The Surgeon r-1

by Tess Gerritsen

  Then the scalpel lifted away.

  She opened her eyes and looked into his face. So ordinary, so forgettable. A man she might have seen a dozen times and never registered. Yet he knew her. He had hovered on the edges of her world, had placed her at the bright center of his universe, while he circled around her, unseen in the darkness.

  And I never knew he was there.

  He set the scalpel down on the tray. And smiling, he said, “Not yet.”

  Only when he’d walked out of the room did she know the torment was postponed, and she gave a sharp gasp of relief.

  So this was his game. Prolong the terror, prolong the pleasure. For now he would keep her alive, giving her time to contemplate what came next.

  Every minute alive is another minute to escape.

  The effect of the chloroform had dissipated, and she was fully alert, her mind racing on the potent fuel of panic. She was lying spreadeagled on a steel-framed bed. Her clothes had been stripped off; her wrists and ankles were bound to the bedframe with duct tape. Though she yanked and strained against the bindings until her muscles quivered from exhaustion, she could not free herself. Four years ago, in Savannah, Capra had used nylon cord to bind her wrists, and she had managed to slip one hand free; the Surgeon would not repeat that mistake.

  Drenched with sweat, too tired to keep struggling, she focused on her surroundings.

  A single bare lightbulb hung above the bed. The scent of earth and dank stone told her she was in a cellar. Turning her head, she could make out, just beyond the circle of light, the cobbled surface of the stone foundation.

  Footsteps creaked overhead, and she heard chair legs scrape. A wooden floor. An old house. Upstairs, a TV went on. She could not remember how she had arrived in this room or how long the drive had taken. They might be miles away from Boston, in a place where no one would think to look.

  The gleam of the tray drew her gaze. She stared at the array of instruments, neatly laid out for the procedure to come. Countless times she herself had wielded such instruments, had thought of them as tools of healing. With scalpels and clamps she had excised cancers and bullets, had stanched the hemorrhage from ruptured arteries and drained chest cavities drowning in blood. Now she stared at the tools she had used to save lives and saw the instruments of her own death. He had put them close to the bed, so she could study them and contemplate the razor edge of the scalpel, the steel teeth of the hemostats.

  Don’t panic. Think. Think.

  She closed her eyes. Fear was like a living thing, wrapping its tentacles around her throat.

  You beat them before. You can do it again.

  She felt a drop of perspiration slide down her breast, into the sweat-soaked mattress. There was a way out. There had to be a way out, a way to fight back. The alternative was too terrible to contemplate.

  Opening her eyes, she stared at the lightbulb overhead and focused her scalpel-sharp mind on what to do next. She remembered what Moore had told her: that the Surgeon fed on terror. He attacked women who were damaged, who were victims. Women to whom he felt superior.

  He will not kill me until he has conquered me.

  She drew in a deep breath, understanding now what game had to be played. Fight the fear. Welcome the rage. Show him that no matter what he does to you, you cannot be defeated.

  Even in death.

  Twenty-four

  Rizzoli jerked awake, and pain stabbed her neck like a knife. Lord, not another pulled muscle, she thought as she slowly raised her head and blinked at the sunlight in the office window. The other workstations in her pod were deserted; she was the only one sitting at a desk. Sometime around six, she’d put her head down in exhaustion, promising herself just a short nap. It was now nine-thirty. The stack of computer printouts she’d used as a pillow was damp with drool.

  She glanced at Frost’s workstation and saw his jacket hanging over the back of the chair. A doughnut bag sat on Crowe’s desk. So the rest of the team had come in while she was sleeping and had surely seen her slack-jawed and leaking spittle. What an entertaining sight that must have been.

  She stood and stretched, trying to work the crick out of her neck, but knew it was futile. She’d just have to go through the day with her head askew.

  “Hey, Rizzoli. Get your beauty sleep?”

  Turning, she saw a detective from one of the other teams grinning at her across the partition.

  “Don’t I look it?” she growled. “Where is everyone?”

  “Your team’s been in conference since eight.”

