“I was never here,” he said. “When the police come to talk to me, I’ll tell them I was home in bed the whole time. It was Patrick who killed all those girls and buried them in his yard. Patrick who killed you. And then he shot himself.”
Behind her, hand concealed in shadow, she clutched her weapon. But Mark already had his gun pointed at her. He would have the first shot, the best shot. There’d be no time for her to aim, no time to do anything but squeeze off the last bullet she would probably ever fire. Even as she lifted her weapon, she knew she was too slow, too late.
But at that instant Mark gasped in a startled breath and turned away from her, his attention shifting, his gun swinging toward someone—something—else.
Jane brought up her gun and fired. Three shots, four. Her reflexes on automatic. The bullets slammed into his torso and Mark staggered backward, collapsing against an end table. It gave way in a crash of splintering wood.
Pulse whooshing in her ears, Jane rose to her feet and stood over his body, her weapon aimed and ready should he miraculously spring back to life. He did not move.
But the shadows did.
It was just a whisper of air, utterly soundless. A flutter of black against black at the periphery of her vision. Slowly she turned toward the figure that stood cloaked in darkness. Though she was clutching a gun, though she could have fired, she did not. She simply stared at a face crowned with silvery fur. At jagged teeth that gleamed in the moonlight.
“Who are you?” she whispered. “What are you?”
A breath of wind brushed her face, and she blinked. When she opened her eyes again, the face was gone. Frantically she glanced around the room, searching for whatever had been standing there, but she saw only moonlight and shadow. Was it really here, or did I imagine it? Did I create a creature out of darkness and my own fear?
Through the window, a movement caught her eye. She looked out at the moonlit garden and saw it, then, darting across the lawn and vanishing into the cover of trees.
“Detective Rizzoli?”
With a start, Jane whirled around to see the two women in the doorway, Iris sagging heavily against Bella.
“She needs an ambulance!” said Bella.
“I am not as young as I once was,” groaned Iris. “Or as swift.”
Gently, Bella lowered her teacher to the floor. Cradling Iris in her lap she began to murmur in Chinese, words that she repeated again and again, as though chanting a magical spell. Words of healing.
Words of hope.
Jane stood among the jumble of Brookline PD and Boston PD vehicles parked in Patrick Dion’s driveway and watched the sun come up. She had not slept in twenty-four hours, had not eaten since lunch the day before, and her first glimpse of dawn was so dazzling that she closed her eyes, suddenly dizzy, and swayed backward against a police cruiser. When she opened her eyes again, Maura and Frost had emerged from the house and were now walking toward her.
“You should go home,” said Maura.
“That’s what everyone tells me.” She looked toward the residence. “You finished in there?”
“They’re bringing out the bodies now.”
Frost frowned as Jane bent down to pull on shoe covers. “You know, you probably shouldn’t go in the house,” he said.
“Like I haven’t already been in there?”
“That’s the point.”
He didn’t need to explain; she already understood. She’d been the one to take down Mark Mallory, and it was almost certainly her gun that had fired the bullet into Patrick Dion’s brain. Her weapon was now in the custody of ballistics, and she missed its weight on her belt.
The front door opened and the first stretcher came out, bearing one of the bodies. In silence they watched it roll toward the waiting morgue van.
“The older man had one bullet wound. Right temple, close range,” said Maura.
“Patrick Dion,” said Jane.
“I have a feeling we’re going to find gunshot residue on his right hand. Does that remind you of another crime scene?”
“The Red Phoenix,” said Jane softly. “Wu Weimin.”
“His death was called a suicide.”
“What are you going to call this one, Maura?”
Maura sighed. “We have no witnesses, do we?”
Jane shook her head. “Bella said that she and Iris were upstairs when it happened. They didn’t see it.”
“But there was another intruder in the house,” Frost pointed out. “You said you saw him.”
“I don’t know what I saw.” Jane looked toward the garden. There, last night by moonlight, she had caught a glimpse of something slipping into the woods. “I don’t think I’ll ever know.”
