They were silent for a few seconds.
"It has to be him," Maura murmured. "It can't be a coincidence, can it?"
"Statistically impossible." Nick shook his head.
Michael Hebert was Carl Martinek. The Boston Police Department's intern. Katherine's promising young associate. The man Elizabeth had been pursuing.
Maura glanced at her son-in-law. "Can we get Liz's cell phone signal even if the damn thing is off?"
Nick pressed his lips together and shook his head. "Hardly possible. We try all the time."
"Do we have Carl's cell phone data?"
"Neither," the detective replied. "All out. The most we could do is ask the others if they've seen Liz's car anywhere. But that would be like finding a needle in a haystack."
On Jane's forehead, a steep frown, part anger, part despair. "That means we have no way of finding out where Liz is? This guy may have her in his power and can do whatever he wants with her. Just because the fucking cell phones are off?"
"The cell phones --," Nick repeated, looking down strained. Then his expression brightened. "The cell phones!" he exclaimed.
The two women looked at him uncomprehendingly.
"I just remembered something." He stood up abruptly. "Come with me to BRIC!"
xxx
There was something next to Elizabeth.
Slippery, soft. She saw skin, rotten green skin, on a rotten green corpse. It was like a horror mask, where you expect the eyes to fall out of the grimace. But nothing fell out. But because Elizabeth had moved her hand in the wrong direction, one of the corpse's putrid bubbles burst with a sickening smacking sound, spraying the detective in the face with a smelly liquid.
"You know what it is?" asked Carl. "I'm talking to an expert, after all." The flashlight's beam rested on the rotting corpse. Rotting liquid. From ... let me introduce you. Jason Walton!"
Jason Walton, the former cop, grinned at Elizabeth. Or rather, the head that lay on the corpse's lap and on which the lamp now shone. He smiled with gray-green gums and lips rotting away. The face looked like brownish dried paper, and the body was bloated and full of poison-blistered blisters where the epidermis was peeling away and teeming with bacteria under the rotting skin.
"Soon, you'll look just as pretty, Elizabeth. You'll be rotting here just the same because I can't have you getting on my case. And you can scream all you want, and no one will hear you."
He glared at her. Again she felt the glare of the flashlight on her face. "Do you think any of those lying around have been heard? Do you think they didn't scream, too? By God, they did. But did it do them any good? Do they look like they've been freed?"
The cone of light moved once more to the severed head. Brownish-red liquid dripped from the thing that had been Jason Walton's mouth and nose, while the body, hanging more on a chair than sitting, was bloated like a giant larva fed on pestilence.
"You know the vampire myth, Elizabeth?" the death guard asked. "It was believed that the dead sucked the living. Because at the time of the Consumption, when there were too few graves, existing graves were opened to put the dead in them. And there you could see such corpses."
The beam once again focused on the bloated body of Jason Walton. "It was thought that the dead were well-fed while the living were starving. And at the same time --" The beam moved upward. "At the same time, the dead had their mucous membranes dissolving because the tissue was rotting away, liquefying and draining out of the openings, such as the mouth. And everyone thought: This corpse is a vampire. This corpse drank blood!"
The cone of light caught the head again, the swollen eyes, the distended lips, the features so deformed by the putrefaction that one could hardly tell the ethnicity.
"The vampires were decapitated then," said the death guard. "Well, that's been done proactively with good old Jason."
Elizabeth felt the despair crashing over her like a black surge. She was alone in the darkness, among the rotting corpses, with cut faces and severed heads. She would end up among them. With the dead, for whom she had always lived. And with whom she would now remain for good.
So she sat amid death and decay. It seemed to her like those terrible hours when she had to break the news of the death of a loved one to relatives. Either one could stay there or leave, but usually, one could not bring oneself to leave the mourners alone in their pain.
One became a phantom, became a dead person oneself. But here it was not only in the figurative sense so: Carl, the death guard, wanted to see them die here.
