She stumbled to her feet and staggered toward higher ground. Away from the water, away from the blood. She collapsed farther up on the bank, dropping onto a bed of grass. There she lay as the next contraction came and went. And the next, and the next. Through pain-dimmed eyes she watched the quarter moon wheel across the heavens. Saw the stars fade and a pink glow seep into the eastern sky.
As the sun lifted over the horizon, Mattie Purvis welcomed her daughter into the world.
THIRTY
Turkey vultures traced lazy circles in the sky, the black-winged heralds of fresh carrion. The dead do not long escape Mother Nature’s attention. The perfume of decomposition draws blowflies and beetles, crows and rodents, all converging on Death’s bounty. And how am I any different? Maura thought, as she headed down the grassy bank toward the water. She too was drawn to the dead, to poke and prod cold flesh like any scavenger. This was such a beautiful place for so grim a task. The sky was a cloudless blue, the lake like silvered glass. But at the water’s edge, a white sheet draped what the vultures, circling above, were so eager to feast on.
Jane Rizzoli, standing with Barry Frost and two Massachusetts State Police officers, stepped forward to meet Maura. “Body was lying in a couple inches of water, over in those cattails. We pulled it up onto the bank. Just wanted you to know it’s been moved.”
Maura stared down at the draped corpse, but did not touch it. She was not quite ready to confront what lay beneath the plastic sheet. “Is the woman all right?”
“I saw Mrs. Purvis in the ER. She’s a little banged up, but she’ll be fine. And the baby’s doing great.” Rizzoli pointed toward the bank, where tufts of feathery grass grew. “She had it right over there. Managed it all by herself. When the park ranger drove by around seven, he found her sitting at the side of the road, nursing the baby.”
Maura stared up the bank and thought of the woman laboring alone under the open sky, her cries of pain unheard, while twenty yards away, a corpse cooled and stiffened. “Where did he keep her?”
“In a pit, about two miles from here.”
Maura frowned at her. “She made it all this way on foot?”
“Yeah. Imagine running in the dark, through the trees. And doing it while you’re in labor. Came down that slope there, out of the woods.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“You should see the box he kept her in, like a coffin. Buried alive for a week—I don’t know how she came out of it still sane.”
Maura thought of young Alice Rose, trapped in a pit all those years ago. Just one night of despair and darkness had haunted her for the rest of her short life. In the end, it had killed her. Yet Mattie Purvis had emerged not only sane, but prepared to fight back. To survive.
“We found the white van,” said Rizzoli.
“Where?”
“It’s parked way up on one of the maintenance roads, about thirty, forty yards away from the pit where he buried her. We never would have found her there.”
“Have you found any remains yet? There must be victims buried nearby.”
“We’ve just started to look. There’s a lot of trees, a large area to search. It’ll take time for us to comb that whole hill for graves.”
“All these years, all those missing women. One of them could be my …” Maura stopped, and looked up at the trees on the slope. One of them could be my mother. Maybe I don’t have a monster’s blood in my veins at all. Maybe my real mother has been dead all these years. Another victim, buried somewhere in those woods.
“Before you make any assumptions,” said Rizzoli, “you need to see the corpse.”
Maura frowned at her. Looked down at the shrouded body lying at her feet. She knelt and reached for a corner of the sheet.
“Wait. I should warn you—”
“Yes?”
“It’s not what you’re expecting.”
Maura hesitated, her hand hovering over the sheet. Insects hummed, greedy for access to fresh meat. She took a breath and peeled back the cover.
For a moment she didn’t say a word as she stared at the face she’d just exposed. What stunned her was not the ruined left eye, or the screwdriver handle jammed deep into the orbit. That gruesome detail was merely a feature to be noted, mentally filed away as she would file a dictated report. No, it was the face that held her attention, that horrified her.
“He’s too young,” she murmured. “This man’s too young to be Elijah Lank.”
“I’d guess he’s about thirty, thirty-five.”
Maura released a shocked breath. “I don’t understand …”
“You do see it, don’t you?” Rizzoli asked quietly. “Black hair, green eyes.”
