“With you in charge, I know she will.” He took her into his arms for a farewell hug. “I’m sorry, Maura,” he murmured. “Sorry for everything that’s gone wrong.” He pulled away and looked at her. “Back when you knew me at Stanford, I’m sure you thought I was a fuckup. I guess I haven’t done too good a job of changing your mind.”
“You get us out of here, Doug, and I’ll rethink that opinion.”
“You can count on it.” He tightened the chest strap of his backpack. “Hold the fort, Dr. Isles. I promise I’ll be back with the cavalry.”
She watched from the porch as he headed up the road. The day had already warmed into the twenties, and not a cloud was visible in the sky. If he was going to attempt the journey, today was the day to do it.
The door suddenly opened and Elaine came flying out of the house. She had already said her goodbye to Doug moments earlier, but here she was again, running to catch up with him, running as though her life depended on it. Maura could not hear their conversation, but she saw Elaine pull off the cashmere scarf she always wore and gently drape it around Doug’s neck as a parting gift. They embraced, a hug that seemed to last forever. Then Doug was on his way, climbing up the rutted road that led out of the valley. Only when he’d rounded the bend and vanished behind the trees did Elaine finally turn back to the house. She climbed the porch steps to where Maura was standing but didn’t say a word, just brushed past her and walked inside, shutting the door behind her.
EVEN BEFORE DETECTIVE QUEENAN INTRODUCED HIMSELF, JANE would have pegged him as a cop. He stood beside a snow-covered Toyota in the parking lot of the Mountain Lodge, conversing with a man and a woman. As Jane and her party climbed out of their rental car and approached the Toyota, it was Queenan who turned to look at them, watching with the alert gaze that characterized a man whose job was all about observation. In every other way he seemed ordinary—balding, overweight, his mustache streaked with the first hints of gray.
“Are you Detective Queenan?” said Gabriel.
The man nodded. “You must be Agent Dean.”
“And I’m Detective Rizzoli,” said Jane.
Queenan frowned at her. “Boston PD?”
“Homicide unit,” she said.
“Homicide? Aren’t you folks kind of jumping the gun here? We don’t know that any crime’s been committed.”
“Dr. Isles is a friend of ours,” said Jane. “She’s a reliable professional, and she wouldn’t go missing on a whim. We’re all concerned about her welfare.”
Queenan turned to look at Brophy. “And are you with Boston PD, too?”
“No, sir,” said Brophy. “I’m a priest.”
At that, Queenan gave a startled laugh. “A fibbie, a cop, and a priest. Now, that’s a team I haven’t seen before.”
“What have you got so far?” Jane asked.
“Well, we have this,” Queenan said, and he pointed at the parked Toyota where two people stood, watching the conversation. The man was named Finch, and he worked as a security guard for the lodge. The woman was an employee with the Hertz rental car agency.
“This Toyota’s been parked here since at least Friday night,” said Finch. “Hasn’t been moved.”
“You confirmed that on surveillance video?” asked Jane.
“Uh, no, ma’am. Cameras don’t cover this lot.”
“Then how do you know it’s been here that long?”
“Look at the snow piled up on it. We had a big storm on Saturday that dumped almost two feet, which is about what I see on this car.”
“This is Maura’s car?”
The Hertz lady said, “The rental contract for this vehicle was made out to a Dr. Maura Isles. It was booked online three weeks ago, and she picked it up last Tuesday. Paid for it with an AmEx card. It was supposed to be returned to our airport lot yesterday morning.”
“She didn’t call to extend the rental?” asked Gabriel.
“No, sir.” The woman pulled a key ring out of her pocket and looked at Queenan. “Here’s that spare key you wanted, Detective.”
Queenan pulled on a set of latex gloves and unlocked the front passenger door. Gingerly he leaned inside and opened the glove compartment, where he found the rental contract. “Maura Isles,” he confirmed, scanning the papers. He peered at the odometer. “Looks like she put in about ninety miles. Not much driving for a six-day rental.”
