The doorbell rang.
She snapped straight, heart slamming against her chest. She forced herself to rise from the sofa and peeked through the glass panel.
A dark-haired young woman, pretty and petite, stood on the porch.
Maura took a deep breath and felt the tension go out of her. She opened the door. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry to bother you,” the woman said, “but I’m trying to find David Chatworth’s house. I know he lives around here somewhere, but my cell phone just died. Could I borrow your phone book?”
“Of course. Hold on,” said Maura. She turned toward the kitchen, where she kept the phone directory. Made it only halfway up the hall when she heard the front door suddenly slam shut.
Footsteps closed in behind her.
Jane sat at her desk, troubled by her conversation with Maura. Flash of recognition was how Maura had described her reaction to O’Brien, a certainty that she’d met him. But it couldn’t have happened on Saturday night, because O’Brien was at his friend’s house in Swampscott.
She pulled out her file on their interview with Monica Vargas, the woman whom O’Brien had been visiting. Thirty-five years old and an architect, she lived alone in an impressive house with a view of the sea. She had been definite about O’Brien’s visit, had told Jane and Frost that O’Brien arrived around six pm, dined with Monica and her mother, and the three of them had watched Woody Allen DVDs. Around midnight, O’Brien left her house. Monica had offered the police her mother’s phone number, should they need further corroboration.
Yes, a rock-solid alibi.
But now, thinking back to that interview, Jane recalled details about Monica that suddenly seemed significant. Her poise, her beauty. An attractive female professional, confident and accomplished.
Like Sarah Shapiro and Kitty O’Brien. Like Maura Isles.
She spun around to her computer and was just about to do a background check on Monica Vargas when her phone rang.
“We finally got into Scanlon’s TracFone,” said Frost.
“We have access to his calls?”
“We have everything. And you won’t believe what’s here.”
She saw the excitement on Frost’s face when she walked into the crime lab. He sat in front of a computer screen as a printer churned out pages of documents.
“He hardly made any calls on this phone,” he said. “But he did use it to send text messages.” He pointed to the computer screen. “We’ve got them all here, dating back four years. About a dozen of them. And they were all sent to the same recipient.”
Jane frowned at the date of the most recent text. “Scanlon sent one Saturday night. Eight thirty pm.”
“Look at what he wrote.” Frost clicked on the body of the text, and one sentence appeared. It was an address in Brookline. Maura’s.
“This is how Scanlon told his partner where to find the next catch,” she said, and she gave Frost an excited slap on the back. “We’ve got the second perp!”
“Wait. You need to see something else. The other texts.” He scrolled down the list. “See the dates? This one here, eighteen months ago, corresponds to the attack on Sarah Shapiro. And this one, just before it, was Kitty O’Brien.”
“So we have a record of every attack. Every victim’s address.”
“Right. Now look at this one.” He clicked on a text from nine months earlier.
Jane stared at the address. Swampscott. “It’s Monica Vargas! She was a victim, too?”
“Only she never reported it,” said Frost. “And Julia Chan, the woman who gave Sarah Shapiro her alibi? Her address is in here as well. Somehow, these women managed to connect. They found each other. We’ve got a whole nest of victims here, and they’re covering for each other. We can’t trust anyone’s alibi.”
“Which means Harry O’Brien could have killed Scanlon. He could have been … oh, Jesus.” Jane snatched up her cell phone.
“What?”
“Maura spoke to Harry O’Brien this evening. She recognized him.”
“Does he know that?”
Jane hung up. “She’s not answering her phone.”
It was dark when they arrived at Maura’s house. There were no lights on inside, and the front door was unlocked. Jane and Frost glanced at each other, a grim acknowledgment of what could very well await them. They both drew their weapons, and Jane gave the door a nudge. She slipped through first, moved into the living room.
Suddenly a lamp came on. Jane froze.
Harry O’Brien stood clutching Maura as a shield in front of him, his gun pressed to her temple.
