Tess Gerritsen - The Surgeon

“Here it is,” said Anna, returning with the box, which she set on the kitchen table. “We didn’t want to leave it in her apartment, not with all those strangers going in and out cleaning the place. So my brothers thought I should keep the box until the family decides what to do with the jewelry.” She lifted the lid, and a melody began to tinkle. “Somewhere My Love.” Anna seemed momentarily stunned by the music. She sat very still, her eyes filling with tears.

“Mrs. Garcia?”

Anna swallowed. “I’m sorry. My husband must have wound it up. I wasn’t expecting to hear…”

The melody slowed to a few last sweet notes and stopped. In silence Anna gazed down at the jewelry, her head bent in mourning. With sad reluctance she opened one of the velvet-lined compartments and withdrew the necklace.

Rizzoli could feel her heartbeat quickening as she took the necklace from Anna. It was as she’d remembered it when she’d seen it around Elena’s neck in the morgue, a tiny lock and key dangling from a fine gold chain. She turned over the lock and saw the eighteen-karat stamp on the back.

“Where did your sister get this necklace?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know how long she’s owned it?”

“It must be something new. I never saw it before the day…”

“What day?”

Anna swallowed. And said softly: “The day I picked it up at the morgue. With her other jewelry.”

“She was also wearing earrings and a ring. Those you’ve seen before?”

“Yes. She’s had those a long time.”

“But not the necklace.”

“Why do you keep asking about it? What does it have to do with…” Anna paused, horror dawning in her eyes. “Oh god. You think he put it on her?”

The baby in the high chair, sensing something was wrong, let out a wail. Anna set her own son down on the floor and scurried over to pick up the crying infant. Hugging him close, she turned away from the necklace as though to protect him from the sight of that evil talisman. “Please take it,” she whispered. “I don’t want it in my house.”

Rizzoli slipped the necklace into a Ziploc bag. “I’ll write you a receipt.”

“No, just take it away! I don’t care if you keep it.”

Rizzoli wrote the receipt anyway and placed it on the kitchen table next to the baby’s dish of creamed spinach. “I need to ask one more question,” she said gently.

Anna kept pacing the kitchen, jiggling the baby in agitation.

“Please go through your sister’s jewelry box,” said Rizzoli. “Tell me if there’s anything missing.”

“You asked me that last week. There isn’t.”

“It’s not easy to spot the absence of something. Instead, we tend to focus on what doesn’t belong. I need you to go through this box again. Please.”

Anna swallowed hard. Reluctantly she sat down with the baby in her lap and stared into the jewelry box. She took out the items one by one and laid them on the table. It was a sad little assortment of department store trinkets. Rhinestones and crystal beads and faux pearls. Elena’s taste had run toward the bright and gaudy.

Anna laid the last item, a turquoise friendship ring, on the table. Then she sat for a moment, a frown slowly forming on her face.

“The bracelet,” she said.

“What bracelet?”

“There should be a bracelet, with little charms on it. Horses. She used to wear it every day in high school. Elena was crazy about horses….” Anna looked up with a stunned expression. “It wasn’t worth anything! It was just made of tin. Why would he take it?”

Rizzoli looked at the Ziploc bag containing the necklace — a necklace she was now certain had once belonged to Diana Sterling. And she thought, I know exactly where we’ll find Elena’s bracelet: around the wrist of the next victim.

Rizzoli stood on Moore’s front porch, triumphantly waving the Ziploc bag containing the necklace.

“It belonged to Diana Sterling. I just spoke to her parents. They didn’t realize it was missing until I called them.”

He took the bag but didn’t open it. Just held it, staring at the gold chain coiled inside the plastic.

“It’s the physical link between both cases,” she said. “He takes a souvenir from one victim. Leaves it with the next.”

“I can’t believe we missed this detail.”

“Hey, we didn’t miss it.”

“You mean you didn’t miss it.” He gave her a look that made her feel ten feet taller. Moore wasn’t a guy who’d slap your back or shout your praises. In fact, she could not remember ever hearing him raise his voice, either in anger or in excitement. But when he gave her that look , the eyebrow raised in approval, the mouth tilted in a half smile, it was all the praise she’d ever need.

Flushing with pleasure, she reached down for the bag of take-out food she’d brought. “You want dinner? I stopped in at that Chinese restaurant down the street.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yeah, I did. I figure I owe you an apology.”

“For what?”

“For this afternoon. That stupid deal with the tampon. You were just standing up for me, trying to be the good guy. I took it the wrong way.”

An awkward silence passed. They stood there, not sure of what to say, two people who don’t know each other well and are trying to get past the rocky start of their relationship.

Then he smiled, and it transformed his usually sober face into that of a much younger man. “I’m starved,” he said. “Bring that food in here.”

With a laugh, she stepped into his house. It was her first time here, and she paused to glance around, taking in all the womanly touches. The chintz curtains, the floral watercolors on the wall. It was not what she expected. Hell, it was more feminine than her own apartment.

“Let’s go into the kitchen,” he said. “My papers are in there.”

He led her through the living room, and she saw the spinet piano.

“Wow. You play?” she asked.

“No, it’s Mary’s. I’ve got a tin ear.”

It’s Mary’s. Present tense. It struck her then that the reason this house seemed so feminine was that it was still present-tense-Mary, a house waiting, unaltered, for its mistress to come home. A photo of Moore’s wife was displayed on the piano, a sunburned woman with laughing eyes and hair in windblown disarray. Mary, whose chintz curtains still hung in the house she would never return to.

In the kitchen, Rizzoli set the bag of food on the table, next to a stack of files. Moore shuffled through the folders and found the one he was searching for.

“Elena Ortiz’s E.R. report,” he said, handing it to her.

“Cordell dug this up?”

He gave an ironic smile. “I seem to be surrounded by women more competent than I am.”

She opened the folder and saw a photocopy of a doctor’s chicken-scratch handwriting. “You got the translation on this mess?”

“It’s pretty much what I told you over the phone. Unreported rape. No kit collected, no DNA. Even Elena’s family didn’t know about it.”

She closed the folder and set it down on his other papers. “Jeez, Moore. This mess looks like my dining table. No place left to eat.”

“It’s taken over your life, too, has it?” he said, clearing away the files to make space for their dinner.

“What life? This case is all there is to mine. Sleep. Eat. Work. And if I’m lucky, an hour at bedtime with my old pal Dave Letterman.”

“No boyfriends?”

“Boyfriends?” She snorted as she took out the food cartons and laid napkins and chopsticks on the table. “Oh yeah. Like I gotta beat ’em all off.” Only after she said it did she realize how self-pitying that sounded — not at all the way she meant it. She was quick to add: “I’m not complaining. If I need to spend the weekend working, I can do it without some guy whining about it. I don’t do well with whiners.”