Dean took a step toward her.
Instantly her weapon snapped up. “Stay right where you are.”
“Easy, Rizzoli. No reason to shoot my head off.”
“Isn’t there?”
“I’m just walking closer. So we can talk.”
“We can talk fine from this distance.”
He looked toward the flashing lights of the cruisers. “Who do you suppose radioed in the homicide call?”
She held steady, didn’t let her aim waver.
“Use your head, Detective. I assume you’ve got a good one.” He took another step.
“Just fucking freeze right there.”
“Okay.” He held up his hands. Said again, lightly, “Okay.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Same thing you are. This is where the action is.”
“How did you know? If you’re the one who called in that ten fifty-four, how did you know the action was here?”
“I didn’t.”
“You just happened to come along and find him?”
“I heard Dispatch call for a property check of Fairview Cemetery. A possible trespasser.”
“So?”
“So I wondered if it was our unsub.”
“You wondered?”
“Yes.”
“You must have had a good reason.”
“Instinct.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Dean. You turn up fully dressed for night ops, and I’m supposed to believe you just moseyed on over to check out a trespasser?”
“My instincts are good.”
“You’d have to have ESP to be that good.”
“We’re wasting time here, Detective. Either arrest me or work with me.”
“I’m leaning toward the first choice.”
He regarded her with an unruffled expression. There was too much he wasn’t telling her, too many secrets she’d never get out of him. Not here, not tonight. At last she lowered her weapon but did not holster it. Gabriel Dean didn’t inspire that level of trust.
“Since you were first on the scene, what did you see?”
“I found the security guard already down. I used his car radio to call Dispatch. The blood was still warm. I thought there was a chance our boy’d be close by. So I went looking.”
She gave a dubious snort. “In the trees?”
“I saw no other vehicles in the cemetery. Do you know what neighborhood surrounds us, Detective?”
She hesitated. “Dedham’s to the east. Hyde Park north and south.”
“Exactly. Residential neighborhoods on all sides, with lots of places to park a car. From there it’s just a short stroll to this cemetery.”
“Why would the unsub come here?”
“What do we know about him? Our boy is obsessed with the dead. He craves the smell of them, the touch of them. He holds on to corpses until the stench becomes impossible to disguise, to hide. Only then does he surrender the remains. This is a man who probably gets turned on just by walking through a cemetery. So here he was, in the dark, indulging in a little erotic adventure.”
“This is sick.”
“Look into his mind, his universe. We may think it’s sick, but for him, this place is a little slice of paradise. A place where the dead are laid to rest. Just the place the Dominator would come. He walks around here and probably imagines a whole harem of sleeping women right beneath his feet.
“But then he’s disturbed, surprised by the arrival of a security patrol. A guard who’s probably expecting to deal with nothing more dangerous than a few teenagers looking for a little nighttime adventure.”
“And the guard lets a lone man stroll right up and cut his throat?”
Dean was silent. For this he had no explanation. Neither did Rizzoli.
By the time they walked back up the slope, the night was pulsing with blue lights, and her team was already stringing crime scene tape between stakes. Rizzoli stared at the grim carnival of activity and suddenly she felt too weary to deal with any of it. Seldom had she questioned her own judgment, doubted her own instincts. But tonight, faced with the evidence of her failure, she wondered if Gabriel Dean wasn’t right-that she had no business leading this investigation. That the trauma inflicted on her by Warren Hoyt had so damaged her that she could no longer function as a cop. Tonight she had made the wrong choice, had refused to release anyone from her team to answer the call for a premises check. We were only a mile away. Sitting in our cars, waiting for nothing, while this man was dying.
The string of defeats had piled up so heavily on her shoulders that she felt her back sag as though under the weight of real stones. She returned to her car and flipped open her cell phone; Frost answered.
“Yellow Cab dispatcher confirms the cabbie’s story,” he told her. “They got the call at two-sixteen. Male claiming his car was out of gas on Enneking Parkway. She dispatched Mr. Wilensky. We’re trying to track down the number the call came from.”
“Our boy’s not stupid. The call’s going to lead nowhere. A pay phone. Or a stolen cell phone. Shit.” She slapped the dashboard.
“So what about the cabbie? He comes up clean.”
“Release him.”
“You sure?”
“It was all a game, Frost. The unsub knew we’d be waiting for him. He’s playing with us. Demonstrating he’s in control. That he’s smarter than us.” And he just proved it.
She hung up and sat for a moment, collecting the energy to step out of the car and face what came next. Another death investigation. All the questions that would surely follow about her decisions tonight. She thought of how fiercely she had pinned her hopes on the belief that the unsub would adhere to his pattern. Instead he had used that very pattern to taunt her. To produce the fiasco she was now staring at.
Several of the cops standing by the crime scene tape turned and looked her way-a signal that, tired as she was, she could not hide in her car much longer. She remembered Korsak’s thermos of coffee; awful as it was, she could use the shot of caffeine. She reached around to retrieve the thermos behind her seat and suddenly stopped.
She looked up at the law enforcement personnel standing among the cruisers. She saw Gabriel Dean, lean and sleek as a black cat as he walked the crime scene perimeter. She saw cops scanning the ground, flashlights sweeping back and forth. But she did not see Korsak.
She stepped out of the car and approached Officer Doud, who’d been part of the stakeout team. “Have you seen Detective Korsak?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
“He wasn’t here when you arrived? He wasn’t waiting by the body?”
“I haven’t seen him here at all.”
She stared toward the trees, where she had encountered Gabriel Dean. Korsak was running right behind me. But he never caught up. And he didn’t come back here…
She began walking toward the trees, retracing the route she had run across the cemetery. During that sprint, she’d been so focused on pursuit that she’d paid little attention to Korsak, who’d trailed behind her. She remembered her own fear, the pounding heart, the night wind rushing past her face. She remembered his heavy breathing as he’d struggled to keep up. Then he’d fallen behind, and she’d lost track of him.
She moved faster now, her flashlight sweeping left and right. Was this the route she’d taken? No, no, she’d gone down a different row of headstones. She recognized an obelisk looming to the left.
Correcting course, she headed for the obelisk and almost tripped over Korsak’s legs.
He lay crumpled beside a headstone, the shadow of his bulky torso merging with the granite. At once she was on her knees, screaming for assistance as she rolled him onto his back. One glance at his swollen, dusky face told her he was in cardiac arrest.
She felt his neck, wanting so desperately to detect a carotid pulse that she almost mistook the bounding pulse of her own fingers for his. But he had none.