Like mine.
“I mean, sure, there could be a million guys with hair and eyes that color. But the resemblance …” She paused. “Frost saw it, too. We all saw it.”
Maura pulled the sheet over the corpse and stepped back, retreating from the truth which had stared so undeniably from the dead man’s face.
“Dr. Bristol’s on his way now,” said Frost. “We didn’t think you’d want to do this autopsy.”
“Then why did you call me?”
“Because you said you wanted to be in the loop,” said Rizzoli. “Because I promised I would. And because …” Rizzoli looked down at the draped body. “Because you’d find out sooner or later who this man was.”
“But we don’t know who he was. You think you see a resemblance. That’s not proof.”
“There’s more. Something we just learned this morning.”
Maura looked at her. “What?”
“We’ve been trying to track down Elijah Lank’s whereabouts. Searching for any place his name may have popped up. Arrests, traffic tickets, anything. This morning we got a fax from a county clerk in North Carolina. It was a death certificate. Elijah Lank died eight years ago.”
“Eight years ago? Then he wasn’t with Amalthea when she killed Theresa and Nikki Wells.”
“No. By then, Amalthea was working with a new partner. Someone who stepped in to take Elijah’s place. To continue the family business.”
Maura turned and stared at the lake, its water now blindingly bright. I don’t want to hear the rest of this, she thought. I don’t want to know.
“Eight years ago, Elijah died of a heart attack in a Greenville hospital,” said Rizzoli. “He showed up in the emergency room complaining of chest pain. According to their records, he was brought to the ER by his family.”
Family.
“His wife, Amalthea,” said Rizzoli. “And their son, Samuel.”
Maura took a deep breath and smelled both decay and the scent of summer in the air. Death and life mingled in a single perfume.
“I’m sorry,” said Rizzoli. “I’m sorry you had to find out. There’s still a chance we’re wrong about this man, you know. There’s still a chance he’s not related to them at all.”
But they weren’t wrong, and Maura knew it.
I knew it when I saw his face.
When Rizzoli and Frost walked into J.P. Doyle’s that evening, the cops standing around the bar greeted them with a loud and boisterous round of applause that made Rizzoli flush. Hell, even the guys who didn’t particularly like her were applauding in comradely acknowledgment of her success, which at that moment was being trumpeted on the five o’clock news playing on the TV above the bar. The crowd began to stomp in unison as Rizzoli and Frost approached the counter, where the grinning bartender had already set out two drinks for them. For Frost, a shot of whiskey, and for Rizzoli …
A large glass of milk.
As everyone burst out laughing, Frost leaned over and whispered in her ear: “You know, my stomach’s kind of upset. Wanna trade drinks?”
The funny thing was, Frost really did like milk. She slid her glass his way, and asked the bartender for a Coke.
As their fellow cops came around to shake their hands and slap high fives, she and Frost ate peanuts and sipped their virtuous drinks. She missed having her
usual Adams ale. Missed a lot of things tonight—her husband, her beer. Her waistline. Still, this was a good day. It’s always a good day, she thought, when a perp goes down.
“Hey, Rizzoli! The bets are up to two hundred bucks you’re having a girl, a hundred twenty on a boy.”
She glanced sideways and saw Detectives Vann and Dunleavy standing beside her at the bar. The fat Hobbit and the skinny one, holding up their twin pints of Guinness.
“So what if I have both?” she asked. “Twins?”
“Huh,” said Dunleavy. “We didn’t consider that.”
“So who wins then?”
“I guess no one.”
“Or everyone?” said Vann.
The two men stood pondering that question for a while. Sam and Frodo, stuck on the Mount Doom of dilemmas.
“Well,” said Vann, “I guess we should add another category.”
Rizzoli laughed. “Yeah, you guys do that.”
“Great work, by the way,” said Dunleavy. “Just watch, next thing, you’re gonna be in People magazine. A perp like that, all those women. What a story.”
“You want the honest truth?” Rizzoli sighed and set down her Coke. “We can’t take the credit.”
