Die Again: A Rizzoli And Isles Novel Part 23

That makes me laugh, because I don't feel brave at all. I feel like a quivering mouse afraid to leave this home where I've felt so safe. I don't want to leave because I know what's out there in the world. I know who is out there, and my hands shake at the mere thought of seeing him again. But that is what she's asking me to do, that policewoman who called from Boston. You know his face. You know how he thinks and how he hunts. We need you to help us catch him.

Before he kills again.

Christopher reaches across the table to grasp my hands. Only then do I notice how cold I am. How warm he is. "You had the nightmare last night, didn't you?"

"You noticed."

"It's not hard when I'm sleeping right next to you."

"I haven't had the dream in months. I thought I was over it."

"That b.l.o.o.d.y phone call," he mutters. "You know they don't have anything solid. It's just their theory. They could be looking for someone else entirely."

"They found Richard's lighter."

"You can't be sure it's the same lighter."

"Another R. Renwick?"

"It's a common enough name. Anyway, if it is the same lighter, it means the killer's far away. He's moved on, to a different continent."

Which is why I want to stay here, where Johnny can't find me. I'd be insane to go in search of a monster. I drain my coffee cup and stand, the chair squealing across the stones. I don't know what I was thinking, buying wrought-iron garden furniture. Perhaps it was the sense of permanence, the feeling that I could always count on it to last, but the chairs are heavy and hard to move. As I walk back into the house I feel as if I'm hauling yet another burden, heavy as wrought iron, fear-forged and anchoring me to this place. I go to the sink to wash cups and saucers, and tidy up a countertop that is already pristine.

You know how he thinks. And how he hunts.

An image of Johnny Posthumus's face suddenly rears up in my mind, as real as if he's standing right outside my kitchen, staring through the window. I flinch and a spoon clatters to the floor. He's always there, haunting me, just a stray thought away. After I left Botswana, I felt certain he would one day track me down. I'm the only one who lived through it, the one witness he couldn't kill. Surely that's a challenge he can't ignore. But the months became years and I heard nothing from either the Botswana or the South African police, and I began to hope that Johnny was dead. That his bones lie scattered somewhere in the wilderness, like Richard's. Like the others'. That was the only way I could feel safe again, by imagining him dead. These past six years, no one has seen or heard from him, so it was reasonable to believe he'd met his end and couldn't hurt me.

The call from Boston changes everything.

Footsteps thump lightly down the stairs and our daughter Violet comes dancing into the kitchen. At four years old, she's still fearless because we have lied to her. We've told her the world is a place of peace and light and she does not know that monsters are real. Christopher scoops her into his arms, swirls her around, and carries her laughing into the living room for their Sat.u.r.day-morning ritual of cartoons. The dishes are washed, the coffeepot rinsed, and everything is as it should be, but I pace the kitchen looking for new tasks, anything to distract me.

I sit down at the computer and see a batch of emails that have popped into my inbox since last night, from my sister in London, from the other mothers in Violet's playgroup, from some Nigerian who wants to wire a fortune into my bank account, if only I will give him my number.

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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 a.s.sumed, 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 gra.s.s, 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 pa.s.sport 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 h.e.l.l-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 appet.i.tes. Yet they clearly got on well together, a friendship forged in the heat of murder investigations in Kosovo.

Henk led them to a silver BMW, the favored automotive mascot of every man on the prowl, and he waved at the front seat. "Jane, would you like to ride shotgun?"

"No, I'll let Gabriel have the honors. You two have a lot of mischief to catch up on."

"Not as good a view back there," said Henk as they all buckled their seat belts. "But I guarantee you'll love the view where we're going."

"Where are we going?"

"Table Mountain. You're here for such a short time, and it's the one place you really don't want to miss. Your hotel room probably isn't ready yet anyway, so why don't we head straight for the mountain?"

Gabriel turned to her. "You feel up for it, Jane?"

What she really longed for was a shower and a bed. Her head ached from the blinding sunlight and the inside of her mouth felt like a tar pit, but if Gabriel could launch straight into a day of sightseeing, she'd d.a.m.n well do her best to keep up with the boys. "Let's do it," she said.

An hour and a half later, they pulled into the parking lot of Table Mountain's lower cableway station. Stepping out of the car, Jane stared up at aerial lines that soared up the side of the mountain. She was not particularly afraid of heights, but the idea of swooping up to that dizzying mountaintop made her stomach drop. Suddenly she was no longer exhausted; all she could think about was cables snapping apart and a two-thousand-foot plunge to death.

"And up there is the view I promised you," said Henk.

"Jesus. There are people hanging off the side of that cliff!" said Jane.

"Table Mountain's a favorite place for rock climbers."

"Are they out of their frigging minds?"

"Oh, we lose a few climbers every year. After you fall from that height, it's not a rescue. It's a body recovery."

"And that's where we're going? Up there?"

"Are you afraid of heights?" Those pale wolf eyes turned to her in amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Trust me, Henk," Gabriel said with a laugh. "Even if she were, she'd never admit it."

