Die Again (Rizzoli & Isles, #11)(71)

“What’s her name?”

“Millie Jacobson. The sole survivor.”





SOUTH AFRICA

EVERY MORNING FOR THE PAST FIVE DAYS, A CARMINE BEE-EATER HAS been visiting the bottlebrush tree. Even as I step into my back garden with a cup of coffee, the bird sits unruffled, a bright red ornament perched among the cheerful tangle of shrubs and flowers. I have worked hard on this garden, digging and composting, weeding and watering, transforming what was once a patch of scrub into my own private retreat. But on this warm November day, I scarcely register the summery blooms or the visiting bee-eater. Last night’s phone call has left me too shaken to think of anything else.

Christopher comes out to join me, and wrought iron scrapes across the patio stones as he sits down with his coffee at the garden table. “What are you going to do?” he asks.

I breathe in the scent of flowers and focus on the trellis, gloriously engulfed by vines. “I don’t want to go.”

“So you’ve decided.”

“Yes.” I sigh. “No.”

“I can handle this for you. I’ll tell them to leave you alone. You’ve answered all their questions, so what more can they expect?”

“A little courage, maybe,” I whisper.

“Good God, Millie. You’re the bravest woman I know.”

That makes me laugh, because I don’t feel brave at all. I feel like a quivering mouse afraid to leave this home where I’ve felt so safe. I don’t want to leave because I know what’s out there in the world. I know who is out there, and my hands shake at the mere thought of seeing him again. But that is what she’s asking me to do, that policewoman who called from Boston. You know his face. You know how he thinks and how he hunts. We need you to help us catch him.

Before he kills again.

Christopher reaches across the table to grasp my hands. Only then do I notice how cold I am. How warm he is. “You had the nightmare last night, didn’t you?”

“You noticed.”

“It’s not hard when I’m sleeping right next to you.”

“I haven’t had the dream in months. I thought I was over it.”

“That bloody phone call,” he mutters. “You know they don’t have anything solid. It’s just their theory. They could be looking for someone else entirely.”

“They found Richard’s lighter.”

“You can’t be sure it’s the same lighter.”

“Another R. Renwick?”

“It’s a common enough name. Anyway, if it is the same lighter, it means the killer’s far away. He’s moved on, to a different continent.”

Which is why I want to stay here, where Johnny can’t find me. I’d be insane to go in search of a monster. I drain my coffee cup and stand, the chair squealing across the stones. I don’t know what I was thinking, buying wrought-iron garden furniture. Perhaps it was the sense of permanence, the feeling that I could always count on it to last, but the chairs are heavy and hard to move. As I walk back into the house I feel as if I’m hauling yet another burden, heavy as wrought iron, fear-forged and anchoring me to this place. I go to the sink to wash cups and saucers, and tidy up a countertop that is already pristine.

You know how he thinks. And how he hunts.

An image of Johnny Posthumus’s face suddenly rears up in my mind, as real as if he’s standing right outside my kitchen, staring through the window. I flinch and a spoon clatters to the floor. He’s always there, haunting me, just a stray thought away. After I left Botswana, I felt certain he would one day track me down. I’m the only one who lived through it, the one witness he couldn’t kill. Surely that’s a challenge he can’t ignore. But the months became years and I heard nothing from either the Botswana or the South African police, and I began to hope that Johnny was dead. That his bones lie scattered somewhere in the wilderness, like Richard’s. Like the others’. That was the only way I could feel safe again, by imagining him dead. These past six years, no one has seen or heard from him, so it was reasonable to believe he’d met his end and couldn’t hurt me.

The call from Boston changes everything.

Footsteps thump lightly down the stairs and our daughter Violet comes dancing into the kitchen. At four years old, she’s still fearless because we have lied to her. We’ve told her the world is a place of peace and light and she does not know that monsters are real. Christopher scoops her into his arms, swirls her around, and carries her laughing into the living room for their Saturday-morning ritual of cartoons. The dishes are washed, the coffeepot rinsed, and everything is as it should be, but I pace the kitchen looking for new tasks, anything to distract me.

I sit down at the computer and see a batch of emails that have popped into my inbox since last night, from my sister in London, from the other mothers in Violet’s playgroup, from some Nigerian who wants to wire a fortune into my bank account, if only I will give him my number.

And there’s one from Detective Jane Rizzoli in Boston. It was sent last night, barely an hour after our phone conversation.

I hesitate to open it, already sensing that this is the point of no return. Once I cross this line, I cannot retreat behind my solid wall of denial. In the next room, Christopher and Violet are laughing at cartoon mayhem while here I sit, my heart pounding, my hand frozen.