The Surgeon

Fifteen

He’s with her now.

Rizzoli’s knife moved clumsily on the cutting board, and pieces of chopped onion skittered off the counter onto the floor. In the next room, her dad and two brothers had the TV blaring. The TV was always blaring in this house, which meant that everyone was always yelling above it. If you didn’t yell in Frank Rizzoli’s house, you didn’t get heard, and just a normal family conversation sounded like an argument. She swept the chopped onion into a bowl and started on the garlic, her eyes burning, her mind still wrapped around the troubling image of Moore and Catherine Cordell.

After the session with Dr. Polochek, Moore had been the one to take Cordell home. Rizzoli had watched them walk together to the elevator, had seen his arm go around Cordell’s shoulder, a gesture that struck her as more than just protective. She could see the way he looked at Cordell, the expression that came over his face, the spark in his eyes. He was no longer a cop guarding a citizen; he was a man falling in love.

Rizzoli pulled the garlic cloves apart, smashed them one by one with the flat of her blade, and peeled off the skin. Her knife slammed hard against the cutting board, and her mother, standing at the stove, glanced at her but said nothing.

He’s with her now. In her home. Maybe in her bed.

She released some of her pent-up frustration by whacking the cloves, bang-bang-bang. She didn’t know why the thought of Moore and Cordell disturbed her so much. Maybe it was because there were so few saints in the world, so few people who played strictly by the rules, and she’d thought Moore was one of them. He had given her hope that not all of humanity was flawed, and now he’d disappointed her.

Maybe it was because she saw this as a threat to the investigation. A man with intensely personal stakes cannot think or act logically.

Or maybe it’s because you’re jealous of her. Jealous of a woman who can turn a man’s head with just a glance. Men were such suckers for women in distress.

In the next room, her father and brothers gave a noisy cheer at the TV. She longed to be back in her own quiet apartment and began formulating excuses to leave early. At the very least she’d have to sit through dinner. As her mom kept reminding her, Frank Jr. didn’t get home very often, and how could Janie not want to spend time with her brother? She’d have to endure an evening of Frankie’s boot camp stories. How pitiful the new recruits were this year, how the youth of America was going soft and he had to kick a lot more butt just to get those girly-men through the obstacle course. Mom and Dad hung on his every word. What ticked her off was that the family asked so little about her work. So far in his career, Frankie the macho Marine had only played at war. She saw battle every day, against real people, real killers.

Frankie swaggered into the kitchen and got a beer from the refrigerator. “So when’s dinner?” he asked, popping off the tab. Acting as though she were just the maid.

“Another hour,” said their mom.

“Jesus, Ma. It’s already seven-thirty. I’m starved.”

“Don’t curse, Frankie.”

“You know,” said Rizzoli, “we’d be eating a lot sooner if we had a little help from the guys.”

“I can wait,” said Frankie, and turned back to the TV room. In the doorway he stopped. “Oh, I almost forgot. You got a message.”

“What?”

“Your cell phone rang. Some guy named Frosty.”

“You mean Barry Frost?”

“Yeah, that’s his name. He wants you to call him back.”

“When was this?”

“You were outside moving the cars.”

“Goddamnit, Frankie! That was an hour ago!”

“Janie,” said their mother.

Rizzoli untied her apron and threw it on the counter. “This is my job, Ma! Why the hell doesn’t anyone respect that?” She grabbed the kitchen phone and punched in Barry Frost’s cell phone number.

He answered on the first ring.

“It’s me,” she said. “I just got the message to call back.”

“You’re gonna miss the takedown.”

“What?”

“We got a cold hit on that DNA from Nina Peyton.”

“You mean the semen? The DNA’s in CODIS?”

“It matches a perp named Karl Pacheco. Arrested 1997, charged with sexual assault, but acquitted. He claimed it was consensual. The jury believed him.”

“He’s Nina Peyton’s rapist?”

“And we got the DNA to prove it.”

She gave a triumphant punch in the air. “What’s the address?”

“Four-five-seven-eight Columbus Ave. The team’s just about all here.”

“I’m on my way.”

She was already running out the door when her mother called: “Janie! What about dinner?”

“Gotta go, Ma.”

“But it’s Frankie’s last night!”

“We’re making an arrest.”

“Can’t they do it without you?”

