At two A.M. in Stony Brook Reservation, the air as muggy and thick as soup. Rizzoli and Korsak sat in her parked car, closely abutting dense shrubbery. From their position, they could observe all cars entering Stony Brook from the east. Additional surveillance vehicles were stationed along Enneking Parkway, the main thoroughfare winding through the reservation. Any vehicle that pulled off onto one of the dirt parking areas could swiftly be hemmed in on all sides by converging vehicles. It was a purse-string trap, from which no car could escape.
Rizzoli was sweating in her vest. She rolled down the window and breathed in the scent of decaying leaves and damp earth. Forest smells.
“Hey, you’re letting in mosquitoes,” complained Korsdk.
“I need the fresh air. It smells like cigarettes in here.”
“I only lit up one. I don’t smell it.”
“Smokers never do.”
He looked at her. “Jeez, you been snapping at me all night. You got a problem with me, maybe we should talk about it.”
She stared out the window, toward the road, which remained dark and untraveled. “It’s not about you,” she said.
“Who, then?”
When she didn’t answer, he gave a grunt of comprehension. “Oh. Dean again. So what’d he do now?”
“Few days ago, he complained about me to Marquette.”
“What’d he tell him?”
“That I’m not the right man for the job. That maybe I need counseling for unresolved issues.”
“He talking about the Surgeon?”
“What do you think?”
“What an asshole.”
“And today, I find out we got instant feedback from CODIS. It’s never happened before. All Dean has to do is snap his fingers, and everyone jumps. I just wish I knew what he was doing here.”
“Well, that’s the thing about fibbies. They say information is power, right? So they keep it from us, ‘cause it’s a macho game to them. You and me, we’re just pawns to Mr. James Fucking Bond.”
“You’re getting confused with the CIA.”
“CIA, FBI.” He shrugged. “All those alphabet agencies, they’re all about secrets.”
The radio crackled. “Watcher Three. We got a vehicle, late-model sedan, moving south on Enneking Parkway.”
Rizzoli tensed, waiting for the next team to report in.
Now Frost’s voice, in the next vehicle. “Watcher Two. We see him. Still moving south. Doesn’t look like he’s slowing down.”
Seconds later, a third unit reported: “Watcher Five. He’s just passed the intersection of Bald Knob Road. Heading out of the park.”
Not our boy. Even at this early-morning hour. Enneking Parkway was well traveled. They had lost count of how many vehicles they’d tracked through the reservation. Too many false alarms punctuating long intervals of boredom had burned up all her adrenaline, and she was fast sliding into sleep-deprived torpor.
She leaned back with a disappointed sigh. Beyond the windshield she saw the blackness of woods, lit only by the occasional spark of a firefly. “Come on, you son of a bitch,” she murmured. “Come to Mama…”
“You want some coffee?” asked Korsak.
“Thanks.”
He poured a cup from his thermos and handed it to her. The coffee was black and bitter and utterly disgusting, but she drank it anyway.
“Made it extra strong tonight,” he said. “Two scoops of Folgers instead of one. Puts hair on your chest.”
“Maybe that’s what I need.”
“I figure, I drink enough of this stuff, some of that hair might migrate back up to my head.”
She looked off toward the woods, where darkness hid rotting leaves and foraging animals. Animals with teeth. She remembered the gnawed remains of Rickets Lady and thought of raccoons chewing on ribs and dogs rolling skulls around like balls, and what she imagined, staring into the trees, was not Bambi.
“I can’t even talk about Hoyt anymore,” she said. “Can’t mention him without people giving me that pitying look. Yesterday, I tried to point Out the parallels between the Surgeon and our new boy, and I could see Dean thinking: She’s still got the Surgeon on the brain. He thinks I’m obsessed.” She sighed. “Maybe I am. Maybe that’s how it’ll always be. I’ll walk onto any crime scene and I’ll see his handiwork. Every perp will have his face.”
They both glanced at the radio as Dispatch said, “We have a request for a premises check, Fairview Cemetery. Any units in the area?”
No one responded.
Dispatch repeated the request: “We have a call for a premises check, Fairview Cemetery. Possible unauthorized entry. Unit Twelve, are you still in the area?”
