It was just before two noon when Katherine said goodbye to her last patient of the day and closed the office door. She pulled her cell phone out of her purse and checked to see if her sister had called while she was in session. A glance at the screen told her it hadn't. What had happened?
She ran through the possibilities. Maybe Elizabeth had accomplished nothing. Or she had accomplished something and had been caught by Jane. Or maybe she'd changed her mind.
Katherine regretted involving Elizabeth, but what choice did she have? She was convinced Rosa was in danger, if not already dead or badly injured.
Katherine stared at her cell phone as if it would let her sister call. Finally, she put it back in her purse, which she placed next to her desk. She opened the office door to grab a cup of water at the end of the now quiet hallway. She was about to pull the door shut when she heard a muffled ringing. She almost tripped as she hurried back to her desk and rummaged awkwardly in her bag until she had the cell phone in her hand. She picked up the call. "Hello?" she said before she even put the device to her ear.
"Dr. Isles?" rang out a rushed female voice that Katherine immediately recognized as Rosa's mother.
"Maria?" said Katherine. "Is everything all right?"
"No," Maria replied, sniffling. "Rosa isn't answering her phone, and she hasn't called since yesterday morning. She would never fail to say good night to the Ninas -" she broke off, and Katherine knew Maria feared what she herself had feared when she saw Rosa being led away in handcuffs.
"Take a breath, Maria," Katherine urged her patient's mother.
"Have you heard anything from her? And did you find out where her cell phone is?"
"I'm sorry," was all Katherine could think of. "But I'll ask my sister, who was trying to help me."
"Please," Maria pleaded, "The kids miss their mom."
"I'll call you back as soon as I know anything," Katherine said and hung up. She had already tried Elizabeth's cell phone a few times, and Jane's and Maura's, and had gotten annoyed because neither of them answered. Katherine didn't want to bother either of them, but she needed to know, and that drove her to call her sister again. Again, she heard it ring ...
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Elizabeth stared at her cell phone vibrating on the desk with Katherine's name on the screen. Once again. She couldn't blame her; she herself was also restless and unable to concentrate on her work. She glanced at the clock. It was already close to two, almost six hours after the meeting with Jane and Savarese. It was driving her crazy waiting for word from them. She would have liked to tell Katherine to hold still, that she was working on finding Rosa. But her mother's order not to talk to her sister forced Elizabeth to let her call go straight to voicemail. What the hell is taking so long, Elizabeth wondered.
Jane had announced she and Savarese wouldn't leave for the park until ten to avoid rush hour traffic. But that was four hours ago, the morning commutes flowed in the opposite direction, the weather was clear, and if there really was a lot of traffic, they would surely have used the blue lights and sirens in Jane's unmarked car.
Agitated, Elizabeth rose from her desk to stretch, wondering if Jane and Savarese had driven at all. She let her eyes wander over the room with its compartments and carpeted floor, with its modern furniture a step above the comparative wretchedness of a police department or even a prestigious unit like the Major Crimes Division, where furnishings still looked like they came out of a seventies movie. Rank had its privileges at BPD, and the recent renovation of Jane's department was one of those privileges. Elizabeth knew the real reason she probably hadn't heard from her mother and Savarese was the job itself. Anything could have come up since this morning and pointed them in a new direction, a new case, a breakthrough in an old one. Not being allowed to call her, Elizabeth was at Jane's mercy. There was nothing she could do but, if possible, not stare at her cell phone. And wait.
She walked to the coffee machine, past her colleagues who were also tied to their desks and dressed in civilian clothes. Elizabeth knew it was the end of the line for her here. Every day in this environment, she felt like a part of her was dying. I'm just office furniture, she thought. Just like the filing cabinets she just walked past. True, she stayed for a good reason, so the girls would have it easier and she could save for their college education. But at what cost? Was it worth being tied to a desk for the rest of her working life for that?
No.
Pouring herself a cup of coffee, she walked back to her desk. The shrill ringing of her landline on her desk startled Elizabeth out of her thoughts. Jane and Savarese certainly weren't calling her through an official police line. And she didn't need to talk to anyone else.
A glance at the display told her it was Patrick Young, the detective sergeant, and Dolan's partner. "Yes, Sergeant," she said in a mock-patronizing tone.
"Save the bullshit about the sergeant," Young replied. "Grab your jacket and meet the Big Man at the carpool. Immediately."
