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

a woman, can you? No, your hero Andrew had to do it. And he was a loser, too.”
    The scalpel hesitated. Lifted. She saw it hovering there, in the dim light.
    Andrew. The key is Andrew, the man he worships. His god.
    “Loser. Andrew was a loser,” she said. “You know why he came to see me that night, don’t you? He came to beg.”
    “No.” The word was barely a whisper.
    “He asked me not to fire him. He pleaded with me.” She laughed, a harsh and startling sound in that dim place of death. “It was pitiful. That was Andrew, your hero. Begging
me
to help him.”
    The hand on the scalpel tightened. The blade pressed down on her belly again, and fresh blood oozed out and trickled down her flank. Savagely she suppressed the instinct to flinch, to cry out. Instead she kept talking, her voice as strong and confident as though
she
were the one holding the scalpel.
    “He told me about you. You didn’t know that, did you? He said you couldn’t even
talk
to a woman, you were such a coward.
He
had to find them for you.”
    “Liar.”
    “You were nothing to him. Just a parasite. A worm.”
    “Liar.”
    The blade sank into her skin, and though she fought against it, a gasp escaped her throat.
You will not win, you bastard. Because I’m no longer afraid of you. I’m not afraid of anything.
    She stared, her eyes burning with the defiance of the damned, as he made the next slice.

     

twenty-five
    R izzoli stood eyeing the row of cake mixes and wondered how many of the boxes were infested with mealybugs. Hobbs’ FoodMart was that kind of grocery store—dark and musty, a real Mom and Pop establishment, if you pictured Mom and Pop as a pair of mean geezers who’d sell spoiled milk to school kids. “Pop” was Dean Hobbs, an old Yankee with suspicious eyes who paused to study a customer’s quarters before accepting them as payment. Grudgingly he handed back two pennies’ worth of change, then slammed the register shut.
    “Don’t keep track of who uses that ATM thingamajig,” he said to Rizzoli. “Bank put it in, as a convenience to my customers. I got nothing to do with it.”
    “The cash was withdrawn back in May. Two hundred dollars. I have a photo of the man who—”
    “Like I told that state cop, that was May. This is August. You think I remember a customer from that far back?”
    “The state police were here?”
    “This morning, asking the same questions. Don’t you cops talk to each other?”
    So the ATM transaction had already been followed up on, not by Boston PD but by the staties. Shit, she was wasting her time here.
    Mr. Hobbs’s gaze suddenly shot to a teenage boy studying the candy selection. “Hey, you gonna pay for that Snickers bar?”
    “Uh . . . yeah.”
    “Then take it outta your pocket, why don’t ya?”
    The boy put the candy bar back on the shelf and slunk out of the store.
    Dean Hobbs grunted. “That one’s always been trouble.”
    “You know that kid?” asked Rizzoli.
    “Know his folks.”
    “How about the rest of your customers? You know most of them?”
    “You had a look around town?”
    “A quick one.”
    “Yeah, well, a
quick one’s
all it takes to see Lithia. Twelve hundred people. Nothing much to see.”
    Rizzoli took out Warren Hoyt’s photo. It was the best they could come up with, a two-year-old image from his driver’s license. He was looking straight at the camera, a thin-faced man with trim hair and a strangely generic smile. Though Dean Hobbs had already seen it, she held it out to him anyway. “His name is Warren Hoyt.”
    “Yeah, I seen it. The state police showed me.”
    “Do you recognize him?”
    “Didn’t recognize him this morning. Don’t recognize him now.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Don’t I sound sure?”
    Yes, he did. He sounded like a man who never changed his mind about anything.
    Bells chimed as the door opened, and two teenage girls walked in, summer blondes with long legs bare and tanned in their short shorts. Dean Hobbs was momentarily distracted as they strolled by, giggling, and wandered toward the gloomy back end of the store.
    “They sure have grown,” he murmured in wonder.
    “Mr. Hobbs.”
    “Huh?”
    “If you see the man in that photo, I want you to call me immediately.” She handed him her card. “I can be reached twenty-four hours a day. Pager or cell phone.”
    “Yeah, yeah.”
    The girls, now carrying a bag of potato chips and a six-pack of Diet Pepsi, came back to the register. They stood in all their