Rizzoli stopped, her hand on the doorknob, her temper hissing dangerously toward detonation. And she saw, with startling clarity, that no matter what she achieved or how distinguished her career might be, this one moment would always represent her reality: Janie, the trivial sister. The girl.

Without a word, she walked out and slammed the door.

Columbus Avenue was on the northern edge of Roxbury, smack in the center of the Surgeon’s killing grounds. To the south was Jamaica Plain, the home of Nina Peyton. To the southeast was Elena Ortiz’s residence. To the northeast was the Back Bay, and the homes of Diana Sterling and Catherine Cordell. Glancing at the tree-lined streets, Rizzoli saw brick row houses, a neighborhood populated by students and staff from nearby Northeastern University. Lots of coeds.

Lots of good hunting.

The traffic light ahead turned yellow. Adrenaline spurting, she floored the accelerator and barreled through the intersection. The honor of making this arrest should be hers. For weeks, Rizzoli had lived, breathed, even dreamed of the Surgeon. He had infiltrated every moment of her life, both awake and asleep. No one had worked harder to catch him, and now she was in a race to claim her prize.

A block from Karl Pacheco’s address, she screeched to a halt behind a cruiser. Four other vehicles were parked helter-skelter along the street.

Too late, she thought, running toward the building. They’ve already gone in.

Inside she heard thudding footsteps and men’s shouts echoing in the stairwell. She followed the sound to the second floor and stepped into Karl Pacheco’s apartment.

There she confronted a scene of chaos. Splintered wood from the door littered the threshold. Chairs had been overturned, a lamp smashed, as though wild bulls had raged through the room, trailing destruction. The air itself was poisoned with testosterone, cops on a rampage, hunting for the perp who a few days before had slaughtered one of their own.

On the floor, a man lay facedown. Black — not the Surgeon. Crowe had his heel brutally pressed to the back of the black man’s neck.

“I asked you a question, asshole,” yelled Crowe. “Where’s Pacheco?”

The man whimpered and made the mistake of trying to lift his head. Crowe brought his heel down, hard, slamming the prisoner’s chin against the floor. The man made a choking sound and began to thrash.

“Let him up!” yelled Rizzoli.

“He won’t hold still!”

“Get off him and maybe he’ll talk to you!” Rizzoli shoved Crowe aside. The prisoner rolled onto his back, gasping like a landed fish.

Crowe yelled, “Where’s Pacheco?”

“Don’t — don’t know—”

“You’re in his apartment!”

“Left. He left—”

“When?”

The man began to cough, a deep, violent hacking that sounded like his lungs were ripping apart. The other cops had gathered around, staring with undisguised hatred at the prisoner on the floor. The friend of a cop-killer.

Disgusted, Rizzoli headed up the hall to the bedroom. The closet door hung open and clothes on the hangers had been thrown to the floor. The search of the flat had been thorough and brutish, every door flung open, every possible hiding place exposed. She pulled on gloves and began going through dresser drawers, poking through pockets, searching for a datebook, an address book, anything that could tell her where Pacheco might have fled.

She looked up as Moore came into the room. “You in charge of this mess?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Marquette gave the go-ahead. We had information that Pacheco was in the building.”

“Then where is he?” She slammed the drawer shut and crossed to the bedroom window. It was closed but unlatched. The fire escape was right outside. She opened the window and stuck her head out. A squad car was parked in the alley below, radio chattering, and she saw a patrolman shining his flashlight into a Dumpster.

She was about to pull her head back in when she felt something tap her on the back of the scalp, and she heard the faint clatter of gravel bouncing off the fire escape. Startled, she looked up. The night sky was awash with city lights, and the stars were barely visible. She stared for a moment, scanning the outline of the roof against that anemic black sky, but nothing moved.

She climbed out the window onto the fire escape and started up the ladder to the third story. On the next landing she stopped to check the window of the flat above Pacheco’s; the screen had been nailed in place, and the window was dark.

Again she looked up, toward the roof. Though she saw nothing, heard nothing from above, the hairs on the back of her neck were standing up.

“Rizzoli?” Moore called out the window. She didn’t answer but pointed to the roof, a silent signal of her intentions.

She wiped her damp palms on her slacks and quietly started up the ladder leading to the roof. At the last rung she paused, took a deep breath, and slowly, slowly raised her head to peer over the edge.

