Die Again: A Rizzoli And Isles Novel Part 27

"He'd have to be dead."

There was silence at the table as her three colleagues digested this new possibility.

"I'd say this puts you back at square one," said Crowe. "Looking for a killer with no name, no ident.i.ty. Good luck."

"Maybe we don't have a name," said Jane, "but we do have a face. And we have someone who's seen it."

"Your witness identified Johnny Posthumus."

"Based on a single pa.s.sport photo. We all know that photos can lie."

"So can witnesses."

"Millie isn't a liar," Jane shot back. "She went through h.e.l.l and she didn't even want to come here. But she's sitting out there with Dr. Zucker right now. The least you can do is listen to her."

"Okay." Crowe sighed, sinking back into his chair. "I'll play along for now. Might as well hear what she has to say."

Jane went to the intercom. "Dr. Zucker, can you bring Millie in?"

Moments later Zucker escorted Millie into the conference room. She was dressed in a wool skirt suit with an oxford shirt, but her outfit was a size too large, as if she'd recently lost weight, and she looked more like a girl masquerading in her mother's clothes. Meekly she sat down in the chair that Zucker pulled out for her, but she kept her gaze on the table, as if too intimidated to look at the detectives who were now studying her.

"These are my colleagues in homicide," said Jane. "Detectives Crowe, Tam, and Frost. They've read the file and they know what happened to you in the Delta. But they need more."

Millie frowned at her. "More?"

"About Johnny. The man you knew as Johnny."

"Tell them what you just told me, about Johnny," suggested Dr. Zucker. "Remember how I said that every killer has his own technique, his own signature? These detectives want to know what makes Johnny unique. How he works, how he thinks. What you tell them might be the one detail they need to catch him."

For a moment Millie thought about this. "We trusted him," she said softly. "It all came down to that. We-I-believed he'd take care of us. In the Delta, there are dozens of different ways to die. Every time you step out of the jeep, step out of the tent, there's something waiting to kill you. In a place like that, the one person you have to believe in is your bush guide. The man with the experience, the man with the rifle. We had every reason to trust him. Before Richard booked the trip, he'd done some research. He said Johnny had eighteen years of experience. He said there were testimonials from other travelers. People from all over the world."

"And he got this all off the Internet?" said Crowe, eyebrow arched.

"Yes," Millie admitted, flushing. "But everything seemed perfectly fine when we arrived in the Delta. He met us at the airstrip. The tents were basic but comfortable. And the Delta was beautiful. Truly wild, in a way you can't believe still exists." She paused, eyes unfocused, lost in the memories of that place. She took a breath. "For the first two nights, it all went as promised. The camping, the meals, the game drives. Then ... everything changed."

"After your tracker was killed," said Jane.

Millie nodded. "At dawn, we found Clarence's body. Or ... parts of it. The hyenas had fed, and there was so little left of him, we had no idea what happened. By then we were way out in the bush, too far to use the radio. Anyway, it was dead. So was the truck." She swallowed. "We were stranded."

The room had gone silent. Even Crowe refrained from his usual smart-a.s.s remarks. The mounting horror of Millie's story had gripped them all.

"I wanted to believe it was just a string of bad luck. Clarence getting killed. The truck not starting. Richard still thought it was a grand adventure, something he could write into his book. His hero Jackman Tripp, stranded in the wild, surviving against all odds. We knew we'd be rescued eventually. The plane would come looking for us. So we decided to make the best of it and enjoy the bush experience." She swallowed. "Then Mr. Matsunaga was killed, and it wasn't an adventure anymore. It was a nightmare."

"Did you suspect Johnny was behind it?" asked Frost.

"Not yet. At least, I didn't. Isao's body was found up in a tree, like a cla.s.sic leopard kill. It seemed like another accident, another case of bad luck. But the others were whispering about Johnny. Wondering if he was behind it. He'd promised to keep us safe, and two people were dead." Millie looked down at the table. "I should have listened to them. I should have helped them bring down Johnny, but I couldn't believe it. I refused to believe it, because ..." She stopped.

