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

souls it had cleaved in two. He remembered what Catherine had told him: that every rape victim’s life was divided into
before
and
after
. A sexual assault turns a woman’s world into a bleak and unfamiliar landscape in which every smile, every bright moment, is tainted with despair. Weeks ago he might scarcely have registered Crowe’s laughter. Tonight, he heard it only too well, and he recognized its ugliness.
    He went into the living room, where the black man was being questioned by Detective Sleeper.
    “I’m telling you, we were just hanging out,” the man said.
    “You just hang out with six hundred bucks in your pocket?”
    “I like to carry cash, man.”
    “What’d you come to buy?”
    “Nothin’.”
    “How do you know Pacheco?”
    “I just do.”
    “Oh, a real
close
friend. What was he selling?”
    GHB, thought Moore. The date rape drug. That’s what he’d come to buy. Another busy dick.
    He walked out into the night and felt immediately disoriented by the pulsing lights of the cruisers. Rizzoli’s car was gone. He stared at the empty space and the burden of what he’d done, what he’d felt compelled to do, suddenly weighed so heavily on his shoulders that he could not move. Never in his career had he faced such a terrible choice, and even though he knew in his heart he’d made the right decision, he was tormented by it. He tried to reconcile his respect for Rizzoli with what he had seen her do on the rooftop. It wasn’t too late to retract what he’d said to Marquette. It
had
been dark and confusing on the roof; maybe Rizzoli really thought Pacheco had been holding a weapon. Maybe she had seen some gesture, some movement, that Moore had missed. But try as he might, he could not retrieve any memory that justified her actions. He could not interpret what he’d witnessed as anything but a cold-blooded execution.
    When he saw her again, she was hunched at her desk, holding a bag of ice to her cheek. It was after midnight, and he was in no mood for conversation. But she looked up as he walked past and her gaze froze him to the spot.
    “What did you tell Marquette?” she asked.
    “What he wanted to know. How Pacheco ended up dead. I didn’t lie to him.”
    “You son of a bitch.”
    “You think I wanted to tell him the truth?”
    “You had a choice.”
    “So did you, up on that roof. You made the wrong one.”
    “And you never make the wrong choice, do you? You
never
make a mistake.”
    “If I do, I own up to it.”
    “Oh, yeah. Fucking Saint Thomas.”
    He moved to her desk and gazed straight down at her. “You’re one of the best cops I’ve ever worked with. But tonight, you shot a man in cold blood, and I saw it.”
    “You didn’t have to see it.”
    “But I did.”
    “What did we really see up there, Moore? A lot of shadows, a lot of movement. The separation between a right choice and a wrong choice is
this
thin.” She held up two fingers, nearly touching. “And we allow for that. We allow each other the benefit of the doubt.”
    “I tried to.”
    “You didn’t try hard enough.”
    “I won’t lie for another cop. Even if she’s my friend.”
    “Let’s remember who the fucking bad guys are here. Not
us
.”
    “If we start lying, how do we draw the line between
them
and
us
? Where does it end?”
    She took the bag of ice off her face and pointed to her cheek. One eye was swollen shut and the entire left side of her face was blown up like a mottled balloon. The brutal appearance of her injury shocked him. “This is what Pacheco did to me. Not just a friendly little slap, is it? You talk about
them
and
us
. Which side was
he
on? I did the world a favor by blowing him away. No one’s going to miss the Surgeon.”
    “Karl Pacheco was not the Surgeon. You blew away the wrong man.”
    She stared at him, her bruised face a lurid Picasso that was half-grotesque, half-normal. “We had a DNA match! He was the one—”
    “The one who raped Nina Peyton, yes. Nothing about him matches the Surgeon.” He dropped a Hair and Fiber report on her desk.
    “What’s this?”
    “The microscopic on Pacheco’s head hair. Different color, different curl, different cuticle density from the strand in Elena Ortiz’s wound margin. No evidence of bamboo hair.”
    She sat motionless, staring at the lab report. “I don’t understand.”
    “Pacheco raped Nina Peyton. That’s all we can say about him with any certainty.”
    “Both Sterling and Ortiz were raped—”
    “We