Last to Die

TWENTY-THREE

JANE HAD TO ADMIT, DARREN CROWE LOOKED GOOD ON TV. SITTING at her desk in the homicide unit, she watched the interview on the department’s TV, admiring Crowe’s sharp suit, blow-dried hair, and those dazzling teeth. She wondered if he’d bleached his teeth himself with a drugstore whitening kit, or if he’d paid a professional to polish up the pearly whites.

“Reuben with double sauerkraut,” said Frost, setting a sandwich bag on her desk. He dropped into the chair beside hers and unwrapped his usual lunch, a turkey on white, no lettuce.

“Look how that reporter’s ogling him,” Jane said, pointing to the blond correspondent interviewing Crowe. “I swear, any second now she’s gonna rip off her blazer and scream, Take me, Officer!”

“No one ever says that to me.” Frost sighed, resignedly biting into his sandwich.

“He’s milking this like a pro. Oh look, here he comes with the deep thoughts expression.”

“I saw him practicing that look in the john.”

“Deep thoughts?” She snorted as she unwrapped her Reuben sandwich. “Like he has any. The way he’s staring at that chick, he’s thinking more along the lines of deep throat.”

They sat eating their sandwiches as they watched Crowe on TV describing the Zapata takedown. Could have surrendered, but chose to run … We exercised restraint at all times … clearly the actions of a guilty man …

Her appetite suddenly gone, Jane put down her Reuben.

Illegal aliens like Zapata who bring their violence to this country will be dealt with. That’s my pledge to the good citizens of Boston.

“This is bullshit,” she said. “Just like that, he’s got Zapata tried and convicted.”

Frost didn’t say anything, simply kept eating his turkey sandwich as if nothing else mattered, and that annoyed her. Usually she appreciated her partner’s unflappability. No drama, no meltdowns, just a maddeningly even-keeled Boy Scout who now reminded her of a cow calmly chewing grass.

“Hey,” she said. “Doesn’t this bother you?”

He looked at her, his mouth full of turkey. “I know it bothers you.”

“But you’re okay with it? Closing the book when we’ve got no murder weapon, nothing in Zapata’s possession that ties him to the Ackermans?”

“I didn’t say I was okay with it.”

“Now Cop Hollywood’s on TV there, wrapping it all up like a Christmas present. A present that stinks. It should piss you off.”

“I guess.”

“Does anything piss you off?”

He took another bite of turkey and chewed, thinking over the question. “Yeah,” he finally said. “Alice.”

“Ex-wives are supposed to do that.”

“You asked.”

“Well, this case should, too. Or bug you, at least, the way it’s bugging me and Maura.”

At the mention of Maura’s name, he finally set down his sandwich and looked at her. “What does Dr. Isles think?”

“Same thing I do, that these three kids are somehow connected. Their psychologist has just jumped off a roof, and Maura’s wondering, What is it about these kids that kills everyone close to them? It’s as if they’re cursed. Everywhere they go, someone dies.”

“And now they’re all together in one place.”

Evensong. She thought of dark woods where willow trees were hung with blood-splattered ornaments. Thought of a castle where the occupants themselves were haunted, all of them living in the shadow of violence. Both Teddy and Maura were there behind locked gates, with children who were all too well acquainted with bloodshed.

“Rizzoli.” The voice startled her, and she snapped around in her chair to see Lieutenant Marquette standing behind her. At once she grabbed the remote and shut off the TV.

“Not enough to do around here?” Marquette said. “You two watching soap operas now?”

“Biggest soap opera of them all,” she said. “Detective Crowe telling the good people of Boston how he single-handedly took down the evil genius Zapata.”

Marquette cocked his head. “I need you in my office.”

She saw Frost’s look of uh-oh as she stood up, and she followed Marquette in a brisk march into his office. He closed the door. She waited until he’d settled into his own chair before she sat down. Tried to keep her gaze steady as he stared at her across his desk.

