The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

family.”
    “Your wife’s the one who’ll suffer.”
    “My wife is dead,” he said, and his words dropped like cold stones in the darkness. “Cynthia died last night. All she wanted, all she dreamed about, was seeing our son again. You stole that possibility from her. Thank God she never knew the truth. That’s the one thing I could protect her from—knowing that our boy was murdered.” He took a deep breath and exhaled with calm inevitability. “Now this is all that’s left for me to do.”
    Through the darkness she saw his arm come up, and she knew that his gun was pointed at her. She knew that what happened next was always meant to happen, that it was set in motion on a night twelve years before, the night Bradley died. This gunshot tonight would be only an echo of that earlier one, an echo twelve years delayed. It was a bizarre form of justice all its own, and she understood why this was about to happen, because she was a mother, and if anyone hurt her child she, too, would demand her revenge.
    She did not blame Kimball Rose for what he was about to do.
    She felt strangely prepared as he pulled the trigger, and the bullet slammed into her chest.

THIRTY-EIGHT
     
    This is where it could all end, I think, as I lie on the floor. My chest is on fire with pain, and I am scarcely able to breathe. All Kimball has to do is take a few steps closer to me and fire the killing shot into my head. But footsteps are pounding up the hallway, and I know he hears them, too. He is trapped in this bedroom, with the woman he has just shot. They are kicking at the door—the door I so stupidly locked, thinking it would keep me safe from an intruder. I never anticipated that it would be my rescuers I was locking out, the police who have followed me home, who have watched over me this past week, waiting for this attack. We have all made mistakes tonight, perhaps fatal mistakes. We did not expect Kimball to slip into my house while I was gone; we did not expect he would already be waiting for me in my bedroom.
    But Kimball has made the biggest mistake of all.
    Wood splinters and the door crashes open. The police are like charging bulls. They rush in with shouts and pounding feet and the sharp smells of sweat and aggression. It sounds like a rampaging multitude, but then someone flicks on the light switch and I see that there are only four male detectives, their weapons all trained on Kimball.
    “Drop it!” one of the detectives orders.
    Kimball looks too stunned to respond. His eyes are grief-stricken hollows, his face lax with disbelief. He is a man accustomed to giving orders, not taking them, and he stands helplessly clutching his gun, as though it has grafted itself to his hand and he’s unable to release it even if he wants to.
    “Just set the gun down, Mr. Rose,” says Jane Rizzoli. “And we can talk.”
    I did not see her enter. The male detectives, so much bulkier than she is, blocked my view of her. But now she steps past them into the room, a small and fearless woman who moves with formidable confidence despite the cast on her right arm. She looks in my direction, but it’s only a quick glance, to confirm that my eyes are open and that I am
not
bleeding. Then she focuses again on Kimball.
    “It will go easier if you just put the gun down.” Detective Rizzoli says it quietly, like a mother trying to soothe an agitated child. The other detectives radiate violence and testosterone, but Rizzoli appears utterly calm, even though she is the only one not holding a weapon.
    “Too many people have already died,” she says. “Let’s end it right here.”
    He shakes his head, not a gesture of resistance but of futility. “It doesn’t matter now,” he murmured. “Cynthia’s gone. She won’t have to suffer through this, too.”
    “You kept Bradley’s death from her all these years?”
    “When it happened, she was sick. So sick that I didn’t think she’d survive the month. I thought, Let her die without ever hearing the news.”
    “But she lived.”
    He gave a weary laugh. “She went into remission. It was one of those unexpected miracles that lasted twelve years. So I had to keep up the lie. I had to help Jimmy cover up the truth.”
    “It was your wife’s cheek swab they used to identify the body. Your wife’s DNA, not Carrie Otto’s.”
    “The police had to be convinced the body was Jimmy’s.”
    “Jimmy Otto belonged in prison. You protected a murderer.”
    “I was