Love You More - Lisa Gardner [21]
“Pregnant?” one asked.
“What?”
“Are you pregnant?”
“No.”
“Claustrophobic?”
“No.”
“Then this will be a breeze.”
I was wheeled into another sterile room, this one dominated by a large, donut-shaped machine. The technicians didn’t let me stand, but hoisted me from the gurney directly onto the table.
I was instructed to lie absolutely still while the donut-shaped X-ray moved around my head, taking cross sections of my skull. A computer would then combine the two-dimensional X-ray images to form a three-dimensional model.
In thirty minutes, the doctor would have a graphic image of my brain and my bones, including any swelling, bruising, or bleeding.
The technicians made it sound very easy.
Lying alone on the table, I wondered how deep the scanner could peer. I wondered if it could see all the things I saw every time I closed my eyes. Blood, appearing on the wall behind my husband, then streaking down to the kitchen floor. My husband’s eyes, widening in surprise as he looked down, seemed to actually notice the red stains blooming across his muscled chest.
Brian sliding down, down, down. Me, now standing over him, and watching the light dim in his eyes.
“I love you,” I had whispered to my husband, right before the light fled. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I love you.…”
There is pain, then there was pain.
The machine started to move. I closed my eyes and I allowed myself one last memory of my husband. His final words, as he died on our kitchen floor.
“Sorry,” Brian had gasped, three bullets in his torso. “Tessa … love you … more.”
7
With Brian Darby’s body removed, and Tessa Leoni whisked off to the hospital, the immediate practicalities of the homicide investigation began to wind down while the search for six-year-old Sophie Leoni ramped up.
With that in mind, D.D. summoned the taskforce officers to the white command van and began cracking the whip.
Witnesses. D.D. wanted a short list from all the uniformed officers of any and all neighbors worth a second interview. She then assigned six homicide detectives to begin those interviews ASAP. If someone was a credible witness or potential suspect, she wanted them identified and talking in the next three minutes.
Cameras. Boston was riddled with them. City installed them to monitor traffic. Businesses installed them for security. D.D. formed a three-man team whose job was to do nothing but identify all cameras in a two mile radius and skim through all video footage from the past twelve hours, starting with the video cameras closest to the house and working out.
Known associates. Friends, family, neighbors, teachers, babysitters, employers; if someone had ever set foot on the property, D.D. wanted their name on her desk in the next forty-five minutes. In particular, she wanted all teachers, playmates, and caretakers of Sophie Leoni rounded up and cranked through the wringer. Full background checks, a search of their homes if the detective could talk his way through the door. Officers needed to be eliminating friends and identifying foes and they needed to be doing it now, now, now.
Other people out there knew this family. Enemies from the husband’s job, felons snagged in Trooper Leoni’s patrols, maybe partners in torrid affairs, or longtime personal confidantes. Other people knew Brian Darby and Tessa Leoni. And one of those people might know what had happened to a six-year-old girl who’d last been seen sleeping in her own bed.
Time was not on their side. Get out, hit the streets, beat the clock, D.D. ordered her crew.
Then she shut up and sent them back to work.
The Boston detectives scrambled. The brass nodded. She and Bobby returned to the house.
D.D. trusted her fellow investigators to begin the enormous task of sifting through all the nuances of an entire family’s existence. What she wanted most for herself, however, was to live and breathe the victims’ final hours. She wanted to absorb the crime scene into her DNA. She wanted to inundate herself with the tiniest little domestic details, from paint choices to decorative