Tess Gerritsen - Die Again

And there’s one from Detective Jane Rizzoli in Boston. It was sent last night, barely an hour after our phone conversation.

I hesitate to open it, already sensing that this is the point of no return. Once I cross this line, I cannot retreat behind my solid wall of denial. In the next room, Christopher and Violet are laughing at cartoon mayhem while here I sit, my heart pounding, my hand frozen.

I click the mouse. I might as well have lit the fuse on a stick of dynamite, because what shows up on my screen hits me like an explosion. It is a photograph of the sterling silver cigarette lighter that the police found in a bag of stolen goods in Maine. I see the name R. RENWICK, in the Engraver’s Bold font that Richard liked so much. But it’s the scratch that rivets my gaze. Though faint, it is clearly there, like a single claw mark marring the gloss, slicing across the top of the R. I think of the day it happened, the day it fell out of Richard’s pocket in London and hit the pavement. I think of how often I saw him use that lighter, and how pleased he was when I presented it to him on his birthday. Such a vain and pretentious gift that he’d requested, but that was Richard, always wanting to mark his territory, even if that territory is a shiny bit of sterling silver. I remember how he used it to light his Gauloises by the campfire, and the smart click of it snapping shut.

I have no doubt this lighter is indeed his. Somehow the lighter made its way out of the Okavango Delta, carried in a killer’s pocket, and across the ocean to America. Now they are asking me to follow in his footsteps.

I read the message that Detective Rizzoli sent along with the photo. Is this the same lighter? If so, we urgently need to discuss this further. Will you come to Boston?

The sun shines brightly outside my kitchen window and my garden is at its glorious summer best. In Boston, winter is approaching and I imagine it is chilly and gray, even grayer than London. She has no idea what she’s asking of me. She says she knows the facts of what happened, but facts are cold, bloodless things, like bits of metal welded together into a statue, but missing a soul. She can’t possibly understand what I went through in the Delta.

I take a deep breath and type my response. I’m sorry. I can’t go to Boston .

AS A MARINE, GABRIEL HAD ACQUIRED MORE THAN A FEW SURVIVAL skills, and one of the skills that Jane envied was her husband’s ability to quickly snatch a few precious hours of sleep whenever the opportunity presented itself. Minutes after the flight attendants dimmed the cabin lights, he reclined his seat, closed his eyes, and dropped off straight into dreamland. Jane sat wide awake, counting the hours until landing, and thinking about Millie Jacobson.

The sole survivor of the doomed safari was not back in London, as Jane had assumed, but was now living in a small town in South Africa’s Hex River Valley. After two nightmarish weeks fighting to survive in the bush, caked in mud and eating nothing but reeds and grass, the London-bred bookseller hadn’t returned to the city, but had chosen to settle on the same continent that had nearly killed her.

The photos of Millie Jacobson after she’d emerged from the bush made it clear just how hewn to the bone she’d become by the end of her ordeal. Her UK passport photo had shown a dark-haired young woman with blue eyes and a heart-shaped face, pleasantly ordinary, neither pretty nor plain. The photo taken in the hospital during her recovery was of a woman so transformed that Jane could scarcely believe it was the same person. Somewhere in the wild, what had once been Millie Jacobson was cast off like snakeskin, to reveal a bony, sun-blackened creature with haunted eyes.

While everyone else on the plane seemed to be sleeping, Jane once again reviewed the police file of the Botswana safari murders. At the time there’d been substantial publicity in the UK about the case, where Richard Renwick was a popular thriller novelist. In the United States he was not well known and Jane had never read his books, which were described in the London Times as “action-packed” and “testosterone-driven.” The Times article focused almost entirely on Renwick, devoting only two paragraphs to his live-in girlfriend Millie Jacobson. But it was Millie who now captured Jane’s full attention, and she stared transfixed at the Interpol file photo of the young woman. It had been taken soon after the ordeal, and in Millie’s face Jane saw a reflection of herself not that many years ago. Both of them had been touched by the cold hand of a killer, and survived. That touch was something you never forgot.

She and Gabriel had left Boston on a day of wind-driven sleet and rain, and the weather during their brief stopover in London had been no less gray and wintry. So it was a shock to walk off the plane hours later, into the summery warmth of Cape Town. Here the seasons seemed upside down, and in an airport where everyone else was garbed in shorts and sleeveless dresses, Jane was still wearing the turtleneck and wool sweater that she’d donned in Boston. By the time they claimed their luggage and walked out of immigration, she was sweltering and desperate to strip down to her tank top.

She had just peeled the turtleneck over her face when she heard a man’s voice boom out: “Dean the Machine! You’ve finally made it to Africa!”

“Henk, thanks for meeting us,” said Gabriel.

Jane yanked off the turtleneck to find her husband and a blond, buffalo-sized man exchanging back slaps, that peculiarly male greeting that’s both attack and embrace.

“Long flight, hey?” Henk said. “But now you’ll get to enjoy some warm weather.” He turned to Jane with a gaze that made her feel exposed in her thin tank top. His eyes seemed unnaturally pale in the floridly sunburned face, the same silvery shade of blue that she’d once seen in a wolf’s eyes. “And you’re Jane,” he said, holding out a damp and meaty hand. “Henk Andriessen. I’m glad to finally meet the woman who landed the Machine. I didn’t think anyone could.”

Gabriel laughed. “Jane’s not just any woman.”

As they shook hands, she could feel Henk taking her measure and she wondered if he’d expected Dean the Machine to have landed someone prettier, someone who didn’t walk off the plane looking like a wrung-out rag. “I’ve heard about you, too,” she said. “Something about a boozy night in the Hague twelve years ago.”

Henk glanced at Gabriel. “I hope you told her the redacted version.”

“You mean there’s more to the story than two men walk into a bar ?”

Henk laughed. “That’s all you need to know.” He reached for her suitcase. “Let me show you to my car.”

As they left the terminal, Jane lagged a few paces behind the men, letting them catch up on the latest news in each other’s lives. Gabriel had slept almost all the way from London, and he walked with the energetic spring of someone eager to tackle the day. She knew that Henk was a good ten years older than Gabriel, that he was thrice divorced, originally from Brussels, and had worked with South Africa’s Interpol branch for the past decade. She also knew of his reputation as a heavy drinker and a ladies’ man, and she wondered what sort of trouble he’d dragged Gabriel into on that notorious night in the Hague. Surely Henk was the one who’d done the dragging, because she couldn’t imagine her straitlaced husband as a hell-raiser. Just looking at them from behind, she knew which man had discipline in his favor. Gabriel had the lean build of a runner, and he walked with direction and purpose, while Henk’s bloated waistline was the mark of uncontrollable appetites. Yet they clearly got on well together, a friendship forged in the heat of murder investigations in Kosovo.