Maura turned as the second body was wheeled out of the house. “I could call Patrick Dion’s death a suicide, but it’s too similar to the Red Phoenix, Jane. It feels staged.”
“I think it’s meant to be similar. It’s meant to be an echo from the past. Justice completing its circle.”
“Justice doesn’t qualify as a manner of death.”
Jane looked at her. “Maybe it should.”
“Hey, Frost! Rizzoli!” Detective Tam waved to them from a grove of trees, where he stood with a team of criminalists.
“What is it?” said Jane.
“Cadaver dog’s just scented on something!”
The missing girls. Surely there were more names that had not made it onto Ingersoll’s list, other girls who’d vanished in the years since Charlotte Dion disappeared. And what more convenient place to hide the bodies than in this private sanctuary, closed off from prying eyes? As they approached the CSU team, she saw the dog watching her with alert eyes, tail happily wagging. The dog was the only cheerful one among them. The men and women gathered in the shadow of those trees stood silent and grim-faced because they understood what most likely lay beneath their feet.
“The soil’s been disturbed here,” Tam said, pointing to a patch of bare earth under the trees. “It was covered with loose brush to conceal it.”
A recent burial. Jane looked around at the tree-shaded grounds and the dense shrubbery, at all the secret spots hidden by shade and brush. This was evil on a scale she could scarcely comprehend. How many bodies are lying here, she wondered. How many silent girls who will finally be able to speak? Suddenly she felt overwhelmed by the task ahead of them. She was bruised, hungry, and weary of death.
“Frost, I think I’ll leave this to you. I’m going home,” she said and walked away, back across the lawn. Back into the sunshine.
“Rizzoli,” said Tam. He followed her toward the driveway. “Just wanted to let you know, I spoke to the hospital a little while ago. Iris Fang is out of surgery and awake.”
“Is she going to be okay?”
“She took a bullet to the thigh and lost a lot of blood, but she’ll recover. She seems to be a pretty tough bird.”
“We should all be so tough.”
It was bright on that driveway with the morning sun in their faces. Tam pulled sunglasses from his pocket and slipped them on. “Maybe I should head over to the hospital? Get a statement from her?” he suggested.
“Later. Right now, I need you here. Brookline asked us to assist, so we’re going to be spending a lot of time on this property.”
“So I’m staying with the team?”
She squinted at him, the sun’s glare piercing her tired eyes. “Yeah, until we wrap this up, I’ll ask your District A-1 supervisor to let us keep you. That is, if you want to stay with homicide.”
“Thanks. I’d like that a lot,” he said simply. As he turned to leave, she suddenly noticed a bright streak reflecting off the back of his head. Clinging to his jet-black hair, the lone strand stood out like glitter. A silver hair.
“Tam?” she said.
He turned. “Yeah?”
For a moment she just looked at him, wanting to read his eyes, but he was wearing sunglasses, and in those mirrored lenses all she saw was her own reflection. She remembered how he�
��d slipped so quickly and silently through Ingersoll’s window. Remembered how the Knapp Street surveillance camera had captured both her and Frost clumsily tumbling onto the fire escape, but not Tam. Maybe I’m a ghost, he had joked. Not a ghost, she thought, but someone just as elusive. Someone who’d been present at every step of the investigation, who knew what was being said and what was being planned. She could not see his expression, could not probe for secrets, but she knew they were there, waiting to be discovered. Secrets that she decided she would let him keep.
For now.
“Did you have a question, Rizzoli?” he asked.
“Never mind,” she said. And she turned and walked away.
It was happy hour at J. P. Doyle’s, and the bar was packed with so many off-duty cops that Jane had trouble spotting Korsak. Only after the waitress pointed her toward the dining room did she finally find him, sitting alone in a booth keeping company with a fried seafood platter and a pint of ale.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “What’s doin’?”
“Hope you don’t mind that I already ordered.”
She eyed his mound of deep-fried shrimp. “Guess you’re off the diet, huh?”
