She watched him walk to his own car, parked a few stalls away. Saw him pause as he reached in his pocket, as though trying to locate his keys. She knew her husband well enough to recognize the tension in his shoulders, to note his quick glance around the parking lot. She seldom saw him rattled, and now it made her anxious, knowing that he was on edge. He started his engine and sat waiting for her to leave first.
Only as she left the parking lot did he pull out. He trailed her for a few blocks. He’s watching to see if I’m being followed, she thought. Even after he’d finally peeled away, she found herself glancing in the mirror, though she could think of no reason for anyone to follow her. What did she know, really? Nothing that Moore or anyone else in the homicide unit didn’t already know. Just the memory of a whisper.
Mila. Who is Mila?
She glanced over her shoulder at Moore’s envelope, which she’d tossed on the backseat. She did not look forward to examining those crime scene photos again. But I need to get beyond the horror, she thought. I need to know what happened in Ashburn.
TWENTY-FIVE
Maura Isles was up to her elbows in blood. Pausing in the anteroom, Gabriel watched through the glass partition as Maura reached into the abdomen, lifted out loops of intestine, and plopped them into a basin. He saw no distaste in her face as she dug through the mound, just the quiet concentration of a scientist probing for some detail out of the ordinary. At last she handed Yoshima the basin, and was reaching once again for her knife when she noticed Gabriel.
“I’ll be another twenty minutes,” she said. “You can come in, if you want.”
He pulled on shoe covers and a gown to protect his clothes and stepped into the lab. Though he tried to avoid looking at the body on the table, it was there between them, impossible to ignore. A woman with skeletal limbs and skin hanging like loose crepe over the jutting bones of her pelvis.
“History of anorexia nervosa. Found dead in her apartment,” said Maura, answering his unspoken question.
“She’s so young.”
“Twenty-seven. EMTs said all she had in her refrigerator was a head of lettuce and Diet Pepsi. Starvation in the land of plenty.” Maura reached into the abdomen to dissect the retroperitoneal space. Yoshima, in the meantime, had moved to the head, to incise the scalp. As always, they worked with a minimum of conversation, knowing each other’s needs so well that words did not seem necessary.
“You wanted to tell me something?” said Gabriel.
Maura paused. In her hand she cupped a single kidney, like a lump of black gelatin. She and Yoshima exchanged a nervous glance. At once, Yoshima started up the Stryker saw, and the noisy whine almost covered Maura’s answer.
“Not here,” she said quietly. “Not yet.”
Yoshima pried off the skullcap.
As Maura leaned in to free the brain, she asked, in a cheerfully normal voice: “So how is it, being a daddy?”
“Exceeds all my expectations.”
“You’ve settled on Regina?”
“Mama Rizzoli talked us into it.”
“Well, I think it’s a nice name.” Maura lowered the brain into a bucket of formalin. “A dignified name.”
“Jane’s already shortened it to Reggie.”
“Not quite so dignified.”
Maura pulled off her gloves and looked at Yoshima. He gave a nod. “I need some fresh air,” she said. “Let’s take a break.”
They stripped off their gowns, and she led the way out of the room, to the loading bay. Only when they’d stepped out of the building, and were standing in the parking lot, did she speak again.
“I’m sorry about the conversational runaround,” she said. “We had a security breach. I’m not comfortable talking inside right now.”
“What happened?”
“Last night, around three A.M., Medford Fire and Rescue brought in a body from an accident scene. Normally we keep the exterior bay doors locked, and they have to call a night operator for the key code to get in. They discovered that the doors were already unlocked, and when they stepped inside, they saw that the lights were on in the autopsy lab. They mentioned it to the operator, and security came to check the building. Whoever broke in must have left in a hurry, because a desk drawer in my office was still open.”
“Your office?”
Maura nodded. “And Dr. Bristol’s computer was on. He always turns it off when he leaves at night.” She paused. “It was open to the file on Joseph Roke’s autopsy.”
“Was anything taken from the offices?”
“Not that we’ve determined. But we’re all a little leery now of discussing anything sensitive inside the building. Someone’s been in our offices. And in our lab. And we don’t know what they were after.”