“Unit Twelve. We’re on the ten-forty, River Street. It’s a code one. We’re unable to respond.”
“Roger that. Unit Fifteen? What’s your ten-ten?”
“Unit Fifteen. West Roxbury. Still on that Missile six. These folks are not calming down. Estimate at least a half hour, hour till we can get to Fairview.”
“Any units?” said Dispatch, trolling the radio waves for an available patrol car. On a warm Saturday night, a routine premises check of a cemetery was not a high-priority call. The dead are beyond caring about frolicking couples or teenage vandals. It is the living who must command a cop’s first attention.
Radio silence was broken by a member of Rizzoli’s stakeout team. “Uh, this is Watcher Five. We’re situated on Enneking Parkway. Fairview Cemetery’s in our immediate vicinity-”
Rizzoli grabbed the mike and hit the transmit button. “Watcher Five, this is Watcher One,” she cut in. “Do not abandon your position. You copy?”
“We have five vehicles on stakeout-”
“The cemetery is not our priority.”
“Watcher One,” said Dispatch. “All units are on calls right now. Any chance you could release one?”
“Negative. I want my team to hold position. Copy, Watcher Five?”
“Ten-four. We are holding. Dispatch, we can’t respond to that premises-check call.”
Rizzoli huffed out a sigh. There might be complaints about this come morning, but she was not going to release a single vehicle from her surveillance team, not for a trivial call.
“It’s not like we’re swamped with action,” said Korsak.
“When it happens, it’ll be fast. I’m not going to let anything foul this up.”
“You know that thing we were talking about earlier? About you being obsessed?”
“Don’t start in now.”
“No, I’m not gonna go there. You’ll bite off my head.” He shoved open his door.
“Where you going?”
“Take a leak. I need permission?”
“Just asking.”
“That coffee’s going right through me.”
“No wonder. Your coffee’d burn a hole through cast iron.”
He stepped out of the car and walked into the woods, his hands already fumbling at his fly. He didn’t bother to step behind any tree but just stood there, urinating into the bushes. This she didn’t need to see, and she averted her gaze. Every class has its gross-out kid, and Korsak was it, the boy who openly picked his nose and belched with gusto and wore his lunch on the front of his shirt. The kid whose moist and pudgy hands you avoided touching at all costs, because you were sure to catch his cooties. She felt both repelled by him and sorry for him. She looked down at the coffee he’d poured for her, and she tossed what was left out the window.
Fresh chatter erupted over the radio, startling her.
“We got a vehicle moving east on Dedham Parkway. Looks like a Yellow Cab.”
Rizzoli responded, “A taxicab at three A.M.?”
“That’s what we got.”
“Where’s he going?”
“Just turned north onto Enneking.”
“Watcher Two?” said Rizzoli, calling the next unit on the route.
“Watcher Two,” said Frost. “Yeah, we see him. Just went past us…” A silence. Then, with sudden tension: “He’s slowing down…”
“Doing what?”
“Braking. Looks like he’s about to pull over-”
“Location?” snapped Rizzoli.
“The dirt parking area. He’s just pulled into the parking area!”
It’s him.
“Korsak, we’re hot!” she hissed out the window. As she slipped on her personal comm unit and adjusted the earpiece, every nerve was singing with excitement.
Korsak zipped up his fly and scrambled back into the car. “What? What?”
“Vehicle just pulled off Enneking-Watcher Two, what’s he doing?”
“Just sitting there. Lights are off.”
She hunched forward, pressing the headset to her ear in concentration. The seconds ticked by, transmissions silent, everyone waiting for the suspect’s next move.
He’s checking out the area. Confirming that it’s safe to proceed.
“It’s your call, Rizzoli,” said Frost. “We move on him?”
She hesitated, weighing their options. Afraid to spring the trap too soon.
“Wait,” said Frost. “He just turned his headlights back on. Ah, shit, he’s backing out. He’s changed his mind.”
“Did he spot you? Frost, did he spot you?”
“I don’t know! He’s pulled back onto Enneking. Proceeding north-”
“We’ve spooked him!” In that split second, the only possible decision was crystal clear to her. She barked into her comm unit: “All units, go, go, go! Box him in now!”