“No?”
Frost looked over at Vann and Dunleavy. “Wasn’t us brought him down. It was the vic.”
“Just a housewife,” said Rizzoli. “A scared, pregnant, ordinary housewife. Didn’t need a gun or a billy club, just a goddamn sock filled with batteries.”
Up on the TV, the local news was over, and the bartender flipped the channel to HBO. A movie with women in short skirts. Women who had waistlines.
“So what about that Black Talon?” asked Dunleavy. “How did that tie in?”
Rizzoli was quiet for a moment as she sipped her Coke. “We don’t know yet.”
“You find the weapon?”
She caught Frost looking at her, and felt a ripple of uneasiness. That was the detail that troubled them both. They had found no gun in the van. There had been knotted cords and blood-caked knives. There’d been a neatly kept notebook with the names and phone numbers of nine other baby brokers around the country; Terence Van Gates had not been the only one. And there’d been records of cash payments made to the Lanks through the years, a mother lode of information that would keep investigators busy for years. But the weapon that had killed Anna Leoni was not in the van.
“Oh, well,” said Dunleavy. “Maybe it’ll turn up. Or he got rid of it.”
Maybe. Or maybe we’re still missing something.
It was dark when she and Frost left Doyle’s. Instead of going home, she drove back to Schroeder Plaza, the conversation with Vann and Dunleavy still weighing on her mind, and sat down at her desk, which was covered by a mountain of files. On top were the records from NCIC, several decades’ worth of missing persons reports compiled during their hunt for the Beast. But it was Anna Leoni’s murder that had set the whole search in motion, like a pebble dropped into water, launching ever wider ripples. Anna’s murder was what had led them to Amalthea, and eventually to the Beast. Yet Anna’s death remained a question still unresolved.
Rizzoli cleared away the NCIC files, working her way down to the folder on Anna Leoni. Though she had read and reread everything in this file, she leafed through it again, rereading the witness statements, the autopsy, the reports from hair and fiber, fingerprints, and DNA. She came to the ballistics report, and her gaze lingered over the words Black Talon. She remembered the starburst shape of the bullet in Anna Leoni’s skull X-ray. Remembered, too, the track of devastation it had left in her brain.
A Black Talon bullet. Where was the gun that had fired it?
She closed the folder and looked down at the cardboard box that had been sitting beside her desk for the last week. It contained the files that Vann and Dunleavy had lent her, on the murder of Vassily Titov. He’d been the only other Boston-area victim of a Black Talon bullet in the last five years. She took the folders from that box and piled them on her desk, sighing when she saw how high the stack was. Even a slam-dunk investigation generates reams of paper. Vann and Dunleavy had summed up the case for her earlier, and she had read enough of their files to satisfy herself that they had indeed made a good arrest. The subsequent trial and speedy conviction of Antonin Leonov only reinforced that belief. Yet here she was, reviewing the files again, on a case which left no room for doubt that the right man had been convicted.
Detective Dunleavy’s final report was thorough and convincing. Leonov had been under police surveillance for a week, in anticipation of a delivery of Tajikistan heroin. While the two detectives had watched from their vehicle, Leonov had pulled up in front of Titov’s residence, knocked on the front door, and was admitted. Moments later, two gunshots were fired inside the house. Leonov walked out, climbed into his car, and was about to drive away when Vann and Dunleavy closed in and arrested him. Inside the house, Titov was found dead in the kitchen, two Black Talons in his brain. Ballistics later confirmed both bullets had been fired by Leonov’s weapon.
Open and shut. The perp convicted, the weapon in police custody. Rizzoli could see no link at all between the deaths of Vassily Titov and Anna Leoni, except for the use of Black Talon bullets. Increasingly rare ammunition, but not enough to constitute any real connection between the murders.
Yet she continued flipping through the files, reading through the dinner hour. By the time she reached the last folder, she was almost too tired to tackle it. I’ll get this over and done with, she thought, then pack up the files and put this issue to bed.
