The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

she’s a coward. Only a coward would let her daughter die.”
    She felt the mattress sag as he knelt beside her.
    “Where is she?” he asked. “Where is Medea?”
    Her silence frustrated him. He grasped her wrist and said, “Maybe the hair wasn’t enough. Maybe it’s time to send them another souvenir. Do you think a finger would do?”
    No. God, no.
Panic was screaming at her to wrench her hand away, to kick and shriek, anything to escape the ordeal to come. But she remained frozen, still playing the victim paralyzed by despair. He shone the flashlight directly in her face and, blinded by the light, she could not read his expression, could not see anything in the black hollows of his eyes. He was so focused on provoking a response from her that he did not notice what she held in her free hand. He did not notice her muscles snap as tense as a bowstring.
    “Maybe if I start cutting,” he said, “you’ll start talking.” He pulled out a knife.
    She thrust her hand upward and blindly drove the spike of the high-heeled shoe into his face. She heard the heel thud into flesh and he fell backward, shrieking.
    She snatched up the flashlight and slammed it against the floor, smashing the bulb. The room went black.
Darkness is my friend.
She rolled away and scrambled to her feet. She could hear him a few feet away, groveling on the floor, but she could not see him, and he could not see her. They were equally blind.
    Only I know how to find the door in the dark.
    All the rehearsals, all the preparation, had seared the next moves into her brain. From the edge of the mattress, it was three paces to the wall. Follow the wall seven more steps and she’d reach the door. Though the cast on her leg slowed her down, she wasted no time navigating through the darkness. She paced out seven steps. Eight steps. Nine…
    Where is the damn door?
    She could hear him breathing hard, grunting in frustration as he struggled to get his bearings, to locate her in that pitch-black room.
    Don’t make a sound. Don’t let him know where you are.
    She backed up slowly, scarcely daring to breathe, each step placed with delicate care so she would not give away her position. Her hand slid across smooth concrete, then her fingers brushed across wood.
    The door.
    She turned the knob and pushed. The sudden squeal of hinges seemed deafening.
    Move!
    Already she heard him lunging toward her, noisy as a bull. She stumbled through and swung the door shut. Just as he slammed against it, she slid the bolt home.
    “You can’t escape, Josephine!” he yelled.
    She laughed and it sounded like a stranger’s, a wild and reckless bark of triumph. “Well I just did, asshole!” she shouted back.
    “You’ll be sorry! We were going to let you live, but not now!
Not now!
”
    He began screaming, battering the door in impotent fury as she slowly felt her way up a dark stairway. Her cast set off thuds on the wooden steps. She did not know where the stairs led, and it was almost as dark in here as it had been in her concrete bunker. But with each step she climbed, the stairway seemed to brighten. With each step, she repeated the mantra:
I am my mother’s daughter. I am my mother’s daughter.
    Halfway up the stairs, she saw cracks of light shining around a closed door at the top of the steps. Only as she neared that door did she suddenly focus on what he’d said only a moment before.
    We were going to let you live.
    We.
    The door ahead suddenly swung open and the glare of light was painful. She blinked as her eyes adjusted, as she tried to focus on the figure that loomed in the bright rectangle of the doorway.
    A figure that she recognized.

THIRTY-TWO
     
    Twenty years of neglect and hard winters and frost heaves had reduced the Hilzbrich Institute’s private road to broken blacktop rippling with invading tree roots. Jane paused at the PROPERTY FOR SALE sign, her Subaru idling as she debated whether to drive down that ruined road. No chain blocked the entrance; anyone could enter the property.
    Anyone could be waiting there.
    She pulled out her cell phone and saw that she still had reception. She considered calling for a little local backup, then decided it would be a humiliatingly bad idea. She didn’t want the town cops laughing about the big-city detective who needed an escort just to deal with the scary Maine woods.
Yeah, Detective, those skunks and porcupines can be deadly.
    She started down the road.
    Her Subaru slowly bumped along the fractured