Tess Gerritsen - Last to Die

“Stay inside!” Jane hissed. Instantly the woman retreated and the door slammed shut.

Crowe was already at Apartment 210. He paused, shot his team a glance. “Rizzoli,” he whispered. “Your show. Get us in there.”

She knew why he’d chosen her. Female face and voice, not as threatening. She took a breath and rang the door buzzer. Stood close enough to the peephole that she’d fill the view. Unfortunately that also made it easier for anyone inside to blow off her head. She spied a flicker of movement in the peephole; someone was staring at her.

The door swung open. A Hispanic woman appeared, round-faced, in her forties, with a strong enough resemblance to the Ackerman’s housekeeper that Jane knew this must be Maria’s sister.

“Mrs. Philbrook?” said Jane.

The woman spotted the other detectives in the hall and screamed: “Maria!”

“Go, go!” barked Crowe as he shoved past Jane and burst into the apartment.

Too many things happened at once. Detectives barreling through the apartment. Maria’s sister shouting, wailing in Spanish. As Jane ran through, toward the next room, she caught glimpses of a stained carpet, a striped sofa, a playpen.

Kids. There are kids in this apartment .

Jane darted into a bedroom, where heavy curtains cast a gloom so deep she almost missed the huddled shapes in the corner. A woman was hugging two toddlers, her body curled around the children as though insulating them from harm with her own flesh.

Maria .

Footsteps clanged on metal.

Jane ducked through another doorway, into a second bedroom where Moore was scrambling through the open window, onto the fire escape.

“Zapata?” Jane asked.

“Headed up the ladder!”

Why up?

She stuck her head out the window and saw Arbato and Cahill standing in the alley below, their weapons drawn. She looked up, spotted her three teammates clambering up the ladder in pursuit.

She sprinted back through the apartment and dashed for the stairwell. If Zapata made it to the roof, that’s where she’d intercept him. She took the steps two at a time, saw a door pop open and slam shut as she hurtled past, up the final flight, her heart whomping, her chest heaving.

She burst through the door to the rooftop and emerged into the glare of midday. Saw Zapata scramble over the edge and land with both feet onto the roof.

“Freeze!” she yelled. “Police!”

He halted, staring at her. He was empty-handed. Faded blue jeans, wrinkled buttondown shirt with a ripped sleeve. For a few seconds it was just the two of them on that rooftop. She saw desperation in his eyes, watched it harden to grim determination.

“Hands in the air!” Crowe shouted as he and Frost dropped onto the rooftop behind Zapata.

There was nowhere for him to run. One cop in front of him, two behind him, all of them armed. Jane saw Zapata’s legs wobble, thought he was about to drop to his knees in surrender. His next move shocked her.

He sprang to his left and ran toward the roof’s far edge. Toward the narrow alley that cut between buildings. Only an Olympic-class leap could take a man safely across that gulf.

Yet leap he did, flinging himself from the roof’s edge toward the next building. For a moment he seemed to hang in midair, his body stretched out in a swan dive that almost carried him across the chasm.

Jane scrambled to the edge. Saw Zapata clinging desperately to the rain gutter of the other building as his legs scissored above a four-story drop.

“Jesus, is he nuts?” said Frost.

“Arbato, get next door!” Crowe yelled down at the street, and the two detectives on the ground sprinted across the alley.

Still dangling from the rain gutter, Zapata tried to pull himself up, feet fighting for purchase against the wall. He swung up one leg, missed. Swung again. Just as his shoe made it up over the edge, the gutter tore away from the roof.

Jane closed her eyes, but she couldn’t shut out the squeal of collapsing metal, or the thud of Zapata’s body hitting the pavement.

Somewhere, a woman was screaming.

NINETEEN

MARIA SALAZAR SAT HUNCHED AT THE INTERVIEW TABLE, HEAD drooping as she wiped tears from her eyes. As a young woman, Maria would have been strikingly beautiful. At forty-five she was still handsome, but through the one-way mirror Jane could see the gray roots peeking through on the crown of Maria’s head. Her arms, propped up on the table, were heavy but solid with muscles built up from years of housework. While she had scrubbed and polished and swept other people’s houses, what resentments had bubbled up inside her? As she’d dusted the Ackermans’ antique furniture, vacuumed the Persian carpets, had it ever occurred to her that just one of their paintings, one emerald necklace from Mrs. Ackerman’s jewelry box, could make all her financial woes disappear?

“Never,” Marie moaned in the next room. “I never steal anything!”

Crowe, playing bad cop to Moore’s good cop, leaned in close, his teeth bared with undisguised aggression. “You disarmed the security system for your boyfriend.”

“No.”

“Left the kitchen door unlocked.”

“No.”

“Gave yourself a rock-solid alibi, babysitting your sister’s kids, while Andres slipped into the Ackermans’ house. Was he just going to rob them that night, or was murder always the plan?”

“Andres, he never hurt anyone!”

“His fingerprints are on the kitchen door. They’re inside the kitchen.” Crowe bent even closer and Maria shrank away. Jane almost felt sorry for the woman because there were few sights uglier than Darren Crowe’s snarl, shoved into your face. “He was in the house, Maria. Just walked through that kitchen door.”

“He brought my cell phone! I left it home that morning, so he comes to the house.”

“And left his fingerprints inside the kitchen?”

“I give him coffee. I clean the stove, and he sits for a minute.”

“And Mrs. Ackerman’s okay with that? A strange man, sitting in her kitchen?”

“She don’t mind. Mrs. Ackerman, she’s always nice to me.”

“Come on. Weren’t the Ackermans like every other rich asshole? Paid you almost nothing, while you’re on your knees scrubbing their toilets.”

“No, they treat me good.”

“They had all the money in the world, and look at you, Maria. Struggling to pay your bills. It’s so unfair. You deserve more, don’t you think?”

She shook her head. “You make this up. It’s not the truth.”

“The truth is, Andres had a criminal record in Colombia. Drug smuggling. Burglary.”

“He never hurt anyone.”

“There’s always a first time. Gotta be tempting when we’re talking about people as rich as the Ackermans. All those nice things, there for the taking.” He pulled an evidence bag out of the box he’d brought into the room. “We found these in your apartment, Maria. Nice pearl earrings. How did you afford these?”

“Mrs. Ackerman, she gave them to me. For Christmas.”

“ Gave them to you? Sure.”

“She did .”

“They’re worth about five hundred bucks. Pretty nice bonus.”

“She didn’t want them anymore. Said I could have them.”

“Or did she suddenly find out you’d stolen them? Maybe that’s the reason Andres had to kill them. To keep them quiet so you wouldn’t get arrested.”

Maria’s head came up, her eyes swollen and damp, her face flushed with rage. “You are a devil !”

“I’m just trying to keep this city safe.”

“By making up lies? You don’t know me. You don’t know Andres.”