“Don’t get on my case, okay? Day’s been lousy like a bastard and I need my comfort food, I really do.” He stabbed four shrimp and stuffed them into his mouth. “You gonna order something or what?”
She waved over the waitress, ordered a small salad, and watched Korsak polish off another half dozen shrimp.
“That all you’re eating?” he asked when her order arrived.
“I’m going home for supper. Haven’t spent much time there the past few days.”
“Yeah, I hear it’s been a real circus over there in Brookline. How many bodies they dig up so far?”
“Six, all look to be females. It’ll be months before we’re done searching the property, and they may have other burial spots we don’t know about. So we’re looking at Mark Mallory’s residence as well.”
Korsak lifted his ale in a toast. “What is it you ladies like to say? You go, girl!”
She looked at his grease-splattered shirt and thought: He has the man breasts to actually pull off that phrase. She raised her glass of water and they made an impressive clunk, splashing beer on his ever-shrinking mound of shrimp.
“Just one fly in the ointment,” she said as she picked up her fork. “There’s no way I’ll ever close the files on either John Doe or Jane Doe. And it was her death that set off the whole thing.”
“Never found the sword that killed her?”
“Vanished. Probably walked off that night with whatever I saw disappear into the trees. We’re never going to get anyone to confess. But I have a pretty good idea who did it.”
“Enough to convict?”
“Honestly? I don’t want to convict. Sometimes, Korsak, just doing my job means I’d have to do the wrong thing.”
Korsak laughed. “Don’t ever let Dr. Isles hear you say that.”
“No, she wouldn’t understand,” Jane agreed. What Maura understood was facts, and those facts had led to the conviction of Officer Wayne Graff a few days ago. Yes or no, black or white, for Maura the line was always perfectly clear. But the longer that Jane was a cop, the less certain she was of where that line between right and wrong was drawn.
She dug into her salad and took a bite. “So what’s doing with you? What’d you want to talk to me about?”
He sighed and put down his fork. Very few things, other than an empty plate, could make Vince Korsak surrender his fork. “You know I love your mom,” he said.
“Yeah, I think I got that part figured out.”
“I mean, I really love her. She’s fun and smart and sexy.”
“You can stop right there.” She set down her own fork. “Just tell me where this is going.”
“All’s I want is to marry her.”
“And she’s already said yes. So?”
“The problem is your brother. He calls her three times a day, trying to talk her out of it. It’s pretty clear he despises me.”
“Frankie doesn’t like any kind of change, period.”
“He’s got her all upset and now she’s thinking of calling off the wedding, just to keep him happy.” His deep sigh ended on what sounded close to a whimper, and he turned to stare at the booth across the aisle. At a toddler in a high chair who took one look at him and wailed. The mother shot Korsak a dirty look and pulled the baby into her arms. Poor Korsak, homely enough to scare small children who couldn’t see past his coarse exterior to the kind heart inside. But Mom sees it. And she deserves a good man like him.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll talk to Frankie.” If that didn’t work, she’d also give her brother a good whack upside the head.
His head lifted. “You’d do that for me? Really?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know. I got the idea you weren’t wicked crazy about me and your ma, you know. Getting it on.”
“I just don’t want to hear the sweaty details, okay?” She reached across the table and gave him an affectionate punch on the arm. “You’re cool, Korsak. And you make her happy. That’s all I care about.” She stood up. “I gotta get home. You okay now?”
“I love her. You know that.”
“I know, I know.”
“I love you, too.” He scowled and added: “But not your brother.”
“That I totally understand.”
She left him to his seafood platter and exited through the crowded bar. Just as she reached the door, she heard someone call out: “Rizzoli!”
It was retired Detective Buckholz, who had investigated Charlotte Dion’s disappearance nineteen years ago. He was sitting at his usual place at the counter, a glass of scotch in front of him. “I gotta talk to you,” he said.
“I’m on my way home.”
“Then I’ll walk out with you.”
“Could we talk tomorrow, Hank?”
