Dropping to her knees beside him, she tore open the priest’s shirt and saw where the bullet had penetrated. She heard the ominous sound of air being sucked into the chest. She pressed her hand to the wound, and felt warm blood and clammy flesh. He was shaking from the cold. Wind swept down the street, its bite as sharp as fangs. And I am wearing your coat, she thought. The coat you gave me to keep me warm.
Through the howl of the wind, she heard the wail of the approaching ambulance.
His gaze was unfocused, consciousness fading.
“Stay with me Daniel,” she said. “Do you hear me?” Her voice broke. “You’re going to live.” She leaned forward, tears sliding onto his face as she pleaded into his ear.
“Please. Do it for me, Daniel. You have to live. You have to live.…”
TWENTY-THREE
The TV in the hospital waiting room was tuned, as always, to CNN.
Maura sat with her bandaged foot propped up on a chair, her gaze fixed on the news banner crawling across the bottom of the screen, but she did not register a single word. Though she was now dressed in a wool sweater and corduroy slacks, she still felt cold, and did not think she would ever feel warm again. Four hours, she thought. He has been on the operating table for four hours. She looked at her hand and could still see Daniel Brophy’s blood under her fingernails, could still feel his heart throb like a struggling bird against her palm. She did not need to see an X ray to know what damage the bullet had done; she’d seen the lethal track that a Glaser blue-tip had torn in Rat Lady’s chest, and knew what the surgeons now faced. A lung sliced by exploding shrapnel. Blood pouring from a dozen different vessels. The panic that grips the staff in the O.R. when they see life hemorrhaging out, and the surgeons cannot snap on clamps fast enough.
She looked up as Rizzoli came into the room, carrying a cup of coffee and a cell phone. “We found your phone by the side gate,” she said, handing it to Maura. “And the coffee’s for you. Drink it.”
Maura took a sip. It was too sweet, but tonight she welcomed the sugar. Welcomed any source of energy into her tired and bruised body.
“Is there anything else I can get you?” asked Rizzoli. “Anything else you need?”
“Yes.” Maura looked up from her coffee. “I want you to tell me the truth.”
“I always tell the truth, Doc. You know that.”
“Then tell me that Victor had nothing to do with this.”
“He didn’t.”
“You’re absolutely certain?”
“As sure as I can be. Your ex may be a major-league prick. He may have lied to you. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t kill anyone.”
Maura sank back against the couch and sighed. Staring down at the steaming cup, she asked: “And Matthew Sutcliffe? Is he really a doctor?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. M.D. from the University of Vermont. Did his internal medicine residency in Boston. It’s interesting, Doc. If you’ve got that M.D. behind your name, you’re golden. You can walk into a hospital, tell the staff that your patient’s just been admitted, and no one questions you. Not when the patient’s relative calls and backs up your story.”
“A physician who works as a paid killer?”
“We don’t know that Octagon paid him. In fact, I don’t think the company had anything to do with these murders. Sutcliffe may have done it for his own reasons.”
“What reasons?”
“To protect himself. To bury the truth about what happened in India.” Seeing Maura’s bewildered look, Rizzoli said, “Octagon finally released that list of personnel working at their plant in India. There was a factory doctor.”
“He was the one?”
Rizzoli nodded. “Matthew Sutcliffe, M.D.”
Maura stared at the TV, but her mind was not on the images playing across the screen. She thought of funeral pyres, of skulls savagely fractured. And she remembered her nightmare of fire consuming human flesh. Of bodies, still moving, still writhing in the flames.
She said, “In Bhopal, six thousand people died.”
Rizzoli nodded.
“But the next morning, there were hundreds of thousands who were still alive.” Maura looked at Rizzoli. “Where were the survivors at Bara? Rat Lady couldn’t have been the only one.”
“And if she wasn’t, what happened to the others?”
They stared at each other, both of them now understanding what Sutcliffe had been desperate to conceal. Not the accident itself, but the aftermath. And his role in it. She thought of the horror that must have greeted him that night, after the poisonous cloud had swept across the village. Entire families, lying dead in their beds. Bodies sprawled outside, frozen in their final agonies. The factory doctor would have been the first sent out to assess the damage.
Perhaps he did not realize that some of the victims were still alive until after the decision was made to burn the corpses. Perhaps it was a groan that alerted him, or the twitching of a limb, as they dragged bodies to the flaming pyre.
With the smell of death and seared flesh rising in the air, he must have regarded the living with panic. But by then they could not turn back; they had already gone too far.
This is what you didn’t want the world to know: what you did with the living.
“Why did he attack you tonight?” asked Rizzoli.
Maura shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“You saw him at the hospital. You spoke to him. What happened there?”
Maura thought about her conversation with Sutcliffe. They had stood gazing down at Ursula, and had talked about the autopsy. About lab tests and death summaries.
And toxicology screens.
She said, “I think we’ll know the answer when we do the postmortem.”
“What do you expect to find?”
“The reason why she went into cardiac arrest. You were there that night. You told me that just before she coded, she was panicking. That she looked terrified.”
“Because he was there.”
