The Surgeon: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel: With Bonus Content

no idea?”
    “How could I? I don’t even know who he is.”
    “He was in your house with Andrew Capra. If what you said under hypnosis is true.”
    “Andrew was the only one I saw that night. Andrew’s the only one . . .” She stopped. “Maybe
I’m
not his real obsession, Detective. Have you thought about that? Maybe
Andrew
is.”
    Rizzoli frowned, struck by that statement. Catherine suddenly realized that she had hit on the truth. The center of the Surgeon’s universe was not her but Andrew Capra. The man he emulated, perhaps even worshiped. The partner Catherine had wrenched from him.
    She glanced up as her name was called over the hospital address system.
    “Dr. Cordell, STAT, E.R. Dr. Cordell, STAT, E.R.”
    God, will they never leave me alone?
    She punched the Down button for the elevator.
    “Dr. Cordell?”
    “I don’t have time for any of your questions. I have patients to see.”
    “When will you have the time?”
    The door slid open and Catherine stepped in, the weary soldier called back to the front lines. “My night’s just begun.”
     
    By their blood will I know them.
    I survey the racks of test tubes the way one lusts over chocolates in a box, wondering which will be tastiest. Our blood is as unique as we are, and my naked eye discerns varying shades of red, from bright cardinal to black cherry. I am familiar with what gives us this broad palette of colors; I know the red is from hemoglobin, in varying states of oxygenation. It is chemistry, nothing more, but ah, such chemistry has the power to shock, to horrify. We are all moved by the sight of blood.
    Even though I see it every day, it never fails to thrill me.
    I look over the racks with a hungry gaze. The tubes have come from all over the greater Boston area, funneled in from doctors’ offices and clinics and the hospital next door. We are the largest diagnostic lab in the city. Anywhere in Boston, should you open your arm to the phlebotomist’s needle, the chances are your blood will find its way here. To me.
    I log in the first rack of specimens. On each tube is a label with the patient’s name, the doctor’s name, and the date. Next to the rack is the bundle of accompanying requisition forms. It is the forms I reach for, and I flip through them, scanning the names.
    Halfway through the stack, I stop. I am looking at a requisition for Karen Sobel, age twenty-five, who lives at 7536 Clark Road in Brookline. She is Caucasian and unmarried. All this I know because it appears on the form, along with her Social Security number and employer’s name and insurance carrier.
    The doctor has requested two blood tests: an HIV screen, and a VDRL, for syphilis.
    On the line for diagnosis, the doctor has written: “Sexual assault.”
    In the rack, I find the tube containing Karen Sobel’s blood. It is a deep and somber red, the blood of a wounded beast. I hold it in my hand, and as it warms to my touch, I see her, feel her, this woman named Karen. Broken and stumbling. Waiting to be claimed.
    Then I hear a voice that startles me, and I look up.
    Catherine Cordell has just walked into my lab.
    She is standing so close, I can almost reach out and touch her. I am stunned to see her here, especially at this remote hour between darkness and dawn. Seldom do any physicians venture into our basement world, and to see her now is an unexpected thrill, as arresting as the vision of Persephone descending into Hades.
    I wonder what has brought her. Then I see her hand several tubes of straw-colored fluid to the technician at the next bench, and hear the words “pleural effusion,” and I understand why she has deigned to visit us. Like many physicians, she does not trust the hospital couriers with certain precious body fluids, and she has personally carried the tubes down the tunnel that connects Pilgrim Hospital with the Interpath Labs building.
    I watch her walk away. She passes right by my bench. Her shoulders sag, and she sways, her legs wobbly, as though she is struggling through deep mud. Fatigue and the fluorescent lights make her skin look like little more than a milky wash over the fine bones of her face. She vanishes out the door, never knowing that I’ve been watching her.
    I look down at Karen Sobel’s tube, which I am still holding, and suddenly the blood seems dull and lifeless. A prey not even worth the hunt. Not when compared to what has just walked past me.
    I can still smell Catherine’s scent.
    I log onto the computer, and