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

flipping between channels, what his hand really itched to do was call Catherine. Watching the last crime scene video had brought home exactly what sort of monster now stalked her, and he could not rest easy.
    Twice he picked up the phone and put it down again. He picked it up yet again, and this time his fingers moved of their own accord, punching in a number he knew so well. Four rings, and he got Catherine’s answering machine.
    He hung up without leaving a message.
    He stared at the phone, ashamed by how easily his resolve had crumbled. He had promised himself to hold fast, had agreed to Marquette’s demand that he maintain his distance from Catherine for the duration of the investigation.
When all this is over, somehow I will make things right between us.
    He looked at the stack of Atlanta documents on the desk. It was midnight and he had not even started. With a sigh, he opened the first file from the Atlanta box.
    The case of Dora Ciccone, Andrew Capra’s first victim, did not make for appetizing reading. He already knew the general details; they’d been summarized in Singer’s final report. But Moore had not read the raw reports from Atlanta, and now he was going back in time, examining the earliest work of Andrew Capra. This was where it all started. In Atlanta.
    He read the initial crime report, then progressed through files of interviews. He read statements from Ciccone’s neighbors, from the bartender in the local watering hole where she was last seen alive, and from the girlfriend who discovered the body. There was also a file with a list of suspects and their photographs; Capra was not among them.
    Dora Ciccone was a twenty-two-year-old grad student at Emory. On the night of her death, she was last seen around midnight, sipping a Margarita at La Cantina. Forty hours later, her body was discovered in her home, nude and tied to the bed with nylon cord. Her uterus had been removed and her neck slashed.
    He found the police timeline. It was only a rough sketch in barely legible writing, as though the Atlanta detective had put it together merely to satisfy some internal checklist. He could almost smell failure in these pages, could read it in the depressive droop of the detective’s handwriting. He himself had experienced that heavy feeling that builds in your chest as you pass the twenty-four-hour mark, then a week, then a month, and you still have no tangible leads. This was what the Atlanta detective had—nothing. Dora Ciccone’s killer remained an unknown subject.
    He opened the autopsy report.
    The butchery of Dora Ciccone had been neither as swift nor as skillful as Capra’s later killings. Incisional jags indicated Capra lacked the confidence to make a single clean cut across the lower abdomen. Instead he had hesitated, his blade backtracking, macerating the skin. Once through the skin layer, the procedure degenerated to amateurish hacking, the blade deeply nicking both bladder and bowel as he excavated his prize. On this, his first victim, no suture was used to tie off any arteries. The bleeding was profuse, and Capra would have been working blind, his anatomical landmarks submerged in an ever-deepening pool of crimson.
    Only the coup de grace was performed with any skill. It had been done in one clean slash, left to right, as though, with his hunger now sated and the frenzy fading, he was finally in control and could finish the job with cold efficiency.
    Moore set aside the autopsy report and confronted the remains of his dinner, sitting on a tray beside him. Suddenly queasy, he carried the tray to the door and set it outside in the hall. Then he returned to the desk and opened the next folder, which contained the crime lab reports.
    The first sheet was a microscopic:
Spermatozoa identified in swab from victim’s vaginal vault.
    He knew that DNA analysis of this sperm later confirmed it was Capra’s. Prior to killing Dora Ciccone, he had raped her.
    Moore turned to the next page and found a bundle of reports from Hair and Fiber. The victim’s pubic area had been combed and the hairs examined. Among the samples was a reddish-brown pubic hair that matched Capra’s. He flipped through the next few pages of Hair and Fiber reports, which examined various stray hairs found at the crime scene. Most of the samples were from the victim herself, either pubic or head hairs. There was also a short blond strand retrieved from the blanket, later identified as nonhuman, based on the complex structural