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

raised. And Rose was here, the keeper of the flame, who looked so much like her daughter that Moore sometimes thought he saw Mary herself gazing from Rose’s blue eyes.
    “You look tired,” she said.
    “Do I?”
    “You never went on vacation, did you?”
    “They called me back. I was already in the car, heading up the Maine Turnpike. Had my fishing poles packed. Bought a new tacklebox.” He sighed. “I miss the lake. It’s the one thing I look forward to all year.”
    It was the one thing Mary had always looked forward to as well. He glanced at the swimming trophies on the bookshelf. Mary had been a sturdy little mermaid who would happily have lived her life in the water had she been born with gills. He remembered how cleanly and powerfully she had once stroked across the lake. Remembered how those same arms had wasted away to twigs in the nursing home.
    “After the case is solved,” said Rose, “you could still go to the lake.”
    “I don’t know that it will be solved.”
    “That doesn’t sound like you at all. So discouraged.”
    “This is a different sort of crime, Rose. Committed by someone I can’t begin to understand.”
    “You always manage to.”
    “Always?” He shook his head and smiled. “You give me too much credit.”
    “It’s what Mary used to say. She liked to brag about you, you know.
He always gets his man.
”
    But at what cost? he wondered, his smile fading. He remembered all the nights away at crime scenes, the missed dinners, the weekends when his mind was occupied only by thoughts of work. And there had been Mary, patiently waiting for his attention.
If I had just one day to relive, I would spend every minute of it with you. Holding you in bed. Whispering secrets beneath warm sheets.
    But God grants no such second chances.
    “She was so proud of you,” Rose said.
    “I was proud of her.”
    “You had twenty good years together. That’s more than most people can say.”
    “I’m greedy, Rose. I wanted more.”
    “And you’re angry you didn’t get it.”
    “Yes, I suppose I am. I’m angry that she had to be the one with the aneurysm. That she was the one they couldn’t save. And I’m angry that—” He stopped. Released a deep breath. “I’m sorry. It’s just hard. Everything is so hard these days.”
    “For both of us,” she said softly.
    They gazed at each other in silence. Yes, of course it would be even harder for widowed Rose, who had lost her only child. He wondered whether she would forgive him if he ever remarried. Or would she consider it a betrayal? The consignment of her daughter’s memory to an even deeper grave?
    Suddenly he found he could not hold her gaze, and he glanced away with a twinge of guilt. The same guilt he’d felt earlier that afternoon when he’d looked at Catherine Cordell and felt the unmistakable stirring of desire.
    He set down his empty glass and rose to his feet. “I should be going.”
    “So it’s back to work already?”
    “It doesn’t stop until we catch him.”
    She saw him to the door and stood there as he walked through the tiny garden to the front gate. He turned and said, “Lock your doors, Rose.”
    “Oh, you always say that.”
    “I always mean it, too.” He gave a wave and walked away, thinking:
Tonight more than ever.
     
    Where we go depends on what we know, and what we know depends on where we go.
    The rhyme kept repeating in Jane Rizzoli’s head like an irritating childhood ditty as she stared at the Boston map tacked on a large corkboard on her apartment wall. She had hung the map the day after Elena Ortiz’s body was discovered. As the investigation wore on, she had stuck more and more colored pins on the map. There were three different colors representing three different women. White for Elena Ortiz. Blue for Diana Sterling. Green for Nina Peyton. Each marked a known location within the woman’s sphere of activity. Her residence, her place of employment. The homes of close friends or relatives. Which medical facility she visited. In short, the habitat of the prey. Somewhere in the course of her day-to-day activities, each woman’s world had intersected with the Surgeon’s.
    Where we go depends on what we know, and what we know depends on where we go.
    And where did the Surgeon go? she wondered. What made up
his
world?
    She sat eating her cold supper of a tuna sandwich and potato chips washed down with beer, studying the map as she chewed. She had hung the map on the wall next to her dining