“A vast international conspiracy,” said Crowe. “Right.”
“It warrants a deeper look.”
“No. We stay focused on Andres Zapata. Suddenly he’s nowhere to be seen, which sounds like a guilty man to me.” Crowe looked at Frost. “What do we have on his phone calls?”
Frost shook his head. “Hasn’t used his cell phone since the Ackermans were killed. I’m guessing he tossed it, or he’s already back in Colombia. Maria’s phone calls don’t trip any alarms for me.”
“Then she has some other way she contacts him. Email. A go-between. So we move on to friends of friends. Any new tips since this morning’s broadcast?”
Moore nodded. “We’re trying to keep up with all of them.”
“You know what Master Yoda says. There’s no try, only do.” Crowe glanced at his watch and abruptly stood up, straightening his tie. “Got a reporter waiting for me,” he said and walked out of the room.
“Do you think we should widen that doorway now?” said Jane. “Before his head gets too big to fit through?”
“I think it’s too late,” said Moore. Legendary for his patience, even he looked disgusted as he gathered his papers and stuffed them into his briefcase. Lately he’d been talking a lot about retirement; this might be the case that finally pushed him out the door.
“What do you think about Zapata?” Jane asked him.
“Andres Zapata has everything that Crowe loves in a suspect. Access, opportunity, a rap sheet. And no green card.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“Neither do I have a convincing argument to rebut it. For now, Zapata’s our man.” Moore snapped the briefcase shut and trudged out the door like a weary bureaucrat.
“Geez,” she said to Frost. “What happened to him?”
“You don’t know what it’s been like around here the past few days,” said Frost. “You haven’t had the pleasure of Crowe’s company.”
She sat tapping her pen on the files she’d brought into the meeting. Thought about all the hours she’d devoted to researching the Wards and Yablonskis. “Tell me I’ve got a point, Frost. Tell me there’s something weird about it all.”
“There’s something weird.”
“Thank you.”
“But that doesn’t mean it ties in here. I did that VICAP search. Looked at hundreds of family annihilations across the country. I’m sorry to say, these three families have a lot of company.”
“But it’s the second attacks that make these three stand out. It’s like the Grim Reaper won’t give up until He finishes the job. How do we explain it?”
“Not every crazy thing has an explanation. Sometimes it just is.”
“I never liked that answer. It’s the kind of thing I tell my kid.”
“And Regina’s okay with it, right?”
“Doesn’t mean I am.”
Her cell phone rang. She saw Crowe’s number on the display and groaned. Rolled her eyes at Frost as she answered: “Rizzoli.”
“They spotted Zapata, an apartment in Roxbury. Surveillance tails Maria there, and the fucking moron shows up. Get here now, we’re moving in.”
Ten minutes later Jane and Frost pulled up next to a chain-link fence and scrambled out of their car. Crowe was already there, strutting like General MacArthur exhorting his troops, which consisted of Detectives Arbato and Moore and two patrolmen.
“Front entrance is around the corner,” said Arbato, pointing to the four-story redbrick apartment building. “Cahill’s watching the front door. Hasn’t seen the suspect come out yet.”
“Are we sure it is Zapata?” asked Moore.
“If not, then he’s got a double. Maria stepped off the bus two blocks from here, walked straight to this address. Half an hour later, Zapata cuts across that parking lot, enters the building.”
“You got a list of the tenants?” asked Jane.
“Yeah. There are twenty-four apartments, five of them vacant.”
“Any Hispanic names?” said Crowe. “We’ll check those first.”
One of the patrolmen laughed. “Hey man, that’s profiling!”
“So sue me.”
“Can I see that list?” Frost asked, and he scanned down the names. “There’s a Philbrook living here.”
“Yeah, that’s real Hispanic,” the patrolman said.
“Maria has a sister.” Frost looked up. “She’s married to a Philbrook.”
“That’s gotta be it,” said Crowe. “Which apartment?”
“It says Two Ten.”