Dying among corpses.
Elizabeth thought of the horrible dream that had haunted her on Monday night. Had that nightmare been an announcement earlier in the week? She probably wouldn't be tortured to death, but she would die of miserable thirst. Or lose her mind. Or ram her head against the wall until her skull cracked. Or maybe she would manage to hang herself from the chain. Or to drill the ballpoint pen she still carried in her jacket through her eye into her brain. To die. To leave this room. The room of decay, rot, and death. To die to escape death.
The dead and death.
And God? Either he doesn't exist, or he's a ruthless sadist, one of the psychopaths Elizabeth had hunted, Legion, had once said.
Probably the latter, the detective thought.
And felt something moist and slimy touching her.
Only then did the detective hear her scream.
She screamed and screamed as tears streamed down her face.
She knew she could scream her head off here; no one would hear her or find her.
Carl stared at her like a bird of prey. Then he flipped the light switch.
At that moment, Elizabeth saw what she had touched.
Saw all the dead at once.
Joseph Hurts with his face cut up.
Jason Walton, his head on his lap.
A dead man she hadn't spotted before, mouth open, lips and cheeks burned black, head grotesquely contorted backward, as if there were something solid there that had once been liquid, and as if that something had filled his neck and turned it into a wooden statue of horror.
And she saw two or three other bodies, of which she could only guess who it was.
The judge?
The expert witness?
"Death becomes you, Elizabeth Rizzoli," she heard Carl's voice say. "In life as in death."
Then she heard the heavy door slam shut.
She was alone in a room of death, blackness, and silence.
xxx
"So, Nick, what's your idea?" asked Jane with a strained frown.
Nick had sat down at a computer in BRIC and was frantically hacking some coordinates into the keyboard. "There are two news," he said as he typed, frowning deeply himself. "One bad and one good."
"And?" It was apparent to the chief that she was more than worried about her older daughter. And that she would love to be out on the streets looking for Elizabeth.
"The bad news could be that Elizabeth isn't coming forward because she's in Carl's custody. And that's the good news simultaneously," Nick said, continuing to type. "Because if she's with Carl, we know where she is, and because we know where he is."
Jane kept gritting her teeth. "Why? Can we be sure of that?"
Nick nodded slowly and looked briefly at his mother-in-law. "Pretty much. We'll know Carl's whereabouts if he has the BPD laptop with him, and I'm assuming he does. Because he'll want to know if any information about our missing persons is coming in."
Katherine came into BRIC with hurried steps and took a deep breath. "That's right. After all, he has agreed to take over the coordination of incoming reports."
Jane looked briefly at her other daughter. "Quite altruistically, it seems. So, what about this damn laptop? Can we track that? You can't do that unless it's online, can you?"
Nick took a deep breath. "No, I can always track that. By GPS. Whether it's online via Wi-Fi. Whether he's logging on via cable, hotspot, or not. My GPS in his laptop is always online."
Katherine smiled weakly. "So you know where all the BPD people's laptops are?"
Nick finally looked at her and smiled as well. "Don't worry, Kate, not of our permanent employees. But as for the temporary positions, the interns and so on ... yes. There have been laptops getting away all the time lately. People don't like to give them back." He continued typing. "That's why I put a tracking device on every device, so I always know where it is. Even with Carl." He pointed to a map of Massachusetts. "Bingo. This is the last reception from Liz's cell phone before the battery died. The cell tower that received the signal. And here," he pointed to another spot, "that's Carl Martinek's laptop."
"Somewhere in the middle of nowhere," Jane muttered as she looked at the large monitor on the wall. "Wasn't a maximum security prison planned there once, before the residents revolted against the project?"
Nick looked at her and frowned even more with a nod. "That could fit, and I have the coordinates on my smartphone."
