns back to the crime scene photos.
That broken bracelet tugs at her. She had been prepared to feel fury directed at the mother of Baby Doe, for doing what she did, for the damage it caused Jenna.
But maybe the story is different from how it looks.
Maybe the mother hadn’t meant to abandon the child.
Maybe something had happened to her, too.
And no one has ever bothered to ask the right questions about it.
She picks up her phone, calls an old friend from her rookie years who is now working cold cases.
Benny Healey, a brusque guy from Cherry Hill with a penchant for Italian shoes and a slight dramatic flair as though he learned to be a cop from the movies.
But, she concedes, he does good work. Cold cases is lucky to have him.
“Hauser. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Hey, Healy. I’m looking into something and was wondering if you might see if anything has made it your way. Maybe something that wasn’t shared here with the department.”
“Shoot.”
She runs over the details of the case and he tells her he’ll see what he can dig up.
His department has been working through backlogs of cases from the ’80s and ’90s, hundreds of them.
Untested rape kits, unsolved murders, unprocessed evidence.
Thousands of loose ends, thousands of questions left unanswered.
It makes her mouth go dry just thinking about it.
“Why are you going after this one?” he asks. “Gotta be lots of unidentified bodies in those woods.”
She pauses, stares at the slim file on her desk.
Flicks at the flimsy bent corner of the manilla folder.
She can’t tell him it’s because of her mother.
She thinks of those amber beads in the soil.
Whoever they belonged to. That there’s a bigger story to tell about what happened here.
“I’ve got a hunch that it could be a double homicide.
But we’ll need more hard evidence to go on while I work stuff on my end. ”
“You’re not wasting much time down there, huh? I know they’re hurting on Narcotics. They miss you.”
“Look at you, you big softie. Well, who knows, maybe I’ll be back on it soon enough.”
“Oh yeah? How’s the friend, the one you’re helping out? She doing better, then?”
“Yeah,” Callie says, reflexively. “Yeah, she is doing better. I’m headed over to her house tonight.” What she doesn’t say is that the doctors can’t yet be sure about the difference between better and as good as its going to get.
Jane and Damien live in a two-story Cape Cod off a dirt road. Callie manages to hit the same pothole in their driveway every time she visits, swears to herself as her Jeep bounces hard in the rut.
Part of her still can’t believe that this is where Jane lives.
Private, Jane had said, when they first bought the house.
Peaceful. The house itself is charming, and Jane did a lot of work planting flower beds around the front and side yards, filled the inside with thrifted furniture that she reupholstered herself.
But every time she cuts the engine and walks the flagstone path to the front porch, Callie still can’t shake the sense that this wasn’t quite how the story was supposed to go, for either of them.