Body Double: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

think he honestly meant to kill her.”
    “According to this report, the girl came out of it unharmed.”
    “Unharmed? Not exactly.”
    O’Donnell looked up. “But she did survive it.”
    “Alice Rose spent the next five years of her life being treated for severe depression and anxiety attacks. When she was nineteen, she climbed into a bathtub and slit her wrists. As far as I’m concerned, Elijah Lank is responsible for her death. She was his first victim.”
    “Can you prove there are others?”
    “Forty-five years ago, a married couple named Karen and Robert Sadler vanished from Kennebunkport. Karen Sadler was eight months pregnant at the time. Their remains were found just last week, in that same plot of land where Elijah buried Alice Rose alive. I think the Sadlers were Elijah’s kills. His and Amalthea’s.”
    O’Donnell had gone very still, as though she was holding her breath.
    “You’re the one who first suggested it, Dr. O’Donnell,” said Lieutenant Marquette. “You said Amalthea had a partner, someone she’d called the Beast. Someone who helped her kill Nikki and Theresa Wells. That’s what you told Dr. Isles, isn’t it?”
    “No one else believed my theory.”
    “Well, now we do,” said Rizzoli. “We think the Beast is her cousin, Elijah.”
    O’Donnell’s eyebrow lifted in amusement. “A case of
killing cousins
?”
    “It wouldn’t be the first time that cousins have killed together,” pointed out Marquette.
    “True,” O’Donnell said. “Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono—the Hillside Stranglers—they were cousins.”
    “So there’s a precedent,” said Marquette. “Cousins as killing partners.”
    “You didn’t need me to tell you that.”
    “You knew about the Beast before anyone else did,” said Rizzoli. “You’ve been trying to find him, to contact him through Amalthea.”
    “But I haven’t succeeded. So I don’t see how I can help you find him. I don’t even know why you asked me here, Detective, since you have so little regard for my research.”
    “I know Amalthea talks to you. She wouldn’t say a word to me when I saw her yesterday. But the guards told me she does talk to
you.
”
    “Our sessions are confidential. She’s my patient.”
    “Her cousin isn’t. He’s the one we want to find.”
    “Well, where was his last known location? You must have some information you can start with.”
    “We have almost none. Nothing on his whereabouts in decades.”
    “Do you even know that he’s alive?”
    Rizzoli sighed. Admitted: “No.”
    “He’d be nearly seventy years old now, wouldn’t he? That’s getting a little geriatric for a serial killer.”
    “Amalthea is sixty-five,” said Rizzoli. “Yet no one ever doubted that she killed Theresa and Nikki Wells. That she crushed their skulls, soaked their bodies in gasoline, and lit them on fire.”
    O’Donnell leaned back in her chair and regarded Rizzoli for a moment. “Tell me why Boston PD is even pursuing Elijah Lank. These are old murders—not even your jurisdiction. What’s your interest in this?”
    “Anna Leoni’s murder may be tied in.”
    “How?”
    “Just before she was murdered, Anna was asking a lot of questions about Amalthea. Maybe she learned too much.” Rizzoli slid another file to O’Donnell.
    “What’s this?”
    “You’re familiar with the FBI’s National Crime Information Center? It maintains a searchable database of missing persons from across the country.”
    “Yes, I’m aware of NCIC.”
    “We submitted a search request using the key words
female
and
pregnant.
That’s what we got back from the FBI. Every case they have in their database, back to the 1960s. Every pregnant woman who’s vanished in the continental U.S.”
    “Why did you specify pregnant women?”
    “Because Nikki Wells was nine months pregnant. Karen Sadler was eight months pregnant. Don’t you find that awfully coincidental?”
    O’Donnell opened the folder and confronted pages of computer printouts. She looked up in surprise. “There are dozens of names in here.”
    “Consider the fact that thousands of people go missing every year in this country. If a pregnant woman vanishes every so often, it’s only a blip against that bigger background; it won’t raise any red flags. But when one woman a month vanishes, over a forty-year span, then the total numbers start to add up.”
    “Can you link any of these missing persons cases to Amalthea Lank or her cousin?”
    “That’s why we