Jane already had her phone and was talking to the RRT leader. "Meet us down in five. Four to five men. Yes, there's work again!"
xxx
In the light of the lamp, which gradually dimmed, she saw the corpses sitting around her, leaning against the wall, as if she, Elizabeth Rizzoli, were in an interrogation room being questioned by the dead. Those dead bodies haunted her nightmares with bloody eyes and battered heads.
She looked at the corpses, saw the exposed teeth, the dull, swollen eyes, the black rotted skin, the arteries protruding from under the skin like worms as if they would break the surface at any moment. The long fingernails.
They did look like vampires. It didn't surprise Elizabeth that in times past, these dead had been thought to be unholy bloodsuckers back in the days of consumption.
The bloated corpses, like this one, dripping red fluid from their noses and mouths.
Elizabeth had thought of suicide before she went insane in this mass grave. But shouldn't she hold out? Hope that her mother or whoever found her? Would it help to scream? Or would that make the madness knock louder on her soul?
When you hear your voice alone in the dark, she thought, t hat voice scares you. Then it is the voice of another.
She wondered who had thought that in this dungeon? Before her. Who of those whose bodies now rotted here, forgotten by God and the world?
And wouldn't Carl expect just that? Wouldn't know that he had won, that he had cleared an obstacle aside when he heard her screams? Wouldn't that be a triumph if she couldn't begrudge him? But hadn't she already screamed? And hadn't he already won by doing so?
Suddenly the light of the lamp went out. Elizabeth was surrounded by impenetrable darkness. She felt like she was waking up without knowing whether she had opened her eyes.
But the images of the Guardian of the Dead were still burned into her retinas. The last thing she had seen was the corpse that the Guardian had called Tom earlier. Whatever his crime, Carl had poured molten metal into his mouth. Elizabeth still saw the image of Tom's hideously disfigured corpse in front of her, the grotesque head bent backward as if a metal tripod were fixing his skull. Nothing from the outside, though, but from the inside.
A perfect fit, thought the detective. And almost laughed at this thought.
The air was stuffy and stale. Added to this was the smell of the corpses. The cloying, ammoniacal stench that Elizabeth knew and hated. Mixed with the scent of blood and fear and excrement.
This, too, was a crime scene. Only this time, she wasn't there with her team of investigators, not with the RRT, not in one of the Tyvek suits, working with the CSRU to get the first picture.
This time, she was part of a giant grave.
Just like then, she had entered a secluded building alone in search of the Nameless One. Did she never get any wiser? Did she have to keep running her head into the wall and hoping someone would save her ass?
But what if, this time, there was no one to bail her out? What if she died of thirst here, amidst this awful stench, amidst all these dead people? It was as if she smelled the corpses and tasted them as if the stench of death was creeping into her nose, lungs, head, and soul.
Elizabeth's chest rose and fell in rhythm with her rapid breaths, and it was the only movement in this mausoleum of horror. Each of her breaths was accompanied by a soft, panicked whimper.
At that moment, the light flared up again.
It again illuminated the image of horror, the head of Jason Walton, teeth bared in a lipless grimace, eyes shriveled to brownish crumbs of protein.
Oh, God, thought the detective. Doesn't this ever end?
The light made colorful patterns dance before her eyes. Or were they demons waiting for her in hell?
Elizabeth screamed, tugging violently at the restraints with such force that a sharp pain raced through her ankles. But the shackles held. Her vocal cords felt as if they were made of boiling metal. Boiling metal ... A frightening thought flashed through her mind. Would Carl pour liquid metal down her throat, too?
Again the light went out, and she was alone again in the inky blackness. Was Carl, the self-proclaimed Guardian of the Dead, going to break her psychologically until she was nothing but a drooling bundle of fear and despair?
Then he was well on his way.
She paused.
Wait a minute.
Were there noises?
Elizabeth listened.
Yes, there were voices. Muffled commands. The thump of hard rubber soles on stone. The scratching of plastic windbreakers rubbing on bulletproof vests.
Elizabeth didn't dare hope it yet, but the sounds seemed like the soundtrack of her salvation.