Rizzoli & Isles 8-Book Set

“What do you think would happen if I fired a bullet at this right now?”
    Only then did Maura realize that his rifle was pointing toward the canister. She remained frozen, afraid to make a sound. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed Jane slowly creep deeper into the woods, but Maura could not seem to move.
    “VX gas doesn’t take long to kill you,” said Loftus. “That’s what the contractor told me thirty years ago, when they paid me to dump it. Might take a little longer to disperse on a cold day like this. But on a warm day, it spreads fast. Blows on the wind, seeps through open windows. Into houses.” He lifted his rifle and aimed at the canister.
    Maura felt her heart lurch. One blast from that weapon would disperse a cloud of toxic gas that they could never hope to outrun. Just as the residents of Kingdom Come could not outrun it on that unseasonably warm November day, when they’d opened their windows and their lungs. Death had wafted in and swiftly claimed its victims: children at play, families gathered for meals. A woman on the stairs, whose dying tumble left her bleeding at the bottom.
    “Don’t!” Maura said. “Please.” She stepped out from behind the tree. She could not see where Jane was; she knew only that Loftus was already aware of her presence, and she could not hope to outrun his bullet, either. But the rifle wasn’t aimed at her; it remained pointed at the canister. “This is suicide,” she said.
    He gave her an ironic smile. “That is the general idea, ma’am. Since I can’t see any way this is going to turn out right for me. Not now. Better this than prison.” He looked off toward the destroyed village of Kingdom Come. “When they get back the final analysis onthose bodies, they’ll know what killed them. They’ll be all over this valley, searching for what should’ve stayed buried. It won’t take them long to come knocking on my door.” He released a heavy sigh. “Thirty years ago, I never imagined …” The rifle drooped closer to the canister.
    “You can make things right, Mr. Loftus,” Maura said, struggling to keep her voice calm. Reasonable. “You can tell the authorities the truth.”
    “The truth?” He gave a grunt of self-disgust. “The truth is, I needed the goddamn money. The ranch needed it. And the contractor needed a cheap way to get rid of this.”
    “By turning the valley into a toxic dump?”
    “We’re the ones who paid to make these weapons. You and I and every other tax-paying American. But what do you do with chemical weapons when you can’t use them anymore?”
    “They should have been incinerated.”
    “You think government 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