Last to Die: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

he and his buddy Brian Temple thought they might’ve found it, even if no one at NASA will go on the record and say it.”
    “Because they’re suppressing it?” asked Frost. “Or because it’s not true?”
    Wyman leaned forward, his face flushed from the alcohol. “You don’t get blown up when you’re wrong. It’s when you’re
right
that things get dangerous. And I have a feeling …” He suddenly stopped, his gaze fixed on something behind Jane. She started to turn, and he whispered:
“Don’t.”
    “What is it?”
    “Guy with glasses, white shirt, blue jeans. Seated at six o’clock. I think I saw him at a highway rest stop two hours ago.”
    Jane let the napkin slide off her lap onto the floor. She bent to pick it up and caught a look at the man in question, just as a woman with a toddler in hand slid into the booth beside him.
    “Unless they’re hiring three-year-olds as spies,” said Jane, straightening, “I don’t think you need to worry about the guy with the glasses.”
    “Okay,” Parris admitted. “So I got that one wrong. But there’ve been other things.”
    “Like vans outside your house,” she said, voice neutral.
    He stiffened. “I know how it sounds. When this started, I couldn’t believe it, either. I kept fishing for a logical explanation, but stuff kept happening. Voice mails got lost. Things on my desk got moved, files went missing. That went on for months.”
    “And it’s still going on?”
    Parris paused as the waitress returned with a third martini. He stared at his drink, as if weighing the wisdom of dumping any more alcohol into his bloodstream. At last he picked it up. “No. The weird stuff stopped happening around the same time the case ran out of steam. Government agencies we were working with—NTSB, FBI—told me their investigation was at a standstill. I guess they had other priorities. It all went quiet. The strange vans went away, and my life went back to normal. Then, a few weeks ago, I heard from the New Hampshire police about the Temples’ farmhouse, blown up with Semtex.” He paused. “Now
you’re
here. And I’m just waiting for the vans to show up again.”
    “You have any idea who’s sending them?”
    “I don’t want to know.” He slumped back against the seat. “I’m sixty-four. Should’ve retired two years ago, but I need the income to help out my daughter. This is my job, but it’s not my
life
, you know?”
    “The trouble is,” said Jane, “there may be other lives at stake here. Neil and Olivia’s son, for one.”
    “That’d make no sense, to go after a fourteen-year-old boy.”
    “Makes no sense to go after two other kids, either.”
    Parris frowned. “What kids?”
    “During your investigation, did you ever come across the names Nicholas and Annabelle Clock?”
    “No.”
    “What about Erskine and Isabel Ward?”
    “No. Who are these people?”
    “Other victims. Other families who were murdered the same week Neil and Olivia died. In each of those families, a child survived. And now those three kids have been attacked again.”
    Parris stared at her. “Those other names never came up in my investigation. This is the first I’ve heard of them.”
    “The parallels are eerie, aren’t they?”
    “Is there a connection with NASA? Can you tie them together that way?”
    “Unfortunately, no.”
    “So what
do
you have linking these kids?”
    “That’s what we hoped you could tell us. What the connection is.”
    He sat back, eyeing them over his empty dinner plate, now pooled with blood. “You know as much as I do now, about the Yablonskis. So tell me about the Wards.”
    “They were shot to death in a London alley, appeared to be a mugging gone awry. He was an American diplomat, she was a homemaker. Their eleven-year-old daughter was shot as well, but managed to survive.”
    “Ward was a diplomat, Yablonski a NASA scientist. What’s the connection? I mean, astrobiology isn’t exactly a hot diplomatic issue.”
    Frost suddenly sat up straight. “If ET’s intelligent, we’d have to establish diplomatic relations, wouldn’t we?”
    Jane sighed. “No more
Star Trek
for you.”
    “No, think about it! Neil Yablonski and Brian Temple are about to fly to Rome, to meet with Vatican scientists. Erskine Ward was once assigned to Rome, so he had connections there, at the embassy. He probably spoke fluent Italian.”
    “What about the Clock family?” said Parris. “You haven’t told me about them. Do they have a