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“Sir?” Jane called out. “Sir, we’d like to talk to you.”
The man’s pace quickened to a jog.
“Oh shit. I think we’ve got a runner,” said Frost.
They took off after him, sprinting past gravestones and marble angels. Raindrops splattered Jane’s face and trickled into her eyes, smearing the landscape into a blur of green. She blinked and her quarry came back into view. He was running full tilt now, and he rounded an ivy-smothered mausoleum and darted down a path cutting through woods.
Blood pumping, breaths coming fast, Jane followed him into the woods and her shoe suddenly skidded on wet leaves. Like an out-of-control ice-skater, she slid across the flagstones and went down, landing so hard on her rear end that the impact slammed up her spine.
Frost dashed past her, kept running.
Tailbone throbbing, the seat of her pants now muddy, Jane scrambled back to her feet and followed her partner. When she caught up with him, he had stopped and was frantically scanning the woods. The path ahead of them was deserted, the trail flanked by dense shrubbery. Their quarry had vanished.
Thunder rumbled closer and here they were, once again standing in the worst place to be when lightning strikes: under a tree.
“How the hell did we lose him?” said Jane.
“He had too much of a head start. He must’ve gone off the trail somewhere.” He looked at her. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” She brushed dirt from her pants. “Crap, and I just bought these.”
A twig snapped, loud as a rifle shot.
Jane spun toward the sound and saw a thick wall of rhododendrons. She glanced at Frost, and without a word they simultaneously drew their weapons. She didn’t know who this man was or why he had fled from them, but running was something you did when you were afraid. Or guilty.
She was betting on guilty.
She spied an opening in the wall of shrubbery and eased her way through, only to be trapped in a smothering thicket of green. Thunder boomed and rain splattered the leaves, rattling them like gunfire. She kept moving forward, pushing through the damp jungle and blinking away raindrops. A cloud of mosquitoes rose from the soil and swarmed her face. Waving them away, she blindly pushed forward.
From beyond the bushes came the crack of another snapping twig. The clang of metal.
Jane plunged through the last tangle of branches and burst through to the other side, her weapon raised. She came face-to-face with a man wielding a pair of hedge clippers. A man who stared at her with a look of abject terror. He dropped the hedge clippers and raised both hands in the air. In a glance, Jane took in his rain poncho and work boots and saw the mound of clipped branches in the back of the ATV.
The gardener. I almost shot the gardener.
“Sorry,” she said, and holstered her weapon. “We’re police. It’s okay. It’s—”
“Rizzoli!” yelled Frost. “He’s over there!”
She turned to see a flash of gray as the man they’d been chasing vanished out the cemetery exit. He was beyond their reach now, too far for them to catch.
“Um…can I put them down now?” said the gardener, his arms still raised over his head.
“Yeah,” said Jane. “And maybe you can help us. That man who just ran out the gate, do you know who he is?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Ever seen him before?”
“I didn’t get a look at his face—”
Jane sighed and turned to Frost. “Back to square one.”
“—but he might be on video.”
Jane’s attention snapped back to the gardener. “What video?”
—
