But the Greens? They manage to slip by me like wraiths. I catch only the briefest glimpse of him behind the wheel of a black Toyota as he pulls into the garage. I spy him hanging venetian blinds in the upstairs windows. I see FedEx deliver a box to their home, which the driver tells me was shipped from BH Photo in New York City. （It never hurts to know that your neighborhood FedEx driver is crazy about zucchini bread.） What I don’t see is any sign that these people have jobs. They live irregular lives, coming and going without any apparent schedule, acting as if they’re retired. I ask the Leopolds and Jonas about them, but they don’t know any more than I do. The Greens are a mystery to us all.
All this I’ve explained over the phone to my daughter, Jane, who you’d think would be as curious about this as I am. She points out there’s nothing criminal about wanting to stay away from the neighborhood snoop. She’s proud of her instincts as a cop, proud of being able to sense when something’s not right, but she has no regard for a mother’s instincts. When I call her for the third time about the Greens, she finally loses her patience.
“Call me when something actually happens,” she snaps at me.
A week later, sixteen-year-old Tricia Talley disappears.
Bubbles spiraled past a Cinderella-pink castle, stirring a forest of plastic kelp where a pirate’s chest overflowed with gemstones. A mermaid with swirling red hair reclined on her clamshell bed, surrounded by a legion of crustacean admirers. Only one occupant of this underwater wonderland was actually alive, and at that moment it was staring through the blood-spattered glass at Detective Jane Rizzoli.
“This is a pretty fancy aquarium for one little goldfish,” said Jane. “I think she’s got the whole cast of The Little Mermaid in here. All this for a fish that’s just gonna get flushed down the toilet in a year.”
“Not necessarily. That’s a fantail goldfish,” said Dr. Maura Isles. “A fish like that can theoretically live for ten, twenty years. The oldest one on record lived for forty-three years.”
Peering through the glass, Jane had a watery view of Maura, who was crouched on the other side of the aquarium, examining the body of Sofia Suarez, fifty-two years old. Even at ten forty-five on a Saturday morning, Maura managed to look coolly elegant, a trick Jane had never been able to pull off. It wasn’t just Maura’s tailored slacks and blazer and her geometrically clipped black hair; no, there was something about Maura herself. To most cops at Boston PD, she was an intimidating figure in bloodred lipstick, a woman who used her intellect as a shield. And that intellect was now fully engaged in reading the language of death in the wounds and the blood spatters.
“Is that true? Goldfish can really live forty-three years?” said Jane.
“Look it up.”
“Why would you happen to know that completely useless piece of information?”
“No information is useless. It’s just a key waiting for the right lock to open.”
“Well, I am going to look it up. ’Cause every goldfish I ever owned was dead within a year.”
“No comment.”
Jane straightened and turned to survey once again the modest home of the woman who had lived and died here. Sofia Suarez, who were you? Jane read the clues in the books on the shelves, in the neatly lined-up remotes on the coffee table. A tidy woman who liked to knit, judging by the magazines on the end table. The bookcase was filled with nursing textbooks and romance novels, the collection of a woman who saw death in her job, yet still wanted to believe in love. And in one corner, on a little table adorned with bright plastic flowers, was the enshrined photo of a smiling man with twinkly eyes and a handsome swoop of black hair. A man whose ghostly presence still lingered in every room of this house.
Hanging above the dead man’s shrine was the wedding photo of a younger Sofia and her husband, Tony. On the day they’d married, joy had lit up both their faces. That day, they must have believed that many happy years lay before them, years of growing old together. But last year, death took the husband.
And last night, a killer came for the wife.
Jane circled to the front door, where a stethoscope lay coiled on the floor, spattered with blood.
Here is where the attack starts.
Was the killer already waiting for her as she walked through her door last night? Or was he surprised when he heard the key in the lock and panicked when he realized he was about to be discovered?
The first blow doesn’t kill her. She’s still alive. Still conscious.
Jane followed the trail of blood smeared along the floor, marking the victim’s desperate attempt to escape her attacker. It led from the front door, across the living room, and past the softly burbling aquarium.