The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

desk.
    “Yeah, it’s wet out there.” Grimly, Jane shrugged out of her dripping slicker and hung it on a coat hook.
    “Never seen so much rainfall in a single summer, and I’ve lived here all my life. I hear it’s all because of global warming.”
    “Where is everyone?” Jane said, cutting off the conversation so brusquely that his face tightened. After what had happened tonight, she was in no mood to talk about the weather.
    Taking her cue, he responded just as brusquely: “Detective Young’s down in the basement. His partner’s upstairs, talking to the curator.”
    “I’ll start in the basement.”
    She pulled on gloves and paper shoe covers and headed for the stairwell. With every step, she girded herself for what she was about to confront. When she reached the basement level, she saw a stark warning of what lay ahead. Bloody shoe prints, a man’s size nine or ten, had tracked across the hall from the storage area to the elevator. Alongside the shoe prints was an alarming smear left by something that had been dragged across that floor.
    “Rizzoli?” said Detective Young. He had just emerged from the storage room.
    “Did you find her?” asked Jane.
    “I’m afraid she’s nowhere in this building.”
    “Shit.” Jane looked down again, at the smear. “He took her.”
    “I’d say it looks that way. Pulled her across this hall and brought her up in the elevator to the first floor.”
    “And then what?”
    “Took her out a rear door that leads to their loading dock. There’s an alley behind the building where he could have backed up his vehicle. No one would’ve seen a thing, especially tonight, with all the rain. He just had to load her in and drive away.”
    “How the hell did he get into the building? Weren’t the doors locked?”
    “The senior docent—her name’s Mrs. Willebrandt—said she left around five fifteen and she swears she locked the doors. But she looks like she’s about a thousand years old, so who knows what her memory’s like?”
    “What about everyone else? Where was Dr. Robinson?”
    “He and Ms. Duke drove out to Revere to ship a crate. He says he came back to the building around seven to catch up on some work and he didn’t see anyone here. He assumed Dr. Pulcillo had left for the day, so he wasn’t concerned at first. Until he glanced in her office and noticed her purse was still there. That’s when he called 911.”
    “Detective Frost was supposed to drive her home today.”
    Young nodded. “So he told us.”
    “Then where is he?”
    “He arrived just after we got here. He’s upstairs now.” Young paused, and said quietly: “Go easy on him, huh?”
    “For screwing up?”
    “I’ll let him tell you what happened. But first…” He turned toward the door. “I have to show you this.”
    She followed him into the storage area.
    The footprints were more vivid here, the killer’s soles so wet with blood that they left splash marks. Young moved into the maze of storage items and pointed down a narrow aisle. The object of his attention sat wedged between crates.
    “There’s not much left of the face,” he said.
    But there was still enough of it for Jane to recognize Simon Crispin. The blow had slammed into his left temple, shattering bone and cartilage, leaving a crater of gore. Blood had streamed from the wound into the aisle, where the lake had spread across the concrete and soaked into scattered wood shavings. For a short time after the blow, Simon had lived, long enough for his heart to keep beating and keep pumping blood that had spilled from the ruined head and streamed across this floor.
    “Somehow this killer managed to time it just right,” said Young. “He must have been watching the building. He must have seen Mrs. Willebrandt leave, so he knew that only two people were still here. Dr. Pulcillo and an eighty-two-year-old man.” Young looked at Jane. “I hear her leg was in a cast, so she couldn’t have run away. And she wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight.”
    Jane looked down at the drag mark left by Josephine’s body.
We told her she’d be safe. That’s why she came back to Boston. She trusted us.
    “There’s one more thing you need to see,” said Young.
    She looked up. “What?”
    “I’ll show you.” He led her back toward the exit. They emerged from the maze of crates. “That,” said Young, and he pointed at the closed door. At the two words that had been written in blood:

FIND ME

    Jane climbed the stairs