The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

longer. Everyone is getting on with their lives, she thought.
Everyone except me.
    She picked up the phone and called Nick Robinson. “I want to come back to work,” she said.
             
     
    Jane was looking at the face of Victim Zero, the woman who got away.
    The photo of Medea Sommer was from the yearbook of Stanford University, where Medea had been a student twenty-seven years earlier. She’d been a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty with finely sculpted cheekbones and a haunting resemblance to her daughter, Josephine. You were the one Bradley Rose really wanted, thought Jane. The woman he and his partner Jimmy Otto could never catch. So they collected substitutes, women who looked like Medea. But none of their victims
was
Medea; none could match the original. They kept hunting, kept searching, but Medea and her daughter managed to stay one step ahead of them.
    Until San Diego.
    A warm hand settled onto her shoulder, and she snapped straight in her chair.
    “Wow.” Her husband, Gabriel, laughed. “A good thing you aren’t armed, or you might have just shot me.” He set Regina down on the kitchen floor, and she toddled off to play with her favorite pot lids.
    “I didn’t hear you come in,” said Jane. “That was a short trip to the playground.”
    “The weather doesn’t look so good out there. It’s going to start raining any minute.” He leaned over her shoulder and saw the photo of Medea. “That’s her? The mother?”
    “I tell you, this woman is a
real
Madam X. There’s not much I can dig up on her except her college records.”
    Gabriel sat down and scanned the few documents that Boston PD had been able to gather so far about Medea, and they provided only the barest sketch of a young woman who seemed more shadow than substance. Gabriel slipped on his glasses and sat back to read Medea’s Stanford University records. His horn-rimmed spectacles were new, and they made him look more like a banker than an FBI agent who knew his way around a gun. Even after a year and a half of marriage, Jane had not grown tired of watching him—and admiring him, the way she did now. Despite the thunder rumbling outside, despite the racket in the kitchen where Regina banged pot lids, he focused like a laser on the pages.
    Jane went into the kitchen and scooped up Regina, who squirmed, impatient to escape. Won’t you ever be content just to rest quietly in my arms? Jane wondered as she hugged her wriggling daughter, as she breathed in the scents of shampoo and warm baby skin, the sweetest smells in the world. Every day, Jane saw more of herself in Regina, in the girl’s dark eyes and exuberantly curly hair, and in her fierce independence as well. Her daughter was a fighter, and there would be battles between them to come. But as she looked into Regina’s eyes, Jane also knew that theirs was a bond that could never be broken. To keep her daughter safe, Jane would risk anything, endure anything.
    Just as Josephine did for her mother.
    “This is a puzzling life story,” said Gabriel.
    Jane set her daughter down on the floor and looked up at her husband. “Medea’s, you mean?”
    “Born and raised in Indio, California. Stellar grades at Stanford University. Then she abruptly drops out in her senior year to have a baby.”
    “And soon afterward, they both vanish from the record.”
    “And become other people.”
    “Repeatedly,” said Jane. She sat down at the table again. “Five name changes, as far as Josephine remembers.”
    He pointed to a police report. “This is interesting. In Indio, she filed complaints against both Bradley Rose and Jimmy Otto. They were already engaged in cooperative stalking. Like a wolf pack, moving in on their kill.”
    “What’s even more interesting is that Medea abruptly dropped all charges against Bradley Rose and left Indio. And since she didn’t stay to testify against Jimmy Otto, the charges against him never went anywhere.”
    “Why would she drop the charges against Bradley?” he asked.
    “We’ll never know.”
    Gabriel set down the report. “Being the target of stalkers could explain why she’d run and hide. It would make her keep changing her name, just to stay safe.”
    “But her own daughter doesn’t remember it that way. Josephine claims Medea was running from the law.” Jane sighed.
    “And that leads to another mystery.”
    “What?”
    “There are no outstanding warrants for Medea Sommer. If she committed any crime, no one seems to know