She hung up and looked at Korsak. “Is there a problem?”
“You’re the one looks like she has a problem. You get a fresh lead, and you can’t wait to call your new fibbie pal. What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on.”
“Doesn’t look that way to me.”
Heat flooded her face. She was not being honest with him, and they both knew it. Even as she’d dialed Dean’s cell phone number, she’d felt her pulse quicken, and she knew exactly what it meant. She felt like a junkie craving her fix, unable to stop herself from calling his hotel. Turning her back on Korsak’s baleful gaze, she faced out the window as the phone rang.
“Colonnade.”
“Could you connect me to one of your guests? His name’s Gabriel Dean.”
“One minute please.”
As she waited, she hunted about for the right words to say to him, the right tone of voice. Measured. Businesslike. A cop. You’re a cop.
The hotel operator came back on the line. “I’m sorry, but Mr. Dean is no longer a guest here.”
Rizzoli frowned, her grip tightening on the phone. “Did he leave a forwarding number?”
“There’s none listed.”
Rizzoli stared out the window, her eyes suddenly dazed by the setting sun. “When did he check out?” she asked.
“An hour ago.”
TWENTY
Rizzoli closed the file containing the pages faxed from the Maine State Police and focused out the window at the passing woods, at the occasional glimpse of a white farmhouse through the trees. Reading in the car always made her queasy, and the details of Maria Jean Wake’s disappearance only intensified her discomfort. The lunch they’d eaten on the way did not help matters. Frost had been eager to try the lobster rolls from one of the roadside shacks, and although she’d enjoyed the meal at the time, the mayonnaise was now churning in her stomach. She stared at the road ahead, waiting for the nausea to pass. It helped that Frost was a calm and deliberate driver who made no unexpected moves, whose foot was steady on the gas pedal. She’d always appreciated his utter predictability but never more than now, when she herself was feeling so unsettled.
As she felt better, she began to take note of the natural beauty outside her car window. She’d never ventured this far into Maine before. The farthest north she’d ever made it was as a ten-year-old, when her family had driven to Old Orchard Beach in the summertime. She remembered the boardwalk and the carny rides, blue cotton candy and corn on the cob. And she remembered walking into the sea and how the water was so cold, it pierced straight to her bones like icicles. Yet she had kept wading in, precisely because her mother had warned her not to. “It’s too cold for you, Janie,” Angela had called out. “Stay on the nice warm sand.” And then Jane’s brothers had chimed in: “Yeah, don’t go in, Janie; you’ll freeze off your ugly chicken legs!” So of course she had gone in, striding grim-faced across the sand to where the sea lapped and foamed, and stepping into water that made her gasp. But it was not the water’s cold sting she remembered all these years later; rather, it was the heat of her brothers’ gazes as they watched her from the beach, taunting her, daring her to wade even deeper into that breath-stealing cold. And so she had marched in, the water rising to her thighs, her waist, her shoulders, moving without hesitation, without even a pause to brace herself. She’d pushed on because it was not pain she feared most; it was humiliation.
Now Old Orchard Beach was a hundred miles behind them and the view she saw from the car looked nothing like the Maine she remembered from her childhood. This far up the coast, there were no boardwalks or carny rides. Instead she saw trees and green fields and the occasional village, each anchored around a white church spire.
“Alice and I drive up this way every July,” said Frost.
“I’ve never been up here.”
“Never?” He glanced at her with a look of surprise she found annoying. A look that said, Where have you been?
“Never saw any reason to,” she said.
“Alice’s folks have a camp out on Little Deer Isle. We stay there.”
“Funny. I never saw Alice as the camping type.”
“Oh, they just call it a camp. It’s really like a regular house. Real bathrooms and hot water.” Frost laughed. “Alice’d freak out if she had to pee in the woods.”
“Only animals should have to pee in the woods.”
“I like the woods. I’d live up here, if I could.”
“And miss all the excitement of the big city?” Frost shook his head. “I tell you what I wouldn’t miss. The bad stuff. Stuff that makes you wonder what the hell’s wrong with people.”
“You think it’s any better up here?” He fell silent, his gaze on the road, a continuous tapestry of trees scrolling past the windows.
“No,” he finally said. “Since that’s why we’re here.” She looked out at the trees and thought: The unsub came this way, too. The Dominator, in search of prey. He might have driven this very road, perhaps gazed at these same trees or stopped to eat at that lobster shack at the side of the highway. Not all predators are found in cities. Some wander the back roads or cruise through small towns, the land of trusting neighbors and unlocked doors. Had he been here on vacation and merely spotted an opportunity he could not pass up? Predators go on vacations, too. They take drives in the country and enjoy the smell of the sea, just like everyone else. They are perfectly human.
Outside, through the trees, she began to catch glimpses of the sea and granite headlands, a rugged view she would have appreciated more were it not for the knowledge that the unsub had been here as well.
Frost slowed down and his neck craned forward as he scanned the road. “Did we miss the turn?”
“Which turn?”
“We were supposed to go right on Cranberry Ridge Road.”
“I didn’t see it.”
“We’ve been driving way too long. It should’ve come up by now.”
“We’re already late.”
“I know; I know.”
“We’d better page Gorman. Tell him the dumb city slickers are lost in the woods.” She opened her cell phone and frowned at the weak signal. “You think his beeper’ll work this far out?”
“Wait,” said Frost. “I think we just got lucky.”
Up ahead, a vehicle with an official State of Maine license plate was parked at the side of the road. Frost pulled up beside it, and Rizzoli rolled down her window to talk to the driver. Before she could even introduce herself, the man called out to them:
“You the folks from Boston P.D.?”
“How’d you guess?” she said.
“Massachusetts plates. I figured you’d get lost. I’m Detective Gorman.”
“Rizzoli and Frost. We were just about to page you for directions.”
“Cell phone’s no good down here at the bottom of the hill. Dead zone. Whyn’t you follow me up the mountain?” He started his car.
Without Gorman to lead the way, they would have missed Cranberry Ridge entirely. It was merely a dirt road carved through the woods, marked only by a sign tacked to a post: fire road 24. They bounced along ruts, through a dense tunnel of trees that hid all views as they climbed, the road winding in switchbacks. Then the woods gave way to a burst of sunlight, and they saw terraced gardens and a green field rolling up to a sprawling house at the top of the hill. The view so startled Frost that he abruptly slowed down as they both stared.
“You’d never guess,” he said. “You see that crummy dirt road, and you figure it leads to a shack or a trailer. Nothing like this.”
“Maybe that’s the point of the crummy road.”
“Keep out the riffraff?”
“Yeah. Only it didn’t work, did it?”
By the time they pulled up behind Gorman’s car, he was already standing in the driveway, waiting to shake their hands. Like Frost, he was dressed in a suit, but his was ill-fitting, as though he’d lost a great deal of weight since he’d bought it. His face, too, reflected the shadow of an old illness, the skin sallow and drooping.