The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

you know what they say about DNA. It doesn’t lie. According to our lab, Carrie Otto was definitely a female relative of the man we dug up from that backyard. Either Carrie had
another
brother who got killed here in San Diego, or Medea Sommer lied to you. And she didn’t shoot the man she claims she shot.”
    “Carrie Otto didn’t have another brother.”
    “Exactly. Ergo, Medea Sommer lied to you. So is she in custody?”
    Jane didn’t answer. A dozen frantic thoughts were fluttering in her head like moths and she couldn’t catch and hold a single one.
    “Jesus,” said Detective Potrero. “Don’t tell me she’s free.”
    “I’ll call you back,” said Jane, and disconnected. She sat in her car, staring out the windshield. She saw a pair of doctors walk out of the hospital, moving with princely strides, white coats flapping. Sure of themselves, that was the way they walked, like two men with no doubts while she herself was trapped in them. Jimmy Otto or Bradley Rose? Which man had Medea shot and killed in her home twelve years ago, and why would she lie about it?
    Who did Frost really kill?
    She thought of what she had witnessed in Maine that night. The death of Carrie Otto. The shooting of a man she’d assumed was Carrie’s brother. Medea had called him
Jimmy,
and he had answered to that name. So he
must
have been Jimmy Otto, just as Medea claimed.
    But the DNA was the obstacle she kept banging into, the bulletproof piece of evidence that contradicted everything. According to the DNA, it wasn’t Bradley who’d died in San Diego. It was a male relative of Carrie Otto.
    There was only one conclusion.
Medea lied to us.
    And if they let Medea slip free, they were going to look like total incompetents. Hell, she thought, we
are
incompetents, and the proof is in the DNA. Because, as Detective Potrero had said, DNA doesn’t lie.
    She punched in Crowe’s number on her cell phone, and suddenly went still.
    Or does it?

THIRTY-SEVEN
     
    Her daughter slept. Josephine’s hair would grow in again, and her bruises had already faded, but as Medea gazed down at her daughter in the soft light of the bedroom, she thought that Josephine looked as young and as vulnerable as a child. In some ways she had become a child again. She insisted that a light stay on all night in her room. She did not like to be left alone for more than a few hours. Medea knew this fear was temporary, that in time Josephine would once again find her courage. For now, the warrior woman inside her was in hibernation and healing, but she would be back. Medea knew her daughter, just as she knew herself, and inside that fragile-looking shell beat the heart of a lioness.
    Medea turned to look at Nicholas Robinson, who stood watching them from the bedroom doorway. He had welcomed Josephine into his house, and Medea knew her daughter would be safe there. In the past week, she’d come to know this man and to trust him. He was unexciting, perhaps, and a touch too exacting and cerebral, yet in so many ways he was a good match for Josephine. And he was devoted. That’s all Medea asked of a man. She’d trusted few people over the years, and she saw in his eyes the same steadfast loyalty that she once saw in Gemma Hamerton’s eyes. Gemma died for Josephine.
    She believed that Nicholas would, too.
    As she walked out of his house, she heard him close the dead bolt behind her, and she felt assured that no matter what happened to her, Josephine would be in good hands. That was the one thing she could count on, and it gave her the courage to climb into her car and drive south, toward the town of Milton.
    She had rented a house there, and it stood isolated on a large and weedy lot. It was infested with mice and she heard them at night as she lay in bed, listening for sounds far more ominous than rodent invaders. She didn’t relish returning there tonight, but she drove on anyway, and in her rearview mirror, she glimpsed a car’s headlights tailing her.
    The lights followed her all the way to Milton.
    When she let herself in the front door, she smelled the old-house smells of dust and tired carpets, with maybe a few mold spores thrown in. She’d read that mold could make you sick. It could cripple your lungs, turn your immune system against you, and eventually kill you. The last tenant who’d lived here was an eighty-seven-year-old woman who’d died in this house; maybe the mold had finished her off. She felt herself inhaling lethal specks of it as