“Drop it, O’Brien!” Jane ordered, her weapon raised. She heard Frost move beside her, caught a peripheral view of his gun, clutched in both hands.
“We don’t want violence, Detective,” another voice said, and Jane glanced in surprise at Sarah Shapiro, who rose to her feet from the armchair. “Harry just wants to settle things, once and for all.”
“By killing a witness?” said Jane. “The one person who remembers he was here that night?” She looked at O’Brien. “You were stalking Scanlon. Oh, it was in the name of justice, I get that. The scum deserved to die, and any jury will sympathize.”
“I don’t want to go to jail,” he said.
“You should’ve thought of that before you stabbed him.”
“Did I?” He shook his head. “I told you, I was with a friend that night.”
“She’s covering for you. That alibi will fall apart.”
“No, it won’t. We built a fortress, Detective. You just haven’t realized it yet, because you haven’t finished your job.”
“I know you’re all in this together. And I know this is not helping your case.” She tightened her grip on the Glock. “Drop the gun.”
“Why? I have nothing to lose.”
“Your life?”
O’Brien’s laugh was bitter. “My life is over. It ended when Kitty died. I’m just tying up loose ends.”
“Like Scanlon?”
“And his partner.”
He knows there’s a second man. “We will find that partner, Harry. I swear we will. And he’ll pay.”
“Oh, I know you’ll find him.”
“Drop the gun and we’ll talk. We’ll work on finding him together. We’ll see justice done.”
He seemed to weigh her words, and she saw the struggle in his eyes. The indecision. “It never comes soon enough,” he said softly.
“What doesn’t?”
“Justice. Sometimes you have to give it a nudge.” With that, he pushed Maura so hard that she went sprawling against the sofa. He raised his gun, and the barrel was aimed directly at Jane.
Gunfire exploded as both Jane and Frost opened fire. The bullets punched into O’Brien’s chest, sent him slamming backward against the bookcase. He leaned there staring at them for a moment, an odd smile on his lips, the gun already falling from his hand. Slowly he slid down to the floor, and Sarah dropped to her knees beside him, sobbing, screaming.
He had not fired a single shot.
Maura crouched over the body, felt for a pulse, and began CPR. But staring into O’Brien’s eyes, Jane saw the light fade away. And she knew there was nothing left to save.
A day later, they found the body.
They tracked down the recipient of Scanlon’s text messages, and it led them to the handsome Newton residence of William Heathcote, age forty-two. There they found Mr. Heathcote slumped in the driver’s seat of his silver Mercedes, which was parked inside his garage. He had been dead for several days, which meant he could well have died the same night as Scanlon. The cause of death was immediately apparent: a single gunshot to the right temple. A Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter pistol, reportedly stolen in Miami a year before, was in his hand.
In the Mercedes trunk was a plastic bag containing two chefs’ knives, both covered in dried blood.
It was almost certainly Scanlon’s blood, thought Jane as she watched the CSU team tag the evidence. No case could come more pret
tily tied up with a bow. The evidence was all there to help the police draw the obvious conclusion: Heathcote stabbed Scanlon to death in Olmsted Park, then drove home and committed suicide. In a single bloody evening, two predators met their end.
Jane didn’t believe it for a second; neither did Maura.
They stood together in Heathcote’s driveway, watching as the Boston PD tow truck pulled away with the Mercedes, bound for the crime lab. It was late afternoon, dark clouds were moving in, and the air felt prickly with impending thunder.
But for Maura, the storm had already passed. “Harry was a hero, Jane,” she said. “He never meant to hurt me. He came to my house without a single bullet in that gun.”
“We didn’t know that. We had no choice.”
“Of course you had no choice. It was supposed to happen this way. He wanted to go out with a blaze of publicity, so his daughter would be remembered. And he wouldn’t have to face any questions.” Maura paused. “He had cancer.”
“Harry told you that?”
“No. Dr. Bristol did the autopsy this morning. Harry’s body was riddled with tumors. I think he knew he was dying, and he chose this way to end it.”
