She glanced over her shoulder at him, and their faces were suddenly so close he felt his breath catch.
“You can’t read it?” she asked.
“I can read tire tracks and blood splatters. This I can’t read.”
“It’s Ken Kimball’s handwriting. I recognize his signature.”
“I don’t even recognize it as English.”
“To another doctor, it’s perfectly legible. You just have to know the code.”
“They teach you that in medical school?”
“Along with the secret handshake and the decoder ring instructions.”
It felt strange to be trading quips over such grim business, even stranger to hear humor come from Dr. Cordell’s lips. It was his first glimpse of the woman beneath the shell. The woman she’d been before Andrew Capra had inflicted his damage.
“The first paragraph is the physical exam,” she explained. “He uses medical shorthand. HEENT means head, ears, eyes, nose, and throat. She had a bruise on her left cheek. The lungs were clear, the heart without murmurs or gallops.”
“Meaning?”
“Normal.”
“A doctor can’t just write: ‘The heart is normal’?”
“Why do cops say ‘vehicle’ instead of just plain ‘car’?”
He nodded. “Point taken.”
“The abdomen was flat, soft, and without organomegaly. In other words—”
“Normal.”
“You’re catching on. Next he describes the . . . pelvic exam. Where things are not normal.” She paused. When she spoke again, her voice was softer, drained of all humor. She took a breath, as though to draw in the courage to continue. “There was blood in the introitus. Scratches and bruising on both thighs. A vaginal tear at the four o’clock position, indicating this was not a consensual act. At that point Dr. Kimball says he stopped the exam.”
Moore focused on the final paragraph. This he could read. This contained no medical shorthand.
Patient became agitated. Refused collection of rape kit. Refused to cooperate with any further intervention. After baseline HIV screen and VDRL drawn, she dressed and left before authorities could be called.
“So the rape was never reported,” he said. “There was no vaginal swab. No DNA collected.”
Catherine was silent. She stood with head bowed, her hands clutching the binder.
“Dr. Cordell?” he said, and touched her shoulder. She gave a start, as though he had burned her, and he quickly took his hand away. She looked up, and he saw rage in her eyes. There was a fierceness radiating from her that made her, at that moment, every bit his equal.
“Raped in May, butchered in July,” she said. “It’s a fine world for women, isn’t it?”
“We’ve spoken to every member of her family. No one said anything about a rape.”
“Then she didn’t tell them.”
How many women keep their silence? he wondered. How many have secrets so painful they cannot share them with the people they love? Looking at Catherine, he thought about the fact that she, too, had sought comfort in the company of strangers.
She took the encounter out of the binder for him to photocopy. As he took it, his gaze fell on the doctor’s name, and another thought occurred to him.
“What can you tell me about Dr. Kimball?” he said. “The one who examined Elena Ortiz?”
“He’s an excellent physician.”
“He usually works the night shift?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know if he was on duty last Thursday night?”
It took her a moment to register the significance of that question. When she did, he saw she was shaken by the implications. “You don’t really think—”
“It’s a routine question. We look at all the victim’s prior contacts.”
But the question was not routine, and she knew it.
“Andrew Capra was a doctor,” she said softly. “You don’t think another doctor—”
“The possibility has occurred to us.”
She turned away. Took an unsteady breath. “In Savannah, when those other women were murdered, I just assumed I didn’t know the killer. I assumed that if I ever did meet him, I’d know it. I’d feel it. Andrew Capra taught me how wrong I was.”
“The banality of evil.”
“That’s exactly what I learned. That evil can be so ordinary. That a man I’d see every day, say hello to every day, could smile right back at me.” She added, softly: “And be thinking of all the different ways he’d like to kill me.”
It was dusk when Moore walked back to his car, but the heat of day still radiated from the blacktop. It would be another uncomfortable night. Across the city, women would sleep with windows left open to the night’s fickle breezes. The night’s evils.
