Ice Cold: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

contractors actually built the fancy incinerators they promised? It was cheaper to haul this away and bury it.” His gaze swept the clearing. “There was nothing here then, just an empty valley and a dirt road. I never thought there’d be families living here one day. They had no idea what was on their land. A single canister would’ve been enough to kill them all.” He looked down, once again, at the cylinder. “When I found them, all I could think of was how to make those bodies go away.”
    “So you buried them.”
    “Contractor sent their own men to do it. But the blizzard moved in.”
    That’s when we showed up. The unlucky tourists who stumbled into a ghost town
. The same blinding snowstorm had stranded Maura and her party in Kingdom Come, where they saw too much, learned too much.
We would have revealed everything
.
    Once again, Loftus lifted the rifle and aimed at the canister.
    She took a panicked step toward him. “You could ask for immunity,” she said.
    “There’s no immunity for killing innocent people.”
    “If you testify against the contractor—”
    “They’re the ones with the money. The lawyers.”
    “You can name names.”
    “I already have. There’s an envelope in my truck. It has numbers, dates, names. Every detail I can remember. I hope it’s enough to bring them down.” His hand tightened around the rifle stock, and Maura’s breath froze in her throat.
Where are you, Jane?
    The rustle of branches alerted Maura.
    Loftus heard it, too. In that instant, whatever uncertainty had plagued him suddenly vanished. He looked down at the canister.
    “This doesn’t solve anything, Loftus,” said Maura.
    “It solves everything,” he said.
    Jane emerged from the woods, weapon clutched in both hands, barrel pointed at Loftus. “Drop the rifle,” she said.
    He looked at her with an expression that was strangely impassive. The face of a man who’d given up caring what happened next. “It’s your move, Detective,” he said. “Be a hero.”
    Jane took a step toward him, her weapon rock-steady. “It doesn’t have to end this way.”
    “It’s only a bullet,” said Loftus. He turned toward the canister. Raised his rifle to fire.
    The explosion sent a spray of blood across the white ground. For a second Loftus seemed to hang suspended, like a diver about to plunge into the ocean. The rifle dropped from his hand. Slowly, he collapsed forward, to sprawl facedown on the snow.
    Jane lowered her weapon. “Jesus,” she murmured. “He forced my hand!”
    Maura dropped down beside Loftus and rolled him onto his back. Awareness had not yet left his gaze, and he stared up at her, as though memorizing her face. It was the last image he saw as the light left his eyes.
    “I didn’t have a choice,” said Jane.
    “No. You didn’t. And he knew it.” Slowly Maura rose to her feetand turned toward the vanished settlement of Kingdom Come. And she thought: They didn’t have a choice, either, not those forty-one people who died here. Nor had Douglas and Grace, Elaine and Arlo. Most of us march through life never knowing how or when we’ll die.
    But Montgomery Loftus had made his choice. He had chosen today, by a cop’s bullet, in this poisoned place.
    Slowly she breathed out, and the white cloud from her breath curled into the twilight like one more untethered soul drifting into the valley of ghosts.

D ANIEL WAS STANDING ON THE TARMAC, WAITING TO GREET THEM when Sansone’s private jet taxied to the executive air terminal. The same high winds that had delayed their flight to Massachusetts were now lashing Daniel’s black coat and whipping his hair, yet he stoically endured the gale’s full force as the jet came to a stop and the stairway was lowered.
    Maura was first off the plane.
    She walked down the steps, straight into his waiting arms. Only weeks ago, they would have greeted each other with only a discreet peck on the cheek, a chaste hug. They would have waited until they were behind doors, the curtains drawn, before embracing. But today was her homecoming, her return from the dead, and he pulled her against him without hesitation.
    Yet even as Daniel held her, joyfully murmuring her name, pressing kisses to her face, her hair, she was aware of her friends’eyes watching them. Aware, too, of her own discomfort that what she had tried so long to conceal was now in the open.
    It was not the biting wind, but her awareness of being watched that made her pull away from Daniel far