“You and Crowe are never going to agree on anything, are you?” he said.

“What’s his complaint about me now?”

“The lack of a unified front on the Ackerman case. The fact you keep raising questions about a rush to judgment.”

“Guilty as charged,” she conceded. “I think it is a rush to judgment.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard all your objections. But you have to see how this looks, if the press gets wind of what you’re saying. It’d be a PR nightmare. This case has already gotten everyone’s attention. Wealthy family, dead kids, everything that Nancy Grace loves. It also has a villain that half of America loves to hate, an illegal immigrant. Zapata was everyone’s dream perp. Best of all, he’s dead and the case is closed. A fairy-tale ending.”

“If nightmares were fairy tales,” she said.

“After all, they do call them the Brothers Grimm.”

“The public’s satisfied, so you’re saying I should shut up and be satisfied, too?”

He leaned back in his chair. “Sometimes, Rizzoli, you really are a pain in the butt.”

“I’ve been hearing that a lot lately.”

“Which is why you make a good investigator. You poke and you prod. You go digging holes where no one else wants to. I read your report on the three kids. Semtex in New Hampshire? A plane bombed in Maryland? This thing is looking like one hell of a big graveyard.” He paused, fingers tapping his desk as he studied her. “So go ahead. Do your thing.”

She wasn’t sure what he was saying. “My thing?”

“Dig. Officially, the Ackerman case is closed. Unofficially, I’ve got doubts, too. But you’re the only one who knows it.”

“Can I bring Frost aboard? I could use him.”

“I cannot commit any more resources to this. I’m not even sure I should let you spend time on it.”

“So why are you?”

He leaned forward, his eyes on hers. “Look, I’d love to close this case right now and call it a win. I want our statistics to look good, of course I do. But just like you, I’ve got instincts. Sometimes we’re forced to ignore those gut feelings, and when it turns out we were right all along, we kick ourselves. I don’t want it someday shoved in my face that I shut this down too fast.”

“So we’re covering our asses.”

“Anything wrong with that?” he snapped.

“Not a thing.”

“Okay.” He leaned back again. “What’s your plan?”

She had to think about this for a moment, consider which of the unanswered questions demanded priority. And she decided that her number one question was: What did the Wards, the Yablonskis, and the Clocks have in common, aside from the manner of their deaths? Did they know one another?

She said: “I need to go to Maryland.”

“Why Maryland?”

“Will Yablonski’s father worked at NASA-Goddard. So did Will’s uncle, Brian Temple. I want to talk to their colleagues at NASA. Maybe they know why that plane went down. And why Brian and his wife were so quick to get their nephew out of Maryland and move him to New Hampshire.”

“Where their farmhouse blows up.”

She nodded. “This whole thing’s starting to look very big and very bad. Which is why I want Frost along, to help me sort it out.”

After a moment, he nodded. “Okay, you got Frost. I’ll give you three days on this.”

“We’re on it. Thank you.” She stood up.

“Rizzoli?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Keep it quiet. Don’t tell anyone in the unit, especially Crowe. As far as the public is concerned, the Ackerman case is closed.”

“YOU KNOW HOW THAT old saying goes, It doesn’t take a rocket scientist?” said Frost as they drove through the Goddard Space Flight Center campus. “Well, now we’re going to be hanging out with real rocket scientists! That’s so amazing. I mean, look out the window and just think about the average IQ of these guys you see walking around here.”

“What does that make us, birdbrains?”

“All that math and chemistry and physics they’ve gotta know. I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to launch a rocket.”

“You mean you never shot up one of those toy rockets with vinegar and baking soda?”

“Yeah, right. Like that’s how we got to the moon.”

She pulled into a parking stall in front of the Exploration Sciences Building, and they both clipped on the NASA visitor badges that they’d picked up at the entrance gate.

“Man, I hope I get to keep this,” he said, fondling his badge. “It’d be such a cool souvenir.”

“Can you dial down the geek worship a little bit? You sound like a Trekkie, and frankly, that is so embarrassing.”