No wonder Maura had refused to discuss this over the phone. Even the levelheaded Dr. Isles was now spooked.
“I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” said Maura. “But look at everything that’s happened. Both bodies whisked out of our legal custody. Ballistics evidence confiscated by Washington. Who is calling the shots here?”
He stared at the parking lot, where heat shimmered like water on blacktop. “It goes high,” he said. “It has to.”
“Which means we can’t touch them.”
He looked at her. “It doesn’t mean we won’t try.”
Jane came awake in darkness, the last whispers of the dream still in her ear. Olena’s voice again, murmuring to her from across the mortal divide. Why do you keep tormenting me? Tell me what you want, Olena. Tell me who Mila is.
But the whisper had fallen silent, and she heard only the sound of Gabriel’s breathing. And then, a moment later, the indignant wail of her daughter. She climbed out of bed and let her husband continue sleeping. She was wide awake now anyway, and still haunted by the echoes of the dream.
The baby had punched her way out of the swaddling blanket and was waving pink fists, as though challenging her mother to a fight. “Regina, Regina,” sighed Jane as she lifted her daughter out of the crib, and she suddenly realized how natural the name now felt on her lips. This girl was indeed born a Regina; it had just taken time for Jane to realize it, to stop stubbornly resisting what Angela had known all along. Much as she hated to admit it, Angela was right about a lot of things. Baby names and formula-as-savior and asking for help when you needed it. It was that last part Jane had so much trouble with: admitting that she needed help, that she didn’t know what she was doing. She could work a homicide, could track a monster, but asking her to soothe this screaming bundle in her arms was like asking her to disarm a nuclear bomb. She glanced around the nursery, vainly hoping that some fairy godmother was lurking in the corner, ready to wave a wand and make Regina stop crying.
No fairy godmothers here. Just me.
Regina lasted only five minutes on the right breast, another five minutes on the left, and then it was time for the bottle. Okay, so your mom’s a failure as a milk cow, Jane thought as she carried Regina into the kitchen. So pull me from the herd and shoot me. With Regina happily suckling from the bottle, Jane settled into the kitchen chair, savoring this moment of silence, however brief. She gazed down at her daughter’s dark hair. Curly, just like mine, she thought. Angela had once told her, in a fit of frustration, “Someday you’ll get the daughter you deserve.” And here I am, she thought, with this noisy, insatiable little girl.
The kitchen clock flipped to three A.M.
Jane reached for the stack of folders that Detective Moore had dropped off last night. She had finished reading all the Ashburn files; now she opened a new folder, and saw that this one was not about the Ashburn slayings; it was a Boston PD file on Joseph Roke’s car, the vehicle he had abandoned a few blocks from the hospital. She saw pages of Moore’s notes, photos of the vehicle’s interior, an AFIS report on the fingerprints, and various witness statements. While she’d been trapped in that hospital, her colleagues from the homicide unit hadn’t been sitting idle. They’d been chasing down every scrap of information about the h
ostage takers. I was never on my own, she thought; my friends were out there, fighting for me, and here is the proof.
She glanced at the detective’s signature on one of the witness reports and gave a surprised laugh. Hell, even her old nemesis Darren Crowe had been working hard to save her, and why wouldn’t he? Without her in the unit, he’d have no one else to insult.
She flipped to the photographs of the vehicle’s interior. Saw crumpled-up Butterfinger wrappers and empty cans of Red Bull soda pop on the floor. Lots of sugar and caffeine, just what every psychotic needed to calm down. On the backseat was a wadded-up blanket and a stained pillow and an issue of the tabloid newspaper, the Weekly Confidential. Melanie Griffith was on the cover. She tried to imagine Joe lying on that backseat, leafing through the tabloid, scanning the latest news of celebrities and bad girls, but she couldn’t quite see it. Could he really have cared what the crazies out in Hollywood were up to? Maybe a glance at their screwed-up, coked-up lives made Joe’s own life seem tolerable. The Weekly Confidential was harmless distraction for anxious times.
