“He’s too young,” she murmured. “This man’s too young to be Elijah Lank.”
“I’d guess he’s about thirty, thirty-five.”
Maura released a shocked breath. “I don’t understand…”
“You do see it, don’t you?” Rizzoli asked quietly. “Black hair, green eyes.”
Like mine.
“I mean, sure, there could be a million guys with hair and eyes that color. But the resemblance…” She paused. “Frost saw it, too. We all saw it.”
Maura pulled the sheet over the corpse and stepped back, retreating from the truth which had stared so undeniably from the dead man’s face.
“Dr. Bristol’s on his way now,” said Frost. “We didn’t think you’d want to do this autopsy.”
“Then why did you call me?”
“Because you said you wanted to be in the loop,” said Rizzoli. “Because I promised I would. And because…” Rizzoli looked down at the draped body. “Because you’d find out sooner or later who this man was.”
“But we don’t know who he was. You think you see a resemblance. That’s not proof.”
“There’s more. Something we just learned this morning.”
Maura looked at her. “What?”
“We’ve been trying to track down Elijah Lank’s whereabouts. Searching for any place his name may have popped up. Arrests, traffic tickets, anything. This morning we got a fax from a county clerk in North Carolina. It was a death certificate. Elijah Lank died eight years ago.”
“Eight years ago? Then he wasn’t with Amalthea when she killed Theresa and Nikki Wells.”
“No. By then, Amalthea was working with a new partner. Someone who stepped in to take Elijah’s place. To continue the family business.”
Maura turned and stared at the lake, its water now blindingly bright. I don’t want to hear the rest of this, she thought. I don’t want to know.
“Eight years ago, Elijah died of a heart attack in a Greenville hospital,” said Rizzoli. “He showed up in the emergency room complaining of chest pain. According to their records, he was brought to the ER by his family.”
Family.
“His wife, Amalthea,” said Rizzoli. “And their son, Samuel.”
Maura took a deep breath and smelled both decay and the scent of summer in the air. Death and life mingled in a single perfume.
“I’m sorry,” said Rizzoli. “I’m sorry you had to find out. There’s still a chance we’re wrong about this man, you know. There’s still a chance he’s not related to them at all.”
But they weren’t wrong, and Maura knew it.
I knew it when I saw his face.
When Rizzoli and Frost walked into J.P. Doyle’s that evening, the cops standing around the bar greeted them with a loud and boisterous round of applause that made Rizzoli flush. Hell, even the guys who didn’t particularly like her were applauding in comradely acknowledgment of her success, which at that moment was being trumpeted on the five o’clock news playing on the TV above the bar. The crowd began to stomp in unison as Rizzoli and Frost approached the counter, where the grinning bartender had already set out two drinks for them. For Frost, a shot of whiskey, and for Rizzoli…
A large glass of milk.
As everyone burst out laughing, Frost leaned over and whispered in her ear: “You know, my stomach’s kind of upset. Wanna trade drinks?”
The funny thing was, Frost really did like milk. She slid her glass his way, and asked the bartender for a Coke.
As their fellow cops came around to shake their hands and slap high fives, she and Frost ate peanuts and sipped their virtuous drinks. She missed having her usual Adams ale. Missed a lot of things tonight-her husband, her beer. Her waistline. Still, this was a good day. It’s always a good day, she thought, when a perp goes down.
“Hey, Rizzoli! The bets are up to two hundred bucks you’re having a girl, a hundred twenty on a boy.”
She glanced sideways and saw Detectives Vann and Dunleavy standing beside her at the bar. The fat Hobbit and the skinny one, holding up their twin pints of Guinness.
“So what if I have both?” she asked. “Twins?”
“Huh,” said Dunleavy. “We didn’t consider that.”
“So who wins then?”
“I guess no one.”
“Or everyone?” said Vann.
The two men stood pondering that question for a while. Sam and Frodo, stuck on the Mount Doom of dilemmas.
“Well,” said Vann, “I guess we should add another category.”
Rizzoli laughed. “Yeah, you guys do that.”
“Great work, by the way,” said Dunleavy. “Just watch, next thing, you’re gonna be in People magazine. A perp like that, all those women. What a story.”
“You want the honest truth?” Rizzoli sighed and set down her Coke. “We can’t take the credit.”
“No?”
Frost looked over at Vann and Dunleavy. “Wasn’t us brought him down. It was the vic.”
“Just a housewife,” said Rizzoli. “A scared, pregnant, ordinary housewife. Didn’t need a gun or a billy club, just a goddamn sock filled with batteries.”
Up on the TV, the local news was over, and the bartender flipped the channel to HBO. A movie with women in short skirts. Women who had waistlines.
“So what about that Black Talon?” asked Dunleavy. “How did that tie in?”
Rizzoli was quiet for a moment as she sipped her Coke. “We don’t know yet.”
“You find the weapon?”
She caught Frost looking at her, and felt a ripple of uneasiness. That was the detail that troubled them both. They had found no gun in the van. There had been knotted cords and blood-caked knives. There’d been a neatly kept notebook with the names and phone numbers of nine other baby brokers around the country; Terence Van Gates had not been the only one. And there’d been records of cash payments made to the Lanks through the years, a mother lode of information that would keep investigators busy for years. But the weapon that had killed Anna Leoni was not in the van.
“Oh, well,” said Dunleavy. “Maybe it’ll turn up. Or he got rid of it.”
Maybe. Or maybe we’re still missing something.
It was dark when she and Frost left Doyle’s. Instead of going home, she drove back to Schroeder Plaza, the conversation with Vann and Dunleavy still weighing on her mind, and sat down at her desk, which was covered by a mountain of files. On top were the records from NCIC, several decades’ worth of missing persons reports compiled during their hunt for the Beast. But it was Anna Leoni’s murder that had set the whole search in motion, like a pebble dropped into water, launching ever wider ripples. Anna’s murder was what had led them to Amalthea, and eventually to the Beast. Yet Anna’s death remained a question still unresolved.
Rizzoli cleared away the NCIC files, working her way down to the folder on Anna Leoni. Though she had read and reread everything in this file, she leafed through it again, rereading the witness statements, the autopsy, the reports from hair and fiber, fingerprints, and DNA. She came to the ballistics report, and her gaze lingered over the words Black Talon. She remembered the starburst shape of the bullet in Anna Leoni’s skull X-ray. Remembered, too, the track of devastation it had left in her brain.
A Black Talon bullet. Where was the gun that had fired it?
She closed the folder and looked down at the cardboard box that had been sitting beside her desk for the last week. It contained the files that Vann and Dunleavy had lent her, on the murder of Vassily Titov. He’d been the only other Boston-area victim of a Black Talon bullet in the last five years. She took the folders from that box and piled them on her desk, sighing when she saw how high the stack was. Even a slam-dunk investigation generates reams of paper. Vann and Dunleavy had summed up the case for her earlier, and she had read enough of their files to satisfy herself that they had indeed made a good arrest. The subsequent trial and speedy conviction of Antonin Leonov only reinforced that belief. Yet here she was, reviewing the files again, on a case which left no room for doubt that the right man had been convicted.