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  DIE AGAIN: A RIZZOLI & ISLES NOVEL

  Tess Gerritsen

  Ballantine Books

  This is an uncorrected eBook file.

  Please do not quote for publication until you check your copy against the finished book.

  Tentative On-Sale Date: December 30, 2014

  Tentative Publication Month: January 2015

  Tentative Print Price: $27.00

  Tentative eBook Price: $13.99

  Please note that books will not be available in stores until the above on-sale date.

  All reviews should be scheduled to run after that date.

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  Ballantine Books

  An imprint of Random House

  1745 Broadway • New York, NY • 10019

  By Tess Gerritsen

  RIZZOLI & ISLES NOVELS

  The Surgeon

  The Apprentice

  The Sinner

  Body Double

  Vanish

  The Mephisto Club

  The Keepsake

  Ice Cold

  The Silent Girl

  Last to Die

  Die Again

  OTHER NOVELS

  Girl Missing

  Harvest

  Life Support

  Bloodstream

  Gravity

  The Bone Garden

  This is an uncorrected eBook file. Please do not quote for publication until you check your copy against the finished book.

  Die Again is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Tess Gerritsen

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Gerritsen, Tess.

  Rizzoli & Isles : die again : a novel / Tess Gerritsen.

  pages; cm.—(Rizzoli & Isles)

  ISBN 978-0-345-54385-1

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-54386-8

  1. Rizzoli, Jane, Detective (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Isles, Maura (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 3. Policewomen—Fiction. 4. Women forensic scientists—Fiction. I. Title. II. Title: Die again.

  PS3557.E687R585 2014 813'.54—dc23 2014032292

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  To Levina

  Contents

  Cover

  eBook Information

  By Tess Gerritsen

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  One

  Okavango Delta, Botswana

  In the slanting light of dawn I spot it, subtle as a watermark, pressed into the bare patch of dirt. Were it midday, when the African sun glares down hot and bright, I might have missed it entirely, but in early morning, even the faintest dips and depressions cast shadows, and as I emerge from our tent that lone footprint catches my eye. I crouch down beside it and feel a sudden chill when I realize that only a thin layer of canvas shielded us while we slept.

  Richard emerges through the tent flap and gives a happy grunt as he stands and stretches, inhaling the scents of dew-laden grass and wood smoke and breakfast cooking on the campfire. The smells of Africa. This adventure is Richard’s dream; it has always been Richard’s, not mine. I’m the good-sport girlfriend whose default mode is Of course I’ll do it, darling. Even when it means twenty-eight hours and three different planes, from London to Johannesburg to Maun and then into the bush, the last plane a rickety crate flown by a hung-over pilot. Even when it means two weeks in a tent, swatting mosquitoes and peeing behind bushes.

  Even if it means I could die, which is what I’m thinking as I stare down at that footprint, pressed into the dirt barely three feet from where Richard and I were sleeping last night.

  “Smell the air, Millie!” Richard crows. “Nowhere else does it smell like this!”

  “There was a lion here,” I say.

  “I wish I could bottle it and bring it home. What a souvenir that would be. The smell of the bush!”

  He isn’t listening to me. He’s too high on Africa, too wrapped up in his great-white-adventurer fantasy where everything is brilliant and fantastic, even last night’s meal of tinned pork and beans, which he declared the “splendid-est supper ever!”

  I repeat, louder: “There was a lion here, Richard. It was right next to our tent. It could have clawed its way in.” I want to alarm him, want him to say, Oh my God, Millie, this is serious.

  Instead he blithely calls out to the nearest members of our group: “Hey, come take a look! We had a lion here last night!”

  First to join us are the two girls from Cape Town, whose tent is pitched beside ours. Sylvia and Vivian have Dutch last names that I can neither spell nor pronounce. They’re both in their twenties, tan and long-legged and blond, and at first I had trouble telling them apart, until Sylvia finally snapped at me in exasperation: “It’s not like we’re twins, Millie! Can’t you see that Vivian has blue eyes and I have green?” As the girls kneel on either side of me to examine the paw print, I notice that they smell different, too. Vivian-with-the-blue-eyes smells like sweet grass, the fresh, unsoured scent of youth. Sylvia smells like the citronella lotion she’s always slathering on to repel the mosquitoes, because DEET is a poison. You do know that, don’t you? They flank me like blond-goddess bookends, and I can’t help but see that Richard is once again eyeing Sylvia’s cleavage, which is so blatantly displayed in her low-cut tank top. For a girl so conscientious about coating herself in mosquito repellent, she exposes an alarming amount of bitable skin.

  Naturally Elliot is quick to join us, too. He’s never far from the blondes, whom he met only a few weeks ago in Cape Town. He’s since attached himself to them like a loyal puppy, hoping for a scrap of attention.

