One display in particular draws everyone’s attention: a Venetian device, dating back to the 1600s, designed to punish women found guilty of sexual congress with Satan. Made of iron, and fashioned into the shape of a pear, it is inserted into the vagina of the unlucky accused. With each turn of a screw, the pear expands, until the cavity ruptures with fatal results. The vaginal pear is only one device in an array of ancient instruments meant to mutilate breasts and genitals in the name of the holy church, which could not abide the sexual powers of women. I am perfectly matter-of-fact as I describe these devices to my doctors, most of whom have never visited such a museum and who would no doubt be embarrassed to admit any desire to see one. But even as I tell them about the four-clawed breast rippers and the mutilating chastity belts, I am watching their eyes. Searching beneath their surface repulsion and horror, to see the undercurrent of excitement. Arousal. Oh yes, they all want to hear the details.
As the plane touched down, Rizzoli closed the file on Warren Hoyt’s letter and looked out the window. She saw gray skies, heavy with rain, and sweat gleaming on the faces of workers standing on the tarmac. It would be a steam bath outside, but she welcomed the heat, because Hoyt’s words so deeply chilled her.
In the limo ride to the hotel, she stared out through tinted windows at a city she had visited only twice before, the last time for an interagency conference at the FBI’s Hoover Building. On that visit, she had arrived at night, and she remembered how awed she’d been at the sight of the memorials, aglow in floodlights. She remembered a week of hard partying and how she’d tried to match the men beer for beer, bad joke for bad joke. How booze and hormones and a strange city had all added up to a night of desperate sex with a fellow conference attendee, a cop from Providence-married, of course. This was what Washington meant to her: The city of regrets and stained sheets. The city that had taught her she was not immune to the temptations of a bad cliché. That although she might think she was the equal of any man, when it came to the morning after, she was the one who felt vulnerable.
In line at the Watergate Hotel registration desk, she eyed the stylish blonde ahead of her. Perfect hair, red shoes with sky-high heels. A woman who looked as if she actually belonged at the Watergate. Rizzoli was painfully aware of her own scuffed and cloddish blue pumps. Girl-cop shoes, meant to be walked in, and walked in a lot. No need for excuses, she thought. This is me; this is who I am. The girl from Revere who hunts monsters for a living. High heels are not what hunters wear.
“May I help you, ma’am?” a clerk called to her.
Rizzoli wheeled her bag to the counter. “There should be a reservation. Rizzoli.”
“Yes, your name’s right here. And there’s a message from a Mr. Dean. Your meeting’s scheduled at three-thirty.”
“Meeting?”
He glanced up from his computer screen. “You didn’t know about it?”
“I guess I do now. Is there an address?”
“No, ma’am. But a car will be here to pick you up at three.” He handed her a key card and smiled. “Looks like you’re all taken care of.”
Black clouds smeared the sky, and the tingle of an approaching thunderstorm lifted the hair on her arms. She stood just outside the lobby, sweating in the rain-heavy air, and waited for the limo to arrive. But it was a dark-blue Volvo that swung into the porte cochere and stopped beside her.
She peered through the passenger window and saw it was Gabriel Dean behind the wheel.
The lock clicked open and she slid into the seat beside him. She had not expected to face him so soon, and she felt unprepared. Resentful that he appeared so calm and in control while she was still disoriented by the morning’s travel.
“Welcome to Washington, Jane,” he said. “How was the trip?”
“Smooth enough. I could get to like riding in limousines.”
“And the room?”
“Way better than I’m used to.”
A ghost of a smile touched his lips as he turned his attention to driving. “So it’s not all torture for you.”
“Did I say it was?”
“You don’t look particularly happy to be here.”
“I’d be a lot happier if I knew why I was here.”
“It’ll be clear once we get there.”
She glanced out at the street names and realized they were headed northwest, in the opposite direction from FBI headquarters. “We’re not going to the Hoover Building?”
“No. Georgetown. He wants to meet you at his house.”
“Who does?”
“Senator Conway.” Dean glanced at her. “You’re not carrying, are you?”
“My weapon’s still packed in my suitcase.”
“Good. Senator Conway doesn’t allow firearms into his house.”
“Security concerns?”
“Peace of mind. He served in Vietnam. He doesn’t need to see any more guns.”
The first raindrops began to patter on the windshield.
She sighed. “I wish I could say the same.”
Senator Conway’s study was furnished in dark wood and leather-a man’s room, with a man’s collection of artifacts, thought Rizzoli, noting the array of Japanese swords mounted on the wall. The silver-haired owner of that collection greeted her with a warm handshake and a quiet voice, but his coal-dark eyes were direct as lasers, and she felt him openly taking her measure. She endured his scrutiny, only because she understood that nothing could proceed unless he was satisfied by what he saw. And what he saw was a woman who stared straight back at him. A woman who cared little about the subtleties of politics but cared greatly about the truth.
“Please, have a seat, Detective,” he said. “I know you just flew in from Boston. You probably need time to decompress.”
A secretary brought in a tray of coffee and china cups. Rizzoli curbed her impatience while the coffee was poured, cream and sugar passed around. At last the secretary withdrew, closing the door behind her.
Conway set down his cup, untouched. He had not really wanted it, and now that the ceremony had been dispensed with, he focused all his attention on her. “It was good of you to come.”
“I hardly had much of a choice.” Her bluntness made him smile. Though Conway observed all the social niceties of handshakes and hospitality, she suspected that he, like most native New Englanders, valued straight talk as much as she did. “Shall we get straight to business, then?”
She set down her cup as well. “I’d prefer that.”
Dean was the one who stood and crossed to the desk. He brought a bulging accordion folder back to the sitting area and took out a photograph, which he laid on the coffee table in front of her. “June 25, 1999,” he said.
She stared at the image of a bearded man, sitting slumped, a spray of blood on the whitewashed wall behind his head. He was dressed in dark trousers and a torn white shirt. His feet were bare. On his lap was perched a china cup and saucer.
She was still reeling, struggling to process the image, when Dean laid a second photograph next to it. “July 15, 1999,” he said.
Again the victim was a man, this one clean-shaven. Again he had died sitting propped up against a blood-splattered wall.
Dean set down a third photograph of yet another man. But this one was bloated, his belly taut with the expanding gases of decomposition. “September 12,” he said. “The same year.”
She sat stunned by this gallery of the dead, laid out so neatly on the cherrywood table. A record of horror set incongruously among the civilized clutter of coffee cups and teaspoons. As Dean and Conway waited silently, she picked up each photo in turn, forcing herself to take in the details of what made each case unique. But all were variations on the same theme that she had seen played out in the homes of the Yeagers and the Ghents. The silent witness. The conquered, forced to watch the unspeakable.