BOSTON
MAURA SET A VASE OF YELLOW ROSES ON THE DRESSER AND TOOK one last glance around her guest bedroom. The white duvet was freshly laundered, the Turkish rug thoroughly vacuumed, and the bathroom supplied with fluffy white towels. The last time anyone had slept in this room was in August, when seventeen-year-old Julian Perkins had visited during his summer break from school. Since his departure, she’d hardly stepped into this room. Now she gave it a critical once-over, to confirm that all was ready for her houseguest. The window had a view of her back garden, but on this late-November afternoon, what she saw was a dreary landscape of bare perennials and brown grass. At least there was a bright touch of spring in the painting of luscious pink peonies hanging over the bed, and on the dresser with that vase of yellow roses. A cheerful welcome for a guest on a grim mission.
Jane had emailed to explain the situation, and Maura had read Millie’s file, so she knew what to expect. But when the doorbell rang and she laid eyes on Millie for the first time, she was taken aback by how haggard the woman looked. It was a long journey from Cape Town and Jane looked bedraggled as well, but Millie appeared frail as ectoplasm, her eyes hollow, her thin frame almost lost in her oversized sweater.
“Welcome to Boston,” said Maura as they came into the house, Jane carrying Millie’s suitcase. “I apologize for the weather.”
Millie managed a wan smile. “I didn’t expect it to be so cold.” She looked down sheepishly at her enormous sweater. “I bought this at the airport. I think I could fit another woman in here.”
“You must be exhausted. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“That would be lovely, but first I think I need to use the toilet.”
“Your room’s down the hall, on the right, and you have your own bathroom. Please, take your time to get settled in. The tea can always wait.”
“Thank you.” Millie took her suitcase. “I’ll be a few minutes.”
Maura and Jane waited until they heard Millie’s bedroom door close. Then Jane said: “You sure this is okay? I tried to come up with another solution, but our apartment’s too small.”
“It’s perfectly fine, Jane. You said it’s only for a week, and you can’t stick that poor woman in a hotel.”
“Well, I do appreciate it. The only alternative was my mom’s house, but it’s a loony bin these days, with Dad driving her nuts.”
“How are things with your mother?”
“Besides her being psychotically depressed?” Jane shook her head. “I’m waiting for her to get up the nerve and kick him out. The trouble is, she tries so hard to make everyone else happy, she forgets all about herself.” Jane sighed. “My mom, the saint.”
Something my mother will never be, thought Maura. She thought about the last time she’d visited Amalthea in prison. Remembered the woman’s soulless eyes, her calculating gaze. Even then the tumor must have been incubating inside Amalthea, evil within evil, like poisonous nesting dolls. With cancer now consuming her, had she come to feel remorse? For such a creature, was redemption even possible? In a few months, six at the most, those eyes would go dark forever. And I will always wonder.
Jane looked at her watch. “I’ve got to go. Tell Millie I’ll pick her up around ten tomorrow, for the team meeting. I’ve asked Brookline PD to send a cruiser by your house every so often, to keep an eye on things.”
“Is that necessary? No one knows she’s here.”
“It’s all about making her feel safe. It was a struggle just to get her here, Maura. As far as she’s concerned, we’ve brought her straight to the beast’s lair.”
“It may be true.”
“But we need her. We just have to keep her comfortable, so she doesn’t jump on a plane home.”
“I don’t mind a houseguest,” said Maura. She glanced down at the cat, who chose that instant to jump onto the coffee table. “Although this particular houseguest I’d love to get rid of.” She plucked up the cat and dropped him back on the floor.
“You two still not bonding, huh?”
“Oh, he’s bonded all right. To my can opener.” In disgust, Maura clapped cat hair from her hands. “So what do you make of her?”
Jane glanced toward the hallway and said quietly: “She’s scared, and I can’t blame her. She’s the only one who walked out alive, the only one who can ID him in court. Six years later, he’s still giving her nightmares.”
“It’s not hard to understand. You and I have been in her shoes.” She didn’t need to elaborate; they both knew what it was like to be hunted, to lie sleepless in your own bed, listening for the shattering of a window, the turn of the doorknob. They were part of the same unfortunate sisterhood of women who have been stalked by killers.
