Die Again (Rizzoli & Isles, #11)(8)

“Got yourself a new friend,” said Jane.

“Normal feline marking behavior. He’s claiming me as his territory,” said Maura as she plunged a gloved hand into the garbage can.

“I know you like to be thorough, Maura,” said Jane. “But how about picking through those in the morgue? Like, in a biohazard room or something?”

“I need to be certain …”

“Of what? You can smell they’re in there.” To Jane’s disgust, Maura bent over the garbage can and reached even deeper into the pile of entrails. In the morgue, she’d watched Maura slice open torsos and peel off scalps, de-flesh bones and buzz-saw through skulls, performing all these tasks with laser-guided concentration. That same icy focus was on Maura’s face as she dug through the congealed mass in the trash can, heedless of the flies now crawling in her fashionably clipped dark hair. Was there anyone else who could look so elegant while doing something so disgusting?

“Come on, it’s not like you haven’t seen guts before,” said Jane.

Maura didn’t answer as she plunged her hands deeper.

“Okay.” Jane sighed. “You don’t need us for this. Frost and I will check out the rest of the—”

“There’s too much,” Maura muttered.

“Too much what?”

“This isn’t a normal volume of viscera.”

“You’re the one who’s always talking about bacterial gases. Bloating.”

“Bloating doesn’t explain this.” Maura straightened, and what she held in her gloved hand made Jane cringe.

“A heart?”

“This is not a normal heart, Jane,” said Maura. “Yes, it has four chambers, but this aortic arch isn’t right. And the great vessels don’t look right, either.”

“Leon Gott was sixty-four,” said Frost. “Maybe he had a bad ticker.”

“That’s the problem. This doesn’t look like a sixty-four-year-old man’s heart.” Maura reached into the garbage pail again. “But this one does,” she said, and held out her other hand.

Jane looked back and forth between the two specimens. “Wait. There are two hearts in there?”

“And two complete sets of lungs.”

Jane and Frost stared at each other. “Oh shit,” he said.





FROST SEARCHED THE DOWNSTAIRS AND SHE TOOK THE UPSTAIRS. WENT room by room, opening closets and drawers, peering under beds. No gutted bodies anywhere, nor any signs of a struggle, but plenty of dust bunnies and cat hair. Mr. Gott—if indeed he was the man hanging in the garage—had been an indifferent housekeeper, and scattered across his dresser were old hardware store receipts, hearing aid batteries, a wallet with three credit cards and forty-eight dollars in cash, and a few stray bullets. Which told her that Mr. Gott was more than a little casual about firearms. She wasn’t surprised to open his nightstand drawer and find a fully loaded Glock inside, with a round in the chamber, ready to fire. Just the tool for the paranoid homeowner.

Too bad the gun was upstairs while the homeowner was downstairs, getting his guts ripped out.

In the bathroom cabinet she found the expected array of pills for a man of sixty-four. Aspirin and Advil, Lipitor and Lopressor. And on the countertop was a pair of hearing aids—high-end ones. He hadn’t been wearing them, which meant he might not have heard an intruder.

As she started downstairs, the telephone rang in the living room. By the time she reached it, the answering machine had already kicked in and she heard a man’s voice leave a message.

Hey, Leon, you never got back to me about the trip to Colorado. Let me know if you want to join us. Should be a good time.

Jane was about to play the message again, to see the caller’s phone number, when she noticed that the PLAY button was smeared with what looked like blood. According to the blinking display, there were two recorded messages, and she’d just heard the second one.

With a gloved finger she pressed PLAY.

November three, nine fifteen A.M.:… and if you call immediately, we can lower your credit card rates. Don’t miss this opportunity to take advantage of this special offer.

November six, two P.M.: Hey, Leon, you never got back to me about the trip to Colorado. Let me know if you want to join us. Should be a good time.

November 3 was a Monday, today was a Thursday. That first message was still on the machine, unplayed, because at nine on Monday morning, Leon Gott was probably dead.

“Jane?” said Maura. The gray tabby had followed her into the hallway and was weaving figure of eights between her legs.

“There’s blood on this answering machine,” said Jane, turning to look at her. “Why would the perp touch it? Why would he check the victim’s messages?”

“Come see what Frost found in the backyard.”

Jane followed her into the kitchen and out the back door. In a fenced yard landscaped only with patchy grass stood an outbuilding with metal siding. Too big to be just a storage shed, the windowless structure looked large enough to hide any number of horrors. As Jane stepped inside, she smelled a chemical odor, alcohol-sharp. Fluorescent bulbs cast the interior in a cold, clinical glare.

Frost stood beside a large worktable, studying a fearsome-looking tool bolted to it. “I thought at first this was a table saw,” he said. “But this blade doesn’t look like any saw I’ve ever come across. And those cabinets over there?” He pointed across the workshop. “Take a look at what’s inside them.”