“I am a Trekkie.” As they stepped out of the car, he raised his hand in a Vulcan salute. “Live long and—”

“Don’t do that while we’re in there, okay?”

“Hey, look at that!” He pointed to the bumper sticker on one of the cars in the parking lot. “BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY!”

“So?”

“So these are my people!”

“Then maybe they’ll keep you,” she muttered as she stretched the kinks from her back. They had caught an early-morning flight to Baltimore, and as they walked into the building, she glanced around hoping to spot a coffee machine. Instead she saw an enormous man waddling their direction.

“You the folks from Boston?” he asked.

“Dr. Bartusek?” said Jane. “I’m Detective Rizzoli. This is my partner, Detective Frost.”

“Call me Bert.” Grinning, Bartusek grabbed her hand and gave it an enthusiastic shake. “Big-city homicide detectives! I bet you folks have really interesting jobs.”

“Not as interesting as yours,” said Frost.

“Mine?” Bartusek snorted. “Nowhere as cool as hunting down killers.”

“My partner here thinks it’s way cooler to work for NASA,” said Jane.

“Well, you know what they say about the grass on the other side of the fence,” Bartusek said with a laugh as he waved them down the hall. “Come on, let’s go sit in my office. The guys upstairs gave me full clearance to talk to you. ’Course, what else am I going to do, when a cop asks me questions? If I don’t answer, you might arrest me!” He led them down the corridor, and Jane imagined she could almost feel the building shake with each ponderous step he took. “I’ve got a lot of questions myself,” he said. “Me and my colleagues, we all want to know what happened to Neil and Olivia. You speak to Detective Parris yet?”

“We’re meeting with him this evening,” said Jane. “Assuming he gets back from Florida in time.”

“Parris seemed like a smart cop when I met him. Asked me just about every possible question. But I don’t think he ever came up with an answer.” He glanced at Jane. “Two years later, I’m wondering if you’ll be able to.”

“You have any theories about that plane crash?”

He shook his head. “Never made sense to any of us, why anyone would want to kill Neil. A good guy, a really good guy. We talked about it a lot here, and we went down all the possible reasons. Did he owe someone money? Did he tick off the wrong people? Was it a crime of passion?”

“Is that a possibility, a crime of passion?” asked Frost. “He or his wife having an affair?”

Bartusek stopped outside a doorway, his massive girth blocking any view into the room. “I didn’t think it was possible at the time. I mean, they were such regular people. But then, you never know what’s really going on in a marriage, do you?” He gave a sad shake of the head and stepped into his office. On his walls hung a gallery of stunning photos of galaxies and nebulae, like multicolored amoebas.

“Wow. The Horsehead Nebula,” said Frost, admiring one of the photos.

“You know your night sky, Detective.”

Jane glanced at her partner. “You really are a Trekkie.”

“Told you so.” Frost moved on to another photograph. “I see your name here, Dr. Bartusek. You took these?”

“Astrophotography’s a hobby of mine. You’d think, after spending my day studying the universe, I’d go home and take photos of birds or flowers. But no, I keep my eye on the sky. Always have.” He squeezed in behind his desk and sank into a massive chair, setting off a loud groan of the springs. “You might call it an obsession.”

“Is that true for all rocket scientists?” asked Frost.

“Well, technically speaking, I’m not really a rocket scientist. Those are the guys who light the candles and blow stuff up. They’d tell you they have the fun jobs.”

“And your job?”

“I’m an astrophysicist. In this building, we’re focused on the research side. My colleagues and I, we formulate a scientific question, and we figure out what kind of data we need to answer it. Maybe we want to sample dust from a passing comet, or we want to do a wide-field infrared survey of the sky. To get that data, we need to launch a special telescope. That’s when we turn to the rocket scientists, who help us get that scope up and into position. We define the purpose of a mission. The rocket engineers design a way to do it. Truth is, we kinda talk different languages. They’re gearheads. They think of us as eggheads.”