“That’d be the rear of the building,” said Arbato. “Security code for the entrance keypad is one two seven.”
“Arbato,” snapped Crowe, “you and these two officers stay on the exits. Rest of us, in.”
Anyone who spotted them would know something was about to go down as Crowe and Moore, Frost and Jane moved together toward the front entrance. But those in Apartment 210, which faced the rear of the building, would be blind to what was coming their way. Crowe punched 1-2-7 on the entrance keypad, and the lock clicked open. As Jane followed him inside, her heart was thumping, her hands starting to sweat. This could go down easy, or it could turn into a bloody disaster. Which meant these might be the last seconds she’d ever register, her shoes moving up scuffed stairs, the weight of the Glock in her hands. Frost’s back was just ahead of her, his Kevlar vest bulging beneath his shirt. All these details she took in with click-click efficiency, a dozen impressions at once.
They reached the second-floor landing. Apartment 210 was down the hall. Behind her, a door suddenly opened and Jane whirled, weapon swinging around. A young woman stared back, baby clutched in her arms, dark eyes wide with terror.
“Stay inside!” Jane hissed. Instantly the woman retreated and the door slammed shut.
Crowe was already at Apartment 210. He paused, shot his team a glance. “Rizzoli,” he whispered. “Your show. Get us in there.”
She knew why he’d chosen her. Female face and voice, not as threatening. She took a breath and rang the door buzzer. Stood close enough to the peephole that she’d fill the view. Unfortunately that also made it easier for anyone inside to blow off her head. She spied a flicker of movement in the peephole; someone was staring at her.
The door swung open. A Hispanic woman appeared, round-faced, in her forties, with a strong enough resemblance to the Ackerman’s housekeeper that Jane knew this must be Maria’s sister.
“Mrs. Philbrook?” said Jane.
The woman spotted the other detectives in the hall and screamed: “Maria!”
“Go, go!” barked Crowe as he shoved past Jane and burst into the apartment.
Too many things happened at once. Detectives barreling through the apartment. Maria’s sister shouting, wailing in Spanish. As Jane ran through, toward the next room, she caught glimpses of a stained carpet, a striped sofa, a playpen.
Kids. There are kids in this apartment.
Jane darted into a bedroom, where heavy curtains cast a gloom so deep she almost missed the huddled shapes in the corner. A woman was hugging two toddlers, her body curled around the children as though insulating them from harm with her own flesh.
Maria.
Footsteps clanged on metal.
Jane ducked through another doorway, into a second bedroom where Moore was scrambling through the open window, onto the fire escape.
“Zapata?” Jane asked.
“Headed up the ladder!”
Why up?
She stuck her head out the window and saw Arbato and Cahill standing in the alley below, their weapons drawn. She looked up, spotted her three teammates clambering up the ladder in pursuit.
She sprinted back through the apartment and dashed for the stairwell. If Zapata made it to the roof, that’s where she’d intercept him. She took the steps two at a time, saw a door pop open and slam shut as she hurtled past, up the final flight, her heart whomping, her chest heaving.
She burst through the door to the rooftop and emerged into the glare o
f midday. Saw Zapata scramble over the edge and land with both feet onto the roof.
“Freeze!” she yelled. “Police!”
He halted, staring at her. He was empty-handed. Faded blue jeans, wrinkled buttondown shirt with a ripped sleeve. For a few seconds it was just the two of them on that rooftop. She saw desperation in his eyes, watched it harden to grim determination.
“Hands in the air!” Crowe shouted as he and Frost dropped onto the rooftop behind Zapata.
There was nowhere for him to run. One cop in front of him, two behind him, all of them armed. Jane saw Zapata’s legs wobble, thought he was about to drop to his knees in surrender. His next move shocked her.
He sprang to his left and ran toward the roof’s far edge. Toward the narrow alley that cut between buildings. Only an Olympic-class leap could take a man safely across that gulf.
Yet leap he did, flinging himself from the roof’s edge toward the next building. For a moment he seemed to hang in midair, his body stretched out in a swan dive that almost carried him across the chasm.
