Tess Gerritsen - The Surgeon

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.

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 the 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.