She started the car, jammed the gear into drive. Her tires spun, digging a trough through soft dirt and fallen leaves, branches whipping at the windshield. She heard her team’s rapid-fire transmissions and the far-off blare of multiple sirens.
“Watcher Three. We now have Enneking north blocked off-”
“Watcher Two. In pursuit-”
“Vehicle is approaching! He’s braking-”
“Box him in! Box him in!”
“Do not confront without backup!” Rizzoli ordered. “Wait for backup!”
“Roger that. Vehicle has halted. We are holding position.”
By the time Rizzoli screeched to a halt, Enneking Parkway was a knot of cruisers and throbbing blue lights. Rizzoli felt temporarily blinded as she stepped out of her car. The surge of adrenaline had excited them all to fever pitch and she could hear it in their voices, the crackling tension of men on the edge of violence.
Frost yanked open the suspect’s door, and half a dozen weapons were pointed at the driver’s head. The cabbie sat blinking and disoriented, blue lights pulsing on his face.
“Step out of the vehicle,” Frost ordered.
“What-what’d I do?”
“Step out of the vehicle.” On this adrenaline-drenched night, even Barry Frost had transformed into someone frightening.
The cabbie slowly emerged, hands held high. The instant both his feet touched the ground, he was spun around and shoved facedown against the hood of the cab.
“What’d I do!” he cried as Frost patted him down.
“State your name!” said Rizzoli.
“I don’t know what this is all about-”
“Your name!”
“Wilensky.” He gave a sob. “Vernon Wilensky-”
“Check,” said Frost, reading the cabbie’s I.D. “Vernon Wilensky, white male, born 1955.”
“Matches the carriage permit,” said Korsak, who’d leaned into the cab to check the I.D. clipped to the visor.
Rizzoli glanced up, eyes narrowing against the glare of oncoming headlights. Even at three A.M., there was traffic moving along the parkway, and with the road now blocked by police vehicles, they’d soon have cars backing up in both directions.
She focused again on the cabbie. Grabbing his shirt, she turned him around to face her and aimed her flashlight in his eyes. She saw a middle-aged man, blond hair gone thin and scraggly, skin sallow in the harsh beam of ight. This was not the face she’d envisioned as their unsub. She had looked into the eyes of evil more times than she cared to count and carried, in her memory, all the faces belonging to the monsters she had encountered in her career. This scared man did not belong in that gallery.
“What are you doing here, Mr. Wilensky?” she said.
“I was just-just picking up a fare.”
“What fare?”
“A guy, called for a cab. Said he ran outta gas on Enneking Parkway-”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know! I stopped where he said he’d be waiting, and he wasn’t there. Please, it’s all a mistake. Call my dispatcher! She’ll back me up!”
Rizzoli said to Frost: “Pop open the trunk.”
Even as she walked to the rear of the cab, a sick feeling was building in her stomach. She lifted the trunk hood and aimed her Maglite. For a solid five seconds she stared into that empty trunk, the sick feeling now worsening to full-blown nausea. She pulled on gloves. Felt her face flushing hot and bright, her chest going hollow with despair, as she peeled back the gray carpet lining the trunk. She saw a spare tire, a jack, and a few tools. She began yanking on the carpet, peeling it back farther, all her rage focused on ripping away every square inch of it, exposing every dark nook it might conceal. She was like a madwoman, clawing desperately for the scraps of her own redemption. When she could tear away no more and the trunk was exposed down to bare metal, she just stared at the empty space, refusing to accept what was plain to see. The irrefutable evidence that she had screwed up.
A setup. This was just a setup, meant to distract us. But from what?
The answer came to her with dizzying speed. A call erupted from their radios.
“Ten fifty-four, ten fifty-four, Fairview Cemetery. All units, ten fifty-four, Fairview Cemetery.”
Frost’s gaze met hers, both of them struck in that instant by the same terrible realization. Ten fifty-four. Homicide.
“Stay with the cab!” she ordered Frost, and she sprinted to her car. In the tangle of vehicles, hers was the easiest to extract, the quickest to turn around. Even as she scrambled in behind the wheel and twisted the key, she was cursing her own stupidity.
