The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

he’d seen two nights before. The marks were darker up here, left by shoes still wet with fresh blood. The prints emerged from the room at the far end of the hall. Abbott pointed into the first doorway they came to. Inside was an unmade bed. “This is the guest room, where Ms. Pulcillo was sleeping.”
    Jane frowned. “But it’s closer to the stairs.”
    “Yeah. I found that strange, too. The killer walks right past Ms. Pulcillo’s room and heads straight up the hall to Ms. Hamerton’s. Maybe he didn’t know there was a guest in the house.”
    “Or maybe this door was locked,” said Frost.
    “No, that’s not it. This door doesn’t have a lock. For some reason, he bypassed it and went to Ms. Hamerton’s room first.” Abbott took a breath and continued to the master bedroom. There he paused on the threshold, hesitant to step inside.
    When Jane looked past him, through the doorway, she understood why.
    Though the body of Gemma Hamerton had been removed, her last moments on earth were recorded in vivid splatters of red on the walls, the bedsheets, the furniture. Stepping into that room, Jane felt a cold breath whisper against her skin, as though a ghost had just brushed past. Violence leaves its imprint, she thought. Not just in bloodstains, but on the air itself.
    “Her body was found crumpled in that far corner,” said Abbott. “But you can see, from the blood splatters, that the initial wound was made somewhere near the bed. Arterial splashes there, on the headboard.” He pointed to the wall on the right. “And over there, I think those are cast-off drops.”
    Jane tore her gaze from the soaked mattress and stared at the arc of angular droplets thrown off by centrifugal force as the bloody knife had swung away from the body. “He’s right-handed,” she said.
    Abbott nodded. “Judging by the wound, the ME says there was no hesitation, no tentative slices. He did it with one clean stroke, severing major vessels in the neck. The ME estimates she had maybe a minute or two of consciousness. Long enough for her to grab the phone. Crawl to that corner over there. The receiver had her bloody fingerprints on it, so we know she was wounded when she dialed.”
    “So the killer hung up the phone?” asked Frost.
    “I assume so.”
    “But you said the operator tried calling back and got a busy signal.”
    Abbott paused, thinking about it. “I guess that is a little weird, isn’t it? First he hangs up, then he takes the receiver off the hook again. I wonder why he’d do that.”
    Jane said. “He didn’t want it to ring.”
    “The noise?” said Frost.
    Jane nodded. “It would also explain why he didn’t use his gun on this victim. Because he knew someone else was in the house, and he didn’t want to wake her.”
    “But she did wake up,” said Abbott. “Maybe she heard the body fall. Maybe Ms. Hamerton managed to cry out. Whatever the reason, something woke up Ms. Pulcillo, because she came into this room. She saw the intruder. And she ran.”
    Jane stared at the corner where Gemma Hamerton had died, curled up in a lake of her own blood.
    She walked out of the bedroom and headed back up the hall. At the doorway to Josephine’s room she stopped, gazing at the bed. The killer walked right past this room, she thought. A young woman is sleeping in there and her door is unlocked. Yet he bypassed her and continued to the master bedroom. Did he not know a guest was here? Did he not realize there was another woman in the house?
    No. No, he knew. That’s why he took the phone off the hook. That’s why he used a knife and not his gun. He wanted the first kill to be silent.
    Because he was planning to move to Josephine’s room next.
    She went down the stairs and stepped outside. The afternoon was sunny, the insects humming in the windless heat, but the chill of the house was still with her. She descended the porch steps.
    You pursued her here, down the stairs. On a moonlit night, she would have been easy to follow. Just a lone girl in her nightgown.
    She walked slowly up the driveway, following the route along which Josephine had fled, her bare feet cut by glass. The main road was ahead, beyond the trees, and all the fleeing girl had to do was reach a neighbor’s house. Scream and pound on a door.
    Jane paused, her gaze on the bloodstained gravel.
    But here the bullet struck her leg, and she fell.
    Slowly she followed the trail of blood that Josephine had smeared along the road as she’d struggled