“She was here for a medical conference,” said Jane. “And she was staying at this hotel. She probably didn’t get much of a chance for sightseeing.” Jane peered through the window, careful not to touch the glass. Except for a folded USA Today lying on the front passenger seat, the interior looked spotless. Of course it would be; Maura was a neatness freak, and Jane had never spied so much as a stray Kleenex in her Lexus. “What’s the date on that newspaper?” she asked.
Queenan unfolded the USA Today. “It’s last Tuesday’s.”
“The day she flew here,” said Brophy. “She must have picked it up at the airport.”
Queenan straightened. “Let’s take a look in the trunk,” he said. He circled to the rear, brushed off the snow, and pressed the unlock button on the remote. They all gathered around to watch, and Jane noticed Queenan hesitate before reaching down with a gloved hand to lift open the trunk. The same thought was probably going through all their heads at that moment. A missing woman. An abandoned vehicle. Too many surprises had been found in car trunks, too many horrors folded like embryos inside steel wombs. In these freezing temperatures, there would be no odors to alert anyone, no olfactory clues of what might lie inside. As Queenan lifted the trunk, Jane felt her breath catch in her throat. She stared into the now revealed space.
“Empty and clean as a whistle,” said Queenan, and she heard relief in his voice. He looked at Gabriel. “So we have a rental car that looks to be in good shape, and no luggage. Wherever your friend went, she took her stuff with her. That sounds like a planned jaunt to me.”
“Then where is she?” said Jane. “Why isn’t she answering her cell phone?”
Queenan looked at her as though she were merely an irritating distraction. “I don’t know your friend. Maybe you have a better handle on that answer than I do.”
The Hertz lady said, “When can we get this vehicle back? It’s part of our fleet.”
“We’ll need to hold on to it for a while,” said Queenan.
“How long?”
“Until we decide if a crime has actually been committed. At the moment, I’m not sure.”
“Then how do you explain her disappearance?” said Jane.
Once again, that flicker of irritation passed through his eyes when he looked at her. “I said I’m not sure. I’m keeping an open mind, ma’am. How about we all try doing that?”
“I CAN’T SAY I really remember this particular guest,” said Michelle, a desk clerk at the Mountain Lodge. “But then, we had two hundred doctors, plus their families, staying here last week. There’s no way I could have kept track of everyone.”
They had crowded into the manager’s office, which was barely large enough to hold them all. The manager stood near the door with his arms crossed as he watched the interview. It was his presence, more than the questions, that seemed to make Michelle nervous, and she kept glancing toward her boss, as if afraid he’d disapprove of her answers.
“Then you don’t recognize her picture?” Queenan asked, tapping on the official photo that Jane had printed off the Massachusetts medical examiner’s website. It was an image of a somber professional. Maura gazed directly at the camera, her mouth neutral and unsmiling—appropriate for the line of work she was in. When one’s job involved slicing open the dead, a broad grin would be unsettling.
Michelle studied the photo again with self-conscious diligence. She was young, in her midtwenties, and having so many people watching would make it difficult for anyone to concentrate. Especially when one of those people was your boss.
Jane said to the manager, “Would you mind stepping out, sir?”
“We only need to borrow it for a short time.”
“Since this business involves my hotel, I think I should know exactly what’s going on.” He looked at the clerk. “Do you remember her or not, Michelle?”
The young woman gave a helpless shrug. “I can’t be sure. Are there any other pictures?”
After a silence, Brophy said quietly: “I have one.” From the inside pocket of his jacket, he produced the photo. It was a casual snapshot of Maura seated at her kitchen table, a glass of red wine in front of her. Compared with the somber photo from the ME’s office, this looked like a different woman entirely, her face flushed with alcohol and laughter. The photo was worn around the edges from repeated handling; it was something that he probably always carried with him, to be brought out and gazed at in lonely moments. For Daniel Brophy, there must be many such moments, torn between duty and longing, between God and Maura.