“She’s going to face a lot of questions tomorrow, be asked to relive some painful memories,” said Jane. “Make sure she gets a good night’s sleep.” As she stepped out the front door to leave, her cell phone rang and she paused on the porch to answer it. “Hey, Tam, we just got in. I’m heading over to catch up on …” She halted on the porch. “What? Are you sure?”
Maura watched as Jane hung up and stood staring at the phone as if it had just betrayed her. “What is it?”
Jane turned to face her. “We have a problem. Remember Jane Doe?”
“The bones from the backyard?”
“You had me convinced she was killed by Leopard Man.”
“I still believe it. The claw marks on her skull. The evidence of evisceration. The nylon cord. It all fits the picture.”
“The problem is, she’s just been identified, and it’s confirmed by DNA. Her name was Natalie Toombs, twenty years old. She was a coed at Curry College. White female, five foot three.”
“That’s all consistent with the skeletal remains I examined. What’s the problem?”
“Natalie vanished fourteen years ago.”
Maura stared at her. “Fourteen years? Do we know where Johnny Posthumus was then?”
“Working at a bush lodge in South Africa.” Jane shook her head. “He couldn’t have killed Natalie.”
“THIS SHOOTS YOUR ALL-POWERFUL Leopard Man theory all to hell, Rizzoli,” said Darren Crowe. “Fourteen years ago, when Natalie Toombs vanished in Boston, this guy was working in Sabi Sands, South Africa. It’s all documented in the Interpol report. His employee records from the bush lodge, a log of his hours and pay stubs. Obviously, he didn’t kill Natalie. Which means you brought that witness all the way here from South Africa for nothing.”
Still groggy from a bad night’s sleep, Jane tried to focus on her laptop. She’d awakened disoriented that morning, had downed two cups of coffee to kick-start her brain before this team conference, but the deluge of new facts left her struggling to catch up. She felt the other three detectives watching her as she clicked through pages that confirmed what Tam had told her yesterday over the phone. Natalie Toombs, formerly referred to as Jane Doe, had been a twenty-year-old English major at Curry College, barely two miles from where her bones were found buried. Natalie had lived in an off-campus rental house with two other coeds, who described her as outgoing, athletic, and a nature lover. She was last seen on a Saturday afternoon, her backpack full of books, leaving for a study date with someone named Ted, whom neither housemate had ever met.
The next day, the housemates reported her missing.
For fourteen years, the case had languished in the national missing persons database, along with thousands of other unsolved disappearances. Her mother, who’d since passed away, had provided the FBI with a DNA sample, in the event her daughter’s remains ever turned up. It was this DNA that confirmed the bones dug up in the backyard construction site were indeed Natalie’s.
Jane looked at Frost, who gave an apologetic shake of the head. “It’s hard to argue with the facts,” he said, sounding pained. It always hurt to admit when Crowe was right.
“You wasted a nice chunk of Boston PD change, flying that witness here from South Africa,” said Crowe. “Good job, Rizzoli.”
“But there’s physical evidence linking at least one murder to Botswana,” she pointed out. “That cigarette lighter. We know it belonged to Richard Renwick. How did it get from Africa to Maine, unless the killer carried it?”
“Who knows how many hands it’s passed through in the last six years? It could’ve gotten here in the pocket of some innocent tourist who picked it up God knows where. Any way you look at it, it’s clear that Natalie Toombs wasn’t killed by Johnny Posthumus. Her death predates all these other cases by nearly a decade. I’m calling it quits on our joint investigation. You keep looking for your Leopard Man, Rizzoli, and we’ll look for our perp. ’Cause I don’t think there’s any connection between our cases.” He turned to his partner. “Come on, Tam.”
“Millie DeBruin came all the way from Cape Town,” said Jane. “She’s waiting with Dr. Zucker right now. At least listen to her.”
“Why?”
“What if there is only one killer? What if he moves across states, across international borders, by assuming other identities?”
“Wait. Is this some new theory?” Crowe laughed. “An impostor who kills under other people’s names?”
