Chapter Seven
"That's like the eighteenth text you've gotten in ten minutes." Frankie Rizzoli tried to peer over his sister's shoulder at her phone but she quickly hunched out of the way. "What're you up to?"
"More work than you," she retorted. "Don't you ever go out on patrol anymore? You just hang around my desk like a, some kind of stupid fish thing that hangs around."
"A remora."
"Yeah, a remora. And it runs in the family," she added in an undertone, spotting her mother coming towards them.
"Frankie, there you are! I've been looking all over for you."
Frankie stiffened before putting on his best surprised face and turning to face her. "Hey, Ma—everything all right?"
Before he could even finish the sentence, Angela Rizzoli had thrown her arms around him and soundly kissed him. "All right? It couldn't be better. Oh, could any mother have a better child, I ask you?" She pressed her cheek to his, beaming at Frost and Korsak.
Jane schooled her face to a perfect mask of disappointed surprise. "What am I, chopped liver?"
"I love you too, baby," Angela said with a quick sideways hug, the kind that distant cousins rated at a family get-together. "Frankie…you're so thoughtful. Do you want to pick me up? It might be easier to go in one car. I'll be ready early, I promise. Come at 6:30. No, 6! I don't want to be late."
With what sounded an actual squeal of delight, Angela scurried off, leaving her baffled son holding the white envelope she had pressed into his hand. His fingers stiff and clumsy, Frankie peeled back the flap and extracted two tickets with a note attached.
"Dear Ma," he read aloud. "I know how badly you wanted to do this and I heard you tell Jane if only someone would go with you. She's so busy with her important work as a top homicide detective…" At that his voice grew suspicious and deepened. "…but someday I'll make you proud, like I'm proud of you. Would you be my date tonight?"
Frankie turned the tickets over and instantly a deep red flush crept up over his collar. "Legally Blonde: the Musical? What the hell is this?"
"Oh Frankie…you're the most thoughtful son in the whole world." Jane managed to make it through the first half of the sentence in a sarcastic, crooning tone before she lost control. "Thank God….thank God Ma has you since I'm such a horrible excuse for a daughter!"
"Hey, maybe for Mother's Day, you two can get mani-pedis?" Frost suggested.
Korsak's brows had gathered in a disapproving knot. "I can't believe you even know the term for that. How many have you had? Tell the truth."
"I didn't buy these tickets!" Frankie insisted hotly. "I didn't write that note—what the hell, you set me up!"
Jane affected a look of innocent indignation while edging back out of his reach. "No, I'm too busy being a top homicide detective."
Frankie's eyes were bulging in a way that Maura might have suggested would require a checkup to rule out excessive inter-cranial pressure. "What have I ever done to you to deserve this?"
Nothing actually, Jane had to admit, but it was a miracle that her mother hadn't come barging in to the house the last two nights and she needed to guarantee that again if she was going to have another chance to talk to Maura. It was Maura actually who had overheard her mother wistfully mention how much she missed going out, not that their father had been one for dinner and a show, and Maura who had helped arrange the last minute tickets. Making Frankie take the fall for it had just been an added bonus, and she needed a little bright spot in her day given everything she was trying to deal with.
Frankie had escalated to an apoplectic fit that rendered him wordless and choking and it was only matched by Frost's coughing fit to mask his own laughter.
"It's not so bad," Korsak said. He had an air of resigned practicality, earned and learned from three marriages. "You go, you smile, you clap, and you ask her if she enjoyed herself. Just focus on that and I guarantee your next birthday will be a good one."
Jane's text alert went off again and she checked almost without thinking, expecting yet another message from Maura about plans for the night. In the last three hours, dinner had escalated from pizza, since apparently Maura had an unwritten rule about not eating the same thing two nights in a row, to something extremely complicated and unpronounceable that Jane was in charge of picking up.
"Never should have taught her how to text," she sighed.
But it wasn't Maura.
"How the hell did you get here?"
As soon as the words echoed back to Jane from the nearly deserted parking garage, she realized how angry they sounded. The only sign Special Agent Dean gave was a resigned tilt of his head. He was wearing a full suit, probably issued by the Bureau she thought, with a very boring tie, and he looked like he had been born in it.
Slowly he pointed at the black sedan he was leaning against. "They run on gasoline, y'know."
"Yeah, but you were in your office when we talked this morning. That's," she searched back to a time in college when she had driven straight through to DC for a Tom Petty concert, "like seven hours away if you do the speed limit, and I know the Bureau checks for tickets."
"Oh, is that why you didn't get in?"
Jane couldn't help smiling at that and some of the first wave of adrenaline washed off her. "I'm sorry," she blurted. "I'm just really on edge and I don't have anyone I can ask for help about this except you, so when you show up like this it makes me think the worst, and right now I've had about all the bad news I can handle."
She waited for him to say she was being ridiculous and it wasn't that bad, it had all been a misunderstanding. He didn't.
Sitting in the car with the air conditioning on, Dean slid a folder out of his briefcase but didn't hand it over immediately. Jane slid her twitching fingers in between her knees and gripped them there.
"I made some calls," Dean said. "One of the major fugitives wanted for Rwandan war crimes was arrested last year, Bernard Munyagishari, and a tribunal is meeting now to decide his case. My friend at the Agency says that rebels are stirring things up right now to create fear and influence the outcome.'