Maura nodded. “She knew what was about to happen, and she couldn’t speak, not with a tube in her throat. I’ve seen too many codes. I know what they’re like. Everyone crowding into the room, so much confusion. Half a dozen drugs going in at once.” She paused. “Ursula was allergic to penicillin.”
“Would it show up on the drug screen?”
“I don’t know. But he’d worry about that, wouldn’t he? And I was the only person insisting on the test.”
“Detective Rizzoli?”
They turned to see an OR nurse standing in the doorway.
“Dr. Demetrios wanted you to know that everything went well. They’re closing him up now. The patient should be moving to the surgical ICU in about an hour.”
“Dr. Isles here has been waiting to see him.”
“It will be a while before he can have any visitors. We’re keeping him intubated and under sedation. It’s better if you come back later in the day. Maybe after lunchtime.”
Maura nodded and slowly rose to her feet.
So did Rizzoli. “I’ll drive you home,” she said.
It was already dawn by the time Maura walked into her house. She looked at the trail of dried blood she’d left on the floor, the evidence of her ordeal. She walked through each room, as though to reclaim it from the darkness. To reassert that this was still her home, and that fear had no place within these walls. She went into the kitchen, and found that the broken window had already been boarded up against the cold.
Jane’s orders, no doubt.
Somewhere, a phone was ringing.
She picked up the receiver on the wall, but there was no dial tone. The line had not yet been repaired.
My cell phone, she thought.
She went into the living room where she’d left her purse. By the time she pulled out the phone, the ringing had stopped. She punched in her code to hear the message.
The call had been from Victor. She sank onto the couch, stunned to hear his voice.
“I know it’s too soon for
me to be calling you. And you’re probably wondering why the hell you should listen to me, after … well, after everything that’s happened. But now it’s all out in the open. You know I have nothing to gain by this. So maybe you’ll believe me when I tell you how much I miss you, Maura. I think we could make it work again. We could give it another chance. Give me another chance, won’t you? Please.”
For a long time she sat on the couch, holding the phone in numb hands, and staring at the cold fireplace. Some flames cannot be rekindled, she thought. Some flames are better left dead.
She slipped the phone back into her purse. Rose to her feet. And went to clean the blood off her floor.
By ten A.M., the sun had finally broken through the clouds, and as she drove home, Rizzoli had to squint against the brilliance of its reflection on the newly fallen snow. The streets were quiet, the sidewalks a pristine white. On this Christmas morning, she felt renewed. Cleansed of all doubt.
She touched her abdomen and thought: I guess it’s just you and me, kid.
She parked the car in front of her building and stepped out. Paused there, in the cold sunshine, to take a deep breath of crystalline air.
“Merry Christmas, Jane.”
She went very still, her heart thumping hard. Slowly she turned.
Gabriel Dean stood near the front entrance to her apartment building. She watched him walk toward her, but she could think of nothing to say to him. Once, they had been as intimate with each other as a man and a woman could be, yet here they were, as tongue-tied as strangers.
“I thought you were in Washington,” she finally said.
“I got in about an hour ago. I took the first flight out of D.C.” He paused. “Thank you for telling me,” he said quietly.
“Yeah, well.” She shrugged. “I wasn’t sure you’d even want to know.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“It’s a complication.”
“Life is a series of complications. We have to deal with each one as it comes.”
Such a matter-of-fact response. The man in the gray suit had been her initial impression of Gabriel when they’d first met, and that was how she saw him now, standing before her in his dark overcoat. So calm and detached.
“How long have you known about it?” he asked.
“I wasn’t sure until a few days ago. I took one of those home pregnancy tests. But I think I’ve suspected it for a few weeks.”
“Why did you wait so long to tell me?”
“I wasn’t going to tell you at all. Because I didn’t think I was going to keep it.”
“Why not?”
She laughed. “For one thing, I’m lousy with kids. Someone hands me a baby, I don’t know what to do with it. Do you burp it or change its diaper? And how am I supposed to go to work if I’ve got a baby at home?”
“I didn’t know cops took a vow of childlessness.”
“But it’s so hard, you know. I look at other moms, and I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know if I can do it.” She huffed out a cloud of white and straightened. “At least, I’ve got my family in town. I’m pretty sure my mom will be thrilled to baby-sit. And there’s a daycare a few blocks from here. I’m going to check it out, see how young they’ll take them.”
“So that’s it, then. You’ve got it all planned.”
“More or less.”
“Right down to who’s going to watch our baby.”
Our baby. She swallowed, thinking of the life growing inside her, a part of Gabriel himself.
“There are still details I need to figure out.”
He was standing perfectly straight, still playing the man in the gray suit. But when he spoke, she heard a note of anger that startled her. “And where do I come in?” he asked. “You’ve made all those plans, and you didn’t mention me once. Not that I’m surprised.”
She shook her head. “Why do you sound so upset?”
“It’s the same old act, Jane. The one you can’t stop playing. Rizzoli in charge of her own life. All safe in your suit of armor. Who needs a man? Hell, not you.”