“Does she look familiar?” Queenan asked Michelle.
The young woman frowned. “This is the same woman? She looks so different in this picture.”
Happier. In love.
Michelle looked up. “You know, I think I do remember her. Was she here with her husband?”
“She’s not married,” said Jane.
“Oh. Well, maybe I’m thinking of the wrong woman, then.”
“Tell us about the woman you do remember.”
“She was with this guy. A really cute guy with blond hair.”
Jane avoided looking at Brophy; she didn’t want to see his reaction. “What else do you remember about them?”
“They were going out to dinner together. I remember they stopped at the desk, and he asked for directions to the restaurant. I just assumed they were married.”
“Why?”
“Because he was laughing and said something like, ‘You see? I have learned to ask for directions.’ I mean, that’s something a guy would say to his wife, right?”
“When did you see this couple?”
“It would have been Thursday night. Because I was off duty on Friday.”
“And Saturday, the day she checked out? Were you working that morning?”
“Yes, but a lot of us were on duty. That’s when the conference ended and we had all those guests checking out. I don’t remember seeing her then.”
“Someone at the desk must have helped her check out.”
“Actually, no,” the manager said. He held up a computer printout. “You said you wanted her room bill, so I ran off a copy. Looks like she used the in-room checkout feature on her TV. She didn’t have to stop at the desk at all when she left.”
Queenan took the printout. Flipping through the pages, he read aloud all the charges. “Room tax. Restaurant. Internet. Restaurant. I don’t see anything out of the ordinary here.”
“If it was an in-room checkout,” Jane said, “how do we know she actually did it herself?”
Queenan didn’t even bother to suppress a snort. “Are you suggesting that someone broke into her room? Packed up her stuff and checked out for her?”
“I’m just pointing out that we don’t have proof she was actually here on Saturday morning, the day she supposedly left.”
“What kind of proof do you need?”
Jane turned to the manager. “You have a security camera mounted over the reception desk. How long do you keep the recordings?”
“We’d still have the video from last week. But you’re talking about hours and hours of recordings. Hundreds of people walking through the lobby. You’d be here all week watching those.”
“What time did she check out, according to the bill?”
Queenan looked at the printout. “It was seven fifty-four AM.”
“Then let’s start there. If she walked out of this hotel on her own two feet, we should be able to spot her.”
THERE WAS NOTHING in life so mind numbing as reviewing a surveillance video. After only thirty minutes, Jane’s neck and shoulders were sore from craning forward, trying to catch every passing figure on the monitor. It did not help matters that Queenan kept sighing and fidgeting in his chair, making it clear to everyone else in the room that he thought this was a fool’s errand. And maybe it is, thought Jane as she watched figures twitch across the screen, groups gathering and dispersing. As the time stamp moved toward eight AM, and dozens of hotel guests converged on the reception desk for checkout, her attention was pulled in too many directions at once.
It was Daniel who spotted her. “There!” he said.
Gabriel froze the recording. Jane counted at least two dozen people captured in that freeze-frame of the lobby, most of them standing near the desk. Others were caught in the background, clustered near the lobby chairs. Two men stood talking on their cell phones, and both were simultaneously looking at their watches. Welcome to the era of the compulsive multitasker.
Queenan said: “I don’t see her.”
“Go back,” said Daniel. “I’m sure it was her.”
Gabriel reversed the sequence, frame by frame. They watched as people walked backward, as groups broke apart and new clusters formed. One of the cell phone talkers twitched this way and that, as though dancing to some erratic beat coming through his receiver.
“That’s her,” Daniel said softly.
The dark-haired woman was at the very edge of the screen, her face caught in profile. No wonder Jane had missed seeing it the first time: Maura was weaving through the lobby with half a dozen people standing between her and the camera. Only at that instant, as she walked past a gap in the crowd, did the lens capture her image.
“Not a very clear shot,” said Queenan.