She set aside the Boston PD file and reached for the folder on the Ashburn slayings. Once again, she confronted the crime scene photos of slaughtered women. Once again, she paused over the photo of Jane Doe number five. Suddenly she could not bear to look at blood, at death, any longer. Chilled to the bone, she closed the file.
Regina was asleep.
She carried the baby back to the crib, then slipped into her own bed, but she could not stop shivering, even though the heat of Gabriel’s body warmed the sheets. She needed so badly to sleep, but could not quiet the chaos in her head. Too many images were spinning through her brain. This was the first time she understood what the phrase too tired to sleep meant. She’d heard that people could go psychotic from lack of sleep; maybe she had already passed that threshold, pushed across the edge by nightmares, by her demanding newborn. I need to make these dreams go away.
Gabriel’s arm came around her. “Jane?”
“Hey,” she murmured.
“You’re shaking. Are you cold?”
“A little.”
He wrapped her closer, pulling her into his warmth. “Did Regina wake up?”
“A while ago. I’ve already fed her.”
“It was my turn to do it.”
“I was awake anyway.”
“Why?”
She didn’t answer.
“It’s the dream again. Isn’t it?” he asked.
“It’s like she’s haunting me. She won’t leave me alone. Every damn night, she keeps me from sleeping.”
“Olena’s dead, Jane.”
“Then it’s her ghost.”
“You don’t really believe in ghosts.”
“I didn’t. But now …”
“You’ve changed your mind?”
She turned on her side to look at him, and saw the faint glow of city lights in his eyes. Her beautiful Gabriel. How did she get so lucky? What did she do to deserve him? She touched his face, fingers brushing across stubble. Even after six months of marriage, it still astonished her that she shared her bed with this man.
“I just want things to go back to the way they were,” she said. “Before any of this happened.”
He pulled her against him, and she smelled soap and warm skin. Her husband’s smells. “Give it more time,” he said. “Maybe you need to have these dreams. You’re still processing what happened. Working through the trauma.”
“Or maybe I need to do something about it.”
“Do what?”
“What Olena wanted me to do.”
He sighed. “You’re talking about the ghost again.”
“She did speak to me. I didn’t imagine that part. It’s not a dream, it’s a memory, something that really happened.” She rolled onto her back and stared up at the shadows. “ ‘Mila knows.’ That’s what she said. That’s what I remember.”
“Mila knows what?”
She looked at Gabriel. “I think she was talking about Ashburn.”
TWENTY-SIX
By the time they boarded the plane to Washington-Reagan, her breasts were aching and swollen, her body yearning for the relief that only a suckling infant could provide. But Regina was not within reach; her daughter was spending the day in Angela’s capable hands, and at that moment was probably being cooed at and fussed over by someone who actually knew what she was doing. Gazing out the plane’s window, Jane thought: My baby’s only two weeks old, and already I’m abandoning her. I’m such a bad mom. But as the city of Boston dropped away beneath their climbing aircraft, it wasn’t guilt she felt, but a sudden lightness, as though she’d shed the weight of motherhood, of sleepless nights and hours of pacing back and forth. What is wrong with me, she wondered, that I’m so relieved to be away from my own child?
Bad mom.
Gabriel’s hand settled on hers. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t worry about it. Your mother’s so good with her.”
She nodded, and kept her gaze out the window. How did she tell her own husband that his child had a lousy mother who was thrilled to be out of the house and back in the chase? That she missed her job so much that it hurt just to watch a cop show on TV?
A few rows behind them, a baby started to cry, and Jane’s breasts throbbed, heavy with milk. My body is punishing me, she thought, for leaving Regina behind.
The first thing she did after walking off the plane was to duck into the women’s restroom. There she sat on a toilet, milking herself into wads of tissue paper, wondering if cows felt the same blessed relief when their udders were emptied. Such a waste, but she didn’t know what else to do but squeeze it out and flush it down the toilet.
When she re-emerged, she found Gabriel waiting for her by the airport newsstand. “Feeling better?” he asked.
“Moo.”