Jane scrambled to the edge. Saw Zapata clinging desperately to the rain gutter of the other building as his legs scissored above a four-story drop.
“Jesus, is he nuts?” said Frost.
“Arbato, get next door!” Crowe yelled down at the street, and the two detectives on the ground sprinted across the alley.
Still dangling from the rain gutter, Zapata tried to pull himself up, feet fighting for purchase against the wall. He swung up one leg, missed. Swung again. Just as his shoe made it up over the edge, the gutter tore away from the roof.
Jane closed her eyes, but she couldn’t shut out the squeal of collapsing metal, or the thud of Zapata’s body hitting the pavement.
Somewhere, a woman was screaming.
NINETEEN
Maria Salazar sat hunched at the interview table, head drooping as she wiped tears from her eyes. As a young woman, Maria would have been strikingly beautiful. At forty-five she was still handsome, but through the one-way mirror Jane could see the gray roots peeking through on the crown of Maria’s head. Her arms, propped up on the table, were heavy but solid with muscles built up from years of housework. While she had scrubbed and polished and swept other people’s houses, what resentments had bubbled up inside her? As she’d dusted the Ackermans’ antique furniture, vacuumed the Persian carpets, had it ever occurred to her that just one of their paintings, one emerald necklace from Mrs. Ackerman’s jewelry box, could make all her financial woes disappear?
“Never,” Marie moaned in the next room. “I never steal anything!”
Crowe, playing bad cop to Moore’s good cop, leaned in close, his teeth bared with undisguised aggression. “You disarmed the security system for your boyfriend.”
“No.”
“Left the kitchen door unlocked.”
“No.”
“Gave yourself a rock-solid alibi, babysitting your sister’s kids, while Andres slipped into the Ackermans’ house. Was he just going to rob them that night, or was murder always the plan?”
“Andres, he never hurt anyone!”
“His fingerprints are on the kitchen door. They’re inside the kitchen.” Crowe bent even closer and Maria shrank away. Jane almost felt sorry for the woman because there were few sights uglier than Darren Crowe’s snarl, shoved into your face. “He was in the house, Maria. Just walked through that kitchen door.”
“He brought my cell phone! I left it home that morning, so he comes to the house.”
“And left his fingerprints inside the kitchen?”
“I give him coffee. I clean the stove, and he sits for a minute.”
“And Mrs. Ackerman’s okay with that? A strange man, sitting in her kitchen?”
“She don’t mind. Mrs. Ackerman, she’s always nice to me.”
“Come on. Weren’t the Ackermans like every other rich asshole? Paid you almost nothing, while you’re on your knees scrubbing their toilets.”
“No, they treat me good.”
“They had all the money in the world, and look at you, Maria. Struggling to pay your bills. It’s so unfair. You deserve more, don’t you think?”
She shook her head. “You make this up. It’s not the truth.”
“The truth is, Andres had a criminal record in Colombia. Drug smuggling. Burglary.”
“He never hurt anyone.”
“There’s always a first time. Gotta be tempting when we’re talking about people as rich as the Ackermans. All those nice things, there for the taking.” He pulled an evidence bag out of the box he’d brought into the room. “We found these in your apartment, Maria. Nice pearl earrings. How did you afford these?”
“Mrs. Ackerman, she gave them to me. For Christmas.”
“Gave them to you? Sure.”
“She did.”
“They’re worth about five hundred bucks. Pretty nice bonus.”
“She didn’t want them anymore. Said I could have them.”
“Or did she suddenly find out you’d stolen them? Maybe that’s the reason Andres had to kill them. To keep them quiet so you wouldn’t get arrested.”
Maria’s head came up, her eyes swollen and damp, her face flushed with rage. “You are a devil!”
“I’m just trying to keep this city safe.”
“By making up lies? You don’t know me. You don’t know Andres.”
“I know he was a criminal. I know he ran from us. That tells me he was guilty.”
“He was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Colombia. He couldn’t go back to Colombia. They would kill him there.”