Elizabeth was puzzled. "Where exactly am I going?" she asked, reaching for her blazer.
"How the hell should I know?" opined Young. "Your security clearance is higher than mine."
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Electronic music pounded from the speakers above Katherine's head, competing with the trampling of feet on the battery of treadmills. She ran as fast as she could in her gym on one of them as if trying to escape from her thoughts of Rosa. But the faster she ran, the faster her mind seemed to run through the blackest possibilities. In an instant, she imagined Rosa in a windowless room with a mattress on the floor, screaming for help. She blinked the thought away, and immediately she saw Rosa trapped in a dark box, a coffin, gasping for air. But she was still alive. Katherine shooed away the notion, but immediately the image of a shallow grave with earth shoveled on top surfaced. She couldn't breathe ... she was suffocating. She needed help ...
Katherine turned off the treadmill, picked up her gym bag from the floor, and pulled out her cell phone. The only call was from Maura, and she listened to her voice message. Maura had called to invite her over for dinner tonight. Then Katherine called her sister again, but this time it went straight to voicemail.
What the hell was going on? Why had her sister turned off her cell phone?
Now Katherine was even more nervous as she walked into the locker room, and she hoped the shower would wash away her fears.
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The car's engine was already starting when Elizabeth opened the passenger door. When she got in, she found Dolan already behind the wheel. "Rizzoli," he said as the young woman pulled the door shut. It wasn't until she buckled her seat belt that she noticed Dolan had been looking straight ahead the entire time. Not for a moment had he looked at her.
"Dolan," Elizabeth replied, keeping her nervousness in check and wondering how much trouble she had gotten herself into. "May I ask where we're going?"
"I think you know," Dolan said without emotion.
Elizabeth realized abruptly what had been discussed in Jane's office that morning. And that the moment Elizabeth's fear for her own skin turned to excitement.
Jane's right hand didn't drive to Arnold Arboretum Park or anywhere else without a good reason. Unless, of course, she had scored a hit. Her presence here could only mean her mother and Savarese had found something.
As Dolan drove off, Elizabeth didn't know if she was allowed to ride along because she had been right. But as she looked out the window, she suddenly had to grin. It took her a moment to realize why: maybe it was a good omen, she thought. A respite from a fate over which she had not the slightest control. A reprieve from the execution of her career.
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He exhaled in relief as he entered his small basement apartment. He had accomplished his mission. Perfectly. Every detail executed as planned. He felt a serenity he hadn't felt in a long time and went over in his mind the many moments of his victory. Savored them.
He unwrapped the knives. He had dipped them in a bucket of bleach, and the stainless steel blades sparkled. They will need sharpening, he thought.
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Half an hour later, Dolan stopped in front of the location where Rosa's cell phone was last located. Elizabeth saw two men in suits standing next to an unmarked car, and she wondered where the rest of the cavalry was because they would undoubtedly need more people for the task ahead. A thorough search of this area would take a lot of cops.
They got out of the car and were greeted warmly by one of the men in the suit. Detective Mike Fitzgerald made small talk with Dolan as they were led to the newer of the two cars, a dark blue Ford Taunus.
"You know the way?" asked Fitzgerald.
Elizabeth nodded slowly and exhaled loudly. "Yes."
"Savarese said he'd found something."
Not a hundred yards away, passersby had gathered in front of the yellow police tape, which was flapping a bit in the wind, wanting to catch a glimpse of what was going on behind the yellow tape.
Dolan and Elizabeth revealed themselves as detectives to the uniformed man guarding that tape and ducked through it.
"Nobody passes that police tape. If any chiefs show up and turn on you for not letting them through, and if it's the Chief of Police himself, you tell them you're acting on my orders," Jane barked with a deadly serious face.
"Yes, ma'am," Elizabeth heard the officers say obediently.
Dolan signaled her. They walked around the forensics van where Savarese and a forensics technician named Anita Aitken were waiting.
Elizabeth knew Aitken, a slender woman in her early thirties with short blond hair. They had worked together on and off, and Elizabeth respected her because Aitken literally turned over every stone in her search for evidence at a crime scene.
"You're a piece of work, Liz, honestly," Jane said as she stepped up. "It's just a good thing you were right because if I drove out here for nothing, I would have kicked your ass personally."
It was Jane's typical double-edged way of delivering a compliment to someone, and Elizabeth wondered exactly what she had been right about.