“Hey! Hey!” shouted Korsak. He was running beside the car, pounding on the door.
She braked just long enough to let him scramble in and yank his door shut. Then she floored the accelerator, flinging him back against his seat.
“What the fuck, you gonna leave me back there?” he yelled.
“Buckle up.”
“I’m not just some ride-along.”
“Buckle up!”
He dragged his seat belt over his shoulder and snapped it shut. Even over the voices chattering on the radio, she could hear his labored breathing, wet with mucousy wheezes.
“Watcher One, responding to the ten fifty-four,” she said to Dispatch.
“Your ten-ten?”
“Enneking Parkway, just passed the intersection with Turtle Pond. ETA less than a minute.”
“You’ll be first on the scene.”
“Situation?”
“No further information. Assume ten fifty-eight.”
Armed and believed dangerous.
Rizzoli’s foot was lead on the pedal. The road to Fairview Cemetery came up so fast she almost missed it. They took the turn with tires screaming, Rizzoli wrestling the wheel for control.
“Whoa!” gasped Korsak as they nearly slammed into a row of roadside boulders. The wrought-iron gate hung open and she drove through. The cemetery was unlit, and beyond her headlights were rolling lawns, gravestones jutting up like white teeth.
A vehicle from a private security patrol was parked a hundred yards from the cemetery gate. The driver’s door was open and the dome light was glowing. Rizzoli braked and was already reaching for her weapon as she stepped out, the reflex so automatic she did not even register the action. Too many other details were assaulting her: The smell of freshly mown grass and damp earth. The punch of her heartbeat against her breastbone.
And the fear. As her gaze swept the darkness, she felt the icy lick of fear because she knew that if the cab was a setup, then this could be, too. A bloody game that she had not even been aware she was part of.
She froze, her eyes focusing on a puddle of shadow near the base of a memorial obelisk. Aiming her Maglite, she saw the security guard’s crumpled body.
As she stepped toward him, she smelled the blood. There was no other scent like it, and it rang primitive alarms in her brain. She knelt down on grass that was wet with it, still warm with it. Korsak was right beside her, shining his flashlight as well, and she could hear his snuffling breaths, the piggy noises he always made when he’d exerted himself.
The guard was lying facedown. She rolled him onto his back.
“Jesus!” yelped Korsak, jerking away with such violence his flashlight beam shot wildly toward the sky.
Rizzoli’s beam was trembling as well as she stared at the nearly severed neck, nubs of cartilage gleaming whitely from the butchered flesh. Man down, all right. Down, out, and barely attached to his own head.
Flashing blue lights cut through the night, a surreal kaleidoscope weaving toward them. She rose to her feet, and her slacks were sticky with blood, the fabric adhering to her knees. Eyes narrowed against the glare of approaching cruisers, she turned away, facing the black expanse of the cemetery. In that instant, as the advancing headlights cut an arc through the darkness, an image froze on her retinas: a figure, moving among the headstones. It was just a split second’s glimpse, and in the next pulse of light the figure was lost in the sea of jutting marble and granite.
“Korsak,” she said. “Someone moving-two o’clock.”
“Can’t see a damn thing.”
She stared. Saw it again, moving down the slope, toward the cover of trees. In an instant she was sprinting, weaving through the obstacle course of headstones, feet pounding across the sleeping dead. She heard Korsak close behind, wheezing like an accordion, but he couldn’t keep up. Within seconds she was on her own, legs pumping on the rocket fuel of adrenaline. She was almost to the trees, closing in on where she had last spotted the figure, but she saw no moving silhouettes, no flitting of darkness across darkness. She slowed, stopped, her gaze sweeping back and forth, seeking the slightest movement in the shadows.
Though she was now at a standstill, her pulse accelerated, driven by fear. By the skin-crawling certainty that he was nearby. He was watching her. Yet she was reluctant to turn on her flashlight, to send out a beacon announcing her location.
The snap of a twig made her whirl to her right. The trees loomed in front of her, an impenetrable black curtain. Through the roar of her own blood, the rush of air through her lungs, she heard leaves rustle and more twigs crack.