Beneath the moonless sky, the rooftop was a forest of shadows. She saw the silhouette of a table and chairs, a tangle of arching branches. A rooftop garden. She scrambled over the edge, dropped lightly onto the asphalt shingles, and drew her weapon. Two steps, and her shoe hit an obstacle, sent it clattering. She inhaled the pungent scent of geraniums. Realized she was surrounded by plants in clay pots. An obstacle course of them at her feet.

Off to her left, something moved.

She strained to make out a human form in that jumble of shadows. Saw him then, crouching like a black homunculus.

She raised her weapon and commanded: “Freeze!”

She did not see what he already held in his hand. What he was preparing to hurl at her.

A split second before the garden trowel hit her face, she felt the air rush toward her, like an evil wind whistling out of the darkness. The blow slammed into her left cheek with such force she saw lights explode.

She landed on her knees, a tidal wave of pain roaring up her synapses, pain so terrible it sucked her breath away.

“Rizzoli?” It was Moore. She hadn’t even heard him drop onto the rooftop.

“I’m okay. I’m okay….” She squinted toward where the figure had been crouching. It was gone. “He’s here,” she whispered. “I want that son of a bitch.”

Moore eased into the darkness. She clutched her head, waiting for the dizziness to pass, cursing her own carelessness. Fighting to keep her head clear, she staggered to her feet. Anger was a potent fuel; it steadied her legs, strengthened her grip on the weapon.

Moore was a few yards to her right; she could just make out his silhouette, moving past the table and chairs.

She moved left, circling the roof in the opposite direction. Every throb in her cheek, every poker stab of pain, was a reminder that she’d screwed up. Not this time. Her gaze swept the feathery shadows of potted trees and shrubs.

A sudden clatter made her whirl to her right. She heard running footsteps, saw a shadow dart across the roof, straight toward her.

Moore yelled, “Freeze! Police!”

The man kept coming.

Rizzoli dropped to a crouch, weapon poised. The throbbing in her face crescendoed into bursts of agony. All the humiliation she’d endured, the daily snubs, the insults, the never-ending torment dished out by the Darren Crowes of the world, seemed to shrink into a single pinpoint of rage.

This time, bastard, you’re mine. Even as the man suddenly halted before her, even as his arms lifted toward the sky, the decision was irreversible.

She squeezed the trigger.

The man twitched. Staggered backward.

She fired a second time, a third, and each kick of the weapon was a satisfying snap against her palm.

“Rizzoli! Cease fire!”

Moore’s shout finally penetrated the roaring in her ears. She froze, her weapon still aimed, her arms taut and aching.

The perp was down, and he was not moving. She straightened and slowly walked toward the crumpled form. With each step came the mounting horror of what she’d just done.

Moore was already kneeling at the man’s side, checking for a pulse. He looked up at her, and although she could not read his expression on that dark roof, she knew there was accusation in his gaze.

“He’s dead, Rizzoli.”

“He was holding something — in his hand—”

“There was nothing.”

“I saw it. I know I did!”

“His hands were up in the air.”

“Goddamnit, Moore. It was a good shooting! You’ve got to back me up on this!”

Other voices suddenly broke in as cops scrambled onto the roof to join them. Moore and Rizzoli said nothing more to each other.

Crowe shone his flashlight on the man. Rizzoli caught a nightmarish glimpse of open eyes, a shirt black with blood.

“Hey, it’s Pacheco!” said Crowe. “Who brought him down?”

Rizzoli said, tonelessly, “I did.”

Someone gave her a slap on the back. “Girl cop does okay!”

“Shut up,” said Rizzoli. “Just shut up!” She stalked away, clambered down the fire escape, and retreated numbly to her car. There she sat, huddled behind the steering wheel, her pain giving way to nausea. Mentally she kept playing and replaying the scene on the rooftop. What Pacheco had done, what she had done. She saw him running again, just a shadow, flitting toward her. She saw him stop. Yes, stop. She saw him look at her.

A weapon. Jesus, please, let there be a weapon.

But she had seen no weapon. In that split second before she’d fired, the image had been seared into her brain. A man, frozen. A man with hands raised in submission.

Someone knocked on the window. Barry Frost. She rolled down the glass.

