Die Again (Rizzoli & Isles, #11)(84)

“Okay.” Crowe sighed, sinking back into his chair. “I’ll play along for now. Might as well hear what she has to say.”

Jane went to the intercom. “Dr. Zucker, can you bring Millie in?”

Moments later Zucker escorted Millie into the conference room. She was dressed in a wool skirt suit with an oxford shirt, but her outfit was a size too large, as if she’d recently lost weight, and she looked more like a girl masquerading in her mother’s clothes. Meekly she sat down in the chair that Zucker pulled out for her, but she kept her gaze on the table, as if too intimidated to look at the detectives who were now studying her.

“These are my colleagues in homicide,” said Jane. “Detectives Crowe, Tam, and Frost. They’ve read the file and they know what happened to you in the Delta. But they need more.”

Millie frowned at her. “More?”

“About Johnny. The man you knew as Johnny.”

“Tell them what you just told me, about Johnny,” suggested Dr. Zucker. “Remember how I said that every killer has his own technique, his own signature? These detectives want to know what makes Johnny unique. How he works, how he thinks. What you tell them might be the one detail they need to catch him.”

For a moment Millie thought about this. “We trusted him,” she said softly. “It all came down to that. We—I—believed he’d take care of us. In the Delta, there are dozens of different ways to die. Every time you step out of the jeep, step out of the tent, there’s something waiting to kill you. In a place like that, the one person you have to believe in is your bush guide. The man with the experience, the man with the rifle. We had every reason to trust him. Before Richard booked the trip, he’d done some research. He said Johnny had eighteen years of experience. He said there were testimonials from other travelers. People from all over the world.”

“And he got this all off the Internet?” said Crowe, eyebrow arched.

“Yes,” Millie admitted, flushing. “But everything seemed perfectly fine when we arrived in the Delta. He met us at the airstrip. The tents were basic but comfortable. And the Delta was beautiful. Truly wild, in a way you can’t believe still exists.” She paused, eyes unfocused, lost in the memories of that place. She took a breath. “For the first two nights, it all went as promised. The camping, the meals, the game drives. Then … everything changed.”

“After your tracker was killed,” said Jane.

Millie nodded. “At dawn, we found Clarence’s body. Or … parts of it. The hyenas had fed, and there was so little left of him, we had no idea what happened. By then we were way out in the bush, too far to use the radio. Anyway, it was dead. So was the truck.” She swallowed. “We were stranded.”

The room had gone silent. Even Crowe refrained from his usual smart-ass remarks. The mounting horror of Millie’s story had gripped them all.

“I wanted to believe it was just a string of bad luck. Clarence getting killed. The truck not starting. Richard still thought it was a grand adventure, something he could write into his book. His hero Jackman Tripp, stranded in the wild, surviving against all odds. We knew we’d be rescued eventually. The plane would come looking for us. So we decided to make the best of it and enjoy the bush experience.” She swallowed. “Then Mr. Matsunaga was killed, and it wasn’t an adventure anymore. It was a nightmare.”

“Did you suspect Johnny was behind it?” asked Frost.

“Not yet. At least, I didn’t. Isao’s body was found up in a tree, like a classic leopard kill. It seemed like another accident, another case of bad luck. But the others were whispering about Johnny. Wondering if he was behind it. He’d promised to keep us safe, and two people were dead.” Millie looked down at the table. “I should have listened to them. I should have helped them bring down Johnny, but I couldn’t believe it. I refused to believe it, because …” She stopped.

“Why?” Dr. Zucker asked gently.

Millie blinked away tears. “Because I was halfway in love with him,” she whispered.

In love with the man who tried to kill her. Jane looked around the table at her colleagues’ startled expressions, but she herself found nothing shocking about Millie’s confession. How many other women had been killed by husbands and boyfriends, by men they adored? A woman in love is a poor judge of character. No wonder Millie was so deeply haunted; she had been betrayed not just by Johnny, but by her own heart.

“I’ve never admitted that before. Not even to myself,” said Millie. “But out there, in the wild, everything was so different. Beautiful and strange. The sounds at night, the way the air smelled. You wake up every morning feeling a little bit scared. On edge. Alive.” She looked at Zucker. “That was Johnny’s world. And he made me feel safe in it.”

The ultimate aphrodisiac. In the face of danger, there’s no one more desirable than the protector, thought Jane. It was why women fell in love with cops and bodyguards, why singers crooned about someone to watch over me. In the African bush, the most desirable man is the one who can keep you alive.

“The others were talking about overpowering Johnny and taking control of the gun. I wouldn’t go along with it, because I thought they were paranoid. And Richard was egging them on, trying to play the hero, because he was jealous of Johnny. There we were, surrounded by animals that could eat us, but the real battle was inside our camp. It was Johnny and me, against everyone else. They stopped trusting me, stopped telling me their plans. I thought we could all just ride it out till we got rescued, and then they’d see how ridiculous they were. I thought we just needed to calm down and wait it out. And then …” She swallowed. “He tried to kill Elliot.”