Body Double: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

know. There’s still a chance he’s not related to them at all.”
    But they weren’t wrong, and Maura knew it.
    I knew it when I saw his face.
    When Rizzoli and Frost walked into J.P. Doyle’s that evening, the cops standing around the bar greeted them with a loud and boisterous round of applause that made Rizzoli flush. Hell, even the guys who didn’t particularly like her were applauding in comradely acknowledgment of her success, which at that moment was being trumpeted on the five o’clock news playing on the TV above the bar. The crowd began to stomp in unison as Rizzoli and Frost approached the counter, where the grinning bartender had already set out two drinks for them. For Frost, a shot of whiskey, and for Rizzoli . . .
    A large glass of milk.
    As everyone burst out laughing, Frost leaned over and whispered in her ear: “You know, my stomach’s kind of upset. Wanna trade drinks?”
    The funny thing was, Frost really
did
like milk. She slid her glass his way, and asked the bartender for a Coke.
    As their fellow cops came around to shake their hands and slap high fives, she and Frost ate peanuts and sipped their virtuous drinks. She missed having her usual Adams ale. Missed a lot of things tonight—her husband, her beer. Her waistline. Still, this was a good day. It’s always a good day, she thought, when a perp goes down.
    “Hey, Rizzoli! The bets are up to two hundred bucks you’re having a girl, a hundred twenty on a boy.”
    She glanced sideways and saw Detectives Vann and Dunleavy standing beside her at the bar. The fat Hobbit and the skinny one, holding up their twin pints of Guinness.
    “So what if I have both?” she asked. “Twins?”
    “Huh,” said Dunleavy. “We didn’t consider that.”
    “So who wins then?”
    “I guess no one.”
    “Or everyone?” said Vann.
    The two men stood pondering that question for a while. Sam and Frodo, stuck on the Mount Doom of dilemmas.
    “Well,” said Vann, “I guess we should add another category.”
    Rizzoli laughed. “Yeah, you guys do that.”
    “Great work, by the way,” said Dunleavy. “Just watch, next thing, you’re gonna be in
People
magazine. A perp like that, all those women. What a story.”
    “You want the honest truth?” Rizzoli sighed and set down her Coke. “We can’t take the credit.”
    “No?”
    Frost looked over at Vann and Dunleavy. “Wasn’t us brought him down. It was the vic.”
    “Just a housewife,” said Rizzoli. “A scared, pregnant, ordinary housewife. Didn’t need a gun or a billy club, just a goddamn sock filled with batteries.”
    Up on the TV, the local news was over, and the bartender flipped the channel to HBO. A movie with women in short skirts. Women who had waistlines.
    “So what about that Black Talon?” asked Dunleavy. “How did that tie in?”
    Rizzoli was quiet for a moment as she sipped her Coke. “We don’t know yet.”
    “You find the weapon?”
    She caught Frost looking at her, and felt a ripple of uneasiness. That was the detail that troubled them both. They had found no gun in the van. There had been knotted cords and blood-caked knives. There’d been a neatly kept notebook with the names and phone numbers of nine other baby brokers around the country; Terence Van Gates had not been the only one. And there’d been records of cash payments made to the Lanks through the years, a mother lode of information that would keep investigators busy for years. But the weapon that had killed Anna Leoni was not in the van.
    “Oh, well,” said Dunleavy. “Maybe it’ll turn up. Or he got rid of it.”
    Maybe. Or maybe we’re still missing something.
    It was dark when she and Frost left Doyle’s. Instead of going home, she drove back to Schroeder Plaza, the conversation with Vann and Dunleavy still weighing on her mind, and sat down at her desk, which was covered by a mountain of files. On top were the records from NCIC, several decades’ worth of missing persons reports compiled during their hunt for the Beast. But it was Anna Leoni’s murder that had set the whole search in motion, like a pebble dropped into water, launching ever wider ripples. Anna’s murder was what had led them to Amalthea, and eventually to the Beast. Yet Anna’s death remained a question still unresolved.
    Rizzoli cleared away the NCIC files, working her way down to the folder on Anna Leoni. Though she had read and reread everything in this file, she leafed through it again, rereading the witness