Leesburg Detective Eddie Wardlaw did not look particularly thrilled to see them. He was in his forties, with a sour face and eyes that didn’t smile even when his lips tried to. Jane could not decide if he was tired or just irritated about their visit. Before offering any handshake, he asked to see their IDs, and spent an insulting length of time examining each one, as though certain they were fraudulent. Only then did he grudgingly shake their hands and escort them past the front desk.
“I spoke to Detective Moore this morning,” he said as he led them at a deliberate pace down the hallway.
“We told him we were flying down to see you,” said Jane.
“He said that you two were okay.” Wardlaw reached in his pocket for a set of keys, paused, and looked at them. “I needed to have some background on you both, so I’ve been asking around. Just so you understand what’s going on.”
“Actually, we don’t,” said Jane. “We’re trying to figure out this whole business ourselves.”
“Yeah?” Wardlaw gave a grunt. “Welcome to the club.” He unlocked the door and led them into a a small conference room. On the table was a cardboard box, labeled with a case number, and containing a stack of files. Wardlaw pointed to the files. “You can see how much we have. I couldn’t copy it all. I only sent Moore what I felt comfortable sharing at the time. This thing has been screwy from the word go, and I needed to be absolutely sure of anyone who’s seeing these files.”
“Look, you want to check my credentials again?” said Jane. “You’re welcome to talk to anyone in my unit. They all know my record.”
“Not you, Detective. Cops I don’t have a problem with. But guys from the Bureau …” He looked at Gabriel. “I’m forced to be a little more cautious. Especially considering what’s happened so far.”
Gabriel responded with that coolly impervious look that he could call up at an instant’s notice. The same look that had once kept Jane at arm’s length when they had first met. “If you have a concern about me, Detective, let’s discuss it right now, before we go any further.”
“Why are you here, Agent Dean? You people have already combed through everythin
g we have.”
“The FBI’s stepped in on this?” asked Jane.
Wardlaw looked at her. “They demanded copies of everything. Every scrap of paper in that box. Didn’t trust our crime lab, so they had to bring in their own technicians to examine the physical evidence. The feds have seen it all.” He turned back to Gabriel. “So if you have questions about the case, why don’t you just check with your pals at the Bureau?”
“Believe me, I can vouch for Agent Dean,” said Jane. “I’m married to him.”
“Yeah, that’s what Moore told me.” Wardlaw laughed and shook his head. “Fibbie and a cop. Ask me, it’s like cats marrying dogs.” He reached into the box. “Okay, this is what you wanted. Investigation control files. Occurrence reports.” He took out folders one by one and slapped them down on the table. “Lab and autopsy reports. Vic photos. Daily logs. News releases and press clippings …” He paused, as though suddenly remembering something. “I’ve got another item you might find useful,” he said, and turned toward the door. “I’ll get it.”
Moments later, he came back carrying a videocassette. “I keep this locked in my desk,” he said. “With all these feds pawing through this box, I thought I should store this video in a safe place.” He crossed to a closet and wheeled out a TV monitor and VCR player. “Being this close to Washington, we get the occasional case with, well … political complications,” he said as he untangled the cord. “You know, elected officials behaving badly. Few years ago, a senator’s wife got killed when her Mercedes rolled over on one of our back roads. Trouble was, the man driving the car wasn’t her husband. Even worse, the guy worked in the Russian embassy. You should’ve seen how quick the FBI showed up on that one.” He plugged in the TV, then straightened and looked at them. “I’m having a sense of déjà vu on this case.”
“You think there are political implications?” said Gabriel.
“You’re aware of who really owns the house? It took us weeks to find out.”
“A subsidiary of the Ballentree Company.”
“And that’s the political complication. We’re talking about a Goliath in Washington. White House buddy. The country’s biggest defense contractor. I had no idea what I was walking into that day. Finding five women shot to death was bad enough. Add in the politics, the FBI meddling, and I’m ready for goddamn early retirement.” Wardlaw inserted the tape in the VCR, grabbed the remote, and pressed PLAY.
The Rizzoli & Isles Series 11-Book Bundle Page 145