"What did you two find?" asked Dolan.
"Tire prints," Savarese replied, leading the group to the site. "They must be fresh because it rained last night. That made the trail nice and muddy."
Aitken knelt down next to the tracks. "I took pictures of them and entered them into the database," she explained. "They're Dunlop tires, 235/55 HR 17s."
"And do these tires belong specifically to a certain type of car?"
Jane frowned deeply and sucked the air loudly into her lungs.
"Yes," Aitken replied, standing up and pointing to a police car with a nod of his head. "They're the high-performance tires that all Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptors are equipped with."
Savarese squinted at the captain. "We had a whole fleet of those, didn't we?" he said cryptically.
Elizabeth knew he didn't want to say what everyone was thinking: that a cop had kidnapped Rosa Castillo and brought her out here to do God knows what with her.
"All the police departments in the Boston area have been driving these cars since the late nineties. If a cop kidnapped Rosa Castillo, it must not have been one of us," Savarese now said.
"Or not a cop at all," Elizabeth interjected. "It could be someone impersonating one. Used Crown Vics from police stocks are easy to come by. Our perp could have bought it just about anywhere."
Dolan looked anxiously at Jane, who looked a little too pale for his taste. "Do we know what happened to this woman?"
Jane took a deep breath without answering the question.
"Um," Savarese said, gesturing in one direction. "Yeah, but from the looks of that back there, we should have a hell of a time proving it."
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Katherine sat on the couch her patients usually occupy, trying to read in a People magazine she accidentally put in her bag at the gym. But she couldn't concentrate. Her mind wandered. She looked out the window at Boston and wondered where her sister was. Had she found Rosa yet?
She forced herself to think of something else, anything, as long as she didn't see those horrible images of Rosa in front of her. She began to free associate, thinking of the oppressive heat. Then she thought of the sun, how children always draw it with a smiling face. But she had never done it. When she was a child, her suns had been red-orange and angry. Now she imagined the sun as a ball of fire, sending unbearable heat across the city. What will happen when the sun burns out, she thought. What will people do then? How will the world survive?
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The group walked around the trees and along the side of the path, careful not to destroy tire tracks or other potential evidence. They were nearly a hundred yards from the police tape when they came to a small, open area in the shade of the surrounding tall maples and oaks.
Aitken made a sign for them to stop on a bed of dry leaves that looked as if it had remained untouched since last fall.
"This is as far as we should go," she called out, "until a team from CSRU has worked through all this." She gestured to four large black metalheads standing on a grate held up all around by massive, charred logs. A pile of ash under the grate was all that was left of the campfire.
"Looks like someone did a little cooking," Dolan remarked.
"And forgot to take his pots," Savarese added.
"Does anyone else smell bleach beside me?" asked Elizabeth as she detected an odor that, to her knowledge, didn't occur in nature.
Jane shook her head. "The only thing I smell is burnt wood."
"No, Liz is right, I smell it too," Aitken said. "And I bet if we get closer, we'll find that the pots were cleaned with it."
Jane voiced what they all suspected. "The only reason to clean with bleach is to remove human remains without residue. So no DNA is detectable anymore."
"And he wasn't just cleaning," Aitken said, pointing to the spot at the edge of the clearing where the tire tracks ended. "Look at the ground directly behind the tire tracks. It's unnaturally depressed, in the shape of a perfect square."
"He must have laid out a plastic tarp," Jane suggested.
"A very large tarp," agreed Aitken. "So that nothing was left on the ground when he cut up the body."
In fact, the place looked completely out of place in that spot, Elizabeth thought. As if sterilized. A little piece of order that had no place in the chaos of nature.
"I don't know how you do that without leaving a ton of blood behind," Dolan said.
"If I had to guess, I'd say he bled her out somewhere else," Aitken replied.
"So we think this maniac handcuffs our victim, kills her, and then brings her out here to cook her?" pondered Dolan aloud. "Why?"
"To loosen the flesh from the bones," Jane explained, leaning against a tree a bit behind the others. No one had noticed that she had moved away from the others.
"Are you all right, Captain?" asked Elizabeth, walking over to her mother. Jane looked like she was leaning against the tree.
"It's like putting a chicken in a pot to make chicken soup. If you cook it long enough, the meat practically falls off the bones by itself. And that's exactly what our man here did," said Jane, who Elizabeth reached by now.