  “What?”

  “I think the meeting just broke up.”

  “No one bothered to tell me.” She headed up the hall, the last cobwebs of sleep blasted away by anger. Oh, she knew what was going on. This was how they drove you out, not with a frontal assault but with the drip, drip of humiliation. Leave you out of the meetings, out of the loop. Reduce you to cluelessness.

  She walked into the conference room. The only one there was Barry Frost, gathering his papers from the table. He looked up, and a faint flush spread across his face when he saw her.

  “Thanks for letting me know about the meeting,” she said.

  “You looked so wiped out. I figured I could catch you up on all this later.”

  “When, next week?”

  Frost looked down, avoiding her gaze. They’d worked together as partners long enough for her to recognize the guilt in his face.

  “So I’m out in the cold,” she said. “Was that Marquette’s decision?”

  Frost gave an unhappy nod. “I argued against it. I told him we needed you. But he said, with the shooting and all…”

  “He said what?”

  Reluctantly Frost finished: “That you were no longer an asset to the unit.”

  No longer an asset. Translation: her career was finished.

  Frost left the room. Suddenly dizzy from lack of sleep and food, she dropped into a chair and just sat there, staring at the empty table. For an instant she had a flashback to being nine years old, the despised sister, wanting desperately to be accepted as one of the boys. But the boys had rejected her, as they always did. She knew Pacheco’s death was not the real reason she’d been shut out. Bad shootings had not ruined the careers of other cops. But when you were a woman and better than anyone else and you had the nerve to let them know it, a single mistake like Pacheco was all it took.

  When she returned to her desk, she found the workpod deserted. Frost’s jacket was now gone; so was Crowe’s doughnut bag. She, too, might as well split. In fact, she ought to just clean out her desk right now, since there was no future for her here.

  She opened her drawer to take out her purse and paused. An autopsy photo of Elena Ortiz stared up at her from a jumble of papers. I’m his victim, too, she thought. Whatever resentments she might hold against her colleagues, she did not lose sight of the fact the Surgeon was responsible for her downfall. The Surgeon was the one who had humiliated her.

  She slammed the drawer shut. Not yet. I’m not ready for surrender.

  She glanced at Frost’s desk and saw the stack of papers that he’d gathered from the conference table. She looked around to make sure no one was watching her. The only other detectives were at another pod at the far end of the room.

  She grabbed Frost’s papers, took them to her desk, and sat down to read.

  They were Warren Hoyt’s financial records. This was what the case had come down to: a paper chase. Follow the money, find Hoyt. She saw credit card charges, bank checks, deposits and withdrawals. A lot of big numbers. Hoyt’s parents had left him a wealthy young man, and he’d indulged in travel every winter to the Caribbean and Mexico. She found no evidence of another residence, no rent checks, no fixed monthly payments.

  Of course not. He was not stupid. If he maintained a lair, he’d pay for it in cash.

  Cash. You can’t always predict when you’ll run out of cash. ATM withdrawals were often unplanned or spontaneous transactions.

  She flipped through t
he bank records, searching for every ATM use, and jotted them down on a separate piece of paper. Most were cash withdrawals from locations near Hoyt’s residence or the medical center, areas within his normal field of activity. It was the unusual she was searching for, the transactions that didn’t fit his pattern.

  She found two of them. One at a bank in Nashua, New Hampshire, on June 26. The other was at an ATM in Hobb’s FoodMart in Lithia, Massachusetts, on May 13.

  She leaned back, wondering if Moore was already chasing down these two transactions. With so many other details to follow up on and all the interviews with Hoyt’s colleagues at the lab, a pair of ATM withdrawals might be way down on the team’s priority list.

  She heard footsteps and glanced up with a start, panicked that she’d been caught reading Frost’s papers, but it was only a clerk from the lab who walked into the pod. The clerk gave Rizzoli a smile, dropped a folder on Moore’s desk, and walked out again.

  After a moment, Rizzoli rose from her chair and went to Moore’s desk to peek inside the folder. The first page was a report from Hair and Fiber, an analysis of the light brown strands found on Warren Hoyt’s pillow.

