“Oh, well,” said Dunleavy. “Maybe it’ll turn up. Or he got rid of it.”

Maybe. Or maybe we’re still missing something.

It was dark when she and Frost left Doyle’s. Instead of going home, she drove back to Schroeder Plaza, the conversation with Vann and Dunleavy still weighing on her mind, and sat down at her desk, which was covered by a mountain of files. On top were the records from NCIC, several decades’ worth of missing persons reports compiled during their hunt for the Beast. But it was Anna Leoni’s murder that had set the whole search in motion, like a pebble dropped into water, launching ever wider ripples. Anna’s murder was what had led them to Amalthea, and eventually to the Beast. Yet Anna’s death remained a question still unresolved.

Rizzoli cleared away the NCIC files, working her way down to the folder on Anna Leoni. Though she had read and reread everything in this file, she leafed through it again, rereading the witness statements, the autopsy, the reports from hair and fiber, fingerprints, and DNA. She came to the ballistics report, and her gaze lingered over the words Black Talon. She remembered the starburst shape of the bullet in Anna Leoni’s skull X-ray. Remembered, too, the track of devastation it had left in her brain.

A Black Talon bullet. Where was the gun that had fired it?

She closed the folder and looked down at the cardboard box that had been sitting beside her desk for the last week. It contained the files that Vann and Dunleavy had lent her, on the murder of Vassily Titov. He’d been the only other Boston-area victim of a Black Talon bullet in the last five years. She took the folders from that box and piled them on her desk, sighing when she saw how high the stack was. Even a slam-dunk investigation generates reams of paper. Vann and Dunleavy had summed up the case for her earlier, and she had read enough of their files to satisfy herself that they had indeed made a good arrest. The subsequent trial and speedy conviction of Antonin Leonov only reinforced that belief. Yet here she was, reviewing the files again, on a case which left no room for doubt that the right man had been convicted.

Detective Dunleavy’s final report was thorough and convincing. Leonov had been under police surveillance for a week, in anticipation of a delivery of Tajikistan heroin. While the two detectives had watched from their vehicle, Leonov had pulled up in front of Titov’s residence, knocked on the front door, and was admitted. Moments later, two gunshots were fired inside the house. Leonov walked out, climbed into his car, and was about to drive away when Vann and Dunleavy closed in and arrested him. Inside the house, Titov was found dead in the kitchen, two Black Talons in his brain. Ballistics later confirmed both bullets had been fired by Leonov’s weapon.

Open and shut. The perp convicted, the weapon in police custody. Rizzoli could see no link at all between the deaths of Vassily Titov and Anna Leoni, except for the use of Black Talon bullets. Increasingly rare ammunition, but not enough to constitute any real connection between the murders.

Yet she continued flipping through the files, reading through the dinner hour. By the time she reached the last folder, she was almost too tired to tackle it. I’ll get this over and done with, she thought, then pack up the files and put this issue to bed.

She opened the folder and found a report on the search of Antonin Leonov’s warehouse. It contained Detective Vann’s description of the raid, a list of Leonov’s arrested employees, along with an accounting of everything confiscated, from crates and cash to bookkeeping records. She skimmed down until she reached the list of officers on the scene. Ten Boston PD cops. Her gaze froze on one particular name, a name she hadn’t noticed when she’d read the report a week ago. Just a coincidence. It doesn’t necessarily mean…

She sat and thought about it for a moment. She remembered a drug raid she’d been in on as a young patrol officer. Lots of noise, lots of excitement. And confusion-when a dozen adrenaline-hyped cops converge on a hostile building, everyone’s nervous, everyone’s looking out for himself. You may not notice what your fellow cop is doing. What he’s slipping into his pocket. Cash, drugs. A box of bullets that would never be missed. It’s always there, that temptation to take a souvenir. A souvenir you might later find useful.

She picked up the phone and called Frost.

THE DEAD WERE NOT good company.

Maura sat at her microscope, staring through the eyepiece at sections of lung and liver and pancreas-bits of tissue sliced from a suicide victim’s mortal remains, preserved under glass, and stained a gaudy pink and purple with a hematoxylin-eosin preparation. Except for the occasional clink of the slides, and the faint hiss of the air-conditioning vent, the building was quiet. Yet it was not empty of people; in the cold room downstairs, half a dozen silent visitors lay zipped into their shrouds. Undemanding guests, each with a story to tell, but only to those willing to cut and probe.

The phone rang on her desk; she let the after-hours office recording pick up. Nobody here but the dead. And me.

The story Maura now saw beneath her microscope lens was not a new one. Young organs, healthy tissues. A body designed to live many more years, had the soul been willing, had some inner voice only whispered to the despairing man: Now, wait a minute, heartbreak is temporary. This pain will pass, and you’ll find another girl to love someday.

She finished the last slide and set it in the box. Sat for a moment, her mind not on the slides she had just reviewed, but on another image: a young man with dark hair and green eyes. She had not watched his autopsy; that afternoon, while he had been split open and dissected by Dr. Bristol, she had remained upstairs in her office. But even as she’d dictated reports and flipped through microscope slides late into the evening, she had been thinking about him. Do I really want to know who he is? She still hadn’t decided. Even as she rose from her desk, as she gathered her purse and an armful of files, she was uncertain of her answer.

Again, the phone rang; again, she ignored it.

Walking down the silent hallway, she passed closed doors and deserted offices. She remembered another evening when she had walked out of this empty building, to find the claw mark scratched into her car, and her heart started to beat a little faster.

But he’s gone, now. The Beast is dead.

She stepped out the rear exit, into a night soft with summery warmth. She paused beneath the building’s outside lamp to scan the shadowy parking lot. Drawn by the glow of the light, moths swarmed around the lamp and she heard wings fluttering against the bulb. Then, another sound: the closing of a car door. A silhouette walked toward her, taking on form and features as it moved into the lamp’s glow.

She gave a sigh of relief when she saw it was Ballard. “Were you waiting for me?”

“I saw your car in the lot. I tried calling you.”

“After five, I let the machine pick up.”

“You weren’t answering your cell phone, either.”

“I turned it off. You don’t need to keep checking on me, Rick. I’m fine.”

“Are you, really?”

She sighed as they walked to her car. She looked up at the sky, where stars were washed pale by city lights. “I have to decide what to do about the DNA. Whether I really want to know the truth.”

“Then don’t do it. It doesn’t matter if you are related to them. Amalthea has nothing to do with who you are.”

“That’s what I would have said before.” Before I knew whose bloodlines I might share. Before I knew I might come from a family of monsters.