  “Is that a fresh print?” Elliot asks, sounding worried. At least someone else shares my sense of alarm.

  “I didn’t see it here yesterday,” says Richard. “The lion mu
st have come through last night. Imagine stepping out to answer the call of nature and running into that.” He yowls and swipes a clawed hand at Elliot, who flinches away. This makes Richard and the blondes laugh, because Elliot is everyone’s comic relief, the anxious American whose pockets bulge with tissues and bug spray, sunscreen and sanitizer, allergy pills, iodine tablets, and every other possible necessity for staying alive.

  I don’t join in their laughter. “Someone could have been killed out here,” I point out.

  “But this is what happens on a real safari, hey?” says Sylvia brightly. “You’re out in the bush with lions.”

  “Doesn’t look like a very big lion,” says Vivian, leaning in to study the print. “Maybe a female, do you think?”

  “Male or female, they can both kill you,” says Elliot.

  Sylvia gives him a playful slap. “Ooh. Are you scared?”

  “No. No, I just assumed that Johnny was exaggerating when he gave us that talk the first day. Stay in the jeep. Stay in the tent. Or you die.”

  “If you want to play it perfectly safe, Elliot, maybe you should have gone to the zoo instead,” Richard says, and the blondes laugh at his cutting remark. All hail Richard, the alpha male. Just like the heroes he writes about in his novels, he’s the man who takes charge and saves the day. Or thinks he is. Out here in the wild, he’s really just another clueless Londoner, yet he manages to sound like an expert at staying alive. It’s yet another thing that irritates me this morning, on top of the fact I’m hungry, I didn’t sleep well, and now the mosquitoes have found me. Mosquitoes always find me. Whenever I step outside, it’s as if they can hear their dinner bell ring, and already I’m slapping at my neck and face.

  Richard calls out to the African tracker, “Clarence, come here! Look what came through camp last night.”

  Clarence has been sipping coffee by the campfire with Mr. and Mrs. Matsunaga. Now he ambles toward us, carrying his tin coffee cup, and crouches down to look at the footprint.

  “It’s fresh,” says Richard, the new bush expert. “The lion must have come through just last night.”

  “Not a lion,” says Clarence. He squints up at us, his ebony face agleam in the morning sun. “Leopard.”

  “How can you be so sure? It’s just one paw print.”

  Clarence sketches the air above the print. “You see, this is the front paw. The shape is round, like a leopard’s.” He rises and scans the area. “And it is only one animal, so this one hunts alone. Yes, this is a leopard.”

  Mr. Matsunaga snaps photos of the print with his giant Nikon, which has a telephoto lens that looks like something you’d launch into space. He and his wife wear identical safari jackets and khaki pants and cotton scarves with wide-brimmed hats. Down to the last detail, they are sartorially matched. In holiday spots around the world you find couples just like them, dressed in the same outlandish prints. It makes you wonder: Do they wake up one morning and think, Let’s give the world a laugh today?

  As the sun lifts higher, washing out the shadows that so clearly defined the paw print, the others snap photos, racing against the brightening glare. Even Elliot pulls out his pocket camera, but I think it’s simply because everyone else is doing it, and he doesn’t like to be the odd man out.

  I’m the only one who doesn’t bother to fetch my camera. Richard is taking enough photos for both of us, and he’s using his Canon, the same camera National Geographic photographers use! I move into the shade, but even here, out of the sun, I feel sweat trickle from my armpits. Already the heat is building. Every day in the bush is hot.

  “Now you see why I tell you to stay in your tents at night,” Johnny Posthumus says.

  Our bush guide has approached so quietly that I didn’t realize he’d returned from the river. I turn to see Johnny standing right behind me. Such a grim-sounding name, Posthumus, but he told us it’s a common enough surname among Afrikaans settlers, from which he’s descended. In his features I see the bloodline of his sturdy Dutch ancestors. He has sun-streaked blond hair, blue eyes, and tree-trunk legs that are deeply tanned in khaki shorts. Mosquitoes don’t seem to bother him, nor does the heat, and he wears no hat, slathers on no repellent. Growing up in Africa has toughened his hide, immunized him against its discomforts.

  “She came through here just before dawn,” Johnny says, and points to a thicket on the periphery of our camp. “Stepped out of those bushes, strolled toward the fire, and looked me over. Gorgeous girl, big and healthy.”

  I’m astonished by how calm he is. “You actually saw her?”

  “I was out here building the fire for breakfast when she showed up.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I did what I’ve told all of you to do in that situation. I stood tall. Gave her a good view of my face. Prey animals such as zebras and antelope have eyes at the sides of their heads, but a predator’s eyes face forward. Always show the cat your face. Let her see where your eyes are, and she’ll know you’re a predator, too. She’ll think twice before attacking.” Johnny looks around at the seven clients who are paying him to keep them alive in this remote place. “Remember that, hey? We’ll see more big cats as we go deeper into the bush. If you encounter one, stand tall and make yourself look as large as you can. Face them straight-on. And whatever you do, don’t run. You’ll have a better chance of surviving.”

