The Surgeon: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel: With Bonus Content by Tess Gerritsen Page A

ear.”
    It’s Mary’s.
Present tense. It struck her then that the reason this house seemed so feminine was that it was still present-tense-Mary, a house waiting, unaltered, for its mistress to come home. A photo of Moore’s wife was displayed on the piano, a sunburned woman with laughing eyes and hair in windblown disarray. Mary, whose chintz curtains still hung in the house she would never return to.
    In the kitchen, Rizzoli set the bag of food on the table, next to a stack of files. Moore shuffled through the folders and found the one he was searching for.
    “Elena Ortiz’s E.R. report,” he said, handing it to her.
    “Cordell dug this up?”
    He gave an ironic smile. “I seem to be surrounded by women more competent than I am.”
    She opened the folder and saw a photocopy of a doctor’s chicken-scratch handwriting. “You got the translation on this mess?”
    “It’s pretty much what I told you over the phone. Unreported rape. No kit collected, no DNA. Even Elena’s family didn’t know about it.”
    She closed the folder and set it down on his other papers. “Jeez, Moore. This mess looks like my dining table. No place left to eat.”
    “It’s taken over your life, too, has it?” he said, clearing away the files to make space for their dinner.
    “What life? This case is all there is to mine. Sleep. Eat. Work. And if I’m lucky, an hour at bedtime with my old pal Dave Letterman.”
    “No boyfriends?”
    “Boyfriends?” She snorted as she took out the food cartons and laid napkins and chopsticks on the table. “Oh yeah. Like I gotta beat ’em all off.” Only after she said it did she realize how self-pitying that sounded—not at all the way she meant it. She was quick to add: “I’m not complaining. If I need to spend the weekend working, I can do it without some guy whining about it. I don’t do well with whiners.”
    “Hardly surprising, since you’re the opposite of a whiner. As you made painfully clear to me today.”
    “Yeah, yeah. I thought I apologized for that.”
    He got two beers from the refrigerator, then sat down across from her. She’d never seen him like this, with his shirtsleeves rolled up and looking so relaxed. She liked him this way. Not the forbidding Saint Thomas but a guy she could shoot the breeze with, a guy who’d laugh with her. A guy who, if he just bothered to turn on the charm, could knock a girl’s socks off.
    “You know, you don’t always have to be tougher than everyone else,” he said.
    “Yes, I do.”
    “Why?”
    “Because
they
don’t think I am.”
    “Who doesn’t?”
    “Guys like Crowe. Lieutenant Marquette.”
    He shrugged. “There’ll always be a few like that.”
    “How come I always end up working with them?” She popped open her beer and took a swig. “That’s why you’re the first one I told about the necklace. You won’t hog the credit.”
    “It’s a sad day when it gets down to who claims credit for this or that.”
    She picked up her chopsticks and dug into the carton of kung pao chicken. It was burn-your-mouth spicy, just the way she liked it. Rizzoli was no wimp when it came to hot peppers, either.
    She said, “The first really big case I worked on in Vice and Narcotics, I was the only woman on a team with five men. When we cracked it, there was this press conference. TV cameras, the whole nine yards. And you know what? They mentioned every name on that team but mine. Every other goddamn name.” She took another swallow of beer. “I make sure that doesn’t happen anymore. You guys, you can focus all your attention on the case and the evidence. But I waste a lot of energy just trying to make myself heard.”
    “I hear you fine, Rizzoli.”
    “It’s a nice change.”
    “What about Frost? You have problems with him?”
    “Frost is cool.” She winced at the unintended quip. “His wife’s got him well trained.”
    They both laughed at that. Anyone who overheard Barry Frost’s meek
yes dear
,
no dear
phone