“Marquette’s looking for you,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Something wrong? Rizzoli, you feeling okay?”

“I feel like a truck ran over my face.”

Frost leaned in and stared at her swollen cheek. “Wow. That asshole really had it coming.”

That was what Rizzoli wanted to believe, too: that Pacheco deserved to die. Yes, he did, and she was tormenting herself for no reason. Wasn’t the evidence clear on her face? He had attacked her. He was a monster, and by shooting him she had dispensed swift, cheap justice. Elena Ortiz and Nina Peyton and Diana Sterling would surely applaud. No one mourns the scum of the world.

She stepped out of the car, feeling better because of Frost’s sympathy. Stronger. She walked toward the building and saw Marquette standing near the front steps. He was talking to Moore.

Both men turned to face her as she approached. She noticed Moore was not meeting her gaze but was focused elsewhere, avoiding her eyes. He looked sick.

Marquette said, “I need your weapon, Rizzoli.”

“I fired in self-defense. The perp attacked me.”

“I understand that. But you know the drill.”

She looked at Moore. I liked you. I trusted you. She unbuckled her holster and thrust it at Marquette. “Who’s the fucking enemy here?” she said. “Sometimes I wonder.” And she turned and walked back to the car.

Moore stared into Karl Pacheco’s closet and thought: This is all wrong. On the floor were half a dozen pairs of shoes, size 11, extra wide. On the shelf were dusty sweaters, a shoebox of old batteries and loose change, and a stack of Penthouse magazines.

He heard a drawer slide open and turned to look at Frost, whose gloved hands were rifling through Pacheco’s socks drawer.

“Anything?” asked Moore.

“No scalpels, no chloroform. Not even a roll of duct tape.”

“Ding ding ding!” announced Crowe from the bathroom, and he sauntered out waving a Ziploc bag of plastic vials containing a brown liquid. “From sunny Mexico, land of pharmaceutical plenty.”

“Roofies?” asked Frost.

Moore glanced at the label, printed in Spanish. “Gamma hydroxybutyrate. Same effect.”

Crowe shook the bag. “At least a hundred date rapes in here. Pacheco must’ve had a very busy dick.” He laughed.

The sound grated on Moore. He thought of that busy dick and the damage it had done, not just the physical damage, but the spiritual destruction. The souls it had cleaved in two. He remembered what Catherine had told him: that every rape victim’s life was divided into before and after. A sexual assault turns a woman’s world into a bleak and unfamiliar landscape in which every smile, every bright moment, is tainted with despair. Weeks ago he might scarcely have registered Crowe’s laughter. Tonight, he heard it only too well, and he recognized its ugliness.

He went into the living room, where the black man was being questioned by Detective Sleeper.

“I’m telling you, we were just hanging out,” the man said.

“You just hang out with six hundred bucks in your pocket?”

“I like to carry cash, man.”

“What’d you come to buy?”

“Nothin’.”

“How do you know Pacheco?”

“I just do.”

“Oh, a real close friend. What was he selling?”

GHB, thought Moore. The date rape drug. That’s what he’d come to buy. Another busy dick.

He walked out into the night and felt immediately disoriented by the pulsing lights of the cruisers. Rizzoli’s car was gone. He stared at the empty space and the burden of what he’d done, what he’d felt compelled to do, suddenly weighed so heavily on his shoulders that he could not move. Never in his career had he faced such a terrible choice, and even though he knew in his heart he’d made the right decision, he was tormented by it. He tried to reconcile his respect for Rizzoli with what he had seen her do on the rooftop. It wasn’t too late to retract what he’d said to Marquette. It had been dark and confusing on the roof; maybe Rizzoli really thought Pacheco had been holding a weapon. Maybe she had seen some gesture, some movement, that Moore had missed. But try as he might, he could not retrieve any memory that justified her actions. He could not interpret what he’d witnessed as anything but a cold-blooded execution.

When he saw her again, she was hunched at her desk, holding a bag of ice to her cheek. It was after midnight, and he was in no mood for conversation. But she looked up as he walked past and her gaze froze him to the spot.

“What did you tell Marquette?” she asked.

“What he wanted to know. How Pacheco ended up dead. I didn’t lie to him.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“You think I wanted to tell him the truth?”

“You had a choice.”

“So did you, up on that roof. You made the wrong one.”

