Last to Die: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

wrinkled buttondown shirt with a ripped sleeve. For a few seconds it was just the two of them on that rooftop. She saw desperation in his eyes, watched it harden to grim determination.
    “Hands in the air!” Crowe shouted as he and Frost dropped onto the rooftop behind Zapata.
    There was nowhere for him to run. One cop in front of him, two behind him, all of them armed. Jane saw Zapata’s legs wobble, thought he was about to drop to his knees in surrender. His next move shocked her.
    He sprang to his left and ran toward the roof’s far edge. Toward the narrow alley that cut between buildings. Only an Olympic-class leap could take a man safely across that gulf.
    Yet leap he did, flinging himself from the roof’s edge toward the next building. For a moment he seemed to hang in midair, his body stretched out in a swan dive that almost carried him across the chasm.
    Jane scrambled to the edge. Saw Zapata clinging desperately to the rain gutter of the other building as his legs scissored above a four-story drop.
    “Jesus, is he nuts?” said Frost.
    “Arbato, get next door!” Crowe yelled down at the street, and the two detectives on the ground sprinted across the alley.
    Still dangling from the rain gutter, Zapata tried to pull himself up, feet fighting for purchase against the wall. He swung up one leg, missed. Swung again. Just as his shoe made it up over the edge, the gutter tore away from the roof.
    Jane closed her eyes, but she couldn’t shut out the squeal of collapsing metal, or the thud of Zapata’s body hitting the pavement.
    Somewhere, a woman was screaming.

NINETEEN
 
    M ARIA SALAZAR SAT HUNCHED AT THE INTERVIEW TABLE, HEAD drooping as she wiped tears from her eyes. As a young woman, Maria would have been strikingly beautiful. At forty-five she was still handsome, but through the one-way mirror Jane could see the gray roots peeking through on the crown of Maria’s head. Her arms, propped up on the table, were heavy but solid with muscles built up from years of housework. While she had scrubbed and polished and swept other people’s houses, what resentments had bubbled up inside her? As she’d dusted the Ackermans’ antique furniture, vacuumed the Persian carpets, had it ever occurred to her that just one of their paintings, one emerald necklace from Mrs. Ackerman’s jewelry box, could make all her financial woes disappear?
    “Never,” Marie moaned in the next room. “I never steal anything!”
    Crowe, playing bad cop to Moore’s good cop, leaned in close, his teeth bared with undisguised aggression. “You disarmed the security system for your boyfriend.”
    “No.”
    “Left the kitchen door unlocked.”
    “No.”
    “Gave yourself a rock-solid alibi, babysitting your sister’s kids, while Andres slipped into the Ackermans’ house. Was he just going to rob them that night, or was murder always the plan?”
    “Andres, he never hurt anyone!”
    “His fingerprints are on the kitchen door. They’re
inside
the kitchen.” Crowe bent even closer and Maria shrank away. Jane almost felt sorry for the woman because there were few sights uglier than Darren Crowe’s snarl, shoved into your face. “He was in the house, Maria. Just walked through that kitchen door.”
    “He brought my cell phone! I left it home that morning, so he comes to the house.”
    “And left his fingerprints inside the kitchen?”
    “I give him coffee. I clean the stove, and he sits for a minute.”
    “And Mrs. Ackerman’s okay with that? A strange man, sitting in her kitchen?”
    “She don’t mind. Mrs. Ackerman, she’s always nice to me.”
    “Come on. Weren’t the Ackermans like every other rich asshole? Paid you almost nothing, while you’re on your knees scrubbing their toilets.”
    “No, they treat me good.”
    “They had all the money in the world, and look at you, Maria. Struggling to pay your bills. It’s so unfair. You deserve more, don’t you think?”
    She shook her head. “You make this up. It’s not the truth.”
    “The
truth
is, Andres had a criminal record in Colombia. Drug smuggling. Burglary.”
    “He never hurt anyone.”
    “There’s always a first time. Gotta be tempting when we’re talking about people as rich as the Ackermans. All those nice things, there for the taking.” He pulled an evidence bag out of the box he’dbrought into the room. “We found these in your apartment, Maria. Nice pearl earrings. How did you afford these?”
    “Mrs. Ackerman, she gave them to me.