John Doe (6 page)

It was dark when they arrived at Maura’s house. There were no lights on inside, and the front door was unlocked. Jane and Frost glanced at each other, a grim acknowledgment of what could very well await them. They both drew their weapons, and Jane gave the door a nudge. She slipped through first, moved into the living room.

Suddenly a lamp came on. Jane froze.

Harry O’Brien stood clutching Maura as a shield in front of him, his gun pressed to her temple.

“Drop it, O’Brien!” Jane ordered, her weapon raised. She heard Frost move beside her, caught a peripheral view of his gun, clutched in both hands.

“We don’t want violence, Detective,” another voice said, and Jane glanced in surprise at Sarah Shapiro, who rose to her feet from the armchair. “Harry just wants to settle things, once and for all.”

“By killing a witness?” said Jane. “The one person who remembers he was here that night?” She looked at O’Brien. “You were stalking Scanlon. Oh, it was in the name of justice, I get that. The scum deserved to die, and any jury will sympathize.”

“I don’t want to go to jail,” he said.

“You should’ve thought of that before you stabbed him.”

“Did I?” He shook his head. “I told you, I was with a friend that night.”

“She’s covering for you. That alibi will fall apart.”

“No, it won’t. We built a fortress, Detective. You just haven’t realized it yet, because you haven’t finished your job.”

“I know you’re all in this together. And I know this is
not
helping your case.” She tightened her grip on the Glock. “Drop the gun.”

“Why? I have nothing to lose.”

“Your life?”

O’Brien’s laugh was bitter. “My life is over. It ended when Kitty died. I’m just tying up loose ends.”

“Like Scanlon?”

“And his partner.”

He knows there’s a second man
. “We
will
find that partner, Harry. I swear we will. And he’ll pay.”

“Oh, I know you’ll find him.”

“Drop the gun and we’ll talk. We’ll work on finding him together. We’ll see justice done.”

He seemed to weigh her words, and she saw the struggle in his eyes. The indecision. “It never comes soon enough,” he said softly.

“What doesn’t?”

“Justice. Sometimes, you have to give it a nudge.” With that, he pushed Maura so hard that she went sprawling against the sofa. He raised his gun, and the barrel was aimed directly at Jane.

Gunfire exploded as both Jane and Frost opened fire. The bullets punched into O’Brien’s chest, sent him slamming backward against the bookcase. He leaned there staring at them for a moment, an odd smile on his lips, the gun already falling from his hand. Slowly he slid down to the floor, and Sarah dropped to her knees beside him, sobbing, screaming.

He had not fired a single shot.

Maura crouched over the body, felt for a pulse, and began CPR. But staring into O’Brien’s eyes, Jane saw the light fade away. And she knew there was nothing left to save.

A day later, they found the body.

They tracked down the recipient of Scanlon’s text messages, and it led them to the handsome Newton residence of William Heathcote, age forty-two. There they found Mr. Heathcote slumped in the driver’s seat of his silver Mercedes, which was parked inside his garage. He had been dead for several days, which meant he could well have died the same night as Scanlon. The cause of death was immediately apparent: a single gunshot to the right temple. A Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter pistol, reportedly stolen in Miami a year before, was in his hand.

In the Mercedes trunk was a plastic bag containing two chefs’ knives, both covered in dried blood.

It was almost certainly Scanlon’s blood, thought Jane as she watched the CSU team tag the evidence. No case could come more prettily tied up with a bow. The evidence was all there to help the police draw the obvious conclusion: Heathcote stabbed Scanlon to death in Olmsted Park, then drove home and committed suicide. In a single bloody evening, two predators met their end.

Jane didn’t believe it for a second; neither did Maura.

They stood together in Heathcote’s driveway, watching as the Boston PD tow truck pulled away with the Mercedes, bound for the crime lab. It was late afternoon, dark clouds were moving in, and the air felt prickly with impending thunder.

But for Maura, the storm had already passed. “Harry was a hero, Jane,” she said. “He never meant to hurt me. He came to my house without a single bullet in that gun.”

“We didn’t know that. We had no choice.”

“Of course you had no choice. It was
supposed
to happen this way. He wanted to go out with a blaze of publicity, so his daughter would be remembered. And he wouldn’t have to face any questions.” Maura paused. “He had cancer.”

“Harry told you that?”

“No. Dr. Bristol did the autopsy this morning. Harry’s body was riddled with tumors. I think he knew he was dying, and he chose this way to end it.”

Leaving me with the nightmares, thought Jane, looking up at the darkening sky. Taking a man’s life leaves a stain on your soul, even if you’re forced to do it. Even if the man you kill wants you to pull that trigger.

“We both know it was a conspiracy,” said Jane. “Harry and those victims, they planned this together. They covered for each other. For all I know, they each took their turn stabbing Christopher Scanlon. Fifteen stab wounds, two different knives? And not a single fingerprint.” Jane sighed in frustration. “I
know
what happened, I just can’t prove it.”

“Do you really want to?”

“
You’re
the one who’s always hung up on the facts, the truth. But you’re willing to ignore the truth of this case?”

