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“And returning to Boston on Thursday, there’s a US Airways flight six-four-oh-six, leaving Washington nine-thirty A.M., arriving Boston ten-fifty-three.”
“I’m staying there overnight?”
“That was the request from Agent Dean. We have you booked into the Watergate Hotel, unless there’s another hotel you’d prefer.”
“No. The, uh, Watergate will be fine.”
“A limousine will pick you up at your apartment at ten o’clock tomorrow and take you to the airport. There’ll be another one to meet you when you arrive in D.C. May I have your fax number, please?”
Moments later, Rizzoli’s fax machine began to print. She sat on the bed, staring at the neatly typed itinerary and bewildered by the speed with which events were unfolding. At that moment, more than anything, she longed to talk to Thomas Moore, to ask for his advice. She reached for the phone, then slowly put it down again. Dean’s caution had thoroughly spooked her, and she no longer trusted the security of her own phone line.
It suddenly occurred to her that she had not performed her nightly ritual of checking the apartment. Now she felt driven to confirm that all was secure in her fortress. She reached in the nightstand drawer and took out her weapon. Then, as she had done every night for the past year, she went from room to room, searching for monsters.
Dear Dr. O’Do
In your last letter, you asked me at what point did I know that I was different from everyone else. To be honest, I’m not certain that I am different. I think that I am simply more honest, more aware. More in touch with the same primitive urges that whisper to us all.
I’m certain that you also hear these whispers, that forbidden images must sometimes flash through your mind like lightning, illuminating, just for an instant, the bloody landscape of your dark subconscious. Or you’ll walk through the woods and spot a bright and unusual bird, and your very first impulse, before the boot heel of higher morality crushes it, is the urge to hunt it down. To kill it.
It is an instinct preordained by our DNA. We are all hunters, seasoned through the eons in nature’s bloody crucible. In this, I am no different from you or anyone else, and I find it some source of amusement how many psychologists and psychiatrists have paraded through my life these past twelve months, seeking to understand me, probing my childhood, as though somewhere in my past there was a moment, an incident, which turned me into the creature I am today. I’m afraid I have disappointed them all, because there was no such defining moment. Rather, I have turned their questions around. Instead I ask them why they think they are any different? Surely they have entertained images they’re ashamed of, images that horrify them, images they ca
I watch, amused, as they deny it. They lie to me, the way they lie to themselves, but I see the uncertainty in their eyes. I like to push them to the edge, force them to stare over the precipice, into the dark well of their fantasies.
The only difference between them and me is that I am neither ashamed nor horrified by mine.
But I am classified the sick one. I am the one who needs to be analyzed. So I tell them all the things they secretly want to hear, things I know will fascinate them. During the hour or so in which they visit me, I indulge their curiosity, because that’s the real reason they’ve come to see me. No one else will stoke their fantasies the way I can. No one else will take them to such forbidden territory. Even as they are trying to profile me, I am profiling them, measuring their appetite for blood. As I talk, I watch their faces for the telltales signs of excitement. The dilated pupils. The craning forward of the neck. The flushed cheeks, the bated breath.
I tell them about my visit to San Gimignano, a town perched in the rolling hills of Tuscany. Strolling among the souvenir shops and the outdoor cafes, I came across a museum devoted entirely to the subject of torture. Right, as you know, up my alley. It is dim inside, the poor lighting meant to reproduce the atmosphere of a medieval dungeon. The gloom also obscures the expressions of the tourists, sparing them the shame of revealing just how eagerly they stare at the displays.
One display in particular draws everyone’s attention: a Venetian device, dating back to the 1600s, designed to punish women found guilty of sexual congress with Satan. Made of iron, and fashioned into the shape of a pear, it is inserted into the vagina of the unlucky accused. With each turn of a screw, the pear expands, until the cavity ruptures with fatal results. The vaginal pear is only one device in an array of ancient instruments meant to mutilate breasts and genitals in the name of the holy church, which could not abide the sexual powers of women. I am perfectly matter-of-fact as I describe these devices to my doctors, most of whom have never visited such a museum and who would no doubt be embarrassed to admit any desire to see one. But even as I tell them about the four-clawed breast rippers and the mutilating chastity belts, I am watching their eyes. Searching beneath their surface repulsion and horror, to see the undercurrent of excitement. Arousal. Oh yes, they all want to hear the details.
As the plane touched down, Rizzoli closed the file on Warren Hoyt’s letter and looked out the window. She saw gray skies, heavy with rain, and sweat gleaming on the faces of workers standing on the tarmac. It would be a steam bath outside, but she welcomed the heat, because Hoyt’s words so deeply chilled her.
In the limo ride to the hotel, she stared out through tinted windows at a city she had visited only twice before, the last time for an interagency conference at the FBI’s Hoover Building. On that visit, she had arrived at night, and she remembered how awed she’d been at the sight of the memorials, aglow in floodlights. She remembered a week of hard partying and how she’d tried to match the men beer for beer, bad joke for bad joke. How booze and hormones and a strange city had all added up to a night of desperate sex with a fellow conference attendee, a cop from Providence-married, of course. This was what Washington meant to her: The city of regrets and stained sheets. The city that had taught her she was not immune to the temptations of a bad cliché. That although she might think she was the equal of any man, when it came to the morning after, she was the one who felt vulnerable.
In line at the Watergate Hotel registration desk, she eyed the stylish blonde ahead of her. Perfect hair, red shoes with sky-high heels. A woman who looked as if she actually belonged at the Watergate. Rizzoli was painfully aware of her own scuffed and cloddish blue pumps. Girl-cop shoes, meant to be walked in, and walked in a lot. No need for excuses, she thought. This is me; this is who I am. The girl from Revere who hunts monsters for a living. High heels are not what hunters wear.
“May I help you, ma’am?” a clerk called to her.
Rizzoli wheeled her bag to the counter. “There should be a reservation. Rizzoli.”
“Yes, your name’s right here. And there’s a message from a Mr. Dean. Your meeting’s scheduled at three-thirty.”
“Meeting?”
He glanced up from his computer screen. “You didn’t know about it?”
“I guess I do now. Is there an address?”
“No, ma’am. But a car will be here to pick you up at three.” He handed her a key card and smiled. “Looks like you’re all taken care of.”
Black clouds smeared the sky, and the tingle of an approaching thunderstorm lifted the hair on her arms. She stood just outside the lobby, sweating in the rain-heavy air, and waited for the limo to arrive. But it was a dark-blue Volvo that swung into the porte cochere and stopped beside her.