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“I saw no other vehicles in the cemetery. Do you know what neighborhood surrounds us, Detective?”
She hesitated. “Dedham’s to the east. Hyde Park north and south.”
“Exactly. Residential neighborhoods on all sides, with lots of places to park a car. From there it’s just a short stroll to this cemetery.”
“Why would the unsub come here?”
“What do we know about him? Our boy is obsessed with the dead. He craves the smell of them, the touch of them. He holds on to corpses until the stench becomes impossible to disguise, to hide. Only then does he surrender the remains. This is a man who probably gets turned on just by walking through a cemetery. So here he was, in the dark, indulging in a little erotic adventure.”
“This is sick.”
“Look into his mind, his universe. We may think it’s sick, but for him, this place is a little slice of paradise. A place where the dead are laid to rest. Just the place the Dominator would come. He walks around here and probably imagines a whole harem of sleeping women right beneath his feet.
“But then he’s disturbed, surprised by the arrival of a security patrol. A guard who’s probably expecting to deal with nothing more dangerous than a few teenagers looking for a little nighttime adventure.”
“And the guard lets a lone man stroll right up and cut his throat?”
Dean was silent. For this he had no explanation. Neither did Rizzoli.
By the time they walked back up the slope, the night was pulsing with blue lights, and her team was already stringing crime scene tape between stakes. Rizzoli stared at the grim carnival of activity and suddenly she felt too weary to deal with any of it. Seldom had she questioned her own judgment, doubted her own instincts. But tonight, faced with the evidence of her failure, she wondered if Gabriel Dean wasn’t right-that she had no business leading this investigation. That the trauma inflicted on her by Warren Hoyt had so damaged her that she could no longer function as a cop. Tonight she had made the wrong choice, had refused to release anyone from her team to answer the call for a premises check. We were only a mile away. Sitting in our cars, waiting for nothing, while this man was dying.
The string of defeats had piled up so heavily on her shoulders that she felt her back sag as though under the weight of real stones. She returned to her car and flipped open her cell phone; Frost answered.
“Yellow Cab dispatcher confirms the cabbie’s story,” he told her. “They got the call at two-sixteen. Male claiming his car was out of gas on E
“Our boy’s not stupid. The call’s going to lead nowhere. A pay phone. Or a stolen cell phone. Shit.” She slapped the dashboard.
“So what about the cabbie? He comes up clean.”
“Release him.”
“You sure?”
“It was all a game, Frost. The unsub knew we’d be waiting for him. He’s playing with us. Demonstrating he’s in control. That he’s smarter than us.” And he just proved it.
She hung up and sat for a moment, collecting the energy to step out of the car and face what came next. Another death investigation. All the questions that would surely follow about her decisions tonight. She thought of how fiercely she had pi
Several of the cops standing by the crime scene tape turned and looked her way-a signal that, tired as she was, she could not hide in her car much longer. She remembered Korsak’s thermos of coffee; awful as it was, she could use the shot of caffeine. She reached around to retrieve the thermos behind her seat and suddenly stopped.
She looked up at the law enforcement perso
She stepped out of the car and approached Officer Doud, who’d been part of the stakeout team. “Have you seen Detective Korsak?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
“He wasn’t here when you arrived? He wasn’t waiting by the body?”
“I haven’t seen him here at all.”
She stared toward the trees, where she had encountered Gabriel Dean. Korsak was ru
She began walking toward the trees, retracing the route she had run across the cemetery. During that sprint, she’d been so focused on pursuit that she’d paid little attention to Korsak, who’d trailed behind her. She remembered her own fear, the pounding heart, the night wind rushing past her face. She remembered his heavy breathing as he’d struggled to keep up. Then he’d fallen behind, and she’d lost track of him.
She moved faster now, her flashlight sweeping left and right. Was this the route she’d taken? No, no, she’d gone down a different row of headstones. She recognized an obelisk looming to the left.
Correcting course, she headed for the obelisk and almost tripped over Korsak’s legs.
He lay crumpled beside a headstone, the shadow of his bulky torso merging with the granite. At once she was on her knees, screaming for assistance as she rolled him onto his back. One glance at his swollen, dusky face told her he was in cardiac arrest.
She felt his neck, wanting so desperately to detect a carotid pulse that she almost mistook the bounding pulse of her own fingers for his. But he had none.
She slammed her fist down on his chest. Even that violent punch did not jolt his heart awake.
She tilted his head back and tugged his sagging jaw forward to open the airway. So many things about Korsak had once repelled her. The smell of his sweat and cigarettes, his noisy sniffling, his doughy handshake. None of that registered now as she sealed her mouth against his and blew air into his lungs. She felt his chest expand, heard a noisy wheeze as his lungs expelled the air again. She planted her hands on his chest and began CPR, doing the work his heart refused to do. She kept pumping as other cops arrived to assist, as her arms began to tremble and sweat soaked into her vest. Even as she pumped, she was mentally flogging herself. How had she overlooked him, lying here? Why hadn’t she noticed his absence? Her muscles burned and her knees ached, but she did not stop. She owed that much to him and would not abandon him a second time.
An ambulance siren screamed closer.
She was still pumping as the paramedics arrived. Only when someone took her arm and firmly tugged her away did she relinquish her role. She stood back, legs trembling, as the paramedics took over, inserting an I.V. line, hanging a bag of saline. They tilted Korsak’s head back and thrust a laryngoscope blade down his throat.
“I can’t see the vocal cords!”
“Jesus, he’s got a big neck.”
“Help me reposition.”
“Okay. Try it again!”
Again the paramedic inserted the laryngoscope, straining to hold up the weight of Korsak’s jaw. With his massive neck and swollen tongue, Korsak looked like a freshly slaughtered bull.
“Tube’s in!”
They tore away the rest of Korsak’s shirt, baring a thick mat of hair, and slapped on defibrillator paddles. On the EKG monitor, a jagged line appeared.
“He’s in V-tach!”
The paddles discharged, a jolt of electrical current slicing through Korsak’s chest. The seizure jerked his heavy torso right off the grass and dropped him back in a flaccid mound. The cops’ multiple flashlight beams revealed every cruel detail, from the pale beer belly to the almost feminine breasts that are the embarrassment of so many overweight men.
“Okay! He’s got a rhythm. Sinus tach-”