She opened the folder and found a report on the search of Antonin Leonov’s warehouse. It contained Detective Vann’s description of the raid, a list of Leonov’s arrested employees, along with an accounting of everything confiscated, from crates and cash to bookkeeping records. She skimmed down until she reached the list of officers on the scene. Ten Boston PD cops. Her gaze froze on one particular name, a name she hadn’t noticed when she’d read the report a week ago. Just a coincidence. It doesn’t necessarily mean …
She sat and thought about it for a moment. She remembered a drug raid she’d been in on as a young patrol officer. Lots of noise, lots of excitement. And confusion—when a dozen adrenaline-hyped cops converge on a hostile building, everyone’s nervous, everyone’s looking out for himself. You may not notice what your fellow cop is doing. What he’s slipping into his pocket. Cash, drugs. A box of bullets that would never be missed. It’s always there, that temptation to take a souvenir. A souvenir you might later find useful.
She picked up the phone and called Frost.
THIRTY-ONE
The dead were not good company.
Maura sat at her microscope, staring through the eyepiece at sections of lung and liver and pancreas—bits of tissue sliced from a suicide victim’s mortal remains, preserved under glass, and stained a gaudy pink and purple with a hematoxylin-eosin preparation. Except for the occasional clink of the slides, and the faint hiss of the air-conditioning vent, the building was quiet. Yet it was not empty of people; in the cold room downstairs, half a dozen silent visitors lay zipped into their shrouds. Undemanding guests, each with a story to tell, but only to those willing to cut and probe.
The phone rang on her desk; she let the after-hours office recording pick up. Nobody here but the dead. And me.
The story Maura now saw beneath her microscope lens was not a new one. Young organs, healthy tissues. A body designed to live many more years, had the soul been willing, had some inner voice only whispered to the despairing man: Now, wait a minute, heartbreak is temporary. This pain will pass, and you’ll find another girl to love someday.
She finished the last slide and set it in the box. Sat for a moment, her mind not on the slides she had just reviewed, but on another image: a young man with dark hair and green eyes. She had not watched his autopsy; that afternoon, while he had been split open and dissected by Dr. Bristol, she had remained upstairs in her office. But even as she’d dictat
ed reports and flipped through microscope slides late into the evening, she had been thinking about him. Do I really want to know who he is? She still hadn’t decided. Even as she rose from her desk, as she gathered her purse and an armful of files, she was uncertain of her answer.
Again, the phone rang; again, she ignored it.
Walking down the silent hallway, she passed closed doors and deserted offices. She remembered another evening when she had walked out of this empty building, to find the claw mark scratched into her car, and her heart started to beat a little faster.
But he’s gone, now. The Beast is dead.
She stepped out the rear exit, into a night soft with summery warmth. She paused beneath the building’s outside lamp to scan the shadowy parking lot. Drawn by the glow of the light, moths swarmed around the lamp and she heard wings fluttering against the bulb. Then, another sound: the closing of a car door. A silhouette walked toward her, taking on form and features as it moved into the lamp’s glow.
She gave a sigh of relief when she saw it was Ballard. “Were you waiting for me?”
“I saw your car in the lot. I tried calling you.”
“After five, I let the machine pick up.”
“You weren’t answering your cell phone, either.”
“I turned it off. You don’t need to keep checking on me, Rick. I’m fine.”
“Are you, really?”
She sighed as they walked to her car. She looked up at the sky, where stars were washed pale by city lights. “I have to decide what to do about the DNA. Whether I really want to know the truth.”
“Then don’t do it. It doesn’t matter if you are related to them. Amalthea has nothing to do with who you are.”
“That’s what I would have said before.” Before I knew whose bloodlines I might share. Before I knew I might come from a family of monsters.
“Evil isn’t hereditary.”
“Still, it’s not a good feeling, knowing I might have a few mass murderers in my family.”
She unlocked her door and climbed in behind the wheel. Had just thrust her key in the ignition when Ballard leaned into the car.
The Rizzoli & Isles Series 10-Book Bundle Page 122
