The Keepsake

“That’s probably where I’ll find Bradley,” said Jane. “Under a rock.”

He walked out, slamming the door behind him.

“That,” said Marquette, “was not a smart thing to say.”

She sighed and picked up the photo from his desk. “I know,” she admitted.

“How certain are you that Bradley Rose is our man?”

“Ninety-nine percent.”

“You’d better be ninety-nine point nine percent certain. Because you just saw who we’re dealing with. Now his wife’s in the hospital and he’s gone ballistic. He has the money-and the co

“Then let him make our lives miserable. It doesn’t change the fact that his son is guilty.”

“We can’t afford any more screwups, Rizzoli. Your team’s already made one huge mistake, and that young woman paid for it.”

If he’d intended to wound her, he couldn’t have done a better job. She felt her stomach clench as she stood gripping the file, as though that bundle of papers could salve her guilty conscience about Josephine’s abduction.

“But you know that,” he said quietly.

“Yes. I know that,” she said. And that mistake will haunt me until the day I die.

TWENTY-SEVEN

The house where Nicholas Robinson lived was in Chelsea, not far from the blue-collar Revere neighborhood, where Jane had grown up. Like Jane’s childhood home, Robinson’s was a modest house with a covered front porch and a tiny patch of a yard. In the front garden grew the biggest tomato plants that Jane had ever seen, but the recent heavy rains had cracked the fruit, and a number of overripe globes hung rotting on the vines. The neglected plants should have warned her about Robinson’s state of mind. When he opened the door, she was startled by how drained and haggard he looked, his hair uncombed, his shirt wrinkled as though he’d been sleeping in it for days.

“Is there any news?” he asked, anxiously searching her face.

“I’m sorry, but there isn’t. May I come in, Dr. Robinson?”

He gave a weary nod. “Of course.”

In her parents’ Revere home, the TV was the centerpiece of the living room, and the coffee table was littered with various remotes that had cloned themselves over the years. But in Robinson’s living room she saw no television at all, no entertainment center, and not a remote device in sight. Instead there were shelves filled with books and figurines and bits of pottery, and on the wall hung framed maps of the ancient world. It was every inch an impoverished academic’s house, but there was an orderliness to the clutter, as though every knickknack was precisely where it should be.

He glanced around the room as though uncertain what to do next, then helplessly waved his hands. “I’m sorry. I should offer you something to drink, shouldn’t I? I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.”

“I’m fine, thank you. Why don’t we just sit down and talk?”

They sank onto comfortable but well-worn chairs. Outside a motorcycle roared past, but inside the house, with its shell-shocked owner, there was silence. He said softly: “I don’t know what I should do.”

“I’ve heard the museum may be closed permanently.”

“I wasn’t talking about the museum. I meant Josephine. I’d do anything to help you find her, but what can I do?” He gestured to his books, his maps. “ Thisis what I’m good at. Collecting and cataloging! Interpreting useless details from the past. What purpose does it serve her, I ask you? It doesn’t help Josephine.” He looked down in defeat. “It didn’t save Simon.”

“Maybe you can help us.”

He looked at her with exhaustion-hollowed eyes. “Ask me. Tell me what you need.”

“I’ll start with this question. What was your relationship with Josephine?”

He frowned. “Relationship?”

“She was more than a colleague, I think.” A lot more, judging by what she saw in his face.

He shook his head. “Look at me, Detective. I’m fourteen years older than she is. I’m hopelessly myopic, I barely make a living, and I’m starting to go bald. Why would someone like her want someone like me?”

“So she wasn’t interested in a romantic relationship.”

“I can’t imagine she would be.”

“You mean you don’t actually know? You never asked?”

He gave an embarrassed laugh. “I didn’t have the nerve to actually get the words out. And I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. It might have ruined what we did have.”

“What was that?”

He smiled. “She’s like me-she’s so much like me. Hand us an old bone fragment or a rusted blade, and we can both feel the heat of history in it. That’s what we had in common, a passion for what came before us. That would have been enough, just being able to share that much.” His head drooped and he admitted: “I was afraid to ask for more than that.”

“Why?”

“Because of how beautiful she is,” he said, his words soft as a prayer.

“Was that one of the reasons you hired her?”

She could see that her question instantly offended him. His face tightened and he straightened. “I would never hire on the basis of physical appearance. My only standards are competence and experience.”

“Yet Josephine had almost no experience on her résumé. She was fresh from a doctoral program. You took her on as consultant, yet she was far less qualified than you are.”

“But I’m not an Egyptologist. That’s why Simon told me he was bringing in a consultant. I suppose I should have felt a bit insulted, but to be honest, I knew I wasn’t qualified to evaluate Madam X. I do acknowledge my own limits.”

“There must have been Egyptologists more qualified than Josephine to choose from.”

“I’m sure there were.”

“You don’t know?”

“Simon made the decision. After I advertised the job opening, we received dozens of résumés. I was in the process of narrowing down the choices when Simon told me he’d already made the decision. Josephine wouldn’t have made even my first cut, but he insisted she had to be the one. And somehow, he found the extra funds to hire her full-time.”

“What do you mean, he found the extra funds?”

“A substantial donation came in. Mummies have that effect, you know. They get donors excited, make them more willing to open their wallets. When you’ve worked in archaeological circles as long as Simon did, you learn who has the deep pockets. You know whom to ask for money.”

“But why did he choose Josephine? That’s the question I keep coming back to. Of all the Egyptologists he could have hired, all the freshly minted PhDs who must have applied, why was she hired?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t enthusiastic about the choice, but I saw no point in arguing because I had the impression that he’d already made up his mind, and there was nothing I could do to change it.” Robinson sighed and looked out the window. “And then I met her,” he said softly. “And I realized there was no one else I’d rather work with. No one else I’d rather…” He fell silent.

On that street of modest homes, the sound of traffic was constant, yet this living room seemed to be a trapped in a different and more genteel era, a time when a rumpled eccentric like Nicholas Robinson might contentedly grow old while surrounded by his books and maps. But he had fallen in love, and there was no contentment in his face, only anguish.

“She’s alive,” he said. “I need to believe that.” He looked at Jane. “ Youbelieve it, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do,” she said. She looked away before he could read the rest of the answer in her eyes. But I don’t know if we can save her.