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

long-haired. Very much like Catherine’s.
    He saw it now, in his mind’s eye. The young man on the porch, knocking on the front door. The door opening, spilling golden light into the darkness. Catherine standing there, haloed by that light, inviting in the young colleague she knew from the hospital, never suspecting the horrors he had in mind for her.
    And the second voice, the second man—where does he come in?
    Moore sat for a long time, studying the house, noting the windows and the shrubbery. He stepped out of his car and walked along the sidewalk, to see around the side of the house. The shrubbery was mature and dense, and he could not see past it, into the backyard.
    Across the street, a porch light came on.
    He turned and saw a stout woman standing at her window, staring at him. She was holding a telephone to her ear.
    He got back in his car and drove away. There was one more address he wished to see. It was near the State College, several miles south. He wondered how often Catherine had driven this very road, whether that little pizza shop on the left or that dry-cleaning shop on the right was a place she had frequented. Everywhere he looked, he seemed to see her face, and this disturbed him. It meant he’d allowed his emotions to become entwined in this investigation, and it would serve no one well.
    He arrived at the street he’d been looking for. After a few blocks, he stopped at what should have been the address. What he found was merely an empty lot, thick with weeds. He had expected to find a building here, owned by Mrs. Stella Poole, a widow, age fifty-eight. Three years ago, Mrs. Poole had rented out her upstairs apartment to a surgical intern named Andrew Capra, a quiet young man who always paid his rent on time.
    He stepped out of his car and stood on the sidewalk where Andrew Capra had surely walked. He gazed up and down the street that had been Capra’s neighborhood. It was only a few blocks from the State College, and he assumed that many of the houses on this street were rented to students—short-term tenants who might not know the story of their infamous neighbor.
    A wind stirred the soupy air, and he did not like the smell that arose. It was the damp odor of decay. He looked up at a tree in Andrew Capra’s old front yard and saw a clump of Spanish moss drooping from a branch. He shuddered and thought:
Strange fruit
, remembering a grotesque Halloween from his childhood, when a neighbor, thinking it a fine display to scare trick-or-treaters, had tied a rope around a scarecrow’s neck and hung it from a tree. Moore’s father had been livid when he saw it. Immediately he’d stormed next door and, ignoring the protests of the neighbor, cut down the scarecrow.
    Moore felt the same impulse now, to climb into the tree and yank down that dangling moss.
    Instead he returned to his car and drove back to the hotel.
     
    Detective Mark Singer set a carton on the table and clapped dust from his hands. “This is the last one. Took us the weekend to track ’em down, but they’re all here.”
    Moore eyed the dozen evidence boxes lined up on the table and said, “I should bring a sleeping bag and just move in.”
    Singer laughed. “Might as well, if you expect to get through every piece of paper in those there boxes. Nothin’ leaves the building, okay? Photocopier’s down the hall; just log in your name and agency. Bathroom’s thataway. Most times, there’ll be doughnuts and coffee in the squad room. If you take any doughnuts, the boys’d surely ‘preciate it if you’d slip a few bucks in the jar.” Though all this was said with a smile, Moore heard the underlying message in that soft southern drawl:
We have our ground rules, and even you big boys from Boston have to follow them.
    Catherine had not liked this cop, and Moore understood why. Singer was younger than he’d expected, not yet forty, a muscular overachiever who would not take kindly to criticism. There can be only one alpha dog in a pack, and for the moment Moore would let Singer be that dog.
    “These here four boxes, they hold the investigation control files,” said Singer. “Might want to start with ’em. Cross-index files’re in that box, action files are in this one here.” He walked along the table, slapping boxes as he spoke. “And this has the Atlanta files on Dora Ciccone. It’s just photocopies.”
    “Atlanta PD has those originals?”
    Singer nodded. “First victim, only one he killed there.”
    “Since