The Sinner (29 page)

“Okay!” Brophy said in panic. “I’m doing it!
I’m
getting out. . . .” He pushed open his door and stepped outside.

Sutcliffe said to Maura, “Get behind the wheel.”

Shaking, clumsy, Maura climbed over the gear shift, into the
driver’s
seat. She glanced sideways, out the window, and saw Brophy still standing beside
the car, staring at her helplessly. Rizzoli was shouting at him to move away,
but
he seemed paralyzed.

“Drive,” said Sutcliffe.

Maura put the car in gear and let out the brake. She pressed her
bare
foot to the gas pedal, then lifted it again.

“You can’t kill me,” she said. The logical Dr.
Isles
was back in control. “We’re surrounded by the police. You need me as a
hostage. You need me to drive this car.”

A few seconds passed. An eternity.

She sucked in a gasp as he lowered the gun from her head and
pressed
the barrel, hard, against her thigh.

“And you don’t need your left leg to drive. So do you
want
to keep your knee?”

She swallowed. “Yes.”

“Then let’s go.”

She pressed the accelerator.

Slowly the car began to roll forward, past the parked cruiser
where
Frost was crouched. The dark street stretched ahead of them, unobstructed. The
car
kept moving.

Suddenly she saw Father Brophy in her rearview mirror, running
after
them, lit by the strobelike flashes of the cruiser’s blue lights. He
grabbed
Sutcliffe’s door and yanked it open. Reaching in, Brophy clawed at
Sutcliffe’s
sleeve, trying to drag him out.

The blast of the gun sent the priest flying backwards.

Maura shoved open her own door and threw herself out of the
rolling
car.

She landed on icy pavement, and saw bright flashes as her head
slammed
against the ground.

For a moment she could not move. She lay in blackness, trapped in
a
cold and numbing place, feeling no pain, no fear. Aware only of the wind,
blowing
feathery snow across her face. She heard a voice calling to her from across a
great
distance.

Louder, now. Closer.

“Doc?
Doc?
”

Maura opened her eyes and winced against the glare of
Rizzoli’s
flashlight. She turned her head away from the light and saw the car a dozen
yards
away, its front bumper rammed against a tree. Sutcliffe was lying face-down on
the
street, struggling to get up, his hands cuffed behind him.

“Father Brophy,” she murmured. “Where is Father
Brophy?”

“We’ve already called the ambulance.”

Slowly Maura sat up and looked down the street, where Frost was
crouched
over the priest’s body. No, she thought. No.

“Don’t get up yet,” said Rizzoli, trying to hold
her
still.

But Maura pushed her away and rose, her legs unsteady, her heart
in
her throat. She scarcely felt the icy road beneath her bare feet as she stumbled
toward Brophy.

Frost looked up as she approached. “It’s a chest
wound,”
he said softly.

Dropping to her knees beside him, she tore open the priest’s
shirt
and saw where the bullet had penetrated. She heard the ominous sound of air
being
sucked into the chest. She pressed her hand to the wound, and felt warm blood
and
clammy flesh. He was shaking from the cold. Wind swept down the street, its bite
as sharp as fangs. And I am wearing your coat, she thought. The coat you gave me
to keep me warm.

Through the howl of the wind, she heard the wail of the
approaching
ambulance.

His gaze was unfocused, consciousness fading.

“Stay with me Daniel,” she said. “Do you hear
me?”
Her voice broke. “You’re going to live.” She leaned forward,
tears
sliding onto his face as she pleaded into his ear.

“Please. Do it for me, Daniel. You have to live. You have to
live.
. . .”

T
WENTY
-T
HREE

T
HE
TV in the hospital waiting room was tuned, as
always,
to CNN.

Maura sat with her bandaged foot propped up on a chair, her gaze
fixed
on the news banner crawling across the bottom of the screen, but she did not
register
a single word. Though she was now dressed in a wool sweater and corduroy slacks,
she still felt cold, and did not think she would ever feel warm again. Four
hours,
she thought. He has been on the operating table for four hours. She looked at
her
hand and could still see Daniel Brophy’s blood under her fingernails, could
still feel his heart throb like a struggling bird against her palm. She did not
need
to see an X ray to know what damage the bullet had done; she’d seen the
lethal
track that a Glaser blue-tip had torn in Rat Lady’s chest, and knew what
the
surgeons now faced. A lung sliced by exploding shrapnel. Blood pouring from a
dozen
different vessels. The panic that grips the staff in the O.R. when they see life
hemorrhaging out, and the surgeons cannot snap on clamps fast enough.

She looked up as Rizzoli came into the room, carrying a cup of
coffee
and a cell phone. “We found your phone by the side gate,” she said,
handing
it to Maura. “And the coffee’s for you. Drink it.”

Maura took a sip. It was too sweet, but tonight she welcomed the
sugar.
Welcomed any source of energy into her tired and bruised body.

“Is there anything else I can get you?” asked Rizzoli.
“Anything
else you need?”

