Tess Gerritsen - Die Again

“The others were talking about overpowering Johnny and taking control of the gun. I wouldn’t go along with it, because I thought they were paranoid. And Richard was egging them on, trying to play the hero, because he was jealous of Johnny. There we were, surrounded by animals that could eat us, but the real battle was inside our camp. It was Johnny and me, against everyone else. They stopped trusting me, stopped telling me their plans. I thought we could all just ride it out till we got rescued, and then they’d see how ridiculous they were. I thought we just needed to calm down and wait it out. And then …” She swallowed. “He tried to kill Elliot.”

“The snake in the tent,” said Jane.

Millie nodded. “That’s when I knew I had to make a choice. Even then, I couldn’t quite believe it was Johnny. I didn’t want to believe it.”

“Because he made you trust him,” said Zucker.

Millie wiped her eyes, and her voice cracked. “That’s how he does it. He makes you trust him. He chooses the one person who wants to believe in him. Maybe he looks for the wallflower, the utterly ordinary woman. Or the woman whose boyfriend is leaving her. Oh, he knows which one she is. He smiles at her, and for the first time in her life she feels truly alive.” Again she wiped her eyes. “I was the weakest gazelle in the herd. He knew it.”

“Hardly the weakest,” Tam said gently. “You’re the one who lived.”

“And she’s the one who can identify him,” said Jane. “Whatever his real name is. We have his description. We know he’s about six foot two or three, muscular build. Blond hair, blue eyes. He may have changed his hair color, but he can’t disguise his height.”

“Or his eyes,” said Millie. “The way he looks at you.”

“Describe it.”

“As if he’s looking straight at your soul. Reading your dreams, your fears. As if he can see exactly who you are.”

Jane thought of another man’s eyes, eyes that she’d once stared into as she prepared to die, and gooseflesh rippled across her arms. We’ve both felt a killer’s gaze, she thought. But I knew it when I saw it. Millie didn’t, and her shame was apparent in the drooping shoulders, the bowed head.

Jane’s cell phone rang, shrill and startling. She stood and left the room to answer it.

It was criminalist Erin Volchko calling. “You know those animal hairs they found on Jodi Underwood’s blue robe?”

“The cat hairs,” said Jane.

“Yeah, two of them are definitely from a domestic cat. But there was that third hair I couldn’t ID. The one I sent off to the wildlife lab in Oregon. We just got back the result on the keratin.”

“A snow leopard?”

“No, I’m afraid not. It’s from the species Panthera tigris tigris .”

“That sounds like a tiger.”

“A Bengal tiger, to be specific. Which is a complete surprise to me. Maybe you can explain how a tiger hair got on a victim’s bathrobe.”

Jane already had the answer. “Leon Gott’s house was a Noah’s Ark of mounted animals. I seem to remember a tiger head on his wall, but I have no idea if it was a Bengal tiger.”

“Can you get me a few strands off that mounted head? If we can match those hairs to this tiger hair, it tells us there was transfer from Leon Gott’s house to Jodi Underwood’s robe.”

“Two victims. The same killer.”

“It’s certainly starting to look that way.”

HE IS HERE, SOMEWHERE IN THIS CITY. AS WE SIT IN AFTERNOON TRAFFIC, I look out the car window and watch pedestrians trudge past, heads bowed against the wind that whips between buildings. I have lived so long on the farm that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be in a city. I don’t care for Boston. I don’t like how cold and gray it is here, and these tall buildings cut off any view of the sky, trapping me in eternal shadow. I don’t like the brusqueness of the people, who are so direct and hard-edged. Detective Rizzoli seems distracted as she drives, and she makes no effort at conversation, so we sit in silence. Outside is a cacophony of honking horns and distant sirens and people, so many people. Like the bush, this, too, is a wilderness, where the wrong move—a careless step off the curb, an exchange of words with an angry man—can prove fatal.

Where, in this giant maze of a city, is Johnny hiding?

Everywhere I look, I imagine I see him. I glimpse a towering blond head and a pair of broad shoulders, and my heart gives a lurch. Then he turns and I see it’s not him. Nor is the next tall, fair-haired man who catches my eye. Johnny is simultaneously everywhere, and nowhere.

We halt at another stoplight, boxed in between two lanes of cars. Detective Rizzoli looks at me. “I need to make one quick stop before I take you to Maura’s. Is that okay?”

“That’s fine. Where are we going?”

“A house. The Gott crime scene.”

She says it so casually, but this is what she does for a living. She goes to places where they find bodies. She is like Clarence, our tracker in the Delta, who was always hunting for signs of game. The game that Detective Rizzoli hunts for are those who kill.

At last we escape heavy city traffic and enter a much quieter neighborhood of single-family houses. There are trees here, although November has stripped them of their leaves, which tumble like brown confetti on the streets. The house where we pull up has all its shades closed, and a single strand of police tape flutters on a tree, the lone bright accent in the autumnal gloom.

“I’ll only be a few minutes,” she says. “You can wait in the car.”

I glance around at the deserted street and spy a silhouette in a front window, where someone stands watching us. Of course people would be watching. A killer has visited their neighborhood, and they worry he’ll make a second appearance.

“I’ll come in with you,” I say. “I don’t want to sit out here by myself.”

As I follow her to the front porch, I’m nervous about what I’m going to find. I’ve never been inside a house where someone was murdered, and I imagine blood-spattered walls, a chalk figure drawn on the floor. But when we step inside I see no blood, no signs of violence—unless you count the ghastly display of animal heads. There are dozens of them mounted on the walls, with eyes so life-like they seem to be staring at me. An accusatory gallery of victims. The overwhelming smell of bleach makes my eyes water, my nose sting.

She notices my grimace and says, “The cleaners must have doused the whole house in Clorox. But it’s a lot better than what it used to smell like.”

“Did it happen … was it in this room?”

“No, it was in the garage. I don’t need to go in there.”

“What are we doing here, exactly?”

“Hunting for a tiger.” She scans the trophy heads displayed on the walls. “And there he is. I knew I saw one in here.”

As she drags over a chair to reach the tiger, I imagine the souls of these dead animals murmuring among themselves, passing judgment on us. The African lion looks so alive that I’m almost afraid to approach him, but he draws me like a magnet. I think of the real lions I saw in the Delta, remember their muscles rippling beneath tawny coats. I think of Johnny, golden-haired and just as powerful, and imagine his head staring down at me. The most dangerous creature on this wall.

“Johnny said he’d kill a man before he’d ever shoot a big cat.”

Rizzoli pauses in the midst of plucking hairs from the mounted tiger and looks at me. “Then this house would definitely piss him off. All these cats, killed for sport. Then Leon Gott went bragging about it in a magazine.” She points to the gallery of photos hanging on the opposite wall. “That’s Elliot’s dad.”