Tess Gerritsen - The Keepsake

Taking her cue, he responded just as brusquely: “Detective Young’s down in the basement. His partner’s upstairs, talking to the curator.”

“I’ll start in the basement.”

She pulled on gloves and paper shoe covers and headed for the stairwell. With every step, she girded herself for what she was about to confront. When she reached the basement level, she saw a stark warning of what lay ahead. Bloody shoe prints, a man’s size nine or ten, had tracked across the hall from the storage area to the elevator. Alongside the shoe prints was an alarming smear left by something that had been dragged across that floor.

“Rizzoli?” said Detective Young. He had just emerged from the storage room.

“Did you find her?” asked Jane.

“I’m afraid she’s nowhere in this building.”

“Shit.” Jane looked down again, at the smear. “He took her.”

“I’d say it looks that way. Pulled her across this hall and brought her up in the elevator to the first floor.”

“And then what?”

“Took her out a rear door that leads to their loading dock. There’s an alley behind the building where he could have backed up his vehicle. No one would’ve seen a thing, especially tonight, with all the rain. He just had to load her in and drive away.”

“How the hell did he get into the building? Weren’t the doors locked?”

“The senior docent-her name’s Mrs. Willebrandt-said she left around five fifteen and she swears she locked the doors. But she looks like she’s about a thousand years old, so who knows what her memory’s like?”

“What about everyone else? Where was Dr. Robinson?”

“He and Ms. Duke drove out to Revere to ship a crate. He says he came back to the building around seven to catch up on some work and he didn’t see anyone here. He assumed Dr. Pulcillo had left for the day, so he wasn’t concerned at first. Until he glanced in her office and noticed her purse was still there. That’s when he called 911.”

“Detective Frost was supposed to drive her home today.”

Young nodded. “So he told us.”

“Then where is he?”

“He arrived just after we got here. He’s upstairs now.” Young paused, and said quietly: “Go easy on him, huh?”

“For screwing up?”

“I’ll let him tell you what happened. But first…” He turned toward the door. “I have to show you this.”

She followed him into the storage area.

The footprints were more vivid here, the killer’s soles so wet with blood that they left splash marks. Young moved into the maze of storage items and pointed down a narrow aisle. The object of his attention sat wedged between crates.

“There’s not much left of the face,” he said.

But there was still enough of it for Jane to recognize Simon Crispin. The blow had slammed into his left temple, shattering bone and cartilage, leaving a crater of gore. Blood had streamed from the wound into the aisle, where the lake had spread across the concrete and soaked into scattered wood shavings. For a short time after the blow, Simon had lived, long enough for his heart to keep beating and keep pumping blood that had spilled from the ruined head and streamed across this floor.

“Somehow this killer managed to time it just right,” said Young. “He must have been watching the building. He must have seen Mrs. Willebrandt leave, so he knew that only two people were still here. Dr. Pulcillo and an eighty-two-year-old man.” Young looked at Jane. “I hear her leg was in a cast, so she couldn’t have run away. And she wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight.”

Jane looked down at the drag mark left by Josephine’s body. We told her she’d be safe. That’s why she came back to Boston. She trusted us.

“There’s one more thing you need to see,” said Young.

She looked up. “What?”

“I’ll show you.” He led her back toward the exit. They emerged from the maze of crates. “That,” said Young, and he pointed at the closed door. At the two words that had been written in blood:

FIND ME

Jane climbed the stairs to the third floor. By now the medical examiner and the CSU team had arrived, carrying all their paraphernalia, and the building echoed with the voices and the creaking footsteps of an invading army, the sounds spiraling up the central stairwell. She paused at the top, suddenly weary and sick of blood and death and failure.

Most of all, failure.

The perfectly grilled steak that she had eaten at her mother’s house just hours before now felt like an undigested brick in her stomach. From one minute to the next, she thought; that’s how quickly a pleasant summer Sunday can turn into tragedy.

She walked through the gallery of human bones, past the skeletal mother cradling the fragments of her child, and headed up the hallway toward the administrative offices. Through an open doorway, she spotted Barry Frost sitting alone in one of the offices, his shoulders slumped, his head in his hands.

“Frost?” she said.

Reluctantly he straightened, and she was startled to see that his eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. He turned away, as though embarrassed that she’d glimpsed his anguish, and he quickly swiped a sleeve across his face.

“Jesus,” she said. “What happened to you?”

He shook his head. “I can’t do this. I need to be taken off the case.”

“You want to tell me what went wrong?”

“I fucked up. That’s what went wrong.”

Seldom did she hear him use profanity, and hearing that word from his lips surprised her even more than his confession. She entered the room and shut the door. Then she pulled over a chair and sat down facing him directly so that he would be forced to look at her.

“You were supposed to escort her home tonight. Weren’t you?”

He nodded. “It was my turn.”

“So why didn’t you get here?”

“It slipped my mind,” he said softly.

“You forgot?”

He released a tortured sigh. “Yes, I forgot. I should have been here at six, but I got sidetracked. That’s why I can’t work this case anymore. I need to take a leave of absence.”

“Okay, you screwed up. But we’ve got a missing woman here, and I need all hands on deck.”

“I’m worthless to you right now. I’ll just fuck up again.”

“What the hell is wrong with you? You’re falling apart right when I need you the most.”

“Alice wants a divorce,” he said.

She stared at him, unable to come up with an adequate response. If ever there were a time to give her partner a hug, this would be it. But she’d never hugged him before, and it felt fake to start doing it now. So she just said, “Oh man, I’m sorry.”

“She flew home this afternoon,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t make it to your barbecue. She came home to break the news in person. At least she was nice enough to say it to my face. And not over the phone.” Again, he wiped a sleeve across his face. “I knew something had to be wrong. I could feel it building, ever since she started law school. After that, nothing I did or said seemed to interest her anymore. It was like I’m just this dumb cop she happened to marry, and now she regrets it.”

“Did she actually say that to you?”

“She didn’t have to. I heard it in her voice.” He gave a bitter laugh. “Nine years we’re together, and suddenly I’m not good enough for her.”

Jane couldn’t help but ask the obvious question. “So who’s the other guy?”

“What difference does it make if there’s another guy? The point is, she doesn’t want to be married. Not to me, anyway.” His face crumpled and he shook from the effort not to cry. But the tears came anyway and he rocked forward, his head in his hands. Jane had never seen him so broken, so vulnerable, and it almost frightened her. She didn’t know how to comfort him. At that moment, she would rather have been anywhere else, even at the bloodiest of crime scenes, instead of trapped in this room with a sobbing man. It occurred to her that she should take his weapon. Guns and depressed men did not mix well. Would he be insulted if she did? Would he resist? All these practical considerations ran through her head as she patted him on the shoulder and murmured useless sounds of commiseration. Screw Alice. I never liked her anyway. Now the bitch has gone and made my life miserable as well.