The Surgeon (16 page)

Her childhood piano stood in the living room. The ghost of that
child was still here, in this house where she had been raised.
And Rose was here, the keeper of the flame, who looked so
much like her daughter that Moore sometimes thought he saw
Mary herself gazing from Rose's blue eyes.
"You look tired," she said.
"Do I?"
"You never went on vacation, did you?"
"They called me back. I was already in the car, heading up
the Maine Turnpike. Had my fishing poles packed. Bought a
new tacklebox." He sighed. "I miss the lake. It's the one thing I
look forward to all year."
It was the one thing Mary had always looked forward to as
well. He glanced at the swimming trophies on the bookshelf.
Mary had been a sturdy little mermaid who would happily have
lived her life in the water had she been born with gills. He
remembered how cleanly and powerfully she had once
stroked across the lake. Remembered how those same arms
had wasted away to twigs in the nursing home.
"After the case is solved," said Rose, "you could still go to
the lake."
"I don't know that it will be solved."

"That doesn't sound like you at all. So discouraged."
"This is a different sort of crime, Rose. Committed by
someone I can't begin to understand."
"You always manage to."
"Always?" He shook his head and smiled. "You give me too
much credit."
"It's what Mary used to say. She liked to brag about you, you
know. He always gets his man."
But at what cost? he wondered, his smile fading. He
remembered all the nights away at crime scenes, the missed
dinners, the weekends when his mind was occupied only by
thoughts of work. And there had been Mary, patiently waiting
for his attention. If I had just one day to relive, I would spend
every minute of it with you. Holding you in bed. Whispering
secrets beneath warm sheets.
But God grants no such second chances.
"She was so proud of you," Rose said.
"I was proud of her."
"You had twenty good years together. That's more than
most people can say."

"I'm greedy, Rose. I wanted more."
"And you're angry you didn't get it."
"Yes, I suppose I am. I'm angry that she had to be the one
with the aneurysm. That she was the one they couldn't save.
And I'm angry that--" He stopped. Released a deep breath.
"I'm sorry. It's just hard. Everything is so hard these days."
"For both of us," she said softly.
They gazed at each other in silence. Yes, of course it would
be even harder for widowed Rose, who had lost her only child.
He wondered whether she would forgive him if he ever
remarried. Or would she consider it a betrayal? The
consignment of her daughter's memory to an even deeper
grave?
Suddenly he found he could not hold her gaze, and he
glanced away with a twinge of guilt. The same guilt he'd felt
earlier that afternoon when he'd looked at Catherine Cordell
and felt the unmistakable stirring of desire.
He set down his empty glass and rose to his feet. "I should
be going."
"So it's back to work already?"
"It doesn't stop until we catch him."

She saw him to the door and stood there as he walked
through the tiny garden to the front gate. He turned and said,
"Lock your doors, Rose."
"Oh, you always say that."
"I always mean it, too." He gave a wave and walked away,
thinking: Tonight more than ever.
Where we go depends on what we know and what we know
,
depends on where we go.
The rhyme kept repeating in Jane Rizzoli's head like an
irritating childhood ditty as she stared at the Boston map
tacked on a large corkboard on her apartment wall. She had
hung the map the day after Elena Ortiz's body was
discovered. As the investigation wore on, she had stuck more
and more colored pins on the map. There were three different
colors representing three different women. White for Elena
Ortiz. Blue for Diana Sterling. Green for Nina Peyton. Each
marked a known location within the woman's sphere of
activity. Her residence, her place of employment. The homes
of close friends or relatives. Which medical facility she visited.
In short, the habitat of the prey. Somewhere in the course of
her day-to-day activities, each woman's world had intersected
with the Surgeon's.
Where we go depends on what we know and what we know
,