  Trichorrhexis invaginata, compatible with hair strand found in wound margin of victim Elena Ortiz. Bingo. Confirmation that Hoyt was their man.

  She flipped to a second page. This, too, was a report from Hair and Fiber, on a strand found on Hoyt’s bathroom floor. This one did not make sense. This did not fit in.

  She closed the folder and walked to the lab.

  Erin Volchko was sitting in front of the gammatech prism, shuffling through a series of photomicrographs. As Rizzoli came into the lab, Erin held up a photo and challenged: “Quick! What is it?”

  Rizzoli frowned at the black-and-white image of a scaly band. “It’s ugly.”

  “Yeah, but what is it?”

  “Probably something gross. Like a cockroach leg.”

  “It’s a hair from a deer. Cool, isn’t it? It doesn’t look a thing like human hair.”

  “Speaking of human hair.” Rizzoli handed her the report that she’d just read. “Can you tell me more about this?”

  “From Warren Hoyt’s apartment?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The short brown hairs on Hoyt’s pillow show Trichorrhexis invaginata. He does appear to be your unsub.”

  “No, the other hair. The black strand from his bathroom floor.”

  “Let me show you the photo.” Erin reached for a bundle of photomicrographs. She shuffled through them like cards and pulled one from the deck. “This is the hair from the bathroom. You see the numerical scores there?”

  Rizzoli looked at the sheet, at Erin’s neat handwriting. A00-B00-C05-D33. “Yeah. Whatever it means.”

  “The first two scores, A00 and B00, tell you the strand is straight and black. Under the compound microscope, you can see additional details.” She handed Rizzoli the photo. “Look at the shaft. It’s on the thick side. Notice the cross-sectional shape is nearly round.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It’s one feature that helps us distinguish between races. A hair shaft from an African subject, for instance, is nearly flat, like a ribbon. Now look at the pigmentation, and you’ll notice it’s very dense. See the thick cuticle? These all point to the same conclusion.” Erin looked at her. “This hair is characteristic of East Asian heritage.”

  “What do you mean by East Asian?”

  “Chinese or Japanese. The Indian subcontinent. Possibly Native American.”

  “Can that be confirmed? Is there enough hair root for DNA tests?”

  “Unfortunately, no. It appears to have been clipped, not shed naturally. There’s no follicular tissue on this strand. But I’m confident this hair comes from someone of non-European, non-African descent.”

  An Asian woman, thought Rizzoli as she walked back to the homicide unit. How does this come into the case? In the glass-walled corridor leading to the north wing she paused, her tired eyes squinting against the sunlight as she looked out over the neighborhood of Roxbury. Was there a victim whose body they had yet to find? Had Hoyt clipped her hair as a souvenir, the way he’d clipped Catherine Cordell’s?

  She turned and was startled to see Moore walk right past her, on his way to the south wing. He might never have acknowledged her presence had she not called out to him.

  He stopped and reluctantly turned to face her.

  “That long black strand on Hoyt’s bathroom floor,” she said. “The lab says it’s East Asian. There could be a victim we’ve missed.”

  “We discussed that possibility.”

  “When?”

  “This morning, at the meeting.”

  “Goddamnit, Moore! Don’t leave me out of the loop!”

  His cold silence served to amplify the shrillness of her outburst.

  “I want him, too,” she said. Slowly, inexorably, she approached him until she was right in his face. “I want him as much as you do. Let me back in.”

  “It’s not my decision. It’s Marquette’s.” He turned to leave.

  “Moore?”

  Reluctantly he stopped.

  “I can’t stand this,” she said. “This feud between us.”

  “This isn’t the time to talk about it.”

  “Look, I’m sorry. I was pissed off at you about Pacheco. I know it’s a lousy excuse for what I did. For telling Marquette about you and Cordell.”

  He turned to her. “Why did you do it?”

  “I just told you why. I was pissed off.”

