The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

realize that he had turned back, and was looking at her.
    “Dr. Isles?”
    She glanced up. “Yes?”
    “I have another concern. Not about the case, but something personal. I’m not sure you’re the one I should ask about this.”
    “What is it, Agent Dean?”
    “Do you talk much with Jane?”
    “Naturally. In the course of this investigation—”
    “Not about work. About what’s been troubling her.”
    She hesitated. I could tell him, she thought. Someone should tell him.
    “She’s always been strung pretty tightly,” he said. “But there’s something else going on. I can see she’s under a lot of pressure.”
    “The abbey attack has been a difficult case for her.”
    “It’s not the investigation. There’s something else bothering her. Something she won’t talk about.”
    “I’m not the one you should be asking. You need to speak to Jane.”
    “I’ve tried.”
    “And?”
    “She’s all business. You know how she can be, a goddamn robo-cop.” He sighed. Said, quietly: “I think I’ve lost her.”
    “Tell me something, Agent Dean.”
    “Yes?”
    “Do you care about her?”
    He met her gaze without flinching. “I wouldn’t be asking you this question if I didn’t.”
    “Then you have to trust me on this. You haven’t lost her. If she seems distant, it’s only because she’s afraid.”
    “Jane?” He shook his head and laughed. “She’s not afraid of anything. Least of all me.”
    She watched him walk out of her office, and she thought: You’re wrong. We’re all afraid of the people who can hurt us.
             
     
    As a child, Rizzoli had loved winter. She would look forward all summer long to the first flutters of snow, to the morning when she’d open her bedroom curtains and see the ground covered in white, the purity still unmarred by footprints. She’d laugh as she ran from the house, to dive into the snowdrifts.
    Now, fighting heavy noontime traffic, along with all the other holiday shoppers, she wondered who had stolen the magic.
    The prospect of spending Christmas Eve with her family tomorrow night did nothing to cheer her. She knew how the evening would go: everyone stuffing themselves with turkey, their mouths too full to talk. Her brother Frankie, loud and obnoxious from too much rum-spiked eggnog. Her father, TV remote in hand, turning up ESPN to drown out all meaningful conversation. And her mother, Angela, exhausted from a full day’s cooking, nodding off in the easy chair. Every year, they repeated the same old rituals, but that’s what made a family, she thought. We do the same things in the same way, whether or not they make us happy.
    Though she had no desire to go shopping, she could put off the ordeal no longer; you simply did not show up at the Rizzolis’ on Christmas Eve without the requisite armful of gifts. It didn’t matter how inappropriate the gifts might be, as long as they were prettily wrapped, and everyone got one. Last year her brother Frankie, the asshole, gave her a dried toad from Mexico, its skin fashioned into a coin purse. It was a cruel reminder of the nickname he used to hurl at her. A frog for the frog.
    This year, Frankie was toast.
    She pushed her shopping cart through the crowds at the Target store, in search of a dried-toad equivalent. Christmas carols played over the store speakers and mechanical Santas greeted her with ho-ho-ho’s as she moved with grim determination up aisles festooned with tinsel garlands. For her dad, she bought fleece-lined moccasins. For her mom, a teapot from Ireland, decorated with tiny pink rosebuds. For her younger brother Michael, a plaid bathrobe, and for his new girlfriend Irene, dangly earrings of blood-red Austrian crystal. She even bought gifts for Irene’s little boys, matching snowsuits with racing stripes.
    But for Frankie, the jerk, she was coming up empty-handed.
    She cruised down the aisle for men’s underwear. Here there were possibilities. Frankie the macho Marine in pink thong underwear? No, too disgusting; even she would never stoop that low. She kept moving, past the jockey briefs, and slowed as she reached the boxer shorts, suddenly thinking not of Frankie, but of Gabriel, in his gray suits and boring ties. A man of quiet and conservative tastes, right down to his underwear. A man who could drive a woman crazy, because she’d never know where she stood with him; she’d never know if a real heart was beating under that gray suit.
    Abruptly she left the aisle and kept