“Which was Neil Yablonski?” asked Jane.

“Neil was most definitely an egghead. He and his brother-in-law Brian Temple were the smartest guys around here. Which may be why they were friends. Such good friends, in fact, they were planning a joint trip to Rome with their wives. That’s where Neil and Olivia first met, and they wanted to visit their old romantic haunts.”

“Hardly sounds like a romantic trip if you’re bringing another couple along.”

“Not just any other couple. See, Lynn and Olivia were sisters. Neil and Brian were best friends. So when Lynn and Brian got married, presto, they turned into the four amigos. Brian and Neil had to go to Rome for a meeting anyway, so they thought they’d bring their wives. Man, was Neil looking forward to that trip! Tortured me with all his talk about pasta! Pizza! Fritto misto!” He looked down at his bulging stomach, which suddenly gave a growl. “I think I gained weight just saying those words.”

“But they never made it to Rome?”

Bartusek gave a sad shake of the head. “Three weeks before they were supposed to leave, Neil and Olivia took off for their weekend cottage on the Chesapeake. Neil had a little Cessna he liked to fly down there. Their son, Will, had a science project he needed to work on, so the boy stayed with the Temples. Lucky for the kid, because three minutes after takeoff that Cessna went down in flames. The weather was perfect, and Neil was a very careful pilot. We all assumed it was mechanical. Until Detective Parris and the FBI showed up here a week or so later and started asking a lot of questions. That’s when I realized there was more to the crash than we thought. Parris never came right out and told me, but I read about it later in the newspaper. That the crash was suspicious. That there may have been a bomb aboard that Cessna. Since you folks are now asking about it, I assume it’s true.”

“We’ll discuss that with Detective Parris tonight,” said Jane.

“So it wasn’t an accident. Was it?”

“It appears not.”

Bartusek slumped back against his chair and shook his head. “No wonder Brian freaked out.”

“What do you mean?”

“The day after Neil’s plane went down, Brian came into work white as a sheet. Picked up some of his research papers, said he was going to work from home for a few days, because Lynn and their nephew didn’t want to be alone. A week later, I heard he’d resigned from NASA. That really shocked me, because he loved this job. After twenty-some years, I can’t imagine what would make him just pick up and quit. He didn’t tell any of us where he was going. I didn’t even know they’d moved to New Hampshire until we heard that he and Lynn died in that house fire.”

“So Brian didn’t give you any clue why he left town?”

“Not a word. As I said, he looked pretty shook up, but at the time I thought it was only natural. His best friend and his wife’s sister just got killed, and now he had Neil’s kid to raise.” Bartusek fell silent for a moment, fleshy face drooping at the memory. “Poor boy’s had some damn tough breaks in life. To lose your parents when you’re only twelve.” He shook his head. “You know, I never mentioned this to Detective Parris, but some of us had a theory that it was all a mistake. Maybe the killer put a bomb aboard the wrong Cessna. Couple of big-business types keep their planes at that field. So do a few politicians, and Lord knows some of us would love to bring down their planes.” He paused. “That was a joke. Really.” He looked back and forth at the two detectives. “But I can see you don’t appreciate the humor.”

“We’ve been focusing on Neil, but what about his wife?” said Frost. “Is there any reason she might have been the target?”

“Olivia? No way. She was a sweet gal, but also a bit bland. Whenever I saw her at NASA parties, she’d be standing off in a corner, looking lost. I used to try my best to give her some attention, ’cause she was such a wallflower. But frankly, nothing she ever said was memorable. She had some boring job as a sales rep for medical equipment.”

Frost glanced at his notebook. “Leidecker Hospital Supplies.”

“Yeah, that was it. She didn’t talk much about it. The only time she got animated was when she talked about Will. The kid’s some sort of genius, just like Neil.”

“Okay, let’s go back to Neil,” said Jane. “Did he have any conflicts here at work? Any colleagues he didn’t get along with?”

