She slammed her fist down on his chest. Even that violent punch did not jolt his heart awake.
She tilted his head back and tugged his sagging jaw forward to open the airway. So many things about Korsak had once repelled her. The smell of his sweat and cigarettes, his noisy sniffling, his doughy handshake. None of that registered now as she sealed her mouth against his and blew air into his lungs. She felt his chest expand, heard a noisy wheeze as his lungs expelled the air again. She planted her hands on his chest and began CPR, doing the work his heart refused to do. She kept pumping as other cops arrived to assist, as her arms began to tremble and sweat soaked into her vest. Even as she pumped, she was mentally flogging herself. How had she overlooked him, lying here? Why hadn’t she noticed his absence? Her muscles burned and her knees ached, but she did not stop. She owed that much to him and would not abandon him a second time.
An ambulance siren screamed closer.
She was still pumping as the paramedics arrived. Only when someone took her arm and firmly tugged her away did she relinquish her role. She stood back, legs trembling, as the paramedics took over, inserting an I.V. line, hanging a bag of saline. They tilted Korsak’s head back and thrust a laryngoscope blade down his throat.
“I can’t see the vocal cords!”
“Jesus, he’s got a big neck.”
“Help me reposition.”
“Okay. Try it again!”
Again the paramedic inserted the laryngoscope, straining to hold up the weight of Korsak’s jaw. With his massive neck and swollen tongue, Korsak looked like a freshly slaughtered bull.
“Tube’s in!”
They tore away the rest of Korsak’s shirt, baring a thick mat of hair, and slapped on defibrillator paddles. On the EKG monitor, a jagged line appeared.
“He’s in V-tach!”
The paddles discharged, a jolt of electrical current slicing through Korsak’s chest. The seizure jerked his heavy torso right off the grass and dropped him back in a flaccid mound. The cops’ multiple flashlight beams revealed every cruel detail, from the pale beer belly to the almost feminine breasts that are the embarrassment of so many overweight men.
“Okay! He’s got a rhythm. Sinus tach-”
“BP?”
The cuff whiffed tight around his meaty arm. “Ninety systolic. Let’s move him!”
Even after they’d transferred Korsak into the ambulance and the taillights had winked away into the night, Rizzoli did not move. Numb with exhaustion, she stared after it, imagining what would follow for him. The harsh lights of the E.R. More needles, more tubes. It occurred to her that she should call his wife, but she did not know her name. In fact, she knew almost nothing about his personal life, and it struck her as unbearably sad that she knew far more about the dead Yeagers than about the living, breathing man who’d worked beside her. The partner she’d failed.
She looked down at the grass where he’d been lying. It still bore the imprint of his weight. She imagined him running after her but too short of breath to keep up. He would have pushed himself anyway, driven by male vanity, by pride. Did he clutch his chest before he went down? Did he try to call for help?
I would not have heard him anyway. I was too busy trying to run down shadows. Trying to salvage my own pride.
“Detective Rizzoli?” said Officer Doud. He’d approached so quietly, she had not even realized he was standing beside her.
“Yes?”
“I’m afraid we’ve found another one.”
“What?”
“Another body.”
Stunned, she could say nothing as she followed Doud across the damp grass, his flashlight lighting the way through the blackness. A flicker of more lights far ahead marked their destination. By the time she finally detected the first whiff of decay, they were several hundred yards from where the security guard had fallen.
“Who found it?” she asked.
“Agent Dean.”
“Why was he searching all the way out here?”
“I guess he was doing a general sweep.”
Dean turned to face her as she approached. “I think we’ve found Karenna Ghent,” he said.
The woman lay atop a grave site, her black hair splayed around her, clusters of leaves arranged among the dark strands in mock decoration of mortified flesh. She had been dead long enough for her belly to bloat, for purge fluid to trickle from her nostrils. But the impact of all these details faded in the greater horror of what had been done to the lower abdomen. Rizzoli stared at the gaping wound. A single transverse slice.
The ground seemed to give way beneath her feet and she stumbled backward, blindly reaching for support and finding only air.
It was Dean who caught her, grasping her firmly by the elbow. “It’s not a coincidence,” he said.
She was silent, her gaze still fixed on that terrible wound. She remembered similar wounds on other women. Remembered a summer even hotter than this one.
“He’s been following the news,” said Dean. “He knows you’re the lead investigator. He knows how to turn the tables, how to make a game of cat and mouse go both ways. That’s what it is to him, now. A game.”
Although she registered his words, she didn’t understand what he was trying to tell her. “What game?”
“Didn’t you see the name?” He aimed his flashlight at the words carved into the granite headstone:
Beloved husband and father
Anthony Rizzoli
1901-1962
“It’s a taunt,” said Dean. “And it’s aimed straight at you.”
THIRTEEN
The woman sitting at Korsak’s bedside had lank brown hair that looked as if it had been neither washed nor combed in days. She did not touch him but simply gazed at the bed with vacant eyes, her hands resting in her lap, lifeless as a mannequin’s. Rizzoli stood outside the ICU cubicle, debating whether to intrude. Finally the woman looked up and met her gaze through the window, and Rizzoli could not simply walk away.
She stepped into the cubicle. “Mrs. Korsak?” she asked.
“Yes?”
“I’m Detective Rizzoli. Jane. Please call me Jane.”
The woman’s expression remained blank; clearly she did not recognize the name.
“I’m afraid I don’t know your first name,” said Rizzoli.
“Diane.” The woman was silent for a moment; then she frowned. “I’m sorry. Who are you again?”
“Jane Rizzoli. I’m with Boston P.D. I’ve been working with your husband on a case. He may have mentioned it.”
Diane gave a vague shrug and looked back at her husband. Her face revealed neither grief nor fear. Only the numb passivity of exhaustion.
For a moment Rizzoli simply stood in silent vigil over the bed. So many tubes, she thought. So many machines. And at their center was Korsak, reduced to senseless flesh. The doctors had confirmed a heart attack, and although his cardiac rhythm was now stable, he remained stuporous. His mouth hung agape, an endotracheal tube protruding like a plastic snake. A reservoir hanging at the side of the bed collected a slow trickle of urine. Though the bedsheet concealed his genitals, his chest and abdomen were bare, and one hairy leg protruded from beneath the sheet, revealing a foot with yellow unclipped toenails. Even as she took in these details, she felt ashamed of invading his privacy, of seeing him at his most vulnerable. Yet she could not look away. She felt compelled to stare, eyes drawn to all the intimate details, the very things that, were he awake, he would not want her to see.
“He needs a shave,” said Diane.
Such a trivial concern, yet it was the one spontaneous remark Diane had made. She had not moved a muscle but sat perfectly motionless, hands still limp, her placid expression carved in stone.
Rizzoli searched for something to say, something she thought she should say to comfort her, and settled on a cliche. “He’s a fighter. He won’t give up easily.”
Her words dropped like stones into a bottomless pond. No ripples, no effect. A long silence passed before Diane’s flat blue eyes at last focused on her.