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

impressions can be. How easily pain can be masked by a smile, an upward tilting chin.
    Now he opened a different file. Took a deep breath and re-read the Savannah police report on Dr. Andrew Capra.
    Capra made his first known kill while he was a senior medical student at Emory University in Atlanta. The victim was Dora Ciccone, a twenty-two-year-old Emory graduate student, whose body was found tied to the bed in her off-campus apartment. Traces of the date-rape drug Rohypnol were found in her system on autopsy. Her apartment showed no signs of forced entry.
    The victim had invited the killer into her home.
    Once drugged, Dora Ciccone was tied to her bed with nylon cord, and her screams were muffled with duct tape. First the killer raped her. Then he proceeded to cut.
    She was alive during the operation.
    When he had completed the excision, and had taken his souvenir, he administered the coup de grace: a single deep slash across the neck, from left to right. Though the police had DNA from the killer’s semen, they had no leads. The investigation was complicated by the fact Dora was known as a party girl who liked to cruise the local bars and often brought home men she’d only just met.
    On the night she died, the man she brought home was a medical student named Andrew Capra. But Capra’s name did not come to the attention of the police until three women had been slaughtered in the city of Savannah, two hundred miles away.
    Finally, on a muggy night in June, the killings ended.
    Thirty-one-year-old Catherine Cordell, the chief surgical resident in Savannah’s Riverland Hospital, was startled by someone knocking at her door. When she opened it, she found Andrew Capra, one of her surgery interns, standing on her porch. Earlier that day, in the hospital, she had reprimanded him about a mistake he’d made, and now he was desperate to find out how he could redeem himself. Could he please come in to talk about it?
    Over a few beers, they’d reviewed Capra’s performance as an intern. All the errors he’d made, the patients he might have harmed because of his carelessness. She did not sugarcoat the truth: that Capra was failing and would not be allowed to finish the surgery program. At some point in the evening, Catherine left the room to use the toilet, then returned to resume the conversation and finish her beer.
    When she regained consciousness, she found herself stripped naked and tied to the bed with nylon cord.
    The police report described, in horrifying detail, the nightmare that followed.
    Photographs taken of her in the hospital revealed a woman with haunted eyes, a bruised and horribly swollen cheek. What he saw, in these photos, was summed up in the generic word:
victim
.
    It was not a word that applied to the eerily composed woman he had met today.
    Now, re-reading Cordell’s statement, he could hear her voice in his head. The words no longer belonged to an anonymous victim, but to a woman whose face he knew.
     
    I don’t know how I got my hand free. My wrist is all scraped now, so I must have pulled it through the cord. I’m sorry, but things aren’t clear in my mind. All I remember is reaching for the scalpel. Knowing that I had to get the scalpel off the tray. That I had to cut the cords, before Andrew came back. . . .
    I remember rolling toward the side of the bed. Falling half onto the floor and hitting my head. Then I was trying to find the gun. It’s my father’s gun. After the third woman was killed in Savannah, he insisted I keep it.
    I remember reaching under my bed. Grabbing the gun. I remember footsteps, coming into the room. Then—I’m not sure. That must be when I shot him. Yes, that’s what I think happened. They told me I shot him twice. I guess it must be true.
     
    Moore paused, mulling over the statement. Ballistics had confirmed that both bullets were fired from the weapon, registered to Catherine’s father, that was found lying beside the bed. Blood tests in the hospital confirmed the presence of Rohypnol, an amnesiac drug, in her bloodstream, so she might very well have blank spots in her memory. When Cordell was brought to the E.R., the doctors described her as confused, either from the drug or from a possible concussion. Only a heavy blow to the head could have left such a bruised and swollen face. She did not recall how or when she received that blow.
    Moore turned to the crime scene photos. On the bedroom floor, Andrew Capra lay dead, flat on his back. He had been