The Surgeon: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel: With Bonus Content Read Free Page B

and businesslike. Elena Ortiz’s tormentor had taken what he wanted, and now it was time to finish things. He’d moved to the head of the bed. With his left hand he’d grasped a handful of her hair, yanking backward so hard he tore out more than two dozen strands. These were found later, scattered on the pillow and floor. The bloodstains shrieked out the final events. With her head immobilized and the neck fully exposed, he’d made a single deep slash starting at the left jaw and moving rightward, across the throat. He had severed the left carotid artery and the trachea. Blood spurted. On the wall to the left of the bed were dense clusters of small circular drops flowing downward, characteristic of arterial spray as well as exhalation of blood from the trachea. The pillow and sheets were saturated from downward dripping. Several cast-off droplets, thrown off as the intruder swung away the blade, had spattered the windowsill.
    Elena Ortiz had lived long enough to see her own blood spurt from her neck and hit the wall in a machine-gun spray of red. She had lived long enough to aspirate blood into her severed trachea, to hear it gurgle in her lungs, to cough it out in explosive bursts of crimson phlegm.
    She had lived long enough to know she was dying.
    And when it was done, when her agonal struggles had ceased, you left us a calling card. You neatly folded the victim’s nightshirt, and you left it on the dresser. Why? Is it some twisted sign of respect for the woman you’ve just slaughtered? Or is it your way of mocking us? Your way of telling us that you are in control?
    Moore returned to the living room and sank into an armchair. It was hot and airless in the apartment, but he was shivering. He didn’t know if the chill was physical or emotional. His thighs and shoulders ached, so maybe it was just a virus coming on. A summer flu, the worst kind. He thought of all the places he’d rather be at that moment. Adrift on a Maine lake, his fishing line whicking through the air. Or standing at the seashore, watching the fog roll in. Anywhere but this place of death.
    The chirp of his beeper startled him. He shut it off and realized his heart was pounding. He made himself calm down first before he took out the cell phone and punched in the number.
    “Rizzoli,” she answered on the first ring, her greeting as direct as a bullet.
    “You paged me.”
    “You never told me you got a hit on VICAP,” she said.
    “What hit?”
    “On Diana Sterling. I’m looking at her murder book now.”
    VICAP, the Violent Criminals Apprehension Program, was a national database of homicide and assault information gathered from cases across the country. Killers often repeated the same patterns, and with this data investigators could link crimes committed by the same perpetrator. As a matter of routine, Moore and his partner at the time, Rusty Stivack, had initiated a search on VICAP.
    “We turned up no matches in New England,” said Moore. “We ran down every homicide involving mutilation, night entry, and duct tape bindings. Nothing fit Sterling’s profile.”
    “What about the series in Georgia? Three years ago, four victims. One in Atlanta, three in Savannah. All were in the VICAP database.”
    “I reviewed those cases. That perp is not our unsub.”
    “Listen to this, Moore. Dora Ciccone, age twenty-two, graduate student at Emory. Victim first subdued with Rohypnol, then restrained to the bed with nylon cord—”
    “Our boy here uses chloroform and duct tape.”
    “He sliced open her abdomen. Cut out her uterus. Performed a coup de grace—a single slash across the neck. And finally—get this—he folded her nightclothes and left them on a chair by the bed. I’m telling you, it’s too goddamn close.”
    “The Georgia cases are closed,” said Moore. “They’ve been closed for two years. That perp is dead.”
    “What if Savannah PD blew it? What if he
wasn’t
their killer?”
    “They had DNA to back it up. Fibers, hairs.