“What am I supposed to say? Please, oh please save me? I can’t raise this baby without a man?”
“No, you probably could do it all on your own. You’d find a way, even if it killed you.”
“So what do you want me to say?”
“You do have a choice.”
“And I’ve made it. I told you, I’m keeping the baby.” She started toward her front steps, wading fiercely through the snow.
He grasped her arm. “I’m not talking about the baby. I’m talking about us.” Softly, he said: “Choose me, Jane.”
She turned to face him. “What does that mean?”
“It means we can do this together. It means you let me past the armor. That’s the only way this can work. You let me hurt you, and I let you hurt me.”
“Great. And we both end up with scars.”
“Or we end up trusting each other.”
“We barely know each other.”
“We knew each other well enough to make a baby.”
She felt heat flood her cheeks, and suddenly she could not look at him. She stared down at the snow.
“I’m not saying we’ll be able to pull it off,” he said. “I’m not even sure how to make this work, with you here, and me in Washington.” He paused. “And let’s be honest. Sometimes, Jane, you can be a real bitch.”
She laughed. Brushed her hand across her eyes. “I know. Jesus, I know.”
“But other times …” He reached out and touched her face. “Other times …”
Other times, she thought, you see me for who I am.
And that scares me. No, it terrifies me.
This may be the bravest thing I will ever do.
At last she raised her head and looked at him. She took a deep breath.
And she said, “I think I love you.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Three months later.
Maura sat in the second row of pews in St. Anthony’s church, and the sound of the organ stirred memories from her childhood. She remembered Sunday Mass with her parents, and how hard and unforgiving the church benches had felt, after sitting on them for half an hour. How she had fidgeted, trying to get comfortable, and how her father had swept her up into his lap, the best perch of all, for it came with a pair of protective arms. She would look up at the stained-glass windows, at images that frightened her. Joan of Arc, tied to the stake. Jesus on the cross. Saints, bowed down before their executioners. And blood, so much blood, spilled in the name of faith.
Today, church did not seem forbidding. The organ music was joyful. Garlands of pink flowers festooned the aisles. She saw children happily bouncing on parents’ knees, children untroubled by images of suffering etched into stained glass.
The organ began to play Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
Down the aisle came two bridesmaids wearing light gray pantsuits. Maura recognized both of them as Boston PD cops. The pews were filled with cops today. Glancing back, she spotted Barry Frost and Detective Sleeper in the row just behind her, both of them relaxed and happy. Too often, when cops and their families gathered together in church, it was to mourn one of their own. Today, she saw smiles and bright dresses.
Now Jane appeared, on her father’s arm. For once her dark hair had been tamed into a stylish knot. Her white satin pantsuit, with its oversize jacket, could not quite disguise the swelling abdomen. As she reached Maura’s row of pews, their gazes briefly met, and Maura saw Jane roll her eyes with a look of can you believe I’m doing this? Then Jane’s gaze turned toward the altar.
Toward Gabriel.
Sometimes, thought Maura, the stars line up, the gods smile, and love gets a fighting chance. Just a chance—that’s all it can really hope for. No guarantees, no certainties. She watched Gabriel take Jane’s hand. Then they turned and stood facing the altar. Today they were united, but surely there’d be other days when angry words would fly, or silence would freeze the household. Days when
love would barely stay aloft, like a bird fluttering on one wing. Days when Jane’s quick temper and Gabriel’s cooler nature would send them spinning to their own corners, and they would both question the wisdom of this match.
Then there would be days like today. Perfect days.
It was late afternoon when Maura stepped out of St. Anthony’s. The sun was shining, and for the first time she felt a breath of warmth in the air. The first whisper of spring. She drove with her window down, the scents of the city blowing in, heading not toward home, but toward the neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. To the church in the parish of Our Lady of Divine Light.
Stepping through the massive front door, she found it dim and silent inside, the stained-glass windows catching the day’s last sunlight. She saw only two women, seated together in the front pew, their heads bent in prayer.
Maura moved quietly to the alcove. There she lit three candles for three women. One for Sister Ursula. One for Sister Camille. And one for a faceless leper whose name she would never know. She did not believe in heaven or hell; she was not even sure she believed in the eternal soul. Yet she stood in that house of worship and lit three flames and took comfort from it, because what she did believe in was the power of remembrance. Only the forgotten are truly dead.
She emerged from the alcove and saw that Father Brophy was now standing beside the two women, murmuring words of comfort. He looked up. As the last jewel tones of sunlight glowed through the windows, their gazes met. For just a moment in time, they both forgot where they were. Who they were.
She raised her hand in a farewell salute.
Then she walked out of his church, and back into her own world.
To my mother, Ruby J. C. Tom, with love.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My warmest thanks to:
Peter Mars and Bruce Blake, for their insights into the Boston Police Department.
Margaret Greenwald, M.D., for allowing me a look into the medical examiner’s world.
Gina Centrello, for her unflagging enthusiasm.
Linda Marrow, every writer’s dream editor.
Selina Walker, my miracle worker on the other side of the Pond.
The Rizzoli & Isles Series 11-Book Bundle Page 92