Leaving me with the nightmares, thought Jane, looking up at the darkening sky. Taking a man’s life leaves a stain on your soul, even if you’re forced to do it. Even if the man you kill wants you to pull that trigger.
“We both know it was a conspiracy,” said Jane. “Harry and those victims, they planned this together. They covered for each other. For all I know, they each took their turn stabbing Christopher Scanlon. Fifteen stab wounds, two different knives? And not a single fingerprint.” Jane sighed in frustration. “I know what happened, I just can’t prove it.”
“Do you really want to?”
“You’re the one who’s always hung up on the facts, the truth. But you’re willing to ignore the truth of this case?”
“I could have been a victim, too. I was like a staked goat, drugged and laid out on my sofa, where anything could have been done to me. But it never happened because they stopped it. I don’t know which of them was there in my house, or how many. All I know is that this time, the victims fought back. They caught and killed two monsters.” Maura looked straight at her. “And they saved me.”
Maybe that’s worth more than any truth, thought Jane as she watched Maura climb into her Lexus and drive away. And she remembered what Harry O’Brien had said: Justice. Sometimes you have to give it a nudge.
That you did, Mr. O’Brien. That you did.
Read on for an exciting peek at
GIRL MISSING
By Tess Gerritsen
An hour before her shift started, an hour before she was even supposed to be there, they rolled the first corpse through the door.
Up until that moment, Kat Novak’s day had been going better than usual. Her car had started on the first turn of the key. Traffic had been sparse on Telegraph, and she’d hit all the green lights. She’d managed to slip into her office at five to seven, and for the next hour she could lounge guiltlessly at her desk with a jelly doughnut and the morning edition of the Albion Herald. She made a point of skipping the obituaries. Chances were she already knew all about them.
Then a gurney with a black body bag rolled past her doorway. Oh Lord, she thought. In about thirty seconds, Clark was going to knock at her door and ask for favors. With a sense of dread, Kat listened to the gurney wheels grind down the hall. She heard the autopsy room doors whisk open and shut, heard the distant rumble of male voices. She counted ten seconds, fifteen. And there it was, just as she’d anticipated: the sound of Clark’s Reeboks squeaking across the linoleum floor.
He appeared in her doorway. “Morning, Kat,” he said.
She sighed. “Good morning, Clark.”
“Can you believe it? They just wheeled one in.”
“Yeah, the nerve of them.”
“It’s already seven ten,” he said. A note of pleading crept into his voice. “If you could just do me this favor …”
“But I’m not here.” She licked a dollop of raspberry jelly from her fingers. “Until eight o’clock, I’m nothing more than a figment of your imagination.”
“I don’t have time to process this one. Beth’s got the kids packed and ready to take off, and here I am, stuck with another Jane Doe. Have a heart.”
“This is the third time this month.”
“But I’ve got a family. They expect me to spend time with them. You’re a free agent.”
“Right. I’m a divorcée, not a temp.”
Clark shuffled into her office and leaned his ample behind against her desk. “Just this once. Beth and I, we’re having problems, you know, and I want this vacation to start off right. I’ll return the favor sometime. I promise.”
Sighing, Kat folded up the Herald. “Okay,” she said. “What’ve you got?”
Clark was already pulling off his white coat, visibly shifting to vacation mode. “Jane Doe. No obvious trauma. Another body-fluid special. Sykes and Ratchet are in there with her.”
“They bring her in?”
“Yeah. So you’ll have a decent police report to work with.”
Kat rose to her feet and brushed powdered sugar off her scrub pants. “You owe me,” she said, as they headed into the hall.
“I know, I know.” He stopped at his office and grabbed his jacket—a fly-fisherman’s version, complete with a zillion pockets, some with little feathers poking out.
“Leave a few trout for the rest of us.”
He grinned and gave her a salute. “Into the wilds of Maine I go,” he said, heading for the elevator. “See you next week.”
Feeling resigned, Kat pushed open the door to the autopsy room and went in.