“Yes.” Maura looked up from her coffee. “I want you
to tell me the truth.”

“I always tell the truth, Doc. You know that.”

“Then tell me that Victor had nothing to do with this.”

“He didn’t.”

“You’re absolutely certain?”

“As sure as I can be. Your ex may be a major-league prick. He
may have lied to you. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t kill anyone.”

Maura sank back against the couch and sighed. Staring down at the
steaming
cup, she asked: “And Matthew Sutcliffe? Is he really a doctor?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. M.D. from the University of
Vermont.
Did his internal medicine residency in Boston. It’s interesting, Doc. If
you’ve
got that M.D. behind your name, you’re golden. You can walk into a
hospital,
tell the staff that your patient’s just been admitted, and no one questions
you. Not when the patient’s relative calls and backs up your story.”

“A physician who works as a paid killer?”

“We don’t know that Octagon paid him. In fact, I
don’t
think the company had anything to do with these murders. Sutcliffe may have done
it for his own reasons.”

“What reasons?”

“To protect himself. To bury the truth about what happened in
India.” Seeing Maura’s bewildered look, Rizzoli said, “Octagon
finally
released that list of personnel working at their plant in India. There was a
factory
doctor.”

“He was the one?”

Rizzoli nodded. “Matthew Sutcliffe, M.D.”

Maura stared at the TV, but her mind was not on the images playing
across the screen. She thought of funeral pyres, of skulls savagely fractured.
And
she remembered her nightmare of fire consuming human flesh. Of bodies, still
moving,
still writhing in the flames.

She said, “In Bhopal, six thousand people died.”

Rizzoli nodded.

“But the next morning, there were hundreds of thousands who
were
still alive.” Maura looked at Rizzoli. “Where were the survivors at
Bara?
Rat Lady couldn’t have been the only one.”

“And if she wasn’t, what happened to the others?”

They stared at each other, both of them now understanding what
Sutcliffe
had been desperate to conceal. Not the accident itself, but the aftermath. And
his
role in it. She thought of the horror that must have greeted him that night,
after
the poisonous cloud had swept across the village. Entire families, lying dead in
their beds. Bodies sprawled outside, frozen in their final agonies. The factory
doctor
would have been the first sent out to assess the damage.

Perhaps he did not realize that some of the victims were still
alive
until after the decision was made to burn the corpses. Perhaps it was a groan
that
alerted him, or the twitching of a limb, as they dragged bodies to the flaming
pyre.

With the smell of death and seared flesh rising in the air, he
must
have regarded the living with panic. But by then they could not turn back; they
had
already gone too far.

This is what you didn’t want the world to know: what you
did
with the living.

“Why did he attack you tonight?” asked Rizzoli.

Maura shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“You saw him at the hospital. You spoke to him. What happened
there?”

Maura thought about her conversation with Sutcliffe. They had
stood
gazing down at Ursula, and had talked about the autopsy. About lab tests and
death
summaries.

And toxicology screens.

She said, “I think we’ll know the answer when we do the
postmortem.”

“What do you expect to find?”

“The reason why she went into cardiac arrest. You were there
that
night. You told me that just before she coded, she was panicking. That she
looked
terrified.”

“Because he was there.”

Maura nodded. “She knew what was about to happen, and she
couldn’t
speak, not with a tube in her throat. I’ve seen too many codes. I know what
they’re like. Everyone crowding into the room, so much confusion. Half a
dozen
drugs going in at once.” She paused. “Ursula was allergic to
penicillin.”

“Would it show up on the drug screen?”

“I don’t know. But he’d worry about that,
wouldn’t
he? And I was the only person insisting on the test.”

“Detective Rizzoli?”

They turned to see an OR nurse standing in the doorway.

“Dr. Demetrios wanted you to know that everything went well.
They’re
closing him up now. The patient should be moving to the surgical ICU in about an
hour.”

“Dr. Isles here has been waiting to see him.”

“It will be a while before he can have any visitors.
We’re
keeping him intubated and under sedation. It’s better if you come back
later
in the day. Maybe after lunchtime.”

Maura nodded and slowly rose to her feet.

So did Rizzoli. “I’ll drive you home,” she said.

It was already dawn by the time Maura walked into her house. She
looked
at the trail of dried blood she’d left on the floor, the evidence of her
ordeal.
She walked through each room, as though to reclaim it from the darkness. To
reassert
that this was still her home, and that fear had no place within these walls. She
went into the kitchen, and found that the broken window had already been boarded
up against the cold.

Jane’s orders, no doubt.

Somewhere, a phone was ringing.

She picked up the receiver on the wall, but there was no dial
tone.
The line had not yet been repaired.

My cell phone, she thought.

She went into the living room where she’d left her purse. By
the
time she pulled out the phone, the ringing had stopped. She punched in her code
to
hear the message.

The call had been from Victor. She sank onto the couch, stunned to
hear his voice.

