The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

daughter go.”
    “You haven’t changed,” he murmured in wonder. “All these years and you’re exactly the same.”
    “So are you, Jimmy,” Medea answered without a note of irony.
    “You were the only one he ever wanted. The one he couldn’t have.”
    “But Bradley’s not here now. So why are you doing this?”
    “This is for me. This is to make you pay.” He pressed his gun against Josephine’s temple, and for the first time Jane glimpsed terror in Medea’s face. If the woman felt any fear at all, it was not for herself but for her daughter. The key to destroying Medea had always been Josephine.
    “You don’t want my daughter, Jimmy. You have me.” Medea was in control now, her fear disguised by a cool glaze of contempt.
    “I’m the reason you took her, the reason you’ve been playing these games with the police. Well, here I am. Let her go and I’m all yours.”
    “Are you?” He gave Josephine a shove, and she stumbled away to safety. He turned his gun instead on Medea. Even with that barrel pointed at her, she managed to look utterly calm. She cast a glance at Jane, a look that said:
I have his attention. The rest is up to you.
She took a step toward Jimmy, toward the gun aimed at her chest. Her voice turned silky, even seductive. “You wanted me just as much as Bradley did. Didn’t you? The first time I met you, I saw it in your eyes. What you wanted to do to me. The same thing you did to all those other women. Did you fuck them while they were still alive, Jimmy? Or did you wait until they were dead? Because that’s how you like them, isn’t it? Cold. Dead. Yours for eternity.”
    He said nothing, just kept staring as she moved closer. As she enticed him with the possibilities. For years he and Bradley had pursued her, and here she finally was, within his reach. His and his alone.
    Jane’s weapon lay on the ground only a few feet away. She inched toward it, mentally rehearsing her moves. Drop to the ground, snatch up the gun. Fire. She’d have to do all this with only the use of her left hand. She might be able to get off one shot, two at the most, before Jimmy returned fire. No matter how fast I am, she thought, I won’t be able to bring him down in time. Either Medea or I could die tonight.
    Medea kept moving toward Jimmy. “All these years, you’ve been hunting me,” said Medea softly. “Now here I am and you don’t really want to end it right here and now, do you? You don’t really want the hunt to be over.”
    “But it is over.” He raised the gun and Medea went stock-still. This was the ending she’d been running from all these years, an ending she could not alter with pleading or seduction. If she had walked into this thinking she could control the monster, she now saw her mistake.
    “This isn’t about what I want,” said Jimmy. “I was told to finish it. And that’s what I’m going to do.” The muscles in his forearms snapped taut as he prepared to fire.
    Jane lunged for her weapon. But as her left hand closed around the grip, there was a blast of gunfire. She pivoted and the night swirled by in slow motion, a dozen details assaulting her senses at once. She saw Medea drop to her knees, arms crossed protectively over her head. She felt the crackling heat from the flames and the strange heaviness of the weapon in her left hand as she brought it up and her fingers tightened into a firing grip.
    But even as Jane squeezed off the first round, she realized that Jimmy Otto had already staggered back, that her bullet was punching into a target that was already bloodied by an earlier gunshot.
    Silhouetted by the flames behind him, he tumbled backward like a doomed Icarus, his arms flung out at his sides, his torso in free fall. He slumped back across the hood of the burning car and his hair caught fire, wreathing his head in flames. With a shriek he lurched away from the car. His shirt ignited. He staggered around the yard in an agonized death dance and collapsed.
    “No!”
Carrie Otto’s anguished moan was not a human sound at all, but the guttural cry of a dying animal. She crawled slowly, painfully toward her brother, trailing a black smear of blood across the gravel.
    “Don’t leave me, baby. Don’t leave me.”
    She rolled on top of his body, heedless of the flames, desperate to smother the fire.
    “Jimmy.
Jimmy!
”
    Even as her hair and clothes ignited, even as the fire seared her skin, she clung to her brother in an agonized embrace. They remained