  “You were out here, face-to-face with a leopard,” says Elliot. “Why didn’t you use that?” He points to the rifle that’s always slung over Johnny’s shoulder.

  Johnny shakes his head. “I won’t shoot a leopard. I won’t kill any big cat.”

  “But isn’t that what the gun’s for? To protect yourself?”

  “There aren’t enough of them left in the world. They own this land, and we’re the intruders here. If a leopard charged me, I don’t think I could kill it. Not even to save my own life.”

  “But that doesn’t apply to us, right?” Elliot gives a nervous laugh and looks around at our traveling party. “You’d shoot a leopard to protect us, wouldn’t you?”

  Johnny answers with an ironic smile. “We’ll see.”

  By noon we’re packed up and ready to push deeper into the wild. Johnny drives the truck while Clarence rides in the tracker’s seat, which juts out in front of the bumper. It seems a precarious perch to me, out there with his legs swinging in the open, easy meat for any lion who can snag him. But Johnny assures us that as long as we stay attached to the vehicle, we’re safe, because predators think we’re all part of one huge animal. But step out of the truck and you’re dinner. Got that, everyone?

  Yes sir. Message received.

  There are no roads at all out here, only a faint flattening of the grass where the passage of earlier tires has compacted the poor soil. The damage caused by a single truck can scar the landscape for months, Johnny says, but I cannot imagine many of them make it this far into the Delta. We’re three days’ drive from the bush landing strip where we were dropped off, and we’ve spotted no other vehicles in this wilderness.

  Wilderness was not something I actually believed in four months ago, sitting in our London flat, the rain spitting against the windows. When Richard called me over to his computer and showed me the Botswana safari he wanted to book for our holiday, I saw photos of lions and hippos, rhinos and leopards, the same familiar animals you can find in zoos and game parks. That’s what I imagined, a giant game park with comfortable lodges and roads. At a minimum, roads. According to the website, there’d be “bush camping” involved, but I pictured lovely big tents with showers and flush toilets. I didn’t think I’d be paying for the privilege of squatting in the bushes.

  Richard doesn’t mind roughing it in the least. He’s high on Africa, higher than Mount Kilimanjaro, his camera constantly clicking away as we drive. In the seat behind us, Mr. Matsunaga’s camera matches Richard’s, click for click, but with a longer lens. Richard won’t admit it, but he has lens envy, and when we get back to London he’ll probably go straight online to pric
e Mr. Matsunaga’s gear. This is the way modern men do battle, not with spear and sword, but with credit cards. My platinum beats your gold. Poor Elliot with his unisex Minolta is left in the dust, but I don’t think he minds, because once again he’s snuggled in the last row with Vivian and Sylvia. I glance back at the three of them and catch a glimpse of Mrs. Matsunaga’s resolute face. She’s another good sport. I’m sure that shitting in the bushes wasn’t her idea of a great holiday, either.

  “Lions! Lions!” shouts Richard. “Over there!”

  Cameras click faster as we pull so close I can see black flies clinging to the flank of the male lion. Nearby are three females, lolling in the shade of a leadwood tree. Suddenly there’s an outburst of Japanese behind me, and I turn to see that Mr. Matsunaga has leaped to his feet. His wife hangs on to the back of his safari jacket, desperate to stop him from leaping out of the truck for a better photo.

  “Sit. Down!” Johnny booms out in a voice that no one, man or beast, could possibly ignore. “Now!”

  Instantly Mr. Matsunaga drops back into his seat. Even the lions seem startled, and they all stare at the mechanical monster with eighteen pairs of arms.

  “Remember what I told you, Isao?” scolds Johnny. “If you step out of this truck, you’re dead.”

  “I get excited. I forget,” murmurs Mr. Matsunaga, apologetically bowing his head.

  “Look, I’m only trying to keep you safe.” Johnny releases a deep breath and says quietly: “I’m sorry for shouting. But last year, a colleague was on a game drive with two clients. Before he could stop them, they both jumped out of the truck to take photos. The lions had them in a flash.”

  “You mean—they were killed?” says Elliot.

  “That’s what lions are programmed to do, Elliot. So please, enjoy the view, but from inside the truck, hey?” Johnny gives a laugh to defuse the tension, but we’re all still cowed, a group of misbehaving children who’ve just been disciplined. The camera clicks are halfhearted now, photos taken to cover our discomfort. We’re all shocked by how hard Johnny came down on Mr. Matsunaga. I stare at Johnny’s back, which looms right in front of me, and the muscles of his neck stick out like thick vines. He starts the engine again. We leave the lions and drive on, to our next campsite.