For once, Michael Bell was not on the phone when Elizabeth, Katherine, and Jane entered his office before Linda Davila closed the door behind them.
Bell sat as motionless and stiff at his desk as a sphinx or one of the corpses the Body Broker had sat upright in his basement. Only his eyes were alive as he eyed the three arrivals intently as if waiting for one of them to do something strange in a moment that he could then comment on.
Elizabeth, Katherine, and Jane sat at the round meeting table while Bell remained seated at his desk. Then, abruptly, he leaned forward from his stupor like a gecko snapping at a fly. "I'm listening," he said.
"Cedric Miller confessed," Jane reported. "He's been selling body parts to Medic Research. To do that, he drugged homeless people with alcohol and then murdered them. At least twenty-five years are waiting for the man."
"Good," Bell said slowly. "After the murder of that stone thrower, did it --"
"Cody Wilkins," Elizabeth said carefully.
"Has there been another murder after the murder of Cody Wilkins, where a victim had his heart cut out?"
Elizabeth gritted her teeth and took a deep breath.
"We can't know if --," Katherine began, but Bell curtly cut her off.
"After the murder of Cody Wilkins, has there been another such murder?"
This time it was Jane who gritted her teeth and inhaled. "No."
"So could it be," Bell leaned back in his chair, "that the capture of Cedric Miller and the lack of other murders where the heart was removed are somehow related?"
Katherine gave him a long look and licked her lips. "If you confuse correlation with causation, yes."
Jane's eyebrows shot up involuntarily, and Elizabeth slowly looked at her sister with wide eyes.
Bell had caught the subliminal insult. "And you believe, dear Dr. Isles, that I would make such a mistake."
"No, I don't believe that, Chief Bell," Katherine replied with hard eyes. "I only believe that the arrest of Cedric Miller does not give us any assurance that such murders will be absent in the future."
"Because in your opinion, the Angel of Death, or whatever you call him, is not Cedric Miller. Even if he's a serial killer."
"A serial killer, yes," Elizabeth said. "But not someone who cuts out his victims' hearts."
"Let's save the quibbles," snapped Bell. "So you don't think the Angel of Death is Cedric Miller?"
Katherine licked her lips again and nodded. "That's what we're assuming."
"Then what are you assuming? That it's him, or that it's not him?"
"That it's not him."
Bell stared broodingly ahead for a few seconds. "And that's what makes you travel colleagues from Quantico and New York and have BPD pay for them to stay in a hotel without clearing it with me?" He glowered at the doctor.
Elizabeth felt it was time to step in. "Agent Williams and Sergeant Brooks came here on their own accord."
"Oh?" growled Bell. "And how did they find out about what happened here? Did they follow the flight of swallows? Analyzed tea leaves? Questioned the stars?" He shook his head. "Don't be ridiculous! One of you called them and probably even sent them some uncoordinated material."
"That's why we felt it was so important to include you in the process, too," Elizabeth replied with furrowed brows. "In a case like this --"
"In a case like this, formalistic Bell gets to play along for a change; you mean to say?" the Chief of Police added sarcastically. "So he'll be quiet and cause you less trouble?"
Something like that,Elizabeth though, pressing her lips together to keep from putting that thought into words.
"Chief Bell," Jane now spoke up. "As you know, Dr. Isles was working on a similar case back in Quantico, so there's a distinct possibility that we're solving this ongoing with the help of the FBI and NYPD. Yes, that even the killer who wreaked havoc in Los Angeles and New York so many years ago --"
"Is the same killer who's now wreaking havoc here in Boston? Besides, Kenneth Baldwin was convicted and sentenced for those murders. And God forbid, if he is innocent, what has the actual killer been doing for the past few years that he hasn't murdered anyone? Was he learning a foreign language, taking a college course, or raising a child?" Bell leaned back with a sullen face and crossed one leg over the other.
"That's what we need to find out," Katherine said, raising her eyebrows briefly, "then we might be able to catch him --"
That was as far as she got, before Bell interrupted her. "What do you want, anyway?" he groaned. "You found that arm with the cuts at Medic Research by accident. A gift from the gods. Then you work this Wolfsen so skillfully that he betrays his contact so quickly that you can conveniently arrest him. And all that within two days. Great work. I mean that." Bell meant it. "And instead of being happy about it, you're chasing a phantom that probably doesn't exist and that you're letting some FBI agents talk you into."
Jane sensed that Katherine was about to say something that would very likely cost her her job and make the young woman regret it later, so she placed a hand reassuringly on Katherine's arm.
Elizabeth also sensed that the situation was becoming extremely tense, so she said, "I wish it would be that way."
"And you know what I wish for, Detective Rizzoli?" Bell leaned forward even further. "That you document the confession of Cedric Miller and make inquiries in his circle that will provide information about who else might be among his victims. And as for your friends from New York and Quantico, you can tell them that their Boston vaccation is over." He stared at one after another. "Do I make myself clear?"
"I don't know if --" began Elizabeth, but Bell also cut her off.
"Do I make myself clear?" he asked again with emphasis.
Jane pressed her lips together and nodded hesitantly. "Yes, very clear, Chief Bell."
"Good." Bell got up from his chair and buttoned his jacket.
No one said anything, but Bell took it as a yes.
Elizabeth, Katherine, and Jane left the office.
