The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

let him make our lives miserable. It doesn’t change the fact that his son is guilty.”
    “We can’t afford any more screwups, Rizzoli. Your team’s already made one huge mistake, and that young woman paid for it.”
    If he’d intended to wound her, he couldn’t have done a better job. She felt her stomach clench as she stood gripping the file, as though that bundle of papers could salve her guilty conscience about Josephine’s abduction.
    “But you know that,” he said quietly.
    “Yes. I know that,” she said.
And that mistake will haunt me until the day I die.

TWENTY-SEVEN
     
    The house where Nicholas Robinson lived was in Chelsea, not far from the blue-collar Revere neighborhood, where Jane had grown up. Like Jane’s childhood home, Robinson’s was a modest house with a covered front porch and a tiny patch of a yard. In the front garden grew the biggest tomato plants that Jane had ever seen, but the recent heavy rains had cracked the fruit, and a number of overripe globes hung rotting on the vines. The neglected plants should have warned her about Robinson’s state of mind. When he opened the door, she was startled by how drained and haggard he looked, his hair uncombed, his shirt wrinkled as though he’d been sleeping in it for days.
    “Is there any news?” he asked, anxiously searching her face.
    “I’m sorry, but there isn’t. May I come in, Dr. Robinson?”
    He gave a weary nod. “Of course.”
    In her parents’ Revere home, the TV was the centerpiece of the living room, and the coffee table was littered with various remotes that had cloned themselves over the years. But in Robinson’s living room she saw no television at all, no entertainment center, and not a remote device in sight. Instead there were shelves filled with books and figurines and bits of pottery, and on the wall hung framed maps of the ancient world. It was every inch an impoverished academic’s house, but there was an orderliness to the clutter, as though every knickknack was precisely where it should be.
    He glanced around the room as though uncertain what to do next, then helplessly waved his hands. “I’m sorry. I should offer you something to drink, shouldn’t I? I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.”
    “I’m fine, thank you. Why don’t we just sit down and talk?”
    They sank onto comfortable but well-worn chairs. Outside a motorcycle roared past, but inside the house, with its shell-shocked owner, there was silence. He said softly: “I don’t know what I should do.”
    “I’ve heard the museum may be closed permanently.”
    “I wasn’t talking about the museum. I meant Josephine. I’d do anything to help you find her, but what can I do?” He gestured to his books, his maps. “
This
is what I’m good at. Collecting and cataloging! Interpreting useless details from the past. What purpose does it serve her, I ask you? It doesn’t help Josephine.” He looked down in defeat. “It didn’t save Simon.”
    “Maybe you
can
help us.”
    He looked at her with exhaustion-hollowed eyes. “Ask me. Tell me what you need.”
    “I’ll start with this question. What was your relationship with Josephine?”
    He frowned. “Relationship?”
    “She was more than a colleague, I think.” A lot more, judging by what she saw in his face.
    He shook his head. “Look at me, Detective. I’m fourteen years older than she is. I’m hopelessly myopic, I barely make a living, and I’m starting to go bald. Why would someone like her want someone like me?”
    “So she wasn’t interested in a romantic relationship.”
    “I can’t imagine she would be.”
    “You mean you don’t actually know? You never asked?”
    He gave an embarrassed laugh. “I didn’t have the nerve to actually get the words out. And I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. It might have ruined what we
did
have.”
    “What was that?”
    He smiled. “She’s like me—she’s
so
much like me. Hand us an old bone fragment or a rusted blade, and we can both feel the heat of history in it. That’s what we had in common, a passion for what came before us. That would have been enough, just being able to share that much.” His head drooped and he admitted: “I was afraid to ask for more than that.”
    “Why?”
    “Because of how beautiful she is,” he said, his words soft as a prayer.
    “Was that one of the reasons you hired her?”
    She could see that her question instantly offended him. His face tightened and he straightened.