“Henk Andriessen, our contact at Interpol, was the first person to suggest the possibility. Henk was bothered by the fact that Johnny Posthumus had no criminal record, no history of violence. He had a reputation as a top-notch safari guide, respected by his colleagues. What if the man who took those seven tourists into the bush wasn’t Johnny? None of these tourists had ever met him before. The African tracker had never worked with him before. Another man could have taken the real Johnny’s place.”
“An impostor? Then where’s the real Johnny?”
“He’d have to be dead.”
There was silence at the table as her three colleagues digested this new possibility.
“I’d say this puts you back at square one,” said Crowe. “Looking for a killer with no name, no identity. Good luck.”
“Maybe we don’t have a name,” said Jane, “but we do have a face. And we have someone who’s seen it.”
“Your witness identified Johnny Posthumus.”
“Based on a single passport photo. We all know that photos can lie.”
“So can witnesses.”
“Millie isn’t a liar,” Jane shot back. “She went through hell and she didn’t even want to come here. But she’s sitting out there with Dr. Zucker right now. The least you can do is listen to her.”
“Okay.” Crowe sighed, sinking back into his chair. “I’ll play along for now. Might as well hear what she has to say.”
Jane went to the intercom. “Dr. Zucker, can you bring Millie in?”
Moments later Zucker escorted Millie into the conference room. She was dressed in a wool skirt suit with an oxford shirt, but her outfit was a size too large, as if she’d recently lost weight, and she looked more like a girl masquerading in her mother’s clothes. Meekly she sat down in the chair that Zucker pulled out for her, but she kept her gaze on the table, as if too intimidated to look at the detectives who were now studying her.
“These are my colleagues in homicide,” said Jane. “Detectives Crowe, Tam, and Frost. They’ve read the file and they know what happened to you in the Delta. But they need more.”
Millie frowned at her. “More?”
“About Johnny. The man you knew as Johnny.”
“Tell them what you just told me, about Johnny,” suggested Dr. Zucker. “Remember how I said that every killer has his own technique, his own signature? These detectives want to know what makes Johnny unique. How he works, how he thinks. What you tell them might be the one detail they need to catch him.”
For a moment Millie thought about this. “We trusted him,” she said softly. “It all came down to that. We—I—believed he’d take care of us. In the Delta, there are dozens of different ways to die. Every time you step out of the jeep, step out of the tent, there’s something waiting to kill you. In a place like that, the one person you have to believe in is your bush guide. The man with the experience, the man with the rifle. We had every reason to trust him. Before Richard booked the trip, he’d done some research. He said Johnny had eighteen years of experience. He said there were testimonials from other travelers. People from all over the world.”
“And he got this all off the Internet?” said Crowe, eyebrow arched.
“Yes,” Millie admitted, flushing. “But everything seemed perfectly fine when we arrived in the Delta. He met us at the airstrip. The tents were basic but comfortable. And the Delta was beautiful. Truly wild, in a way you can’t believe still exists.” She paused, eyes unfocused, lost in the memories of that place. She took a breath. “For the first two nights, it all went as promised. The camping, the meals, the game drives. Then … everything changed.”
“After your tracker was killed,” said Jane.
Millie nodded. “At dawn, we found Clarence’s body. Or … parts of it. The hyenas had fed, and there was so little left of him, we had no idea what happened. By then we were way out in the bush, too far to use the radio. Anyway, it was dead. So was the truck.” She swallowed. “We were stranded.”
The room had gone silent. Even Crowe refrained from his usual smart-ass remarks. The mounting horror of Millie’s story had gripped them all.
“I wanted to believe it was just a string of bad luck. Clarence getting killed. The truck not starting. Richard still thought it was a grand adventure, something he could write into his book. His hero Jackman Tripp, stranded in the wild, surviving against all odds. We knew we’d be rescued eventually. The plane would come looking for us. So we decided to make the best of it and enjoy the bush experience.” She swallowed. “Then Mr. Matsunaga was killed, and it wasn’t an adventure anymore. It was a nightmare.”
“Did you suspect Johnny was behind it?” asked Frost.
“Not yet. At least, I didn’t. Isao’s body was found up in a tree, like a classic leopard kill. It seemed like another accident, another case of bad luck. But the others were whispering about Johnny. Wondering if he was behind it. He’d promised to keep us safe, and two people were dead.” Millie looked down at the table. “I should have listened to them. I should have helped them bring down Johnny, but I couldn’t believe it. I refused to believe it, because …” She stopped.