depends on where we go.
And where did the Surgeon go? she wondered. What made
up his world?
She sat eating her cold supper of a tuna sandwich and
potato chips washed down with beer, studying the map as she
chewed. She had hung the map on the wall next to her dining
table, and every morning when she drank her coffee, every
evening when she had dinner--provided she got home for
dinner--she would find her gaze inexorably drawn to those
colored pins. While other women might hang pictures of
flowers or pretty landscapes or movie posters, here she was,
staring at a death map, tracing the movements of the
deceased.
This is what her life had come to: eat, sleep, and work.
She'd been living in this apartment for three years now, but
there were few decorations on the walls. No plants (who had
time to water 'em?), no stupid knickknacks, not even any
curtains. Only venetian blinds on the windows. Like her life,
her home was streamlined for work. She loved, and lived for,
her job. Had known she'd wanted to be a cop since she was
twelve years old, when a woman detective visited her school
on Career Day. First the class had heard from a nurse and a
lawyer, then a baker and an engineer. The students' fidgeting
got louder. Rubber bands shot between rows and a spitball
sailed across the room. Then the woman cop stood up,
weapon holstered at her waist, and the class suddenly

hushed.
Rizzoli never forgot that. She never forgot how even the
boys gazed in awe at a woman.
Now she was that woman cop, and while she could
command the awe of twelve-year-old boys, the respect of
adult men often eluded her.
Be the best was her strategy. Outwork them, outshine them.
So here she was, working even as she ate her dinner.
Homicide and tuna fish sandwiches. She took a long pull of
beer, then leaned back, staring at the map. There was
something creepy about seeing the human geography of the
dead. Where they'd lived their lives, the places that were
important to them. At yesterday's meeting, the criminal
psychologist Dr. Zucker had tossed out a number of profiling
terms. Anchor points. Activity nodes. Target backcloths. Well,
she didn't need Zucker's fancy words or a computer program
to tell her what she was looking at and how to interpret it.
Gazing at the map, what she imagined was a savanna
teeming with prey. The color pins defined the personal
universes of three unlucky gazelles. Diana Sterling's was
centered in the north, in the Back Bay and Beacon Hill. Elena
Ortiz's was in the South End. Nina Peyton's was to the
southwest, in the suburb of Jamaica Plain. Three discrete
habitats, with no overlap.
And where is your habitat?

She tried to see the city through his eyes. Saw canyons of
skyscrapers. Green parks like swaths of pastureland. Paths
along which herds of dumb prey moved, unaware that a hunter
was watching them. A predatory traveler who killed across
both distance and time.
The phone rang and she gave a start, tipping the beer
bottle on its side. Shit. She grabbed a roll of paper towels and
dabbed up the spill as she answered the phone.
"Rizzoli."
"Hello, Janie?"
"Oh. Hey, Ma."
"You never called me back."
"Huh?"
"I called you a few days ago. You said you'd call back and
you didn't."
"It slipped my mind. I'm up to my eyeballs in work."
"Frankie's coming home next week. Isn't that great?"
"Yeah." Rizzoli sighed. "That's great."
"You see your brother once a year. Couldn't you sound a
little more excited?"

"Ma, I'm tired. This Surgeon case is going round-the-clock."
"Have the police caught him?"
"I am the police."
"You know what I mean."
Yeah, she knew. Her mother probably pictured little Janie
answering the phones and bringing coffee to those all-
important male detectives.
"You're coming for dinner, right?" said her mother, sliding
right out of the topic of Jane's work. "Next Friday."
"I'm not sure. It depends on how the case goes."
"Oh, you can be here for your own brother."
"If things heat up, I may have to do it another day."
"We can't do it another day. Mike's already agreed to drive
down Friday."
Well of course. Let's cater to brother Michael.
"Janie?"
"Yeah, Ma. Friday."

She hung up, her stomach churning with unspent anger, a
feeling that was all too familiar. God, how had she survived her
childhood?
She picked up her beer and swallowed the few drops that
hadn't spilled. Looked up at the map again. At that moment,
catching the Surgeon had never been more important to her.
All the years of being the ignored sister, the trivial girl, made
her focus her rage on him.
Who are you? Where are you?
She went very still for a moment, staring. Thinking. Then she
picked up the package of pins and chose a new color. Red.
She stabbed one red pin on Commonwealth Avenue, another
in the location of Pilgrim Hospital, in the South End.
The red marked Catherine Cordell's habitat. It intersected
both Diana Sterling's and Elena Ortiz's. Cordell was the
common factor. She moved through the worlds of both victims.
And the life of the third victim, Nina Peyton, now rests in
her hands.

