Rizzoli & Isles 8-Book Set

the time on the screen. “There were two medical students who walked out right before him.”
    “Yes, I spoke to them. They had to get to a lecture at eleven. That’s why they left the code early. They didn’t notice our man follow them into the stairwell.”
    “So we have no witnesses at all.”
    “Just this camera.”
    She was still focused on the time. Eight minutes into the code. Eight minutes was a long time. She tried to choreograph it in her head. Walk up to the cop: ten seconds. Talk him into following you a few feet up the hallway, into the supply room: thirty seconds. Cut his throat: ten seconds. Walk out, shut the door, enter Nina Peyton’s room: fifteen seconds. Dispatch the second victim, walk out: thirty seconds. That added up to two minutes, tops. That still left six minutes. What did he use that extra time for? To clean up? There was a lot of blood; he may well have been splattered with it.
    He’d had plenty of time to work with. The nurse’s aide did not discover Nina’s body until ten minutes after the man on that video screen walked out the stairwell door. By then, he could have been a mile away, in his car.
    Such perfect timing. This unsub moves with the accuracy of a Swiss watch.
    Abruptly she sat up straight, the realization zinging through her like a bolt of electricity. “He knew. Jesus, Moore, he
knew
there’d be a Code Blue.” She looked at him and saw, by his calm reaction, that he had already reached that conclusion. “Did Mr. Gwadowski have any visitors?”
    “The son. But the nurse was in the room the whole time. And she was there when the patient coded.”
    “What happened just prior to the code?”
    “She changed the IV bag. We’ve sent the bag for analysis.”
    Rizzoli looked back at the video screen, where the image of the man in a white coat remained frozen in mid-stride. “This makes no sense. Why would he take such a risk?”
    “This was a mop-up job, to get rid of a loose end—the witness.”
    “But what did Nina Peyton actually witness? She saw a masked face. He knew she couldn’t identify him. He knew she posed almost no danger. Yet he went to a lot of trouble to kill her. He exposed himself to capture. What does he gain by it?”
    “Satisfaction. He finally finished his kill.”
    “But he could have finished it at her house. Moore, he
let
Nina Peyton live that night. Which means he planned to end it this way.”
    “In the hospital?”
    “Yes.”
    “To what purpose?”
    “I don’t know. But I find it interesting that of all the patients on that ward, it was Herman Gwadowski he chose as his diversion. A patient of Catherine Cordell’s.”
    Moore’s beeper went off. As he took the call Rizzoli turned her attention back to the monitor. She pressed Play and watched the man in the white coat approach the door. He tilted his hip to hit the door’s opening bar and stepped into the stairwell. Not once did he allow any part of his face to be visible on camera. She hit Rewind, viewed the sequence again. This time, as his hip rotated slightly, she saw it: the bulge under his white coat. It was on his right side, at the level of his waist. What was he concealing there? A change of clothes? His murder kit?
    She heard Moore say into the phone: “Don’t touch it! Leave it right where it is. I’m on my way.”
    As he disconnected, Rizzoli asked: “Who’s that?”
    “It’s Catherine,” said Moore. “Our boy’s just sent her another message.”
     
    “It came up in interdepartmental mail,” said Catherine. “As soon as I saw the envelope, I knew it was from him.”
    Rizzoli watched as Moore pulled on a pair of gloves—a useless precaution, she thought, since the Surgeon had never left his prints on any evidence. It was a large brown envelope with a string-and-button closure. On the top blank line was printed in blue ink: “To Catherine Cordell. Birthday greetings from A.C.”
    Andrew Capra
, thought Rizzoli.
    “You didn’t open it?” asked Moore.
    “No. I put it right down, on my desk. And I called you.”
    “Good girl.”
    Rizzoli thought his response was condescending, but Catherine clearly didn’t take it that way, and she flashed him a tense smile. Something passed between Moore and Catherine. A look, a warm current, that Rizzoli registered with a twinge of painful jealousy.
It’s gone further than I realized between these two.
    “It feels empty,” he said. With gloved hands, he unwound the string clasp. Rizzoli slid a sheet of plain