Rizzoli & Isles 8-Book Set

reservation on that flight. She asked me to pick her up at the airport. When Maura says she’ll do something, she does it.And if she can’t follow through, she’ll call. No matter how upset she might be with me, she wouldn’t stoop to something like this. You know that about her, Jane. We both do.”
    “But if she were distraught enough?” said Gabriel. “People do drastic things.”
    Jane frowned at him. “You’re talking what? Suicide?”
    Gabriel kept his gaze on Brophy. “Exactly what’s happened between you two recently?”
    Brophy’s head drooped. “I think we’ve both come to realize that … something has to change.”
    “Did you tell her you were going to end it?”
    “No.” Brophy looked up. “She knows I love her.”
    But that’s not enough, thought Jane. Not enough to build a life.
    “She wouldn’t hurt herself.” Brophy straightened in the chair, his face hardening in a look of certainty. “She wouldn’t play games. Something is wrong, and I can’t believe you’re not taking this seriously.”
    “We are,” said Gabriel calmly. “That’s why we’re asking these questions, Daniel. Because these are the same questions the police will ask in Wyoming. About her state of mind. About whether she might have chosen to disappear. I just want to be sure
you
know the answers.”
    “Which hotel was she staying at?” asked Jane.
    “It’s in Teton Village. The Mountain Lodge. I’ve already called them, and they said she checked out Saturday morning. A day early.”
    “Do they know where she went?”
    “No.”
    “Could she have flown home earlier? Maybe she’s already back in Boston.”
    “I called her home phone. I even drove by her house. She’s not there.”
    “Do you know anything else about her travel arrangements?” Gabriel asked.
    “I have her flight numbers. I know she rented a car in Jackson. She was planning to drive around the area after the conference was over.”
    “Which rental agency?”
    “Hertz.”
    “Do you know if she’s spoken to anyone besides you? Her colleagues at the ME’s office, maybe? Her secretary?”
    “I called Louise on Saturday, and she hadn’t heard anything, either. I didn’t follow up on it because I assumed …” He looked at Jane. “I thought you would check on her.”
    There was no note of accusation in his voice, but there might as well have been. Jane felt a guilty flush in her cheeks. He
had
called her, and she’d dropped the ball because her mind had been on other things. Bodies in freezers. Uncooperative toddlers. She had not really believed that anything was wrong, had thought it was merely a lovers’ spat followed by silent treatment. This sort of thing happened all the time, didn’t it? Plus, there was the fact that Maura had checked out of her hotel a day early. That didn’t sound like an abduction, but a deliberate change in plans. None of it absolved Jane of the fact that she’d done nothing beyond placing that call to Maura’s cell phone. Now almost two days had passed, the golden forty-eight, that window of opportunity when you’re most likely to find a missing person and identify a perp.
    Gabriel stood. “I think it’s time to make some calls,” he said, and went into the kitchen. She and Brophy sat silent, listening to him speak in the other room. Using his FBI voice, as Jane liked to call it, the quiet and authoritative tone he adopted for official business. Hearing it now, she found it hard to believe that that voice belonged to the same man who’d been so easily defeated by a stubborn toddler. I should be the one making the calls, she thought. I’m the cop who failed to follow up. But she knew that just hearing those letters
FBI
would make whoever was on the other end of the line snap to attention. When your husband’s a fibbie, you might as well take advantage of it.
    “… female, age forty-two, I think. Black hair. Five foot six, around a hundred twenty pounds …”
    “Why would she check out of the hotel a day early?” Brophy said softly. He was sitting rigid in the armchair, staring straight ahead. “That’s what I haven’t figured out yet, why she did that. Where was she going, another town, another hotel? Why suddenly change her plans?”
    Maybe she met someone. A man
. Jane didn’t want to say it, but that was the first thought that occurred to her, the first thought that would occur to any cop. A lonely woman on a business trip. A woman whose lover has just disappointed her. Along