ten
E ven on a Monday afternoon, the Gramercy Pub was
a happening place. It was 7:00 P.M., and the corporate singles
were out on the town and ready to play. This was their
playpen.
Rizzoli sat at a table near the entrance and felt puffs of hot
city air blow into the room every time the door swung open to
admit yet another GQ clone, another office Barbie swaying in
three-inch heels. Rizzoli, wearing her usual boxy pantsuit and
sensible flats, felt like the high school chaperone. She saw

two women walk in, sleek as cats, trailing mingled scents of
perfume. Rizzoli never wore perfume. She owned one tube of
lipstick, which was stored somewhere in the back of her
bathroom cabinet, along with the dried-up mascara wand and
the bottle of Dewy Satin foundation. She'd purchased the
makeup five years ago at a department store cosmetics
counter, thinking that perhaps, with the right tools of illusion,
even she could look like cover girl Elizabeth Hurley. The
salesgirl had creamed and powdered, stroked and sketched,
and when it was over had triumphantly handed Rizzoli a mirror
and asked, smiling, "What do you think of your new look?"
What Rizzoli thought, staring at her own image, was that
she hated Elizabeth Hurley for giving women false hope. The
brutal truth was, there are some women who will never be
beautiful, and Rizzoli was one of them.
So she sat unnoticed and sipped her ginger ale as she
watched the pub gradually fill with people. It was a noisy
crowd, with much chatter and clinking of ice cubes, the
laughter a little too loud, a little too forced.
She rose and worked her way toward the bar. There she
flashed her badge at the bartender and said, "I have a few
questions."
He gave her badge scarcely a glance, then punched the
cash register to ring up a drink. "Okay, shoot."
"You remember seeing this woman in here?" Rizzoli laid a

photo of Nina Peyton on the counter.
"Yeah, and you're not the first cop to ask about her. Some
other woman detective was in here 'bout a month or so ago."
"From the sex crimes unit?"
"I guess. Wanted to know if I saw anyone trying to pick up
that woman in the picture."
"And did you?"
He shrugged. "In here, everyone's on the make. I don't keep
track."
"But you do remember seeing this woman? Her name is
Nina Peyton."
"I seen her in here a few times, usually with a girlfriend. I
didn't know her name. Hasn't been back in a while."
"You know why?"
"Nope." He picked up a rag and began wiping the counter,
his attention already drifting away from her.
"I'll tell you why," said Rizzoli, her voice rising in anger.
"Because some asshole decided to have a little fun. So he
came here to hunt for a victim. Looked around, saw Nina
Peyton, and thought: There's some pussy. He sure didn't see
a human being when he looked at her. All he saw was

a human being when he looked at her. All he saw was
something he could use and throw away."
"Look, you don't need to tell me this."
"Yes, I do. And you need to hear it because it happened
right under your nose and you chose not to see it. Some
asshole slips a drug in a woman's drink. Pretty soon she's
sick and staggers off to the bathroom. The asshole takes her
by the arm and leads her outside. And you didn't see any of
that?"
"No," he shot back. "I didn't."
The room had fallen silent. She saw that people were
staring at her. Without another word, she stalked off, back to
the table.
After a moment, the buzz of conversation resumed.
She watched the bartender slide two whiskeys toward a
man, saw the man hand one of them to a woman. She
watched drink glasses lifted to lips and tongues licking off salt
from Margaritas, saw heads tilted back as vodka and tequila
and beer slid down throats.
And she saw men staring at women. She sipped her ginger
ale, and she felt intoxicated, not with alcohol but anger. She,
the lone female sitting in the corner, could see with startling
clarity what this place really was. A watering hole where
predator and prey came together.

Her beeper went off. It was Barry Frost paging her.
"What's all that racket?" asked Frost, barely audible over
her cell phone.
"I'm sitting in a bar." She turned and glared as a nearby
table exploded with laughter. "What did you say?"
". . . a doctor over on Marlborough Street. I've got a copy of
her medical record."
"Whose medical record?"
"Diana Sterling's."
At once Rizzoli was hunched forward, every ounce of
attention focused on Frost's faint voice. "Tell me again. Who's
the doctor and why did Sterling see him?"
"The doctor's a she. Dr. Bonnie Gillespie. A gynecologist
over on Marlborough Street."
Another noisy burst of laughter drowned out his words.
Rizzoli cupped her hand over her ear so she could hear his
next words. "Why did Sterling see her?" she yelled.
But she already knew the answer; she could see it right in
front of her as she stared at the bar, where two men were
converging on a woman like lions stalking a zebra.