He is walking toward me.
She dropped to a crouch, weapon aimed, nerves honed to a hair trigger.
The footsteps suddenly stopped.
She snapped on the Maglite and shone it dead ahead. Saw him, then, dressed in black, standing among the trees. Caught in the beam of light, he twisted away, arm rising to shield his eyes.
“Freeze!” she yelled. “Police!”
The man went perfectly still, his face turned, his hand reaching toward his face. He said, quietly, “I’m going to take off my goggles.”
“No, asshole! You’re going to freeze right where you are.”
“And then what, Detective Rizzoli? Shall we exchange badges? Pat each other down?”
She stared, suddenly recognizing the voice. Slowly, deliberately, Gabriel Dean removed his goggles and turned to face her. With the light in his eyes, he could not see her, but she could see him just fine, and his expression was cool and composed. With the flashlight she made a vertical sweep of his body, saw black clothes, a weapon holstered at his hip. And in his hand, the night-vision goggles which he’d just removed. Korsak’s words shot straight to mind: Mr. James Fucking Bond.
Dean took a step toward her.
Instantly her weapon snapped up. “Stay right where you are.”
“Easy, Rizzoli. No reason to shoot my head off.”
“Isn’t there?”
“I’m just walking closer. So we can talk.”
“We can talk fine from this distance.”
He looked toward the flashing lights of the cruisers. “Who do you suppose radioed in the homicide call?”
She held steady, didn’t let her aim waver.
“Use your head, Detective. I assume you’ve got a good one.” He took another step.
“Just fucking freeze right there.”
“Okay.” He held up his hands. Said again, lightly, “Okay.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Same thing you are. This is where the action is.”
“How did you know? If you’re the one who called in that ten fifty-four, how did you know the action was here?”
“I didn’t.”
“You just happened to come along and find him?”
“I heard Dispatch call for a property check of Fairview Cemetery. A possible trespasser.”
“So?”
“So I wondered if it was our unsub.”
“You wondered?”
“Yes.”
“You must have had a good reason.”
“Instinct.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Dean. You turn up fully dressed for night ops, and I’m supposed to believe you just moseyed on over to check out a trespasser?”
“My instincts are good.”
“You’d have to have ESP to be that good.”
“We’re wasting time here, Detective. Either arrest me or work with me.”
“I’m leaning toward the first choice.”
He regarded her with an unruffled expression. There was too much he wasn’t telling her, too many secrets she’d never get out of him. Not here, not tonight. At last she lowered her weapon but did not holster it. Gabriel Dean didn’t inspire that level of trust.
“Since you were first on the scene, what did you see?”
“I found the security guard already down. I used his car radio to call Dispatch. The blood was still warm. I thought there was a chance our boy’d be close by. So I went looking.”
She gave a dubious snort. “In the trees?”
“I saw no other vehicles in the cemetery. Do you know what neighborhood surrounds us, Detective?”
She hesitated. “Dedham’s to the east. Hyde Park north and south.”
“Exactly. Residential neighborhoods on all sides, with lots of places to park a car. From there it’s just a short stroll to this cemetery.”
“Why would the unsub come here?”
“What do we know about him? Our boy is obsessed with the dead. He craves the smell of them, the touch of them. He holds on to corpses until the stench becomes impossible to disguise, to hide. Only then does he surrender the remains. This is a man who probably gets turned on just by walking through a cemetery. So here he was, in the dark, indulging in a little erotic adventure.”
“This is sick.”
“Look into his mind, his universe. We may think it’s sick, but for him, this place is a little slice of paradise. A place where the dead are laid to rest. Just the place the Dominator would come. He walks around here and probably imagines a whole harem of sleeping women right beneath his feet.
“But then he’s disturbed, surprised by the arrival of a security patrol. A guard who’s probably expecting to deal with nothing more dangerous than a few teenagers looking for a little nighttime adventure.”
“And the guard lets a lone man stroll right up and cut his throat?”
Dean was silent. For this he had no explanation. Neither did Rizzoli.