“So he chose to die here, instead?”
Maria dropped her face in her hands. “He wanted to live,” she sobbed. “He wanted to be left alone.”
“Tell the truth, Maria.”
“That is the truth.”
“Tell the truth, or …” Crowe paused at Moore’s touch on his shoulder. Though no words were exchanged between the two men, Jane saw the look that passed between them. Saw Moore’s disapproving shake of the head, answered by Crowe’s glare.
Abruptly Crowe straightened. “Think about it, Maria,” he said, and walked out of the room.
“Man,” Frost muttered beside Jane. “That’s one asshole on steroids.”
Through the one-way mirror, Jane watched as Moore sat with Maria. He offered no comforting touch, no reassuring words, as the woman continued to sob, hugging herself as though to stop her shaking.
“There’s not enough evidence here,” said Jane.
“The fingerprints on the kitchen door?” said Frost. “The fact he ran from us?”
“Give me a break. You sound like Crowe.”
“And those earrings. Who gives their housekeeper an expensive gift like that?”
“Maybe it’s true. Maybe Mrs. Ackerman was a generous woman. We can’t disprove it. And think about that house, all the things Zapata could have stolen, if this really was a robbery. Even the jewelry box was left.”
“He got spooked. Ran before he could take anything.”
“Does that sound plausible? It’s gotta bother you. It sure as hell bothers me.”
In the next room, Maria slowly rose to her feet, steadied by Moore’s hand. As he guided the housekeeper out the door, Jane said quietly: “It bothers Moore, too.”
“The trouble is, you don’t have anything else to go on. Just a bad feeling.”
That wasn’t enough, but it was also something she couldn’t ignore. A bad feeling was your subconscious telling you you’d missed something, a vital detail that could change the course of an investigation.
It could change lives.
Her phone rang. When she looked at the caller’s name, she had another bad feeling. “Frankie,” she answered with a sigh.
“I’ve called you twice and you didn’t pick up.”
“I’ve been busy.” Chasing suspects. Watching a man die.
“Yeah, well, now it’s too late. It’s all hitting the fan.”<
br />
“What’s going on?”
“We’re at Mom’s, and Korsak’s just arrived.”
“We? You mean Dad’s there, too?”
“Yeah. They’re all yelling at each other.”
“Jesus, Frankie. You’ve gotta keep Dad and Korsak apart. And get one of them out of there.”
“I swear they’re gonna kill each other, Jane.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll be right there.” She hung up.
“Remember. There’s nothing more dangerous than a domestic call,” said Frost, spectacularly unhelpful.
“I just hope I won’t have to call a lawyer.”
“For your dad?”
“For me. After I kill him.”
TWENTY
As Jane stepped out of her car, she could already hear the shouting. She hurried past three familiar vehicles parked at crazy angles in front of her mother’s house and banged on the front door. Banged again when no one answered, probably because they’d gone deaf inside from the racket.
“Finally, the police arrive,” said a cranky voice behind her.
Jane turned to see Angela’s next-door neighbor, Mrs. Kaminsky, glaring at her from the sidewalk. The woman had looked ancient twenty years ago, and the passage of decades had changed nothing, as if she’d been frozen in time, her face forever cemented in a scowl.
“This neighborhood’s gone all to pot,” said Mrs. Kaminsky. “All this running around with strange men.”
“Excuse me?” said Jane.
“Your mother used to be respectable. A good married woman.”
“My dad left her.”
“So that’s an excuse to run wild?”
“Wild? My mom?”
The front door opened. “Thank God you’re here!” said Korsak. “It’s two against one!” He grabbed Jane’s hand. “Come help me.”
“You see?” said Mrs. Kaminsky, pointing at Korsak. “He’s what I’m talking about!”
Jane followed Korsak into the house, relieved to close the front door against the neighbor’s disapproving stare. “What do you mean, two against one?”
“I’m all on my own here. Your dad and Frankie keep hammering away, trying to get your mom to dump me.”
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