He stopped and turned toward the hospital. He could see the bright red “ER” light, glowing like a beacon. A symbol of hope and healing.
Is that your hunting ground? The very place where women go to be healed?
An ambulance glided in from the night, lights flashing. He thought of all the people who might pass through an E.R. in the course of a day. EMT’s, doctors, orderlies, janitors.
And cops. It was a possibility he never wanted to consider, yet it was one he could never dismiss. The profession of law enforcement holds a strange allure for those who hunt other human beings. The gun, the badge, are heady symbols of domination. And what greater control could one exercise than the power to torment, to kill? For such a hunter, the world is a vast plain teeming with prey.
All one has to do is choose.
There were babies everywhere. Rizzoli stood in a kitchen that smelled like sour milk and talcum powder as she waited for Anna Garcia to finish wiping apple juice from the floor. One toddler was clinging to Anna’s leg; a second was pulling pot lids out of a kitchen cabinet and clanging them together like cymbals. An infant was in a high chair, smiling through a mask of creamed spinach. And on the floor, a baby with a bad case of cradle cap was crawling around on a treasure hunt for anything dangerous to put in his greedy little mouth. Rizzoli did not care for babies, and it made her nervous to be surrounded by them. She felt like Indiana Jones in the snake pit.
“They’re not all mine,” Anna was quick to explain as she limped over to the sink, the toddler hanging on like a ball and chain. She wrung out the dirty sponge and rinsed her hands. “Only this one’s mine.” She pointed to the baby on her leg. “That one with the pots, and the one in the high chair, they belong to my sister Lupe. And the one crawling around, I baby-sit him for my cousin. As long as I’m home with mine, I thought I might as well watch a few more.”
Yeah, what’s another smack on the head? thought Rizzoli. But the funny thing was, Anna did not look unhappy. In fact, she scarcely seemed to notice the human ball and chain or the clang-clang of the pots slamming against the floor. In a situation that would give Rizzoli a nervous breakdown, Anna had the serene look of a woman who is exactly where she wants to be. Rizzoli wondered if this was what Elena Ortiz would have been like one day, had she lived. A mama in her kitchen, happily wiping up juice and drool. Anna looked very much like the photos of her younger sister, just a little plumper. And when she turned toward Rizzoli, the kitchen light shining directly on her forehead, Rizzoli had the chilling sensation that she was staring at the same face that had looked up at her from the autopsy table.
“With these little guys around, it takes me forever to do the smallest thing,” said Anna. She picked up the toddler hanging on her leg and propped him expertly on one hip. “Now, let me see. You came for the necklace. Let me get the jewelry box.” She walked out of the kitchen, and Rizzoli felt a moment of panic, left alone with three babies. A sticky hand landed on her ankle and she looked down to see the crawler chewing on her pant cuff. She shook him off and quickly put a safe distance between her and that gummy mouth.
“Here it is,” said Anna, returning with the box, which she set on the kitchen table. “We didn’t want to leave it in her a
partment, not with all those strangers going in and out cleaning the place. So my brothers thought I should keep the box until the family decides what to do with the jewelry.” She lifted the lid, and a melody began to tinkle. “Somewhere My Love.” Anna seemed momentarily stunned by the music. She sat very still, her eyes filling with tears.
“Mrs. Garcia?”
Anna swallowed. “I’m sorry. My husband must have wound it up. I wasn’t expecting to hear . . .”
The melody slowed to a few last sweet notes and stopped. In silence Anna gazed down at the jewelry, her head bent in mourning. With sad reluctance she opened one of the velvet-lined compartments and withdrew the necklace.
Rizzoli could feel her heartbeat quickening as she took the necklace from Anna. It was as she’d remembered it when she’d seen it around Elena’s neck in the morgue, a tiny lock and key dangling from a fine gold chain. She turned over the lock and saw the eighteen-karat stamp on the back.
“Where did your sister get this necklace?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know how long she’s owned it?”