This can't be it, the detective thought. Just before the door closed behind her, she pushed her way into the office again, nearly running Linda Davila over.
"What else is it?" asked Bell gruffly.
"Did you read the report?" she asked, her eyes wide and frowned deeply. "The cuts that are completely different? The DNA that's from a different strain. The --"
"Different cuts?" Bell interrupted her another time. "Yes, because each perpetrator is a different professional. Different DNA? Yes, because there are eight billion people worldwide and not just one!" He scowled at the detective. "Do you have anything else for me? Something useful for a change, maybe?"
Elizabeth was silent, and her mind was blank. Now, of all time, at this critical moment, she didn't know what to say.
"Then may I ask you to do your job now and let me do mine." Bell opened a file that lay before him.
"But we have --" The detective tried one last time.
Again, Bell cut her off. "Detective Rizzoli, what did I tell you to do? What are you supposed to do?"
Elizabeth sighed and slumped her shoulders. "Document Cedric Miller's confession and make inquiries in his circle that will provide information about who else might be among his victims," she repeated prayerfully what Bell had just told her in the briefing.
"There you go," he said, showing his teeth briefly as if he were smiling. "Then do that. Do just that!"
The reverberation and subsequent silence in the hallway stung Elizabeth's ears.
With weary steps, she descended the stairs. She needed to move a little, there was no way she would ride that musty elevator.
Bell had shown her up rhetorically. Her investigation, all the work, the coordination with Brooks and Williams - he had made it all look like silly schoolboy pranks. What was she supposed to tell the sergeant and the agent? That they weren't needed anymore? That they could get right back on the next plane to New York? Because the perp was caught, even if no one believed it?
Bell was much more a manager than an investigator. He was brilliant when mobilizing funds for the BPD in a city like Boston, where money was lacking on every corner and where people hated the police, as in a few places in the world. Funds that benefited them all. But who could also become very unpleasant if things didn't go his way. If he had the impression that things were being wantonly complicated. However, Elizabeth had precisely the opposite in mind. Things only got complicated when everyone believed Cedric Miller was the Angel of Death and then when another murder occurred anyway.
But what proof did she, Elizabeth, have that it wasn't? That it wasn't over yet? Evidence that they needed to investigate further? That having Brooks and Williams here in Boston wasn't redundant? That the top priority wasn't to get around the Body Broker but to prevent murders that might occur in the near future? Because the Body Broker and Kenneth Baldwin were in jail, and the real killer wasn't yet?
Elizabeth's cell phone rang, and she winced. "Rizzoli."
"Liz, it's me," said her wife's voice on the other end of the line. "We matched the DNA profiles."
Elizabeth was confused for a moment, her head buzzing from all the unresolved questions. "I'm sorry, what DNA profiles?"
"The one from Quantico, which one else? Williams and Brooks brought it with the sample, remember? A printout of the DNA profile was also done at that time."
"But you said the results wouldn't be available until tomorrow morning," Elizabeth said, still confused.
"We finished faster than we thought. We checked the printout first thing. We matched the profile to our DNA profiles from the Boston crime scenes, Stephen Foreman's apartment, and the South End crime scene."
The detective sensed she was shaking all at once. "So?"
Once again, Maggie made it unnecessarily tense. "Well, we're still building our profile from the Quantico sample, of course, but matching it to the paper printout was pretty quick, and so --"
Elizabeth closed her eyes and rubbed her throbbing temple with her free hand. "Maggie, please get to the point," she urged.
"The match is identical," the ME said. "It's him."
The detective stared into space for a moment.
It's him.
The windows, the stairs, and the linoleum floor blended into a strange blue and red collage in the last light of day. Elizabeth closed her eyes briefly and opened them again. The blue-red distortion was gone. "And you're sure that the DNA from the Body Broker and the DNA from the killer --"
"Not the same?" added Maggie. "Out of the question, the killer and the Body Broker are two completely different people."
"The Body Broker we caught," Elizabeth said with a frown. "So that means then, the killer --"
Again, Maggie finished the sentence, "The murderer is still on the loose around here somewhere."
xxx
He cut the marks into the skin.
This time it was no longer the skin of a living person. This time it was the skin of a dead man. The skin of a dead man on the body of a dead man.
He would memorize the cut and write it down in his notebook at home.
The man was dead. But just as God was dead and they still drew his shadow in thousands of caves, so would this man live on for a time.
He ran the knife over the skin with gentle pressure. Saw the main arteries gaping apart. Saw the gray-red flesh behind it. He could push the blood out, but it no longer spurted.
He decorated the body. Because this man deserved it.
Go out into the world, kill, and come back, he thought. That was what broke the monotony of reality. These things showed him that he was strong and that he was alive. And that he would survive.
He would be the last to exist when everyone else was dead.
He would rise above all the dead like the tattooed eagle on his back, rising from a sea of skulls.
It was almost like before.
Lightning flashed. Human figures staggered. Faces that stared at him like a pale mass from the darkness. Shadows that tilted back with a shrill cry before blowing away into nothingness. Mud and clay that pelted to the ground above him as thousands died to his right and left.
He, however, stood tall.
And lived.
He applied the knife once more. Let it once again run with a sharp, bloody blade through the skin of the dead.
Then he took a step back.
Looked at his work.
And fixed the eyes of the man.
Dead eyes gazed fixedly at the ceiling as if waiting for his command.
"You are taken in," he murmured.