The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

that Jane usually avoided sitting straight across from him, but she’d arrived late to the meeting and had been forced to take the last remaining seat, facing Zucker. Slowly he perused the photographs spread out on the table. They were images of a vibrant young Lorraine Edgerton. In some shots she wore shorts and T-shirts; in others, jeans and hiking boots. Clearly she was an outdoorswoman, with the tan to prove it. He turned next to what she looked like now: stiff and dry as cordwood, her face a leathery mask stretched taut across bone. When he looked up, his eerily pale eyes focused on Jane, and she had the uneasy feeling that he could see straight into the dark corners of her brain, into places she allowed no one to see. Though there were four other detectives in the room, she was the only woman; perhaps that was the reason Zucker focused on her. She refused to let him intimidate her, and she stared right back.
    “How long ago did you say Ms. Edgerton vanished?” he asked.
    “It was twenty-five years ago,” said Jane.
    “And does that period of time account for the current condition of her body?”
    “We know this
is
Lorraine Edgerton, based on the dental records.”
    “And we also know it doesn’t take centuries to mummify a body,” added Frost.
    “Yes, but could she have been killed far more recently than twenty-five years ago?” said Zucker. “You said she was kept alive long enough for her bullet wound to begin healing. What if she was kept a prisoner for far longer? Could you turn a body into a mummy in, say, five years?”
    “You think this perp could have kept her captive for
decades
?”
    “I’m merely speculating, Detective Frost. Trying to understand what our unknown subject gets out of this. What could drive him to perform these grotesque postmortem rituals. With each of the three victims, he went to a great deal of trouble to keep her from decaying.”
    “He wanted them to last,” said Lieutenant Marquette, chief of the homicide unit. “He wanted to keep them around.”
    Zucker nodded. “Eternal companionship. That’s one interpretation. He didn’t want to let them go, so he turns them into keepsakes that will last forever.”
    “So why kill them at all?” asked Detective Crowe. “Why not just keep them as prisoners? We know he kept two of them alive long enough for their fractures to start healing.”
    “Maybe they died natural deaths from their injuries. From what I read in the autopsy reports, there are no definitive answers as to cause of death.”
    Jane said, “Dr. Isles was unable to make that determination, but we do know that the Bog Lady…” She paused. Bog Lady was the new victim’s nickname, but no detective would ever say it in public. No one wanted to see it splashed across the newspapers. “We know that the victim in the trunk suffered fractures of both legs, and they may have become infected. That could have caused her death.”
    “And preservation would be the only way to keep her around,” said Marquette. “Permanently.”
    Zucker looked down, once again, at the photo. “Tell me about this victim, Lorraine Edgerton.”
    Jane slid a folder across to the psychologist. “That’s what we know about her so far. She was a graduate student working in New Mexico when she vanished.”
    “What was she studying?”
    “Archaeology.”
    Zucker’s eyebrow shot up. “Do I sense a theme here?”
    “It’s hard not to. That summer, Lorraine was working with a group of students at an archaeological dig in Chaco Canyon. On the day she vanished, she told her colleagues that she was going into town. She left on her motorbike in the late afternoon and never came back. Weeks later, the bike was found miles away, near a Navajo reservation. From what I gather about the area, there’s not much in the way of population. It’s mostly open desert and dirt roads.”
    “So there are no witnesses.”
    “None. And now it’s twenty-five years later, and the detective who investigated her disappearance is dead. All we have is his report. Which is why Frost and I are flying out to New Mexico to talk to the archaeologist who was director of the dig. He was one of the last people who saw her alive.”
    Zucker looked at the photos. “She appears to have been an athletic young woman.”
    “She was. A hiker, a camper. A woman who spent a lot of time with a shovel. Not the kind of gal who’d give up without a fight.”
    “But there was a bullet in her leg.”
    “Which may