Ice Cold: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

zone.”
    The growl of a truck engine made them both jump to their feet. Our car is parked out in the open, thought Maura. Whoever has just arrived already knows we’re here.
    “Are you carrying?” Maura asked. “Please tell me you’re armed.”
    “I left it locked in the trunk.”
    “You have to get it.”
    “What the hell is going on?”
    “This
is what it’s all about!” Maura pointed to the half buried canister of VX gas. “Not pesticides. Not mass suicide. It was an
accident
. These are chemical weapons, Jane. They should have been destroyed decades ago. They’ve probably been buried here for years.”
    “Then The Gathering—Jeremiah—”
    “He had nothing to do with why these people died.”
    Jane looked around the clearing with growing comprehension. “The Dahlia Group—the fake company that paid off Martineau—it has something to do with them, doesn’t it?”
    They heard the snap of a breaking branch.
    “Hide!”
whispered Maura.
    They both ducked into the woods just as Montgomery Loftus stepped into the clearing. He was carrying a rifle, but it was pointed at the ground, and he moved with the casual pace of a hunter who has not yet spotted his quarry. Their footprints were all over that clearing, and he could not miss the evidence of their presence. All he had to do was follow their tracks to where they both crouched among the pines. Yet he ignored the obvious and calmly approachedthe hole that Maura had just dug. He looked down at the exposed cylinder. At the shovel that Maura had left lying there.
    “If you bury anything for thirty years, it’ll eventually corrode,” he said. “Metal gets brittle. Accidentally run over it with a bulldozer or crush it against a rock, and it’ll fracture apart.” He raised his voice, as though the trees themselves were his audience. “What do you think would happen if I fired a bullet at this right now?”
    Only then did Maura realize that his rifle was pointing toward the canister. She remained frozen, afraid to make a sound. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed Jane slowly creep deeper into the woods, but Maura could not seem to move.
    “VX gas doesn’t take long to kill you,” said Loftus. “That’s what the contractor told me thirty years ago, when they paid me to dump it. Might take a little longer to disperse on a cold day like this. But on a warm day, it spreads fast. Blows on the wind, seeps through open windows. Into houses.” He lifted his rifle and aimed at the canister.
    Maura felt her heart lurch. One blast from that weapon would disperse a cloud of toxic gas that they could never hope to outrun. Just as the residents of Kingdom Come could not outrun it on that unseasonably warm November day, when they’d opened their windows and their lungs. Death had wafted in and swiftly claimed its victims: children at play, families gathered for meals. A woman on the stairs, whose dying tumble left her bleeding at the bottom.
    “Don’t!” Maura said. “Please.” She stepped out from behind the tree. She could not see where Jane was; she knew only that Loftus was already aware of her presence, and she could not hope to outrun his bullet, either. But the rifle wasn’t aimed at her; it remained pointed at the canister. “This is suicide,” she said.
    He gave her an ironic smile. “That is the general idea, ma’am. Since I can’t see any way this is going to turn out right for me. Not now. Better this than prison.” He looked off toward the destroyed village of Kingdom Come. “When they get back the final analysis onthose bodies, they’ll know what killed them. They’ll be all over this valley, searching for what should’ve stayed buried. It won’t take them long to come knocking on my door.” He released a heavy sigh. “Thirty years ago, I never imagined …” The rifle drooped closer to the canister.
    “You can make things right, Mr. Loftus,” Maura said, struggling to keep her voice calm. Reasonable. “You can tell the authorities the truth.”
    “The truth?” He gave a grunt of self-disgust. “The truth is, I needed the goddamn money. The ranch needed it. And the contractor needed a cheap way to get rid of this.”
    “By turning the valley into a toxic dump?”
    “We’re the ones who paid to make these weapons. You and I and every other tax-paying American. But what do you do with chemical weapons when you can’t use them anymore?”
    “They should have been incinerated.”
    “You think government