Body Double: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

time ago. I would’ve been just out of law school then. Working out of a rented office with rented furniture and no secretary. Answered my own phone. I took every case that came in—divorces, adoptions, drunk driving. Whatever paid the rent.”
    “And you still have all those files, of course. From your cases back then.”
    “They’d be in storage.”
    “Where?”
    “File-Safe, out in Quincy. But before we go any further, I have to tell you. The parties involved in this particular case requested absolute privacy. The birth mother did not want her name revealed. Those records were sealed years ago.”
    “This is a homicide case, Mr. Van Gates. One of the two adoptees is now dead.”
    “Yes, I know. But I fail to see what that has to do with her adoption forty years ago. How is it relevant to your investigation?”
    “Why did Anna Leoni call you?”
    He looked startled. Nothing he said after that could cover up that initial reaction, that expression of
uh-oh.
“Excuse me?” he said.
    “The day before she was murdered, Anna Leoni called your law office from her room at the Tremont Hotel. We just got her phone record. The conversation lasted thirty-seven minutes. Now, you two must have talked about
something
during those thirty-seven minutes. You couldn’t have kept the poor woman on hold all that time?”
    He said nothing.
    “Mr. Van Gates?”
    “That—that conversation was confidential.”
    “Ms. Leoni was your client? You billed her for that call?”
    “No, but—”
    “So you’re not bound by attorney-client privilege.”
    “But I am bound by another client’s confidentiality.”
    “The birth mother.”
    “Well, she
was
my client. She gave up her babies on one condition—that her name never be revealed.”
    “That was forty years ago. She may have changed her mind.”
    “I have no idea. I don’t know where she is. I don’t even know if she’s still alive.”
    “Is that why Anna called you? To ask about her mother?”
    He leaned back. “Adoptees are often curious about their origins. For some of them it becomes an obsession. So they go on document hunts. Invest thousands of dollars and a lot of heartache searching for mothers who don’t want to be found. And if they
do
find them, it’s seldom the fairy-tale ending they expected. That’s what she was looking for, Detective. A fairy-tale ending. Sometimes they’re better off just forgetting it, and moving on with their lives.”
    Rizzoli thought of her own childhood, her own family. She had always known who she was. She could look at her grandparents, her parents, and see her own bloodline engraved on their faces. She was one of them, right down to her DNA, and no matter how much her relatives might annoy her or embarrass her, she knew they were hers.
    But Maura Isles had never seen herself in the eyes of a grandparent. When Maura walked down a street, did she study the faces of passing strangers, searching for a hint of her own features? A familiar curve to the mouth or slope of the nose? Rizzoli could perfectly understand the hunger to know your own origins. To know that you’re not just a loose twig, but one branch of a deeply rooted tree.
    She looked Van Gates in the eye. “Who is Anna Leoni’s mother?”
    He shook his head. “I’ll say it again. This is not relevant to your—”
    “Let me decide that. Just give me the name.”
    “Why? So you can disrupt the life of a woman who may not want to be reminded of her youthful mistake? What does this have to do with the murder?”
    Rizzoli leaned closer, placing both her hands on his desk. Aggressively trespassing on his personal property. Sweet little Bambis might not do this, but girl cops from Revere weren’t afraid to.
    “We can subpoena your files. Or I can ask you politely.”
    They stared at each other for a moment. Then he released a sigh of capitulation. “Okay, I don’t need to go through this again. I’ll just tell you, okay? The mother’s name was Amalthea Lank. She was twenty-four years old. And she needed money—badly.”
    Rizzoli frowned. “Are you telling me she got paid for giving up her babies?”
    “Well . . .”
    “How much?”
    “It was substantial. Enough for her to get a fresh start in life.”
    “How much?”
    He blinked. “It was twenty thousand dollars, each.”
    “For each
baby
?”
    “Two happy families walked away with a child. She walked away with cash. Believe me, adoptive parents pay a lot more today. Do you know how hard it is to