Tess Gerritsen - Die Again

I whirl around, blindly swinging the jar at him. It slams into the side of his head and shatters, releasing a spray of raspberry jam, bright as blood.

He howls in rage and loses his grip. Just for an instant I’m free, and again I lurch for the door. Again, I almost make it.

Then he tackles me and we both go sprawling to the floor, sliding across glass and raspberry jam. The trash can topples, spilling out dirty wrappers and coffee grounds. I struggle to my knees, desperately crawling through scattered garbage.

A cord loops around my neck, goes taut, and yanks my head back.

I reach up, clawing at the cord, but it’s tight, so tight it cuts like a blade into my flesh. I hear his grunt of effort. I can’t loosen the cord. I can’t breathe. The light starts to dim. My feet no longer work. So this is how I die, so far from home. From everyone I love.

As I sag backward, something sharp bites into my hand. My fingers close around the object, which I can barely feel because everything is going numb. Violet. Christopher. I should never have left you .

I fling my arm backward, slashing at his face.

Even through my darkening fog, I can hear his shriek. Suddenly the cord around my neck goes limp. The room brightens. Coughing, gasping, I release the object I’ve been holding and it clatters to the floor. It’s the open cat-food can, its exposed lid sharp as a razor.

I haul myself to my feet and the countertop block of kitchen knives is right in front of me. He’s moving in, and I turn to face him. Blood streams from his slashed brow, a waterfall of it, dripping into his eyes. He lunges, hands reaching for my throat. Partly blinded by his own blood, he doesn’t see what I’m holding. What I bring up just as our bodies collide.

The butcher knife sinks into his belly.

The hands grappling at my throat suddenly fall away, limp. He drops to his knees where, just for an instant he remains upright, his eyes open, his face a bloody mask of surprise. His body tilts sideways, and I close my eyes as he hits the floor.

Suddenly I myself am wobbling. I stagger across the blood and glass and I sink into a chair. I drop my head in my hands, and through the roaring of blood in my ears I hear another sound. A siren. I have no strength to lift my head. I hear banging on the front door, and voices shouting: Police! But I cannot seem to move. Only when I hear them step in through the back door, and one of them utters a startled oath, do I finally look up.

Two policemen loom in front of me, both of them staring at the carnage in the room. “Are you Millie?” one of them asks. “Millie DeBruin?”

I nod.

He says, into his radio: “Detective Rizzoli, she’s here. She’s alive. But you’re not gonna believe what I’m looking at.”

A DAY LATER, THEY UNCOVERED HIS LAIR.

After ground-penetrating radar detected the underground chamber in Alan Rhodes’s backyard, it took only a few minutes’ shovel work to locate the entrance, a wooden hatch cover hidden under an inch of mulch.

Jane was the first to climb down the steps, descending into a chilly blackness that smelled of damp earth. At the bottom she reached a concrete floor and stared at what her flashlight revealed: the snow leopard pelt, mounted on the wall. Dangling from a hook beside it were steel claws, the razor-sharp tips polished to a gleaming brightness. She thought of the three parallel slashes on Leon Gott’s torso. She thought of Natalie Toombs and the three nicks on her skull. Here was the tool that had left those marks in flesh and bone.

“What do you see down there?” called Frost.

“Leopard Man,” she said softly.

Frost came down the stairs and they stood together, their flashlight beams slashing the darkness like sabers.

“Jesus,” he said as his light fixed on the opposite wall. On the two dozen drivers’ licenses and passport photos tacked to corkboard. “They’re from Nevada. Maine. Montana …”

“It’s his trophy wall,” said Jane. Like Leon Gott and Jerry O’Brien, Alan Rhodes also displayed his kills, but on a wall that was for his eyes only. She focused on a page ripped from a passport: Millie Jacobson , the trophy Rhodes thought he’d won, but this prize had been prematurely claimed. Next to Millie’s photo were other faces, other names. Isao and Keiko Matsunaga. Richard Renwick. Sylvia Van Ofwegen. Vivian Kruiswyk. Elliot Gott.

And Johnny Posthumus, the bush guide who had fought to keep them alive. In Johnny’s direct gaze, Jane saw a man ready to do whatever was necessary, without fear, without hesitation. A man prepared to face any beast in the wild. But Johnny had not realized that the most dangerous animal he would ever encounter was the client smiling back at him.

“There’s a laptop in here,” said Frost, crouched over a cardboard box. “It’s a MacBook Air. You think it was Jodi Underwood’s?”

“Turn it on.”

With gloved hands, Frost lifted the computer and pressed the POWER button. “Battery’s dead.”

“Is there a power cord?”

He reached deeper into the box. “I don’t see one. There’s some broken glass in here.”

“From what?”

“It’s a picture.” He pulled out a framed photo, its protective glass shattered. He shone his flashlight on the image, and for a moment neither one of them said a word as they both registered its significance.

Two men stood together, the sun in their faces, the bright light defining every feature. They looked enough alike to be brothers, both with dark hair and squarish faces. The man on the left smiled straight into the lens, but the second man appeared caught by surprise just as he’d turned to face the camera.

“When was this taken?” said Frost.

“Six years ago.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know where this is. I’ve been there. It’s Table Mountain, in Cape Town.” She looked at Frost. “Elliot Gott and Alan Rhodes. They knew each other.”

DETECTIVE RIZZOLI STANDS AT DR. ISLES’S FRONT DOOR, HOLDING A laptop case. “It’s the last piece of the puzzle, Millie,” she says. “I think you’ll want to see it.”

It’s been almost a week since I survived Alan Rhodes’s attack. Although the blood and glass are now gone, and the window has been replaced, I’m still reluctant to go into the kitchen. The memories are too vivid, and the bruises around my neck still too fresh, so instead we move into the living room. I settle onto the sofa between Dr. Isles and Detective Rizzoli, the two women who have been hunting the monster, and who tried to keep me safe from him. But in the end, I’m the one who had to save myself. I’m the one who had to die twice, in order to live again.

The gray tabby crouches on the coffee table and watches with a look of unsettling intelligence as Rizzoli opens her laptop and inserts a flash drive. “These are the photos from Jodi Underwood’s computer,” she says. “This is the reason Alan Rhodes killed her. Because these pictures tell a story, and he couldn’t afford to let anyone see them. Not Leon Gott. Not Interpol. And certainly not you.”

The screen fills with image tiles, all of them too small to make out any details. She clicks on the first tile and the photo blooms on-screen. It’s a smiling, dark-haired man of about thirty, dressed in jeans and a photographer’s vest, a backpack slung over his shoulder. He is standing in an airport check-in line. He has a squarish forehead and gentle eyes, and there is a happy innocence about him, the innocence of a lamb who has no idea he’s headed for slaughter.

“This is Elliot Gott,” says Rizzoli. “The real Elliot Gott. It was taken six years ago, just before he boarded the plane in Boston.”