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

keys.”
     
    The techs were already dusting for prints when Moore returned to the medical suite.
    “Tucked her in bed, did you?” said Rizzoli.
    “She’s going to sleep in the E.R. call room. I don’t want her going home until it’s secure.”
    “You gonna personally change all her locks?”
    He frowned, reading her expression. Not liking what he saw there. “You have a problem?”
    “She’s a nice-looking woman.”
    I know where this is headed, he thought, and gave a tired sigh.
    “A little damaged. A little vulnerable,” said Rizzoli. “Jeez, it makes a guy want to rush right in and protect her.”
    “Isn’t that our job?”
    “Is that all it is, a job?”
    “I’m not going to talk about this,” he said, and walked out of the suite.
    Rizzoli followed him into the hallway like a bulldog snapping at his heels. “She’s at the center of this case, Moore. We don’t know if she’s being straight with us. Please don’t tell me you’re getting involved with her.”
    “I’m not involved.”
    “I’m not blind.”
    “What do you see, exactly?”
    “I see the way you look at her. I see the way she looks at you. I see a cop who’s losing his objectivity.” She paused. “A cop who’s going to get hurt.”
    Had she raised her voice, had she said it with hostility, he might have responded in kind. But she had said those last words quietly, and he could not muster the necessary outrage to fight back.
    “I wouldn’t say this to just anyone,” said Rizzoli. “But I think you’re one of the good guys. If you were Crowe, or some other asshole, I’d say sure, go get your heart reamed out, I don’t give a shit. But I don’t want to see it happen to you.”
    They regarded each other for a moment. And Moore felt a twinge of shame that he could not look past Rizzoli’s plainness. No matter how much he admired her quick mind, her unceasing drive to succeed, he would always focus on her utterly average face and her shapeless pantsuits. In some ways he was no better than Darren Crowe, no better than the jerks who stuffed tampons in her water bottle. He did not deserve her admiration.
    They heard the sound of a throat being cleared and turned to see the crime scene tech standing in the doorway.
    “No prints,” he said. “I dusted both computers. The keyboards, the mice, the disk drives. They’ve all been wiped clean.”
    Rizzoli’s cell phone rang. As she flipped it open, she muttered: “What did we expect? We’re not dealing with a moron.”
    “What about the doors?” asked Moore.
    “There’s a few partials,” said the tech. “But with all the traffic that probably comes in and out of here—patients, staff—we’re not going to be able to ID anything.”
    “Hey, Moore,” said Rizzoli, and she clapped her cell phone shut. “Let’s go.”
    “Where?”
    “Headquarters. Brody says he’s gonna show us the miracle of pixels.”
     
    “I put the image file on the Photoshop program,” said Sean Brody. “The file takes up three megabytes, which means it’s got lots of detail. No fuzzy pics for this perp. He sent a quality image, right down to the victim’s eyelashes.”
    Brody was the BPD’s techno-wiz, a pasty-faced youngster of twenty-three who now slouched in front of the computer screen, his hand practically grafted to the mouse. Moore, Rizzoli, Frost, and Crowe stood behind him, all gazing over his shoulder at the monitor. Brody had an irritating laugh, like a jackal’s, and he gave little chortles of delight as he manipulated the image on the screen.
    “This is the full-frame photo,” said Brody. “Vic tied to the bed. Awake, eyes open, bad case of red eye from the flash. Looks like duct tape on her mouth. Now see, down here in the left-hand corner of the pic, there’s the edge of the nightstand. You can see an alarm clock sitting on top of two books. Zoom in, and see the time?”
    “Two twenty,” said Rizzoli.
    “Right. Now the question is, A.M. or P.M. ? Let’s go up to the top of the photo, where you see a corner of the window. The curtain’s closed, but you can just make out this little chink here, where the edges of the fabric don’t quite meet. There’s no sunlight coming through. If the time on that clock is correct, this photo was taken at two-twenty A.M. ”
    “Yeah, but which day?” said Rizzoli. “This could have been last night or last year. Hell, we don’t even know if the Surgeon’s the guy who snapped this pic.”
    Brody tossed her an annoyed