And one of these days, pride is going to be the death of me, she thought as they crowded into the cable car with dozens of other tourists. She wondered when the system had last been inspected. Stared hard at the Cableway workers, searching for anyone who was drunk or high or psycho. She counted heads, to be sure they weren't over the posted pa.s.senger limit, and hoped they'd made generous weight allowances for men as big as Henk.

Then the cable car swooped into the sky, and all she could focus on was the view.

"Your first look at Africa," said Henk, leaning in to murmur in her ear. "Does it surprise you?"

She swallowed. "It's not what I imagined."

"What did you imagine? Lions and zebras running around everywhere?"

"Well, yeah."

"That's the way most Americans picture Africa. They watch too many nature shows on TV, and when they walk off the plane wearing bush jackets and khaki, they're surprised to find a modern city like Cape Town. Not a zebra in sight, except at the zoo."

"I was kind of hoping to see a zebra."

"Then you should take a few extra days and fly out to the bush."

"I wish we could," she said with a sigh. "But our agencies are keeping us on a tight leash. No time for fun."

The cable car glided to a stop and the doors opened.

"Then let's get some work done, shall we?" said Henk. "There's no reason we can't enjoy the view at the same time."

From the edge of the Table Mountain plateau, Jane stared in wonder as Henk pointed out the landmarks of Cape Town: the rocky outcroppings known as Devil's Peak and Signal Hill, Table Bay, and Robben Island to the north, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for nearly two decades.

"So much history here. So many stories I could tell you about this country." Henk turned to her. "But now we get down to business. The Botswana murders."

"Gabriel told me you had a part in the case."

"Not the initial investigation, which took place in Botswana. Interpol became involved only after Botswana police learned that the killer had crossed the border, into this country. He used the credit cards of two of his victims in border towns, at businesses that didn't require PIN numbers. The safari truck was found abandoned outside Johannesburg. Although the crimes were committed in Botswana, Johnny Posthumus is a citizen of South Africa. The case spans multiple countries, which is why Interpol was brought in. We issued a Red Notice for the arrest of Posthumus, but we still have no clue of his whereabouts."

"Has there been any progress at all on the case?"

"Nothing significant. But you have to understand the challenges we face here. There are about fifty murders a day in this country-that's six times the homicide rate in the US. Many cases remain unsolved, the police are overwhelmed, and evidence labs are underfunded. Also, these murders took place in Botswana, a different country. Coordinating between different jurisdictions adds to the difficulties."

"But you're certain that Johnny Posthumus is your man," said Gabriel.

Andriessen paused, and those few seconds of silence spoke louder than any words that might follow. "I have ... reservations."

"Why?"

"I've delved thoroughly into his past. Johnny Posthumus was born in South Africa, the son of farmers. At age eighteen, he went off to work at a game lodge, in Sabi Sands. He moved on to Mozambique and Botswana, and eventually went solo as an independent guide. There were never any complaints. Through the years, he built a reputation as a reliable man. Except for one drunken brawl, he had no criminal record and no history of violence."

"That you're aware of."

"True, there could be incidents that were never reported. Kill someone in the bush, and the body may never be found. It just troubles me that there were never any warning signs. Nothing in his earlier behavior to indicate that one day, he would bring eight people deep into the Delta and slaughter seven of them."

"According to the sole survivor, that's exactly what happened," said Jane.

"Yes," Henk conceded. "That's what she said."

"Do you have doubts about her?"

"She identified Posthumus based only on a two-year-old pa.s.sport photo, which was shown to her by the Botswana police. There aren't many other photos of him in existence. Most were lost when his parents' farmhouse burned down seven years ago. Remember, Ms. Jacobson walked out of the bush half dead. After such an ordeal, and with only a pa.s.sport photo to go on, can her identification of him really be trusted?"

"If the man wasn't Johnny Posthumus, who was he?"

"We know he used his victims' credit cards. He took their pa.s.sports, and in the few weeks before they were reported missing, he could have a.s.sumed their ident.i.ties. It would allow him to be anyone, to go almost anywhere in the world. Including America."

"And the real Johnny Posthumus? Do you think he's dead?"

"It's only a theory."

"But is there any evidence to back it up? A body? Any remains?"

"Oh, we have thousands of unidentified human remains, from crime scenes around the country. What we lack are the resources to ID them all. Because of the DNA backlog in crime labs, identifying a victim can take months, even years. Posthumus might be among them."

"Or he could be alive and living right now in Boston," said Jane. "He may not have a criminal record, only because he's never made a mistake until Botswana."

"You mean Millie Jacobson."

"He let her escape."

Henk was silent for a moment as he looked out over Table Bay. "At the time, I doubt he considered that a problem. Letting her escape."

"The one woman who could identify him?"

"She was as good as dead. If you stranded any other tourist in the Delta, man or woman, they wouldn't last two days, much less two weeks. She should have died out there."

"Why didn't she?"

"Grit? Luck?" He shrugged. "A miracle."

"You've met the woman," said Gabriel. "What did you think of her?"

"It's been a few years since I interviewed her. Her name's not Jacobson now, but DeBruin. She married a South African. I remember her as ... utterly unremarkable. That was my impression, and to be honest I was surprised. I'd read her statement and I knew what she supposedly survived. I was expecting Superwoman."

Jane frowned. "You don't think her statement was true?"