“It must be something new. I never saw it before the day . . .”
“What day?”
Anna swallowed. And said softly: “The day I picked it up at the morgue. With her other jewelry.”
“She was also wearing earrings and a ring. Those you’ve seen before?”
“Yes. She’s had those a long time.”
“But not the necklace.”
“Why do you keep asking about it? What does it have to do with . . .” Anna paused, horror dawning in her eyes. “Oh god. You think he put it on her?”
The baby in the high chair, sensing something was wrong, let out a wail. Anna set her own son down on the floor and scurried over to pick up the crying infant. Hugging him close, she turned away from the necklace as though to protect him from the sight of that evil talisman. “Please take it,” she whispered. “I don’t want it in my house.”
Rizzoli slipped the necklace into a Ziploc bag. “I’ll write you a receipt.”
“No, just take it away! I don’t care if you keep it.”
Rizzoli wrote the receipt anyway and placed it on the kitchen table next to the baby’s dish of creamed spinach. “I need to ask one more question,” she said gently.
Anna kept pacing the kitchen, jiggling the baby in agitation.
“Please go through your sister’s jewelry box,” said Rizzoli. “Tell me if there’s anything missing.”
“You asked me that last week. There isn’t.”
“It’s not easy to spot the absence of something. Instead, we tend to focus on what doesn’t belong. I need you to go through this box again. Please.”
Anna swallowed hard. Reluctantly she sat down with the baby in her lap and stared into the jewelry box. She took out the items one by one and laid them on the table. It was a sad little assortment of department store trinkets. Rhinestones and crystal beads and faux pearls. Elena’s taste had run toward the bright and gaudy.
Anna laid the last item, a turquoise friendship ring, on the table. Then she sat for a moment, a frown slowly forming on her face.
“The bracelet,” she said.
“What bracelet?”
“There should be a bracelet, with little charms on it. Horses. She used to wear it every day in high school. Elena was crazy about horses. . . .” Anna looked up with a stunned expression. “It wasn’t worth anything! It was just made of tin. Why would he take it?”
Rizzoli looked at the Ziploc bag containing the necklace—a necklace she was now certain had once belonged to Diana Sterling. And she thought, I know exactly where we’ll find Elena’s bracelet: around the wrist of the next victim.
Rizzoli stood on Moore’s front porch, triumphantly waving the Ziploc bag containing the necklace.
“It belonged to Diana Sterling. I just spoke to her parents. They didn’t realize it was missing until I called them.”
He took the bag but didn’t open it. Just held it, staring at the gold chain coiled inside the plastic.
“It’s the physical link between both cases,” she said. “He takes a souvenir from one victim. Leaves it with the next.”
“I can’t believe we missed this detail.”
“Hey, we didn’t miss it.”
“You mean you didn’t miss it.” He gave her a look that made her feel ten feet taller. Moore wasn’t a guy who’d slap your back or shout your praises. In fact, she could not remember ever hearing him raise his voice, either in anger or in excitement. But when he gave her that look, the eyebrow raised in approval, the mouth tilted in a half smile, it was all the praise she’d ever need.
Flushing with pleasure, she reached down for the bag of take-out food she’d brought. “You want dinner? I stopped in at that Chinese restaurant down the street.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yeah, I did. I figure I owe you an apology.”
“For what?”
“For this afternoon. That stupid deal with the tampon. You were just standing up for me, trying to be the good guy. I took it the wrong way.”
An awkward silence passed. They stood there, not sure of what to say, two people who don’t know each other well and are trying to get past the rocky start of their relationship.
Then he smiled, and it transformed his usually sober face into that of a much younger man. “I’m starved,” he said. “Bring that food in here.”
With a laugh, she stepped into his house. It was her first time here, and she paused to glance around, taking in all the womanly touches. The chintz curtains, the floral watercolors on the wall. It was not what she expected. Hell, it was more feminine than her own apartment.