“I know it’s her,” said Daniel, staring at Maura with undisguised yearning. “It’s her face, her haircut. And I recognize the parka.”
“Let’s see if we can get any other views,” said Gabriel. He moved the recording forward, frame by frame. Maura’s dark hair reappeared, bobbing in and out of view as she moved past. Only at the very edge of the screen did she emerge again from the crowd. She was wearing dark pants and a white ski parka with a furred hood. Gabriel advanced one more image, and Maura’s head moved beyond the frame, but half her torso was still visible.
“Well, look at that,” said Queenan, pointing. “She’s wheeling a suitcase.” He looked at Jane. “I think that settles the issue, doesn’t it? She packed her own bag and checked out. She wasn’t dragged from the building. As of Saturday, eight oh five, she was alive and well and leaving the hotel on her own steam.” He glanced at his watch and stood. “Call me if you see anything else worth noting.”
“You’re not staying?”
“Ma’am, we’ve sent her photo to every newspaper and TV station in the state of Wyoming. We’re fielding every call that comes in. The problem is, she—or someone who looks like her—has been sighted just about everywhere.”
“Where, exactly?” asked Jane.
“You name it, she’s been seen there. The Dinosaur Museum in Thermopolis. Grubb’s General Store in Sublette County. Eating dinner at the Irma Hotel in Cody. A dozen different places, all around the state. At the moment, I’m not sure what more I can do. Now, I don’t know your missing friend here. I don’t know what kind of woman she is. But I’m thinking that she met some guy, maybe one of those other doctors here. She packs her suitcase, checks out a day early, and they decide to drive off somewhere together. Don’t you agree that’s the most likely explanation? That she’s holed up in some hotel room with this guy, and they’re having such hot sex that she’s lost track of the calendar?”
Painfully aware that Daniel was standing beside her, Jane said: “She wouldn’t do that.”
“I can’t count the number of times people have said that to me, or some variation on those words. He’s a good husband. He’d never do that. Or: She’d never leave her kids. The point is, people surprise you. They do something crazy, and suddenly you realize you never really knew them. You must’ve dealt with that situation yourself, D
etective.”
Jane could not deny it; were their roles reversed, she would probably be giving the same little speech. How people are not who you think they are, not even people you’ve loved all your life. She thought of her own parents, whose thirty-five-year marriage had disintegrated after her father’s affair with another woman. She thought of her mother’s startling transformation from dowdy housewife into a lusty divorcée in low-cut dresses. No, people are too often not who you think they are. Sometimes they do foolish and inexplicable things.
Sometimes, they fall in love with Catholic priests.
“The point is, we haven’t seen evidence of a crime yet,” said Queenan, pulling on his winter jacket. “No blood, nothing to suggest that anyone forced her to do anything.”
“There was that man. The one the hotel clerk saw with Maura.”
“What about him?”
“If Maura went off with this guy, I’d like to know who he is. Shouldn’t we at least check the videos from Thursday night?”
Queenan stood scowling as he debated whether to pull off his jacket again. At last he sighed. “Okay. Let’s look at Thursday night. The clerk said they were headed out to dinner, so we can start the recording around five PM.”
This time, it was easier to spot their target. According to Michelle, the couple had come up to the reception desk to ask for directions to the restaurant. They fast-forwarded through the video, pausing only when someone approached the desk. Passersby jittered back and forth across the screen. The time stamp advanced toward six PM and the crowd grew larger as guests headed toward dinner, the women now adorned in earrings and necklaces, the men in coats and ties.
At six fifteen, a blond man appeared, facing across the desk.
“There,” said Jane.
For a moment, there was silence as everyone focused on the dark-haired woman standing beside the man. There was no doubt about her identity.
It was Maura, and she was smiling.
“That’s your gal, I take it?” asked Queenan.
“Yes,” said Jane softly.
Tess Gerritsen's Rizzoli & Isles 8-Book Bundle Page 227