"Why?" Dr. Zucker asked gently.

Millie blinked away tears. "Because I was halfway in love with him," she whispered.

In love with the man who tried to kill her. Jane looked around the table at her colleagues' startled expressions, but she herself found nothing shocking about Millie's confession. How many other women had been killed by husbands and boyfriends, by men they adored? A woman in love is a poor judge of character. No wonder Millie was so deeply haunted; she had been betrayed not just by Johnny, but by her own heart.

"I've never admitted that before. Not even to myself," said Millie. "But out there, in the wild, everything was so different. Beautiful and strange. The sounds at night, the way the air smelled. You wake up every morning feeling a little bit scared. On edge. Alive." She looked at Zucker. "That was Johnny's world. And he made me feel safe in it."

The ultimate aphrodisiac. In the face of danger, there's no one more desirable than the protector, thought Jane. It was why women fell in love with cops and bodyguards, why singers crooned about someone to watch over me. In the African bush, the most desirable man is the one who can keep you alive.

"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, pa.s.sing 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 p.i.s.s 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."

In all the pictures, I see the same middle-aged man, posing with a rifle next to his various kills. There is also a framed magazine article: "The Trophy Master: An Interview with Boston's Master Taxidermist."

"I had no idea Elliot's father was a hunter."

"Elliot never told you?"

"Not a word. He didn't talk about his father at all."

"Probably because he was ashamed of him. Elliot and his dad had a falling-out years before. Leon liked to blast away at animals. Elliot wanted to save the dolphins, the wolves, and the field mice."

"Well, I know he loved birds. On safari, he was always pointing them out to us, trying to identify them." I look at the photos of Leon Gott with his dead-animal conquests and shake my head. "Poor Elliot. He was everyone's punching bag."

"What do you mean?"

"Richard was always putting him down, making him the b.u.t.t of jokes. Men and their testosterone, always trying to one-up each other. Richard had to be king, and Elliot had to bow. It was all about impressing the blondes."

"The two South African girls?"

"Sylvia and Vivian. Elliot had such a crush on them, and Richard never lost a chance to show how much more of a man he was."

"You still sound bitter about it, Millie," she observes quietly.

I'm surprised that I am bitter. That even after six years, it still stings to remember those nights around the campfire, Richard's attention all on the girls.

"And during this battle for male dominance, where was Johnny in all this?" she asks.

"It's odd, but he didn't really seem to care. He just stood back and watched the drama. All our petty battles and jealousies-none of it seemed to matter to him."

"Maybe because he had other things to think about. Like what he had planned for all of you."

Was he thinking about those plans as he sat beside me at the fire? Was he imagining how it would feel to spill my blood, watch life drain from my eyes? Feeling suddenly cold, I hug myself as I look at the photos of Leon Gott and his conquered animals.

Rizzoli comes to stand beside me. "I hear he was an a.s.shole," she says, looking at Gott's picture. "But even a.s.sholes deserve justice."

"No wonder Elliot never mentioned him."

"Did he ever talk about his girlfriend?"

I look at her. "Girlfriend?"

"Jodi Underwood. She and Elliot were together for two years."

This surprises me. "He was so busy mooning over the blondes, he never mentioned any girlfriend. Have you met her? What is she like?"

She doesn't answer right away. Something's troubling her, something that makes her hesitate before responding.

"Jodi Underwood is dead. She was killed the same night Leon was."

I stare at her. "You didn't tell me. Why didn't you tell me?"

"It's an active investigation so there are things I can't tell you, Millie."

"You brought me all this way to help you, yet you keep things from me. Important things. You should have told me that."

"We don't know that their deaths are connected. Jodi's murder looks like a robbery, and the method of killing was entirely different from Leon's. That's why I came for these hair samples. We're looking for a physical link between the attacks."