Tess Gerritsen - The Keepsake

“If you were me, is that really what you would do?” Josephine asked softly. She looked up.

Jane stared straight back at her. “It’s exactly what I would do.”

A row of shiny new locks now decorated her apartment door.

Josephine fastened the chain, turned the dead bolt, and slid the latch shut. Then, just for good measure, she wedged a chair beneath the knob-not much of a barrier, but at least it would serve as a warning device.

Clumsy in her cast, she maneuvered on crutches to the window and looked down at the street. She saw Detective Frost emerge from her building and climb into his car. Once, he might have looked up and given her a smile, a friendly wave, but not anymore. He was all business with her now, as cool and detached as his colleague Rizzoli. This is the consequence of telling lies, she thought. I wasn’t honest, and now he doesn’t trust me. He’s right not to trust me.

I haven’t told them the biggest secret of all.

Frost had already checked her apartment when they’d arrived, but she now felt compelled to make her own inspection through her bedroom, her bathroom, and then into the kitchen. It was such a modest little kingdom, but at least it was hers. Everything was as she’d left it a week ago; everything comfortingly familiar. Everything once again back to normal.

But later that evening, as she stood at the stove stirring onions and tomatoes into a simmering pot of chili, she suddenly thought about Gemma, who would never again enjoy a meal, never again smell spices or taste wine or feel the heat wafting up from a stove.

When she finally sat down to eat, she could stomach only a few spoonfuls, and then her appetite vanished. She sat staring at the wall, at the only adornment she’d hung there: a calendar. It was a sign of how uncertain she’d been that she’d actually make a home in Boston. She’d never gotten around to properly decorating her apartment. But now I will, she thought. Detective Rizzoli was right: It’s time to take control and claim this city as my own. I’m going to stop running. I owe it to Gemma, who sacrificed everything for me, who died so that I could live. So now I will live. I’ll have a home, and I’ll make friends, and maybe I’ll even fall in love.

It starts now.

Outside, the afternoon faded to a warm summer dusk.

With her leg in a cast, she could not take her usual evening walk, could not even pace the floor. Instead she opened a bottle of wine and carried it to the couch, where she sat surfing through TV channels, more channels than she ever knew existed, and all of them the same. Pretty faces. Men with guns. More pretty faces. Men with golf clubs.

Suddenly a new image appeared on the TV, one that made her hand freeze on the remote. It was the evening news, and on the screen was a photo of a young woman, dark-haired and pretty.

“…the woman whose mummified body was found in the Crispin Museum has been identified. Lorraine Edgerton vanished from a remote New Mexico park twenty-five years ago…”

It was Madam X. She looks like my mother. She looks like me.

She shut off the TV. The apartment seemed more like a cage than a home, and she was a bird beating itself insane against the bars. I want my life back.

After three glasses of wine, she finally fell asleep.

It was barely light when she woke up. Sitting at the window, she watched the sun rise and wondered how many days she’d be trapped within these walls. This, too, was a kind of death, waiting for the next attack, the next threatening note. She had told Rizzoli and Frost about the mailings addressed to Josephine Sommer-evidence that, unfortunately, she had ripped up and flushed down the toilet. Now the police were monitoring both her apartment and her mail.

The next move was Bradley Rose’s.

Outside, the morning brightened. Buses rumbled past and joggers began their circuit around the block and people headed off to work. She watched as the day progressed and saw the playground fill with children and the afternoon traffic began to build.

By evening, she could stand it no longer. Everyone is getting on with their lives, she thought. Everyone except me.

She picked up the phone and called Nick Robinson. “I want to come back to work,” she said.

Jane was looking at the face of Victim Zero, the woman who got away.

The photo of Medea Sommer was from the yearbook of Stanford University, where Medea had been a student twenty-seven years earlier. She’d been a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty with finely sculpted cheekbones and a haunting resemblance to her daughter, Josephine. You were the one Bradley Rose really wanted, thought Jane. The woman he and his partner Jimmy Otto could never catch. So they collected substitutes, women who looked like Medea. But none of their victims was Medea; none could match the original. They kept hunting, kept searching, but Medea and her daughter managed to stay one step ahead of them.

Until San Diego.

A warm hand settled onto her shoulder, and she snapped straight in her chair.

“Wow.” Her husband, Gabriel, laughed. “A good thing you aren’t armed, or you might have just shot me.” He set Regina down on the kitchen floor, and she toddled off to play with her favorite pot lids.

“I didn’t hear you come in,” said Jane. “That was a short trip to the playground.”

“The weather doesn’t look so good out there. It’s going to start raining any minute.” He leaned over her shoulder and saw the photo of Medea. “That’s her? The mother?”

“I tell you, this woman is a real Madam X. There’s not much I can dig up on her except her college records.”

Gabriel sat down and scanned the few documents that Boston PD had been able to gather so far about Medea, and they provided only the barest sketch of a young woman who seemed more shadow than substance. Gabriel slipped on his glasses and sat back to read Medea’s Stanford University records. His horn-rimmed spectacles were new, and they made him look more like a banker than an FBI agent who knew his way around a gun. Even after a year and a half of marriage, Jane had not grown tired of watching him-and admiring him, the way she did now. Despite the thunder rumbling outside, despite the racket in the kitchen where Regina banged pot lids, he focused like a laser on the pages.

Jane went into the kitchen and scooped up Regina, who squirmed, impatient to escape. Won’t you ever be content just to rest quietly in my arms? Jane wondered as she hugged her wriggling daughter, as she breathed in the scents of shampoo and warm baby skin, the sweetest smells in the world. Every day, Jane saw more of herself in Regina, in the girl’s dark eyes and exuberantly curly hair, and in her fierce independence as well. Her daughter was a fighter, and there would be battles between them to come. But as she looked into Regina’s eyes, Jane also knew that theirs was a bond that could never be broken. To keep her daughter safe, Jane would risk anything, endure anything.

Just as Josephine did for her mother.

“This is a puzzling life story,” said Gabriel.

Jane set her daughter down on the floor and looked up at her husband. “Medea’s, you mean?”

“Born and raised in Indio, California. Stellar grades at Stanford University. Then she abruptly drops out in her senior year to have a baby.”

“And soon afterward, they both vanish from the record.”

“And become other people.”

“Repeatedly,” said Jane. She sat down at the table again. “Five name changes, as far as Josephine remembers.”

He pointed to a police report. “This is interesting. In Indio, she filed complaints against both Bradley Rose and Jimmy Otto. They were already engaged in cooperative stalking. Like a wolf pack, moving in on their kill.”