  “No, there’s more to it than Pacheco. It’s about Catherine, isn’t it? You’ve disliked her from the very first day. You couldn’t stand the fact—”

  “That you were falling in love with her?”

  A long silence passed.

  When Rizzoli spoke, she could not keep the sarcasm from her voice. “You know, Moore, for all your high-minded talk about respecting women’s minds, admiring women’s abilities, you still fall for the same thing every other man does. Tits and ass.”

  He went white with anger. “So you hate her for the way she looks. And you’re pissed at me for falling for it. But you know what, Rizzoli? What man’s going to fall for you, when you don’t even like yourself?”

  She stared in bitterness as he walked away. Only weeks ago, she’d thought Moore was the last person on earth who would say something so cruel. His words stung worse than if they’d come from anyone else.

  That he might have spoken the truth was something she refused to consider.

  Downstairs, passing through the lobby, she paused at the memorial to Boston PD’s fallen cops. The names of the dead were engraved on the wall in chronological order, starting with Ezekiel Hodson in 1854. A vase of flowers sat on the granite floor in tribute. Get yourself killed in the line of duty, and you’re a hero. How simple, how permanent. She didn’t know anything about these men whose names were now immortalized. For all she knew, some of them might have been dirty cops, but death had made their names and reputations untouchable. Standing there, before that wall, she almost envied them.

  She walked out to her car. Rooting around in her glove compartment, she found a New England map. She spread it on the seat and eyed her two choices: Nashua, New Hampshire, or Lithia, in western Massachusetts. Warren Hoyt had used ATM’s at both locations. It was down to pure guesswork. A toss of a coin.

  She started the car. It was ten-thirty; she didn’t reach the town of Lithia until noon.

  Water. It was all Catherine could think about, the cool, clean taste of it streaming into her mouth. She thought of all the fountains from which she had drunk, the stainless-steel oases in the hospital corridors spouting icy water that splashed her lips, her chin. She thought of crushed ice and the way post-op patients would crane their necks and open their parched mouths like baby birds to receive a few precious chips of it.

  And she thought of Nina Peyton, bound in a bedroom, knowing she was doomed to die, yet able to think only of her terrible thirst.

  Th
is is how he tortures us. How he beats us down. He wants us to beg for water, beg for our lives. He wants complete control. He wants us to acknowledge his power.

  All night she had been left to stare at that lone lightbulb. Several times she had dozed off, only to startle awake, her stomach churning in panic. But panic cannot be sustained, and as the hours passed and no amount of struggling could loosen her bonds, her body seemed to shut down into a state of suspended animation. She hovered there, in the nightmarish twilight between denial and reality, her mind focused with exquisite concentration on her craving for water.

  Footsteps creaked. A door squealed open.

  She snapped fully awake. Her heart was suddenly pounding like an animal trying to beat its way out of her chest. She sucked in dank air, cool cellar air that smelled of earth and moist stone. Her breaths came in quickening gasps as the footsteps moved down the stairs and then he was there, standing above her. The light from the lone bulb cast shadows on his face, turning it into a smiling skull with hollows for eyes.

  “You want a drink, don’t you?” he said. Such a quiet voice. Such a sane voice.

  She could not speak because of the tape over her mouth, but he could see the answer in her feverish eyes.

  “Look what I have, Catherine.” He held up a tumbler and she heard the delicious clink of ice cubes and saw bright beads of water sweating on the cold surface of the glass. “Wouldn’t you like a sip?”

  She nodded, her gaze not on him but on the tumbler. Thirst was driving her mad, but she was already thinking ahead, beyond that first glorious sip of water. Plotting her moves, weighing her chances.

  He swirled the water, and the ice rang like chimes against the glass. “Only if you behave.”

  I will, her eyes promised him.

  The tape stung as it was peeled off. She lay completely passive, let him slip a straw into her mouth. She took a greedy sip, but it was barely a trickle against the raging fire of her thirst. She drank again and immediately began to cough, precious water dribbling from her mouth.

  “Can’t — can’t drink lying down,” she gasped. “Please, let me sit up. Please.”