"Let me guess, this Mpiryaninny, whatever, is the one coordinating."
"That's what we think, yes. That's the first piece. Second, I talked to the central African coordinator for the medical team Maura was with. I said that we were concerned with the travel advisory since they'd had a group going into that part of Burundi and asked if everything had gone all right. She said it was good they left when they did because the rebels did destroy a village where they had conducted a clinic the day before. Given the climate in Burundi, they probably wouldn't be sending a team back for a while."
"Yeah, but did she say anything about Maura specifically?" Jane realized that her stomach was clenched tight at the thought that in a few hours she might be woken up for a third night by anguished screaming and there would be nothing she could do to prevent it.
"I've had a little experience with interrogation, Detective Rizzoli, and if you let the subject volunteer information, you can often find out more than if you just charge in, guns blazing."
"Eeeeehhh, yeah, but guns blazing is kinda fun."
Dean smiled for the first time. "Officially, Uncle Sam frowns on it. But yes, she did know something. She said that one of the doctors—Maura—had stayed behind at the village for an extra day and was still there on the morning of the raid. They were worried since they couldn't go back to the area to verify her safety because the UN had it sealed off, but that they got an email from her two days later saying that she had gotten a ride out over the border into Tanzania and she was safe and would just fly home from there."
Jane exhaled but somehow her stomach wasn't feeling any better for the information. "I guess she could've gotten to an Internet café to let them know." But you couldn't email me?
"Her flight details on South African Airways were changed and she flew out of Dar Es Salaam, direct to the US."
"So what happened in those missing days?" Jane murmured. "She said she lost her phone and all her pictures, and the most she'll tell you about the trip is that she gave more polio shots in two weeks than we did in all of Boston last year. No irrelevant scientific facts or cultural trivia, and not single damn word about narrowly escaping death."
Dean leaned forward and took his smartphone out of the dash cradle but didn't turn it on. "I'm going to ask you a serious question, Jane. Do you really want to know what happened?"
"No, I just enjoy calling the Bureau and saying please help me because my self-esteem is getting too well developed. Yes. Yes, I want to know the answer because right now, Dean, I don't know what's going on except that my best friend is in a world of pain and for some reason she feels that she can't trust me and I'm doing the best I can, but I'm scared it's not enough." Jane broke off abruptly when she realized her voice was heading upwards to a register that meant tears would be the next stop.
Dean looked at her for a long moment in his unreadable way before he turned the phone on and pulled up a video taken with an unsteady camera.
"The UN sent some peacekeepers in to go through what was left of the village," he said. "They interviewed some of the survivors."
Jane took the phone from him and watched in silence as the camera panned over the burned timbers and crushed hut walls. Bodies lay half-sprawled in doorways, some missing limbs. A machete still protruded from a fallen tree trunk stained with blood.
The footage jumped to a young woman holding a toddler on her hip. She spoke rapidly, pointing back towards the charred remains of a canvas tent, some scraps still flapping from exposed aluminum tent poles. Jane listened carefully but quickly realized that no matter how carefully she listened, it wasn't going to magically translate itself into English.
"I'm sorry, I don't know what she's saying—is there a subtitle button?"
Just then she heard a single word that pierced through the rest, then repeated two more times: America.
"America? So there was an American? Right, Maura, but what does that mean?" Jane knew she was getting even more agitated and probably shouldn't be handling expensive electronic equipment.
Dean took the phone away from her almost before she realized what he was doing. "Not America—Amaurica. It's the nickname they gave the doctor from America who stayed with them when everyone else went to the next site. That woman is telling the peacekeeper that when the rebels came, Dr. Amaurica stayed behind and helped load the children on the only truck they had. She could have run with everyone else and left her patients, but she chose to stay."
Of course she did. Jane closed her eyes, covering her mouth with one hand. "But they didn't kill her," she managed finally. Her throat had nearly closed on her, aching and tight, but she had forced the words out.
"The last anyone saw, they took her away at gunpoint. Jane, I did a lot of reading today and the fact that she survived is a miracle. The things these death squads did during the genocide made the Nazis look like amateurs. They destroyed hospitals, killed patients and doctors, they even murdered an entire Red Cross team. Nearly 800,000 people died, and if they did keep a woman alive, it was to…."
"Shut up." The words were even more frightening for how softly they were uttered. "Thank you, Dean, but don't say another fucking word."
"You're welcome," he said quietly. He put the file folder on the seat between them, barely touching her leg.
Jane's mind was utterly blank which was a stark contrast to the last three days in which her vivid imagination had been running riot. Now that she had the clearest idea yet of what had happened, it was too much for her mind to absorb, and she thought she might want it to stay that way. The problem was that Maura seemed to be repressing it as well, which was working fine by day, but at night…
Jane realized that Dean hadn't said anything but simply let her sit in shock. She had thought he might suggest dinner or at least a drink to numb the pain, and since he had driven so far to tell her in person, she thought she owed him that much. But he didn't.
"I think…if I were Maura, that I would be very lucky to have a friend like you," was all he said. "Call me if you need anything, Jane. I mean it, anything."