"You think this sick asshole cut the woman up so the meat would come off the bones and made a meal out of her?" asked Elizabeth.
"No, he either threw the meat in the fire or otherwise disposed of it -"
"Captain?" said Savarese, approaching with Aitken and Dolan.
"Graham Waste is only a few miles from here," Jane continued, barely able to suppress the anger in her voice. "But he couldn't get that fire up to 2012°F, and you need that to set the bones on fire."
Elizabeth put a hand on her mother's shoulder. The latter was pale as she turned to face the group. "Good Lord, Ma, what's the matter? You look like you've seen a ghost."
"I have," Jane said in a shaky voice. "One from my past."
"What are you talking about?" asked Dolan.
"I had a case just like this one back then," Jane explained. "When Liz was ten. I never told you about it. The son of a bitch killed women and cooked them. I had nightmares about it for years." she looked at Elizabeth, who took her hand off her shoulder. "I'm okay, Liz." She took a deep breath and looked at the others for a long moment. "Here's what we're going to do," Jane told Aitken. "Call the Chief Medical Examiner and tell him I need as many teams out here as he can spare. If necessary, have them work overtime." She turned to Dolan. "As much as I hate to say it, I think Liz had the right hunch. So we're going to go on the assumption that this madman kidnapped Rosa Castillo on the open road, killed her in another location and bled her out, and then possibly dismembered her here. We're having the scene here photographed and thoroughly searched, and we're sending everything to the lab, and we're doing it as fast as we can, even though we're working through the night. But we're doing it inconspicuously. If the media gets scent of the story and there are reporters all over the place asking questions, this maniac will know we're on to him, and that's the last thing we need."
"With all due respect, Captain," Savarese said, "if we let a fleet of CSRU vehicles into this park, the secrecy should go out the window pretty quickly."
Dolan pulled out his cell phone and consulted a map on the display. "There are some sneak peeks here. You run the operation, Savarese."
"Roger that, sergeant," Savarese replied.
Jane looked first at Dolan and then at her daughter. "And we're heading back to BPD."
"Yes, ma'am," the two detectives said simultaneously.
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An hour later and a silent, awkward car ride, Elizabeth, Jane, and Dolan sat around the cherry table in the conference room. They were just the three of them, and the silence on the drive back had been no accident. What had happened in the forest and what they were about to discuss was for the ears of these three only.
Jane took a deep breath and began. "I was still on patrol then," she said, almost lost in thought. "At the beginning of a day shift, dispatch sent me to a two-family house in Charlestown. There, the owner showed me a mound of dirt in his lawn where someone had dug a hole during the night and filled it back in." She paused as if waiting for a response. But both Elizabeth's and Dolan's expressions only signaled that she should continue. "So I took a look," Jane continued, "and say to the owner if he'd be okay with me digging up again what was obviously buried here. The man replies, go ahead, but he doesn't have a shovel. So I call my sergeant and ask him to bring over some shovels from the precinct. I and my former partner start digging and at about eleven inches deep we hit something hard. We clear away the earth and see the top of a jute bag. I reach in, and the next moment I have a human skull with a bullet hole in my hands. As I run out into the street to get rid of my breakfast, my partner and sergeant called for backup. Forensics and the coroner's office come and pull the bag out of the ground. When they look inside, it's full of human bones."
Jane looked at Elizabeth and Dolan, who gave her their full attention.
There was something funny about Dolan's expression, though; it looked like he was trying to squeeze out of the sponge of his brain a memory that didn't exist. "Why the hell don't I remember any of this?" he pondered aloud. "I was already on duty then."
"Because the bag of bones wasn't even mentioned in the papers, because nobody gave a shit about anything but Charles Hoyt back then."
"Good God," Elizabeth said, and a pained expression flitted across her face that Jane had never observed on her before.
"Are you all right, Liz?" asked Jane.
"Go ahead and tell us," Elizabeth replied blankly.
"Okay," Jane said. "The coroner examines the bones and tells me, from the circumference of the pelvic girdle, the victim was definitely a woman. Then the next night, the exact same thing happens two blocks away. A bag of a poor woman's bones is buried in another poor devil's lawn. I will never forget it. I came home and nearly drank myself into a coma. I started calling the perpetrator the 'butcher'. I couldn't understand what kind of monster kills people, cuts them up, and then cooks them to separate the meat from the bones -"
"Wait a minute," Elizabeth interrupted her mother. "The coroner knew the bones were cooked?"