“I know it’s too soon for me to be calling you. And
you’re
probably wondering why the hell you should listen to me, after . . . well, after
everything that’s happened. But now it’s all out in the open. You know
I have nothing to gain by this. So maybe you’ll believe me when I tell you
how
much I miss you, Maura. I think we could make it work again. We could give it
another
chance. Give
me
another chance, won’t you? Please.”

For a long time she sat on the couch, holding the phone in numb
hands,
and staring at the cold fireplace. Some flames cannot be rekindled, she thought.
Some flames are better left dead.

She slipped the phone back into her purse. Rose to her feet. And
went
to clean the blood off her floor.

By ten
A
.
M
., the sun had finally
broken
through the clouds, and as she drove home, Rizzoli had to squint against the
brilliance
of its reflection on the newly fallen snow. The streets were quiet, the
sidewalks
a pristine white. On this Christmas morning, she felt renewed. Cleansed of all
doubt.

She touched her abdomen and thought: I guess it’s just you
and
me, kid.

She parked the car in front of her building and stepped out.
Paused
there, in the cold sunshine, to take a deep breath of crystalline air.

“Merry Christmas, Jane.”

She went very still, her heart thumping hard. Slowly she turned.

Gabriel Dean stood near the front entrance to her apartment
building.
She watched him walk toward her, but she could think of nothing to say to him.
Once,
they had been as intimate with each other as a man and a woman could be, yet
here
they were, as tongue-tied as strangers.

“I thought you were in Washington,” she finally said.

“I got in about an hour ago. I took the first flight out of
D.C.”
He paused. “Thank you for telling me,” he said quietly.

“Yeah, well.” She shrugged. “I wasn’t sure
you’d
even want to know.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“It’s a complication.”

“Life is a series of complications. We have to deal with each
one as it comes.”

Such a matter-of-fact response.
The man in the gray suit
had
been her initial impression of Gabriel when they’d first met, and that was
how
she saw him now, standing before her in his dark overcoat. So calm and detached.

“How long have you known about it?” he asked.

“I wasn’t sure until a few days ago. I took one of those
home pregnancy tests. But I think I’ve suspected it for a few weeks.”

“Why did you wait so long to tell me?”

“I wasn’t going to tell you at all. Because I
didn’t
think I was going to keep it.”

“Why not?”

She laughed. “For one thing, I’m lousy with kids.
Someone
hands me a baby, I don’t know what to do with it. Do you burp it or change
its
diaper? And how am I supposed to go to work if I’ve got a baby at
home?”

“I didn’t know cops took a vow of childlessness.”

“But it’s so
hard
, you know. I look at other
moms,
and I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know if I can do it.”
She
huffed out a cloud of white and straightened. “At least, I’ve got my
family
in town. I’m pretty sure my mom will be thrilled to baby-sit. And
there’s
a daycare a few blocks from here. I’m going to check it out, see how young
they’ll
take them.”

“So that’s it, then. You’ve got it all
planned.”

“More or less.”

“Right down to who’s going to watch our baby.”

Our baby.
She swallowed, thinking of the life growing inside
her, a part of Gabriel himself.

“There are still details I need to figure out.”

He was standing perfectly straight, still playing the man in the
gray
suit. But when he spoke, she heard a note of anger that startled her. “And
where
do I come in?” he asked. “You’ve made all those plans, and you
didn’t
mention me once. Not that I’m surprised.”

She shook her head. “Why do you sound so upset?”

“It’s the same old act, Jane. The one you can’t
stop
playing. Rizzoli in charge of her own life. All safe in your suit of armor. Who
needs
a man? Hell, not
you
.”

“What am I supposed to say? Please, oh
please
save me?
I
can’t raise this baby without a man?”

“No, you probably could do it all on your own. You’d
find
a way, even if it killed you.”

“So what do you want me to say?”

“You do have a choice.”

“And I’ve made it. I told you, I’m keeping the
baby.”
She started toward her front steps, wading fiercely through the snow.

He grasped her arm. “I’m not talking about the baby.
I’m
talking about us.” Softly, he said: “Choose me, Jane.”

She turned to face him. “What does that mean?”

“It means we can do this together. It means you let me past
the
armor. That’s the only way this can work. You let me hurt you, and I let
you
hurt me.”

“Great. And we both end up with scars.”

“Or we end up trusting each other.”

“We barely know each other.”

“We knew each other well enough to make a baby.”

She felt heat flood her cheeks, and suddenly she could not look at
him. She stared down at the snow.

“I’m not saying we’ll be able to pull it off,”
he said. “I’m not even sure how to make this work, with you here, and
me
in Washington.” He paused. “And let’s be honest. Sometimes, Jane,
you can be a real bitch.”

She laughed. Brushed her hand across her eyes. “I know.
Jesus,
I know.”

“But other times . . .” He reached out and touched her
face.
“Other times . . .”

Other times, she thought, you see me for who I am.

And that scares me. No, it terrifies me.

This may be the bravest thing I will ever do.

At last she raised her head and looked at him. She took a deep
breath.

And she said, “I think I love you.”