“Let’s go into the kitchen,” he said. “My papers are in there.”
He led her through the living room, and she saw the spinet piano.
“Wow. You play?” she asked.
“No, it’s Mary’s. I’ve got a tin ear.”
It’s Mary’s. Present tense. It struck her then that the reason this house seemed so feminine was that it was still present-tense-Mary, a house waiting, unaltered, for its mistress to come home. A photo of Moore’s wife was displayed on the piano, a sunburned woman with laughing eyes and hair in windblown disarray. Mary, whose chintz curtains still hung in the house she would never return to.
In the kitchen, Rizzoli set the bag of food on the table, next to a stack of files. Moore shuffled through the folders and found the one he was searching for.
“Elena Ortiz’s E.R. report,” he said, handing it to her.
“Cordell dug this up?”
He gave an ironic smile. “I seem to be surrounded by women more competent than I am.”
She opened the folder and saw a photocopy of a doctor’s chicken-scratch handwriting. “You got the translation on this mess?”
“It’s pretty much what I told you over the phone. Unreported rape. No kit collected, no DNA. Even Elena’s family didn’t know about it.”
She closed the folder and set it down on his other papers. “Jeez, Moore. This mess looks like my dining table. No place left to eat.”
“It’s taken over your life, too, has it?” he said, clearing away the files to make space for their dinner.
“What life? This case is all there is to mine. Sleep. Eat. Work. And if I’m lucky, an hour at bedtime with my old pal Dave Letterman.”
“No boyfriends?”
“Boyfriends?” She snorted as she took out the food cartons and laid napkins and chopsticks on the table. “Oh yeah. Like I gotta beat ’em all off.” Only after she said it did she realize how self-pitying that sounded—not at all the way she meant it. She was quick to add: “I’m not complaining. If I need to spend the weekend working, I can do it without some guy whining about it. I don’t do well with whiners.”
“Hardly surprising, since you’re the opposite of a whiner. As you made painfully clear to me today.”
“Yeah, yeah. I thought I apologized for that
.”
He got two beers from the refrigerator, then sat down across from her. She’d never seen him like this, with his shirtsleeves rolled up and looking so relaxed. She liked him this way. Not the forbidding Saint Thomas but a guy she could shoot the breeze with, a guy who’d laugh with her. A guy who, if he just bothered to turn on the charm, could knock a girl’s socks off.
“You know, you don’t always have to be tougher than everyone else,” he said.
“Yes, I do.”
“Why?”
“Because they don’t think I am.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Guys like Crowe. Lieutenant Marquette.”
He shrugged. “There’ll always be a few like that.”
“How come I always end up working with them?” She popped open her beer and took a swig. “That’s why you’re the first one I told about the necklace. You won’t hog the credit.”
“It’s a sad day when it gets down to who claims credit for this or that.”
She picked up her chopsticks and dug into the carton of kung pao chicken. It was burn-your-mouth spicy, just the way she liked it. Rizzoli was no wimp when it came to hot peppers, either.
She said, “The first really big case I worked on in Vice and Narcotics, I was the only woman on a team with five men. When we cracked it, there was this press conference. TV cameras, the whole nine yards. And you know what? They mentioned every name on that team but mine. Every other goddamn name.” She took another swallow of beer. “I make sure that doesn’t happen anymore. You guys, you can focus all your attention on the case and the evidence. But I waste a lot of energy just trying to make myself heard.”
“I hear you fine, Rizzoli.”
“It’s a nice change.”
“What about Frost? You have problems with him?”
“Frost is cool.” She winced at the unintended quip. “His wife’s got him well trained.”
They both laughed at that. Anyone who overheard Barry Frost’s meek yes dear, no dear phone conversations with his wife had no doubt who was boss in the Frost household.
“That’s why he’s not gonna move up very far,” she said. “No fire in the belly. Family man.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being a family man. I wish I’d been a better one.”
The Surgeon Page 8
