Tess Gerritsen - Body Double

The funny thing was, Frost really did like milk. She slid her glass his way, and asked the bartender for a Coke.

As their fellow cops came around to shake their hands and slap high fives, she and Frost ate peanuts and sipped their virtuous drinks. She missed having her usual Adams ale. Missed a lot of things tonight-her husband, her beer. Her waistline. Still, this was a good day. It’s always a good day, she thought, when a perp goes down.

“Hey, Rizzoli! The bets are up to two hundred bucks you’re having a girl, a hundred twenty on a boy.”

She glanced sideways and saw Detectives Vann and Dunleavy standing beside her at the bar. The fat Hobbit and the skinny one, holding up their twin pints of Guinness.

“So what if I have both?” she asked. “Twins?”

“Huh,” said Dunleavy. “We didn’t consider that.”

“So who wins then?”

“I guess no one.”

“Or everyone?” said Vann.

The two men stood pondering that question for a while. Sam and Frodo, stuck on the Mount Doom of dilemmas.

“Well,” said Vann, “I guess we should add another category.”

Rizzoli laughed. “Yeah, you guys do that.”

“Great work, by the way,” said Dunleavy. “Just watch, next thing, you’re gonna be in People magazine. A perp like that, all those women. What a story.”

“You want the honest truth?” Rizzoli sighed and set down her Coke. “We can’t take the credit.”

“No?”

Frost looked over at Vann and Dunleavy. “Wasn’t us brought him down. It was the vic.”

“Just a housewife,” said Rizzoli. “A scared, pregnant, ordinary housewife. Didn’t need a gun or a billy club, just a goddamn sock filled with batteries.”

Up on the TV, the local news was over, and the bartender flipped the channel to HBO. A movie with women in short skirts. Women who had waistlines.

“So what about that Black Talon?” asked Dunleavy. “How did that tie in?”

Rizzoli was quiet for a moment as she sipped her Coke. “We don’t know yet.”

“You find the weapon?”

She caught Frost looking at her, and felt a ripple of uneasiness. That was the detail that troubled them both. They had found no gun in the van. There had been knotted cords and blood-caked knives. There’d been a neatly kept notebook with the names and phone numbers of nine other baby brokers around the country; Terence Van Gates had not been the only one. And there’d been records of cash payments made to the Lanks through the years, a mother lode of information that would keep investigators busy for years. But the weapon that had killed Anna Leoni was not in the van.

“Oh, well,” said Dunleavy. “Maybe it’ll turn up. Or he got rid of it.”

Maybe. Or maybe we’re still missing something.

It was dark when she and Frost left Doyle’s. Instead of going home, she drove back to Schroeder Plaza, the conversation with Vann and Dunleavy still weighing on her mind, and sat down at her desk, which was covered by a mountain of files. On top were the records from NCIC, several decades’ worth of missing persons reports compiled during their hunt for the Beast. But it was Anna Leoni’s murder that had set the whole search in motion, like a pebble dropped into water, launching ever wider ripples. Anna’s murder was what had led them to Amalthea, and eventually to the Beast. Yet Anna’s death remained a question still unresolved.

Rizzoli cleared away the NCIC files, working her way down to the folder on Anna Leoni. Though she had read and reread everything in this file, she leafed through it again, rereading the witness statements, the autopsy, the reports from hair and fiber, fingerprints, and DNA. She came to the ballistics report, and her gaze lingered over the words Black Talon. She remembered the starburst shape of the bullet in Anna Leoni’s skull X-ray. Remembered, too, the track of devastation it had left in her brain.

A Black Talon bullet. Where was the gun that had fired it?

She closed the folder and looked down at the cardboard box that had been sitting beside her desk for the last week. It contained the files that Vann and Dunleavy had lent her, on the murder of Vassily Titov. He’d been the only other Boston-area victim of a Black Talon bullet in the last five years. She took the folders from that box and piled them on her desk, sighing when she saw how high the stack was. Even a slam-dunk investigation generates reams of paper. Vann and Dunleavy had summed up the case for her earlier, and she had read enough of their files to satisfy herself that they had indeed made a good arrest. The subsequent trial and speedy conviction of Antonin Leonov only reinforced that belief. Yet here she was, reviewing the files again, on a case which left no room for doubt that the right man had been convicted.

Detective Dunleavy’s final report was thorough and convincing. Leonov had been under police surveillance for a week, in anticipation of a delivery of Tajikistan heroin. While the two detectives had watched from their vehicle, Leonov had pulled up in front of Titov’s residence, knocked on the front door, and was admitted. Moments later, two gunshots were fired inside the house. Leonov walked out, climbed into his car, and was about to drive away when Vann and Dunleavy closed in and arrested him. Inside the house, Titov was found dead in the kitchen, two Black Talons in his brain. Ballistics later confirmed both bullets had been fired by Leonov’s weapon.

Open and shut. The perp convicted, the weapon in police custody. Rizzoli could see no link at all between the deaths of Vassily Titov and Anna Leoni, except for the use of Black Talon bullets. Increasingly rare ammunition, but not enough to constitute any real connection between the murders.

Yet she continued flipping through the files, reading through the dinner hour. By the time she reached the last folder, she was almost too tired to tackle it. I’ll get this over and done with, she thought, then pack up the files and put this issue to bed.

She opened the folder and found a report on the search of Antonin Leonov’s warehouse. It contained Detective Vann’s description of the raid, a list of Leonov’s arrested employees, along with an accounting of everything confiscated, from crates and cash to bookkeeping records. She skimmed down until she reached the list of officers on the scene. Ten Boston PD cops. Her gaze froze on one particular name, a name she hadn’t noticed when she’d read the report a week ago. Just a coincidence. It doesn’t necessarily mean…

She sat and thought about it for a moment. She remembered a drug raid she’d been in on as a young patrol officer. Lots of noise, lots of excitement. And confusion-when a dozen adrenaline-hyped cops converge on a hostile building, everyone’s nervous, everyone’s looking out for himself. You may not notice what your fellow cop is doing. What he’s slipping into his pocket. Cash, drugs. A box of bullets that would never be missed. It’s always there, that temptation to take a souvenir. A souvenir you might later find useful.

She picked up the phone and called Frost.

THE DEAD WERE NOT good company.

Maura sat at her microscope, staring through the eyepiece at sections of lung and liver and pancreas-bits of tissue sliced from a suicide victim’s mortal remains, preserved under glass, and stained a gaudy pink and purple with a hematoxylin-eosin preparation. Except for the occasional clink of the slides, and the faint hiss of the air-conditioning vent, the building was quiet. Yet it was not empty of people; in the cold room downstairs, half a dozen silent visitors lay zipped into their shrouds. Undemanding guests, each with a story to tell, but only to those willing to cut and probe.