people out, but also to keep them in. This was no garden of Eden; it was a death camp.
She reached the top of the stairs and felt another closed door. Pressing her ear against it, she heard nothing. The silence was unnerving. How many gunshots had there been? At least three, she thought, enough to have taken down both Iris and Bella. Were the women lying dead, beyond that door? Were Patrick and Mark now on their way back to the cellar to find her?
Her hand was slick with sweat as she grasped the knob. The door swung open soundlessly, to darkness that was every bit as thick as in the cellar. She could not make out any shapes or shadows. This floor, too, was concrete, and as she slowly inched her way across it, arms outstretched for unseen obstacles, she heard something small and metallic skitter away from her shoe. She collided with an edge that hit her hip and she halted, trying to discern what it was. It felt like a table, coated with dust. Jagged metal suddenly bit her fingers and she pulled back, startled. It was a table saw. She shifted a few feet farther into the darkness and hit another obstacle. This time, a drill press. This was Patrick’s woodworking shop. She stood among the power tools, thinking of saw blades and drills, wondering if mahogany and maple were the only things this equipment had sliced into.
Renewed panic sent her fumbling in the darkness for a way out. She touched a wall and followed it to a corner.
More gunshots. Four in a row.
At last she located the door and wasted no time slipping through it, to find yet another set of steps to climb. How far belowground had she been?
At the top of the stairs, she exited through a door and found herself in a carpeted hallway. Here she could barely make out shapes in the darkness, and a balustrade to her right. Hand brushing across a wall, she inched ahead. She had no idea if she was moving toward the front or the rear of the house; all she wanted to find was a way out.
On the second-floor landing above, footsteps creaked and started down the stairs.
Frantically she ducked through the first open doorway to her left, into a room where moonlight glowed through the windows, reflecting off a desk and bookshelves. An office.
The footsteps had reached the first floor.
She scrambled forward, seeking a hiding place in the shadows, and her shoes crunched across broken shards of glass. Suddenly her foot snagged an obstacle and as she went sprawling, she put out a hand to catch herself. Her palm slid through something warm and sticky. By the glow of moonlight, she stared at the dark form lying on the floor right beside her. A body.
Gasping, she scrabbled away, sliding backward across the floor. Felt something heavy spin away from her hand. A gun. She reached for it, and the instant her fingers closed around the grip, she knew it was her own weapon. The gun that Patrick had taken from her.
Footsteps creaked behind her and came to a halt.
Trapped in the light of the window, Jane was framed by moonglow that seemed as bright and inescapable as a searchlight. She looked up to see Mark’s silhouette standing above her.
“I was never here,” he said. “When the police come to talk to me, I’ll tell them I was home in bed the whole time. It was Patrick who killed all those girls and buried them in his yard. Patrick who killed you. And then he shot himself.”
Behind her, hand concealed in shadow, she clutched her weapon. But Mark already had his gun pointed at her. He would have the first shot, the best shot. There’d be no time for her to aim, no time to do anything but squeeze off the last bullet she would probably ever fire. Even as she lifted her weapon, she knew she was too slow, too late.
But at that instant Mark gasped in a startled breath and turned away from her, his attention shifting, his gun swinging toward someone-something-else.
Jane brought up her gun and fired. Three shots, four. Her reflexes on automatic. The bullets slammed into his torso and Mark staggered backward, collapsing against an end table. It gave way in a crash of splintering wood.
Pulse whooshing in her ears, Jane rose to her feet and stood over his body, her weapon aimed and ready should he miraculously spring back to life. He did not move.
But the shadows did.
It was just a whisper of air, utterly soundless. A flutter of black against black at the periphery of her vision. Slowly she turned toward the figure that stood cloaked in darkness. Though she was clutching a gun, though she could have fired, she did not. She simply stared at a face crowned with silvery fur. At jagged teeth that gleamed in the moonlight.
“Who are you?” she whispered. “What are you?”
A breath of wind brushed her face, and she blinked. When she opened her eyes again, the face was gone. Frantically she glanced around the room, searching for whatever had been standing there, but she saw only moonlight and shadow.
Through the window, a movement caught her eye. She looked out at the moonlit garden and saw it, then, darting across the lawn and vanishing into the cover of trees.
“Detective Rizzoli?”
With a start, Jane whirled around to see the two women in the doorway, Iris sagging heavily against Bella.
“She needs an ambulance!” said Bella.
“I am not as young as I once was,” groaned Iris. “Or as swift.”
Gently, Bella lowered her teacher to the floor. Cradling Iris in her lap she began to murmur in Chinese, words that she repeated again and again, as though chanting a magical spell. Words of healing.
Words of hope.
THIRTY-SEVEN
JANE STOOD AMONG THE JUMBLE OF BROOKLINE PD AND BOSTON PD vehicles parked in Patrick Dion’s driveway and watched the sun come up. She had not slept in twenty-four hours, had not eaten since lunch the day before, and her first glimpse of dawn was so dazzling that she closed her eyes, suddenly dizzy, and swayed backward against a police cruiser. When she opened her eyes again, Maura and Frost had emerged from the house and were now walking toward her.
“You should go home,” said Maura.
“That’s what everyone tells me.” She looked toward the residence. “You finished in there?”
“They’re bringing out the bodies now.”
Frost frowned as Jane bent down to pull on shoe covers. “You know, you probably shouldn’t go in the house,” he said.
“Like I haven’t already been in there?”
“That’s the point.”
He didn’t need to explain; she already understood. She’d been the one to take down Mark Mallory, and it was almost certainly her gun that had fired the bullet into Patrick Dion’s brain. Her weapon was now in the custody of ballistics, and she missed its weight on her belt.
The front door opened and the first stretcher came out, bearing one of the bodies. In silence they watched it roll toward the waiting morgue van.
“The older man had one bullet wound. Right temple, close range,” said Maura.
“Patrick Dion,” said Jane.
“I have a feeling we’re going to find gunshot residue on his right hand. Does that remind you of another crime