By the time they walked back up the slope, the night was pulsing with blue lights, and her team was already stringing crime scene tape between stakes. Rizzoli stared at the grim carnival of activity and suddenly she felt too weary to deal with any of it. Seldom had she questioned her own judgment, doubted her own instincts. But tonight, faced with the evidence of her failure, she wondered if Gabriel Dean wasn’t right-that she had no business leading this investigation. That the trauma inflicted on her by Warren Hoyt had so damaged her that she could no longer function as a cop. Tonight she had made the wrong choice, had refused to release anyone from her team to answer the call for a premises check. We were only a mile away. Sitting in our cars, waiting for nothing, while this man was dying.
The string of defeats had piled up so heavily on her shoulders that she felt her back sag as though under the weight of real stones. She returned to her car and flipped open her cell phone; Frost answered.
“Yellow Cab dispatcher confirms the cabbie’s story,” he told her. “They got the call at two-sixteen. Male claiming his car was out of gas on Enneking Parkway. She dispatched Mr. Wilensky. We’re trying to track down the number the call came from.”
“Our boy’s not stupid. The call’s going to lead nowhere. A pay phone. Or a stolen cell phone. Shit.” She slapped the dashboard.
“So what about the cabbie? He comes up clean.”
“Release him.”
“You sure?”
“It was all a game, Frost. The unsub knew we’d be waiting for him. He’s playing with us. Demonstrating he’s in control. That he’s smarter than us.” And he just proved it.
She hung up and sat for a moment, collecting the energy to step out of the car and face what came next. Another death investigation. All the questions that would surely follow about her decisions tonight. She thought of how fiercely she had pinned her hopes on the belief that the unsub would adhere to his pattern. Instead he had used that very pattern to taunt her. To produce the fiasco she was now staring at.
Several of the cops standing by the crime scene tape turned and looked her way-a signal that, tired as she was, she could not hide in her car much longer. She remembered Korsak’s thermos of coffee; awful as it was, she could use the shot of caffeine. She reached around to retrieve the thermos behind her seat and suddenly stopped.
She looked up at the law enforcement personnel standing among the cruisers. She saw Gabriel Dean, lean and sleek as a black cat as he walked the crime scene perimeter. She saw cops scanning the ground, flashlights sweeping back and forth. But she did not see Korsak.
She stepped out of the car and approached Officer Doud, who’d been part of the stakeout team. “Have you seen Detective Korsak?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
“He wasn’t here when you arrived? He wasn’t waiting by the body?”
“I haven’t seen him here at all.”
She stared toward the trees, where she had encountered Gabriel Dean. Korsak was running right behind me. But he never caught up. And he didn’t come back here…
She began walking toward the trees, retracing the route she had run across the cemetery. During that sprint, she’d been so focused on pursuit that she’d paid little attention to Korsak, who’d trailed behind her. She remembered her own fear, the pounding heart, the night wind rushing past her face. She remembered his heavy breathing as he’d struggled to keep up. Then he’d fallen behind, and she’d lost track of him.
She moved faster now, her flashlight sweeping left and right. Was this the route she’d taken? No, no, she’d gone down a different row of headstones. She recognized an obelisk looming to the left.
Correcting course, she headed for the obelisk and almost tripped over Korsak’s legs.
He lay crumpled beside a headstone, the shadow of his bulky torso merging with the granite. At once she was on her knees, screaming for assistance as she rolled him onto his back. One glance at his swollen, dusky face told her he was in cardiac arrest.
She felt his neck, wanting so desperately to detect a carotid pulse that she almost mistook the bounding pulse of her own fingers for his. But he had none.
She slammed her fist down on his chest. Even that violent punch did not jolt his heart awake.
She tilted his head back and tugged his sagging jaw forward to open the airway. So many things about Korsak had once repelled her. The smell of his sweat and cigarettes, his noisy sniffling, his doughy handshake. None of that registered now as she sealed her mouth against his and blew air into his lungs. She felt his chest expand, heard a noisy wheeze as his lungs expelled the air again. She planted her hands on his chest and began CPR, doing the work his heart refused to do. She kept pumping as other cops arrived to assist, as her arms began to tremble and sweat soaked into her vest. Even as she pumped, she was mentally flogging herself. How had she overlooked him, lying here? Why hadn’t she noticed his absence? Her muscles burned and her knees ached, but she did not stop. She owed that much to him and would not abandon him a second time.