"Yes, on both victims, I don't remember how he determined it," Jane quickly replied. "We'll have to look at the files if we can still find them. Anyway, the fact is," she concluded, "all the cops in town were looking for Hoyt, so the bones were put in the back. The victims were never identified, the perpetrator was never caught. And as far as I know, it never happened again."
Dolan's expression hadn't changed, and now he leaned back wearily. As if he had put two and two together and came up with six. "That's right," he said in a heavy voice. "It didn't happen again. But it wasn't the first time then."
Jane and Elizabeth looked into each other's eyes for a moment, not letting their shock show out of respect for their colleague. "Um, Dolan," Jane said, "would you be kind enough to tell us what you're talking about?"
"About a month before what the captain just told us," Dolan explained. He straightened up, recognizably troubled. "I was still Cambridge, and a dog had dug up some bones in Thomas Danehy Park. They had me standing guard overtime in the rain at the scene. I don't even know if the detectives even investigated the case. We were the only precinct in the city where Hoyt struck twice. Nobody cared about anything else."
"Was this victim identified?" asked Elizabeth.
"I don't think so, and I realized I'd better not ask about it," Dolan replied. Given the position he now held, the remark sounded ironic. "I don't remember if I ever found out about the bones in Charlestown," he said.
"Someone will remember," Jane warned. The captain's ringing cell phone interrupted the conversation. "Hold on, guys, it's Savarese," Jane said, answering the call. "Savarese, I'm with Liz and Dolan, and you're on speaker. What's new out there?"
"Nothing good," Savarese's voice rang out. "Aitken says there's no sign of a body at the pots or around the campfire."
"How can she know that so quickly?" grumbled Elizabeth.
"Because the corpse gas would have attracted a plethora of flies and other animals, and there's nothing to indicate there were any. We'll keep looking, but if someone really did cook a woman here, they cleaned up insanely thoroughly afterward."
"Let us know if anything changes," Jane said, ending the call.
"Okay, guys, now what?" asked Dolan. "If a body was boiled in the park and no one can find a trace of it, is the person actually dead?"
It was a rhetorical question. They were all convinced that Rosa Castillo had indeed been the victim of murder.
"The only way to know for sure is to find those bones," Jane replied.
"And how the hell do we do that?" asked Elizabeth.
"Assuming it's the same guy as thirty-five years ago," said Jane, "I think we should see where he left them then."
Dolan looked at her as if she had lost her mind. "If it's the same guy, he can't possibly be that stupid."
But Jane was undeterred. "He was stupid enough to leave Rosa's cell phone on. Meaning, it wasn't stupidity at all. He wanted us to find the fireplace. And that's why I think he wants us to find the bones, too. I think it's worth a shot."
They decided to work backward, driving across Boston to get to Olmsted Park, where the last bag of bones had been found more than three decades ago. They searched the lawn for an hour until they were convinced no one had dug here recently.
Their next stop was in Charlestown. Jane stayed in the car and talked on the phone while Elizabeth and Dolan walked four blocks up the street looking for freshly dug earth. But apparently, no bodies had been dumped in the neighborhood. They saw a patrol car parked on the side of the street in the next block, the cops inside apparently doing paperwork.
"This is insane," Dolan said, signaling Elizabeth to turn around before the officers spotted them. "If anyone sees the captain out here, they'll know something's up," he growled before they hurried back to their own car.
"Let's go to the next stop," Elizabeth suggested.
"Fuck it," Dolan replied, taking off his jacket, not caring that his Glock was now visible in his belt holster. The heat was clearly getting to him. "I'm going to recommend to the captain that she send a patrol to the site at Thomas Danehy Park. Tell them to see if any digging has been done there. We don't have to tell the men why -" A brief blaring of the siren on Elizabeth's car caused him to break off and hurry with the young woman down the rest of the block to where the car was parked. "What's wrong, Captain?" he gasped as Elizabeth got behind the wheel.
But Jane just called into the radio mike. "No, Dispatch, have patrol cordon off the street and wait for us to arrive. No one goes in or out of the cordon until I get there."
"10-4," the dispatcher's voice rang out.
"Where are we going," Elizabeth asked as she looked at her mother before speeding off.
"Back Bay," the captain called over the din of the siren. "Some garbage men dumped a trash can from a street corner into their truck, and a bag of bones fell out."