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

have patients coming in. I really have nothing more to add.”
    “Let me re-check my facts here.” Rizzoli opened a small spiral-bound notebook. “A little over two years ago, on the night of June fifteenth, you were attacked in your home by Dr. Andrew Capra. A man you knew. An intern you worked with in the hospital.” She looked up at Catherine.
    “You already know the answers.”
    “He drugged you, stripped you. Tied you to your bed. Terrorized you.”
    “I don’t see the point of—”
    “Raped you.” The words, though spoken quietly, had an impact as brutal as a slap.
    Catherine said nothing.
    “And that’s not all he planned to do,” continued Rizzoli.
    Dear god, make her stop.
    “He was going to mutilate you in the worst possible way. As he mutilated four other women in Georgia. He cut them open. Destroyed precisely what made them women.”
    “That’s enough,” said Moore.
    But Rizzoli was relentless. “It could have happened to you, Dr. Cordell.”
    Catherine shook her head. “Why are you doing this?”
    “Dr. Cordell, there is nothing I want more than to catch this man, and I would think you’d want to help us. You’d want to stop it from happening to other women.”
    “This has nothing to do with me! Andrew Capra is
dead
. He’s been dead for two years.”
    “Yes, I’ve read his autopsy report.”
    “Well, I can guarantee he’s dead,” Catherine shot back. “Because I’m the one who blew that son of a bitch away.”

     

four
    M oore and Rizzoli sat sweating in the car, warm air roaring from the AC vent. They’d been stuck in traffic for ten minutes, and the car was getting no cooler.
    “Taxpayers get what they pay for,” said Rizzoli. “And this car’s a piece of junk.”
    Moore shut off the AC and rolled down his window. The odor of hot pavement and auto exhaust blew into the car. Already he was bathed in perspiration. He didn’t know how Rizzoli could stand keeping her blazer on; he had shed his jacket the minute they’d stepped out of Pilgrim Medical Center and were enveloped in a heavy blanket of humidity. He knew she must be feeling the heat, because he saw sweat glistening on her upper lip, a lip that had probably never made the acquaintance of lipstick. Rizzoli was not bad-looking, but while other women might smooth on makeup or clip on earrings, Rizzoli seemed determined to downplay her own attractiveness. She wore grim dark suits that did not flatter her petite frame, and her hair was a careless mop of black curls. She was who she was, and either you accepted it or you could just go to hell. He understood why she’d adopted that up-yours attitude; she probably needed it to survive as a female cop. Rizzoli was, above all, a survivor.
    Just as Catherine Cordell was a survivor. But Dr. Cordell had evolved a different strategy: Withdrawal. Distance. During the interview, he’d felt as though he were looking at her through frosted glass, so detached had she seemed.
    It was that detachment that irked Rizzoli. “There’s something wrong with her,” she said. “Something’s missing in the emotions department.”
    “She’s a trauma surgeon. She’s trained to keep her cool.”
    “There’s cool, and then there’s ice. Two years ago she was tied down, raped, and almost gutted. And she’s so friggin’ calm about it now. It makes me wonder.”
    Moore braked for a red light and sat staring at the gridlocked intersection. Sweat trickled down the small of his back. He did not function well in the heat; it made him feel sluggish and stupid. It made him long for summer’s end, for the purity of winter’s first snowfall. . . .
    “Hey,” said Rizzoli. “Are you listening?”
    “She is tightly controlled,” he conceded. But not ice, he thought, remembering how Catherine Cordell’s hand had trembled as she gave him back the photos of the two women.
    Back at his desk, he sipped lukewarm Coke and re-read the article printed a few weeks before in the
Boston Globe
: “Women Holding the Knife.” It featured three female surgeons in Boston—their triumphs and difficulties, the special problems they faced in their specialty. Of the three photos, Cordell’s was the most arresting. It was more than the fact she was attractive; it was her gaze, so proud and direct that it seemed to challenge the camera. The photo, like the article, reinforced the impression that this woman was in control of her life.
    He set aside the article and sat thinking of how wrong first