Tess Gerritsen's Rizzoli & Isles 8-Book Bundle

by Tess Gerritsen

  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.