“Just the usual stuff.”

“Meaning?”

“A scientist proposes a theory, stakes out a position. Sometimes he gets emotionally attached to that position when others disagree.”

“Who disagreed with Neil?”

“I can’t even remember, that’s how normal it was. He and Brian, they were always having spirited debates, but it was never hostile, you know? It was more like this egghead game between them. You get the two of them talking about debris disks, and whoosh! They’re like two rambunctious kids playing in the sandbox, tossing toys at each other.”

Frost looked up from the notes he’d been jotting. “Debris disks? What are those?”

“That was the subject of their research. It has to do with interstellar cloud cores. When they collapse, angular momentum causes them to form these spinning disks of gas and dust around baby stars.”

“They got into arguments about that?” said Jane.

“Hey, we get into arguments about everything. It’s what makes science so damn engaging. Yeah, sometimes the debates might turn personal, but we can deal with it here. We’re all big boys.” He looked down at his belly and added with an ironic sigh, “Some of us bigger than others.”

“What kind of arguments would you get into over a dirt disk?”

“Debris disks. There’s a lot of controversy about how these rings of dust and gas transform into solar systems with planets. Some say the planets form because of multiple collisions, but what makes those debris particles stick together? How does mass accumulate? How do you turn a bunch of swirling particles into a Mercury, Venus, and Earth? It’s a question we can’t answer yet. We do know ours isn’t the only solar system. There are countless planets in this galaxy alone, and many of them are in the habitable zone.”

Frost, who might as well have had TREKKIE tattooed on his forehead, rocked forward with sudden interest. “You mean we could colonize them?”

“Maybe. Habitable zone means that life in some form could exist there. At least, the carbon-based life we’re familiar with. Data from the Kepler Mission identifies a number of what we call Goldilocks planets. Not too hot, not too cold, but just right. In fact, that’s why Neil and Brian were going to Rome. To present their data to the team at the Vatican observatory.”

Frost gave a surprised laugh. “The Vatican has an observatory?”

“Quite well regarded, part of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.” He saw Frost’s raised eyebrow. “Yeah, I know, it sounds strange that this is the same church that attacked Galileo for believing the earth revolves around the sun. But their academy has some impressive astronomers. They were anxious to look over Neil and Brian’s latest research, because it has major implications. Certainly for the Vatican.”

“Why would this research concern the Catholic Church?” asked Jane.

“Because we’re talking about astrobiology, Detective Rizzoli. The study of life in the universe. Think about it. What does it mean to our perceived place in that universe if we find life on another planet? What happens to the concept of divine creation and Let there be light? It overturns humankind’s most cherished belief, that we are unique. That God made us. It could topple the central pillar of the church.”

“Topple? Did Yablonski and Temple actually have the data to do that?”

“I don’t know that I’d call it proof, exactly.”

“They shared it with you?”

“I saw their initial analysis of data from infrared and radio telescopes. It came from one of those Goldilocks planets I was telling you about. There was carbon dioxide, water, ozone, and nitrogen. Not just the building blocks of life, but also molecules that indicate photosynthesis is taking place.”

“Which means plant life,” said Frost.

Bartusek nodded. “It was highly suggestive.”

“How come we haven’t heard about this?” said Frost. “Where was the press conference, the big White House announcement?”

“You can’t just come out and announce this stuff without being absolutely certain, or you’ll look like an idiot. You know you’ll be attacked. You know there’ll be wacko deniers of every stripe coming after you. We’d need contingency plans to deal with all the nuts who’d try to drive truck bombs into our buildings here.” He stopped to take a calming breath. “So, no. We do not make announcements, not until we can prove anything beyond a shadow of a doubt. Hell, ET himself would need to land on the White House lawn before some people would be convinced. But Neil and Brian, they felt they had enough evidence. In fact, that was one of the last things Neil told me, before he died.”

Jane stared at him. “That he had proof?”

Bartusek nodded. “Of extraterrestrial life.”