An ambulance siren screamed closer.
She was still pumping as the paramedics arrived. Only when someone took her arm and firmly tugged her away did she relinquish her role. She stood back, legs trembling, as the paramedics took over, inserting an I.V. line, hanging a bag of saline. They tilted Korsak’s head back and thrust a laryngoscope blade down his throat.
“I can’t see the vocal cords!”
“Jesus, he’s got a big neck.”
“Help me reposition.”
“Okay. Try it again!”
Again the paramedic inserted the laryngoscope, straining to hold up the weight of Korsak’s jaw. With his massive neck and swollen tongue, Korsak looked like a freshly slaughtered bull.
“Tube’s in!”
They tore away the rest of Korsak’s shirt, baring a thick mat of hair, and slapped on defibrillator paddles. On the EKG monitor, a jagged line appeared.
“He’s in V-tach!”
The paddles discharged, a jolt of electrical current slicing through Korsak’s chest. The seizure jerked his heavy torso right off the grass and dropped him back in a flaccid mound. The cops’ multiple flashlight beams revealed every cruel detail, from the pale beer belly to the almost feminine breasts that are the embarrassment of so many overweight men.
“Okay! He’s got a rhythm. Sinus tach-”
“BP?”
The cuff whiffed tight around his meaty arm. “Ninety systolic. Let’s move him!”
Even after they’d transferred Korsak into the ambulance and the taillights had winked away into the night, Rizzoli did not move. Numb with exhaustion, she stared after it, imagining what would follow for him. The harsh lights of the E.R. More needles, more tubes. It occurred to her that she should call his wife, but she did not know her name. In fact, she knew almost nothing about his personal life, and it struck her as unbearably sad that she knew far more about the dead Yeagers than about the living, breathing man who’d worked beside her. The partner she’d failed.
She looked down at the grass where he’d been lying. It still bore the imprint of his weight. She imagined him running after her but too short of breath to keep up. He would have pushed himself anyway, driven by male vanity, by pride. Did he clutch his chest before he went down? Did he try to call for help?
I would not have heard him anyway. I was too busy trying to run down shadows. Trying to salvage my own pride.
“Detective Rizzoli?” said Officer Doud. He’d approached so quietly, she had not even realized he was standing beside her.
“Yes?”
“I’m afraid we’ve found another one.”
“What?”
“Another body.”
Stunned, she could say nothing as she followed Doud across the damp grass, his flashlight lighting the way through the blackness. A flicker of more lights far ahead marked their destination. By the time she finally detected the first whiff of decay, they were several hundred yards from where the security guard had fallen.
“Who found it?” she asked.
“Agent Dean.”
“Why was he searching all the way out here?”
“I guess he was doing a general sweep.”
Dean turned to face her as she approached. “I think we’ve found Karenna Ghent,” he said.
The woman lay atop a grave site, her black hair splayed around her, clusters of leaves arranged among the dark strands in mock decoration of mortified flesh. She had been dead long enough for her belly to bloat, for purge fluid to trickle from her nostrils. But the impact of all these details faded in the greater horror of what had been done to the lower abdomen. Rizzoli stared at the gaping wound. A single transverse slice.
The ground seemed to give way beneath her feet and she stumbled backward, blindly reaching for support and finding only air.
It was Dean who caught her, grasping her firmly by the elbow. “It’s not a coincidence,” he said.
She was silent, her gaze still fixed on that terrible wound. She remembered similar wounds on other women. Remembered a summer even hotter than this one.
“He’s been following the news,” said Dean. “He knows you’re the lead investigator. He knows how to turn the tables, how to make a game of cat and mouse go both ways. That’s what it is to him, now. A game.”
Although she registered his words, she didn’t understand what he was trying to tell her. “What game?”
“Didn’t you see the name?” He aimed his flashlight at the words carved into the granite headstone:
Beloved husband and father
Anthony Rizzoli
1901-1962
“It’s a taunt,” said Dean. “And it’s aimed straight at you.”