“Why?” Dr. Zucker asked gently.
Millie blinked away tears. “Because I was halfway in love with him,” she whispered.
In love with the man who tried to kill her. Jane looked around the table at her colleagues’ startled expressions, but she herself found nothing shocking about Millie’s confession. How many other women had been killed by husbands and boyfriends, by men they adored? A woman in love is a poor judge of character. No wonder Millie was so deeply haunted; she had been betrayed not just by Johnny, but by her own heart.
“I’ve never admitted that before. Not even to myself,” said Millie. “But out there, in the wild, everything was so different. Beautiful and strange. The sounds at night, the way the air smelled. You wake up every morning feeling a little bit scared. On edge. Alive.” She looked at Zucker. “That was Johnny’s world. And he made me feel safe in it.”
The ultimate aphrodisiac. In the face of danger, there’s no one more desirable than the protector, thought Jane. It was why women fell in love with cops and bodyguards, why singers crooned about someone to watch over me. In the African bush, the most desirable man is the one who can keep you alive.
“The others were talking about overpowering Johnny and taking control of the gun. I wouldn’t go along with it, because I thought they were paranoid. And Richard was egging them on, trying to play the hero, because he was jealous of Johnny. There we were, surrounded by animals that could eat us, but the real battle was inside our camp. It was Johnny and me, against everyone else. They stopped trusting me, stopped telling me their plans. I thought we could all just ride it out till we got rescued, and then they’d see how ridiculous they were. I thought we just needed to calm down and wait it out. And then …” She swallowed. “He tried to kill Elliot.”
“The snake in the tent,” said Jane.
Millie nodded. “That’s when I knew I had to make a choice. Even then, I couldn’t quite believe it was Johnny. I didn’t want to believe it.”
“Because he made you trust him,” said Zucker.
Millie wiped her eyes, and her voice cracked. “That’s how he does it. He makes you trust him. He chooses the one person who wants to believe in him. Maybe he looks for the wallflower, the utterly ordinary woman. Or the woman whose boyfriend is leaving her. Oh, he knows which one she is. He smiles at her, and for the first time in her life she feels truly alive.” Again she wiped her eyes. “I was the weakest gazelle in the herd. He knew it.”
“Hardly the weakest,” Tam said gently. “You’re the one who lived.”
“And she’s the one who can identify him,” said Jane. “Whatever his real name is. We have his description. We know he’s about six foot two or three, muscular build. Blond hair, blue eyes. He may have changed his hair color, but he can’t disguise his height.”
“Or his eyes,” said Millie. “The way he looks at you.”
“Describe it.”
“As if he’s looking straight at your soul. Reading your dreams, your fears. As if he can see exactly who you are.”
Jane thought of another man’s eyes, eyes that she’d once stared into as she prepared to die, and gooseflesh rippled across her arms. We’ve both felt a killer’s gaze, she thought. But I knew it when I saw it. Millie didn’t, and her shame was apparent in the drooping shoulders, the bowed head.
Jane’s cell phone rang, shrill and startling. She stood and left the room to answer it.
It was criminalist Erin Volchko calling. “You know those animal hairs they found on Jodi Underwood’s blue robe?”
“The cat hairs,” said Jane.
“Yeah, two of them are definitely from a domestic cat. But there was that third hair I couldn’t ID. The one I sent off to the wildlife lab in Oregon. We just got back the result on the keratin.”
“A snow leopard?”
“No, I’m afraid not. It’s from the species Panthera tigris tigris.”
“That sounds like a tiger.”
“A Bengal tiger, to be specific. Which is a complete surprise to me. Maybe you can explain how a tiger hair got on a victim’s bathrobe.”
Jane already had the answer. “Leon Gott’s house was a Noah’s Ark of mounted animals. I seem to remember a tiger head on his wall, but I have no idea if it was a Bengal tiger.”
“Can you get me a few strands off that mounted head? If we can match those hairs to this tiger hair, it tells us there was transfer from Leon Gott’s house to Jodi Underwood’s robe.”
“Two victims. The same killer.”
“It’s certainly starting to look that way.”