Tess Gerritsen: The Surgeon

“Why would our unsub use it at all?”

“To maintain his visual field. To control the bleeding long enough so he can see what he’s doing. Our unsub is a very neat man.”

Rizzoli pulled her hand from the wound. In her gloved palm was cupped a tiny clot of blood, like a bright red bead. “How skillful is he? Are we dealing with a doctor? Or a butcher?”

“Clearly he has anatomical knowledge,” said Tierney. “I have no doubt he’s done this before.”

Moore took a step backward from the table, recoiling from the thought of what Elena Ortiz must have suffered, yet unable to keep the images at bay. The aftermath lay right in front of him, staring with open eyes.

He turned, startled, as instruments clattered on the metal tray. The morgue attendant had pushed the tray next to Dr. Tierney, in preparation for the Y-incision. Now the attendant leaned forward and stared into the abdominal wound.

“So what happens to it?” he asked. “Once he whacks out the uterus, what does he do with it?”

“We don’t know,” said Tierney. “The organs have never been found.”

Moore stood on the sidewalk in the South End neighborhood where Elena Ortiz had died. Once this had been a street of tired rooming houses, a shabby backwater neighborhood separated by railroad tracks from the more desirable northern half of Boston. But a growing city is a ravening creature, always in search of new land, and railroad tracks are no barrier to the hungry gaze of developers. A new generation of Bostonians had discovered the South End, and the old rooming houses were gradually being converted to apartment buildings.

Elena Ortiz lived in just such a building. Though the views from her second-story apartment were uninspiring — her windows faced a Laundromat across the street — the building did offer a treasured amenity rarely found in the city of Boston: tenant parking, crammed into the adjacent alley.

Moore walked down that alley now, scanning the windows in the apartments above, wondering who at that moment was looking down at him. Nothing moved behind the windows’ glassy eyes. The tenants facing this alley had already been interviewed; none had offered any useful information.

He stopped beneath Elena Ortiz’s bathroom window and stared up at the fire escape leading to it. The ladder was pulled up and latched in the retracted position. On the night Elena Ortiz died, a tenant’s car had been parked just beneath the fire escape. Size 8 1/ 2shoe prints were later found on the car’s roof. The unsub had used it as a stepping-stone to reach the fire escape.

He saw that the bathroom window was shut. It had not been shut the night she met her killer.

He left the alley, circled back to the front entrance, and let himself into the building.

Police tape hung in limp streamers across Elena Ortiz’s apartment door. He unlocked the door and fingerprint powder rubbed off like soot on his hand. The loose tape slithered across his shoulders as he stepped into the apartment.

The living room was as he remembered it from his walk-through the day before, with Rizzoli. It had been an unpleasant visit, simmering with undercurrents of rivalry. The Ortiz case had started off with Rizzoli as lead, and she was insecure enough to feel threatened by anyone challenging her authority, especially an older male cop. Though they were now on the same team, a team that had since expanded to five detectives, Moore felt like a trespasser on her turf, and he’d been careful to couch his suggestions in the most diplomatic terms. He had no wish to engage in a battle of egos, yet a battle was what it had become. Yesterday he’d tried to focus on this crime scene, but her resentment kept pricking his bubble of concentration.

Only now, alone, could he completely focus his attention on the apartment where Elena Ortiz had died. In the living room he saw mismatched furniture arranged around a wicker coffee table. A desktop computer in the corner. A beige rug patterned with leafy vines and pink flowers. Since the murder, nothing had been moved, nothing altered, according to Rizzoli. The last light of day was fading in the window, but he did not turn on the lights. He stood for a long time, not even moving his head, waiting for complete stillness to fall across the room. This was the first chance he’d had to visit the scene alone, the first time he’d stood in this room undistracted by the voices, the faces, of the living. He imagined the molecules of air, briefly stirred by his entry, now slowing, drifting. He wanted the room to speak to him.

He felt nothing. No sense of evil, no lingering tremors of terror.

The unsub had not come in through the door. Nor had he gone wandering through his newly claimed kingdom of death. He had focused all his time, all his attention, on the bedroom.

Moore walked slowly past the tiny kitchen and started up the hallway. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck begin to bristle. At the first doorway he paused and stared into the bathroom. He turned on the light.

Thursday is a warm night. It is so warm that all across the city, windows are left open to catch every stray breeze, every cool breath of air. You crouch on the fire escape, sweating in your dark clothes, staring into this bathroom. There is no sound; the woman is asleep in the bedroom. She has to be up early for her job at the florist’s, and at this hour her sleep cycle is passing into its deepest, most unarousable phase.

She doesn’t hear the scratch of your putty knife as you pry open the screen.

Moore looked at the wallpaper, adorned with tiny red rosebuds. A woman’s pattern, nothing a man would choose. In every way this was a woman’s bathroom, from the strawberry-scented shampoo, to the box of Tampax under the sink, to the medicine cabinet crammed with cosmetics. An aqua-eye-shadow kind of gal.

You climb in the window, and fibers of your navy-blue shirt catch on the frame. Polyester. Your sneakers, size 8 1/ 2, leave prints coming in on the white linoleum floor. There are traces of sand, mixed with crystals of gypsum. A typical mix picked up from walking the city of Boston.

Maybe you pause, listening in the darkness. Inhaling the sweet foreignness of a woman’s space. Or maybe you waste no time but proceed straight to your goal.

The bedroom.

The air seemed fouler, thicker, as he followed in the intruder’s footsteps. It was more than just an imagined sense of evil; it was the smell.

He came to the bedroom door. By now the hairs on the back of his neck were standing straight out. He already knew what he would see inside the room; he thought he was prepared for it. Yet when he turned on the lights, the horror assailed him once again, as it had the first time he’d seen this room.

The blood was now over two days old. The cleaning service had not yet come in. But even with their detergents and steam cleaners and cans of white paint, they could never fully erase what had happened here, because the air itself was permanently imprinted with terror.

You step through the doorway, into this room. The curtains are thin, only an unlined cotton print, and light from the street lamps shines through the fabric, onto the bed. Onto the sleeping woman. Surely you must linger a moment, studying her. Considering with pleasure the task that lies ahead. Because it is pleasurable for you, isn’t it? You are growing more and more excited. The thrill moves through your bloodstream like a drug, awakening every nerve, until even your fingertips are pulsing with anticipation.

Elena Ortiz did not have time to scream. Or, if she did, no one heard her. Not the family in the unit next door, nor the couple below.

The intruder brought his tools with him. Duct tape. A rag soaked in chloroform. A collection of surgical instruments. He had come fully prepared.