The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

to identify it. She had to bring it to some botanist at Harvard, and he just confirmed it.”
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “What are you talking about?”
    “Those bits of plant matter we picked out of Bog Lady’s hair. There were leaves and some kind of seedpod. Dr. Welsh said it’s from a plant called…” There was a pause, and Jane heard shuffling pages as he searched his notes. “
Carex oronensis.
That’s the scientific name. It’s also known as Orono sedge.”
    “This plant grows in bogs?”
    “And in fields. It also likes highly disturbed sites like clearings and roadsides. The specimen looked fresh, so she thinks it got picked up in the corpse’s hair when the body was moved. Orono sedge doesn’t produce seedpods until July.”
    Jane was now paying full attention to what he was saying. “You said this plant is rare. How rare?”
    “There’s only one area in the world where it grows. The Penobscot River Valley.”
    “Where’s that?”
    “Maine. Up around the Bangor area.”
    She stared out the window at the dense curtain of trees surrounding Dr. Hilzbrich’s house.
Maine. Bradley Rose spent two years of his life here.
    “Rizzoli,” said Frost. “I want to come back.”
    “What?”
    “I shouldn’t have bailed out on you. I want to be on the team again.”
    “Are you sure you’re ready?”
    “I need to do this. I need to help.”
    “You already have,” she said. “Welcome back.”
    As she hung up, Dr. Hilzbrich came into the room, carrying three thick folders. “Here are Jimmy’s files,” he said, handing them to her.
    “I need to know one more thing, Doctor.”
    “Yes?”
    “You said the institute’s been shut down. What happened to the property?”
    He shook his head. “It was on the market for years but it never sold. Too damn remote to interest any developers. I couldn’t keep up with the taxes, so now I’m about to lose it.”
    “It’s currently unoccupied?”
    “It’s been shuttered for years.”
    Once again, she glanced at her watch, and considered how many hours of daylight she had. She looked up at Hilzbrich. “Tell me how to get there.”

THIRTY-ONE
     
    Lying awake on the mildewed mattress, Josephine stared into the darkness of her prison and thought of the day, twelve years ago, when she and her mother had fled San Diego. It was the morning after Medea had mopped up the blood and washed the walls and disposed of the man who had invaded their home, forever changing their lives.
    They had crossed the border into Mexico, and as their car barreled through the arid scrubland of Baja, Josephine was still shaking with fear. But Medea had been eerily calm and focused, her hands perfectly steady on the steering wheel. Josephine had not understood how her mother could be so composed. She had not understood so many things. That was the day she saw her mother for who she really was.
    That was the day she learned she was the daughter of a lioness.
    “Everything I’ve done has been for you,” Medea told her as their car hurtled along blacktop that shimmered with heat. “I did it to keep us together. We are a family, darling, and a family has to stick together.” She looked at her terrified daughter, who sat huddled beside her like an injured animal. “Do you remember what I told you about the nuclear family? How anthropologists define it?”
    A man had just bled to death in their house. They had just disposed of his body and fled the country. And her mother was calmly lecturing her about anthropological theory?
    Despite the incredulity in her daughter’s eyes, Medea had continued. “Anthropologists will tell you that a nuclear family is not mother, father, and child. No, it’s mother and child. Fathers come and go. They sail off to sea or they march off to war, and often they don’t come home. But mother and child are linked forever. Mother and child are the primordial unit.
We
are that unit, and I’ll do whatever it takes to protect it, to protect
us.
That’s why we have to run.”
    And so they had run. They’d left a city they’d both loved, a city that had been home to them for three years—long enough for friendships to be made, for bonds to be forged.
    In one night, with a single gunshot, all those bonds were snapped forever.
    “Look in the glove compartment,” Medea had said. “There’s an envelope.”
    The daughter, still dazed, found the envelope and opened it. Inside were two birth certificates, two passports, and a driver’s license.