“No. I got something to say, and it’s really bugging me.” He drained his glass and slapped it down on the bar. “Let’s step outside. Too damn noisy in here.”
They walked out of Doyle’s and stood in the parking lot. It was a cool spring evening, the smell of damp earth in the air. Jane zipped up her jacket and glanced at her parked car, wondering how long this would take and whether she had time to pick up milk on the way home.
“You know your case against Patrick Dion and Mark Mallory? You got it wrong,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s been plastered all over the news. Two rich guys hunting girls together for twenty-five years. The whole country’s talking about it, wondering why we didn’t notice it. Why we didn’t stop them.”
“They were smart about it, Hank. They didn’t escalate and they didn’t get sloppy. They managed to stay in control.”
“Patrick Dion had alibis for some of those disappearances.”
“Because they took turns snatching the girls. Mallory abducted some of them, Dion took the others. We’ve already found six bodies on Dion’s property, and I’m sure we’ll find others.”
“But not Charlotte’s. I guarantee you won’t find her there.”
“How do you know?”
“When I worked that case, I didn’t do a half-assed job, okay? It may have been nineteen years ago, but I remember the details. Last night, I pulled out my old notes, just to be sure of my facts. I know Patrick Dion was in London the day Charlotte went missing. He flew home that evening, right after he got the news.”
“Okay, so you’re right about that detail. It’s easy to confirm.”
“I’m also right about Mark Mallory. He couldn’t have snatched Charlotte, either, because he had an alibi, too. He was visiting his mother. She’d had a stroke a year earlier, and she was in a rehab hospital.”
She eyed him in the fading daylight. Buckholz was defending his own record, so he couldn’t possibly be objective. Judging by his wasted face, his frayed shirt, retirement ha
d not been kind to him. He practically lived at Doyle’s, as if only there, surrounded by cops, did he feel alive again. Useful again.
Humor the old guy. She gave him a sympathetic nod. “I’ll review the case file and get back to you.”
“You think you can just brush me off? I was a good cop, Rizzoli. I checked out that boy. When you’re talking about abduction, you always look at the family first, so I took a good long look at her stepbrother. Every move he made that day. There was no way Mark Mallory could have snatched Charlotte.”
“Because he said he was visiting his mother? Come on, Hank. You can’t take his word, or his mother’s. She would have lied to protect her own kid.”
“But you can trust the medical record.”
“What?”
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded paper, which he thrust at her. “I got that from Barbara Mallory’s hospital chart. It’s a photocopy of the nurses’ notes. Look at the entry for April twentieth, one PM.”
Jane scanned down to what the nurse had written at that time. BP 115/80, Pulse 84. Patient resting comfortably. Son here visiting and requests that his mother be moved to a quieter room, away from nurses’ station.
“At one PM,” said Buckholz, “Charlotte Dion was with her school group in Faneuil Hall. The teachers first noticed her missing around one fifteen. So tell me how Mark Mallory, who’s sitting in his mom’s hospital room twenty-five miles away, manages to snatch his stepsister off a street in Boston only fifteen minutes later?”
Jane read and reread the nurse’s entry. There was no mistaking the date and time. This is all wrong, she thought.
Except it wasn’t. It was there in black and white.
“Stop making it look like I screwed up,” said Buckholz. “It’s obvious that your two perps didn’t take Charlotte.”
“Then who did?” Jane murmured.
“We’ll probably never find out. I’m betting it was just some guy who saw her and made an opportunistic grab.”
Some guy. A perp they had yet to identify.
She drove home with the photocopied page on the seat beside her and thought about the odds. Two killers in her family, and Charlotte gets snatched by an unrelated stranger? She pulled into her apartment parking space and sat brooding, not yet ready to walk into the noise and the chaos of motherhood. She thought about what they knew for certain: that Dion and Mallory had been stalking and killing girls together. That they’d buried at least six bodies on Dion’s property. Had Charlotte discovered her father’s secret? Was that the real reason they had to dispose of her? Had it been arranged through a third party, so that both Patrick and Mark had solid alibis?
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