“I could have been a victim, too. I was like a staked goat, drugged and laid out on my sofa, where anything could have been done to me. But it never happened because
they
stopped it. I don’t know which of them was there in my house, or how many. All I know is that this time, the victims fought back. They caught and killed two monsters.” Maura looked straight at her. “And they saved me.”

Maybe that’s worth more than any truth, thought Jane as she watched Maura climb into her Lexus and drive away. And she remembered what Harry O’Brien had said:
Justice. Sometimes you have to give it a nudge
.

That you did, Mr. O’Brien. That you did
.

Read on for an excerpt from

Last to Die

by Tess Gerritsen.

Order it today!

Published by Ballantine Books

We called him Icarus
.

It was not his real name, of course. My childhood on the farm taught me that you must never give a name to an animal marked for slaughter. Instead you refer to it as Pig Number One or Pig Number Two, and you always avoided looking it in the eye, to shield yourself from any glimpse of self-awareness or personality or affection. When a beast trusts you, it takes far more resolve to slit his throat
.

We had no such issue with Icarus, who neither trusted us nor had any inkling of who we were. But we knew a great deal about him. We knew that he lived behind high walls in a hilltop villa on the outskirts of Rome. That he and his wife Lucia had two sons, ages eight and ten. That despite his immense wealth, he had simple tastes in food, and a favorite local restaurant, La Nonna, at which he dined almost every Thursday
.

And that he was a monster. Which was the reason we came to be in Italy that summer
.

The hunting of monsters is not for the faint of heart. Nor is it for those who feel bound by such trivial doctrines as law or national borders. Monsters, after all, do not play by the rules, so neither can we. Not if we hope to defeat them
.

But when you abandon civilized standards of conduct, you run the risk of becoming a monster yourself. And that is what happened that summer in Rome. I did not recognize it at the time; none of us did
.

Until it was too late
.

CHAPTER ONE

Ithaca, New York

On the night that thirteen-year-old Claire Ward should have died, she stood on the window ledge of her third-floor bedroom, trying to decide whether to jump. Twenty feet below were scraggly forsythia bushes, long past their spring bloom. They would cushion her fall, but most likely there’d be broken bones involved. She glanced across at the maple tree, eyeing the sturdy branch that arched only a few feet away. She’d never attempted this leap before, because she’d never been forced to. Until tonight she’d managed to sneak out the front door without being noticed. But those nights of easy escapes were over, because Boring Bob was on to her.
From now on young lady, you are staying home! No more running around town after dark like a wildcat
.

If I break my neck on this jump, she thought, it’s all Bob’s fault.

Yes, that maple branch was definitely within reach. She had places to go, people to see, and she couldn’t hang around here forever, weighing her chances.

She crouched, tensing for the leap, but suddenly froze as an approaching car’s headlights angled around the corner. The SUV glided like a black shark beneath her window and continued slowly up the quiet street, as if searching for a particular house. Not ours, she thought; no one interesting ever turned up at the residence of her foster parents Boring Bob and Equally Boring Barbara Buckley. Even their names were boring, not to mention their dinner conversations.
How was your day, dear? And yours? The weather’s turning nice, isn’t it? Can you pass me the potatoes?

In their tweedy, bookish world, Claire was the alien, the wild child they’d never understand, although they tried. They really did. She should be living instead with artists or actors or musicians, people who stayed up all night and knew how to have fun.
Her
kind of people.

The black car had vanished. It was now or never.

She took a breath and sprang. Felt the night air whoosh in her long hair as she soared through the darkness. She landed, graceful as a cat, and the branch shuddered under her weight. Piece of cake. She scrambled down to a lower branch, and was about to jump off when that black SUV returned. Again it glided past, engine purring. She watched it until it vanished around the corner, then she dropped down onto the wet grass.

Glancing back at the house, she expected Bob to come storming out the front door, yelling at her:
Get back inside now, young lady!
But the porch light remained dark.

Now the night could begin.

She zipped up her hoodie and headed toward the Town Common, where the action was – if you could call it that. At this late hour, the street was quiet, most of the windows dark. It was a neighborhood of picture-perfect houses with gingerbread trim, a street populated by college professors and gluten-free vegan moms who all belonged to book groups.
Ten square miles surrounded by reality
was how Bob affectionately described the town, but he and Barbara belonged here.

Claire did not know where she belonged.

She strode across the street, scattering dead leaves with her scuffed boots. A block ahead, a trio of teens, two boys and a girl, stood smoking cigarettes beneath the pool of light cast by a street lamp.

“Hey,” she called out to them.

The taller boy waved. “Hey, Claire Bear. I heard you were grounded again.”

“For about thirty seconds.” She took the lit cigarette he offered her, drew in a lung full of smoke, and exhaled with a happy sigh. “So what’s our plan tonight? What’re we doing?”

“I hear there’s a party over at the falls. But we need to find a ride.”

“What about your sister? She could take us.”

“Naw, Dad took her car keys. Let’s just hang around here and see who else shows up.” The boy paused, frowning past Claire’s shoulder. “Uh oh. Look who just did.”