The body, still sealed in its black bag, lay on the slab. Lieutenant Lou Sykes and Sergeant Vince Ratchet, veterans of the local knife and gun club, were waiting for her. Sykes—a black homicide detective who always insisted on mixing corpses with Versace—looked slim and dapper as usual in a suit and tie. His partner, Vince Ratchet, was, in contrast, a perpetual candidate for Slim-Fast. Ratchet was peering in fascination at a specimen jar on the shelf.
“What the hell is that?” he asked, pointing to the jar. Good old Vince. He was never afraid to sound stupid.
“That’s the right middle lobe of a lung,” Kat said.
“I would’ve guessed it was a brain.”
Sykes laughed. “That’s why she’s the doc and you’re just a dumb cop.” He straightened his tie and looked at her. “Isn’t Clark doing this one?”
Kat snapped on a pair of gloves. “Afraid I am.”
“Thought your shift started at eight.”
“Tell me about it.” She went to the slab and gazed down at the bag, feeling her usual reluctance to open the zipper, to reveal what lay beneath the black plastic. How many of these bags have I opened? she wondered. A hundred? Two hundred? Each one contained its own private horror story. This was the hardest part—sliding down the zipper and unveiling the contents. Once a body was revealed, and once she’d weathered the initial shock of its appearance, she could set to work with a scientist’s dispassion. But the first glimpse, the first reaction—that was always pure emotion, something over which she had no control.
“So, guys,” she said. “What’s the story here?”
Ratchet came forward and flipped open his notebook. It was like an extension of his arm, that notebook; she’d never seen him without it. “Caucasian female, no ID, age twenty to thirty. Body found four a.m. this morning, off South Lexington. No apparent trauma, no witnesses, no nothing.”
“South Lexington,” said Kat, and images of that neighborhood flashed through her mind. She knew the area too well—the streets, the back alleys, the playgrounds rimmed with barbed wire. And, looming above it all, the seven buildings, as grim as twenty-story concrete headstones. “The Projects?” she asked.
“Where else?”
“Who found her?”
“City trash pi
ckup,” said Sykes. “She was in an alley between two of the Project buildings, sort of wedged against a Dumpster.”
“As if she was placed there? Or died there?”
Sykes glanced at Ratchet. “You were at the scene first. What do you say, Vince?”
“Looked to me like she died there. Just lay down, sort of curled up against the Dumpster, and called it quits.”
It was time. Steeling herself for that first glimpse, Kat reached for the zipper and opened the bag. Sykes and Ratchet both took a step backward, an instinctive reaction she herself had to quell. The zipper parted and the plastic fell away to reveal the corpse.
It wasn’t bad; at least it appeared intact. Compared to some of the corpses she’d seen, this one was actually in excellent shape. The woman was a bleached blonde, about thirty, perhaps younger. Her face looked like marble, pale and cold. She was dressed in a long-sleeved purple pullover of some sort of polyester blend, a short black skirt with a patent leather belt, black tights, and brand-new Nikes. Her only jewelry was a dime-store friendship ring and a Timex watch—still ticking. Rigor mortis had frozen her limbs into a vague semblance of a fetal position. Both fists were clenched tight, as though in her last moment of life they’d been caught in spasm.
Kat took a few photos, then picked up a cassette recorder and began to dictate. “Subject is a white female, blonde, found in alley off South Lexington around oh four hundred …” Sykes and Ratchet, already knowing what would follow, took off their jackets and reached into a linen cart for some gowns—medium for Sykes, extra large for Ratchet. The gloves came next. They both knew the drill; they’d been cops for years, and partners for four months. It was an odd pairing, Kat thought, like Abbott and Costello. So far, though, it seemed to work.
She put down the cassette recorder. “Okay, guys,” she said. “On to the next step.”
The undressing. The three of them worked together to strip the corpse. Rigor mortis made it difficult; Kat had to cut away the skirt. The outer clothing was set aside. The tights and underwear were to be examined later for evidence of recent sexual contact. When at last the corpse lay naked, Kat once again reached for the camera and clicked off a few more photos for the evidence file.
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