“And you never make the wrong choice, do you? You never make a mistake.”

“If I do, I own up to it.”

“Oh, yeah. Fucking Saint Thomas.”

He moved to her desk and gazed straight down at her. “You’re one of the best cops I’ve ever worked with. But tonight, you shot a man in cold blood, and I saw it.”

“You didn’t have to see it.”

“But I did.”

“What did we really see up there, Moore? A lot of shadows, a lot of movement. The separation between a right choice and a wrong choice is this thin.” She held up two fingers, nearly touching. “And we allow for that. We allow each other the benefit of the doubt.”

“I tried to.”

“You didn’t try hard enough.”

“I won’t lie for another cop. Even if she’s my friend.”

“Let’s remember who the fucking bad guys are here. Not us.”

“If we start lying, how do we draw the line between them and us? Where does it end?”

She took the bag of ice off her face and pointed to her cheek. One eye was swollen shut and the entire left side of her face was blown up like a mottled balloon. The brutal appearance of her injury shocked him. “This is what Pacheco did to me. Not just a friendly little slap, is it? You talk about them and us. Which side was he on? I did the world a favor by blowing him away. No one’s going to miss the Surgeon.”

“Karl Pacheco was not the Surgeon. You blew away the wrong man.”

She stared at him, her bruised face a lurid Picasso that was half-grotesque, half-normal. “We had a DNA match! He was the one—”

“The one who raped Nina Peyton, yes. Nothing about him matches the Surgeon.” He dropped a Hair and Fiber report on her desk.

“What’s this?”

“The microscopic on Pacheco’s head hair. Different color, different curl, different cuticle density from the strand in Elena Ortiz’s wound margin. No evidence of bamboo hair.”

She sat motionless, staring at the lab report. “I don’t understand.”

“Pacheco raped Nina Peyton. That’s all we can say about him with any certainty.”

“Both Sterling and Ortiz were raped—”

“We can’t prove Pacheco did it. Now that he’s dead, we’ll never know.”

She looked up at him, and the uninjured side of her face was twisted with anger. “It had to be him. Pick three random women in this city, and what are the chances all of them have been raped? That’s what the Surgeon’s managed to do. He’s batted three out of three. If he’s not the one raping them, how does he know which ones to choose, which ones to slaughter? If it’s not Pacheco, then it’s a buddy, a partner. Some fucking vulture feeding off the carrion Pacheco leaves behind.” She thrust the lab report back at him. “Maybe I didn’t shoot the Surgeon. But the man I did shoot was scum. Everyone seems to forget that fact. Pacheco was scum. Do I get a medal?” She rose to her feet and shoved her chair, hard, against the desk. “Administrative duty. Marquette’s turned me into a fucking desk jockey. Thanks a lot.”

In silence he watched her walk away and could think of nothing to say, nothing he could do to repair the rift between them.

He went to his own workstation and sank into the chair. I’m a dinosaur, he thought, lumbering through a world where truth-tellers are despised. He could not think about Rizzoli now. The case against Pacheco had disintegrated, and they were back at square one, hunting for a nameless killer.

Three raped women. It kept coming back to that. How was the Surgeon finding them? Only Nina Peyton had reported her rape to the police. Elena Ortiz and Diana Sterling had not. Theirs was a private trauma, known only to the rapists, their victims, and the medical professionals who had treated them. But the three women had sought medical attention in different places: Sterling in the office of a Back Bay gynecologist. Ortiz in the Pilgrim Hospital E.R. Nina Peyton in the Forest Hills Women’s Clinic. There was no overlap of personnel, no doctor or nurse or receptionist who had come into contact with more than one of these women.

Somehow the Surgeon knew those women were damaged, and he was attracted by their pain. Sexual killers choose their prey from among the most vulnerable members of society. They seek women they can control, women they can degrade, women who do not threaten them. And who is more fragile than a woman who has been violated?

As Moore walked out, he paused to look at the wall where the photos of Sterling, Ortiz, and Peyton were tacked. Three women, three rapes.

And a fourth. Catherine was raped in Savannah.

He blinked as the image of her face suddenly flashed into mind, an image that he could not help adding to that victims’ gallery on the wall.

Somehow, it all goes back to what happened that night in Savannah. It all goes back to Andrew Capra.