The Sinner

by Tess Gerritsen

  But it was not the bullet wound that had repelled Sleeper. It was the victim’s face, its lidless eye staring up at them. Lying against the bathroom tiles, the right side of the face should have been inaccessible to rodent teeth, yet the skin was gone. Exposed muscle had dried in leathery strands, and a pearly nubbin of cheekbone poked through.

  “The rats didn’t do that, either,” said Sleeper.

  “No,” said Maura. “This damage wasn’t done by scavengers.”

  “Christ, did he just tear it off? It’s like he peeled away a . . .”

  A mask. Only this mask had not been made of rubber or plastic, but of human skin.

  “He cut off the face. The hands. He’s left us with no way to identify her,” said Sleeper.

  “But why take the feet?” said Crowe. “That doesn’t make any sense. No one gets identified by their toe prints. Besides, she doesn’t look like the kind of vic who’d be missed. What is she, black? Latina?”

  “What does her race have to do with whether she’s missed or not?” asked Maura.

  “I’m just saying, this isn’t some housewife from the suburbs. Or why would she end up in this neighborhood?”

  Maura stood up, her dislike for Crowe suddenly so strong she found it hard to be near him. She waved her flashlight around the room, her beam streaking across sinks and urinals.

  “There’s blood there, on the wall.”

  “I’d say he whacked her right in here,” said Crowe. “Dragged her in, shoves her up against the wall, and pulls the trigger. Then he does the amputations, right where she falls.”

  Maura stared down at blood on the tiles. Only a few smears, because by then the victim is already dead. Her heart has stopped beating, stopped pumping. She feels nothing as the killer crouches beside her, and his blade sinks deep into her wrist, prying apart joints. As he slices through her flesh, peeling away her face as though he is skinning a bear. And when he is done collecting his prizes, he leaves her here, like a discarded carcass, an offering to the scavengers that infest this abandoned building.

  Within a few days, with no clothing to hinder sharp teeth, the rats would have been down to muscle.

  Within a month, down to bone.

  She looked up at Crowe. “Where are her clothes?”

  “All we found was a single shoe. Tennis shoe, size four. I think he dropped it on the way out. It was lying in the kitchen.”

  “Was there blood on it?”

  “Yeah. Got splattered across the top.”

  She looked down at the stump where the right foot should have been. “So he undressed her here, in this room.”

  “Postmortem sexual assault?” said Sleeper.

  Crowe snorted. “Who’d want to screw a woman with this creeping crud all over her skin? What is that rash, anyway? It’s not infectious, is it? Like smallpox or something?”

  “No, these lesions look chronic, not acute. See how some of them are crusted over?”

  “Well, I can’t see anyone wanting to touch her, much less screw her.”

  “It’s always a possibility,” said Sleeper.

  “Or he may have undressed her just to expose the corpse,” said Maura. “To speed up its destruction by scavengers.”

  “Why bother to take the clothes with him?”

  “It could be one more way to strip her identity.”

  “I think he just wanted them,” said Crowe.

  Maura looked at him. “Why?”

  “For the same reason he took the hands and the feet and the face. He wanted souvenirs.” Crowe looked at Maura, and in the slanting shadows, he seemed taller. Threatening. “I think our boy’s a collector.”

  Her porch light was on; she could see its yellowish glow through the lace of falling snow. Hers was the only house on the block lit up at this hour. So many other nights, she had returned to a house where the lamps were turned on not by human hands but by electric timers. Tonight, she thought, someone is actually waiting for me.

  Then she saw that Victor’s car was no longer parked in front of her house. He’s left, she thought. I’m coming home, as usual, to an empty house. The glowing porch light, which had seemed so welcoming, now struck her as coldly anonymous.

  Her chest felt hollow with disappointment as she turned into her driveway. What disturbed her most was not that he had left; it was her reaction to it. Just one evening with him, she thought, and I’m back where I was three years ago, my resolve shaken, my independence cracking.

  She pressed the garage remote. The door rumbled open and she gave a startled laugh as a blue Toyota was revealed, parked in the left stall.

  Victor had simply moved his car into the garage.

  She pulled in beside the rented Toyota, and as the garage door shut behind her, she sat for a moment, acutely aware of her own quickening pulse, of anticipation roaring through her bloodstream like a drug. From despair to jubilation in ten seconds flat. She had to remind herself that nothing had changed between them. That nothing could change between them.

  She stepped out of the car, took a deep breath, and walked into the house.

  “Victor?”

  There was no answer.

  She glanced in the living room, then went up the hall to the kitchen. The coffee cups had been washed and put away, all evidence of his visit erased. She peeked in the bedrooms and her study—still no Victor.

  Only when she returned to the living room did she spot his feet, clad in sensible white socks, protruding from one end of the couch. She stood and watched him as he slept, his arm trailing limp toward the floor, his face at peace. This was not the Victor she recalled, the man whose volcanic passions had first attracted her, and then driven her away. What she remembered of their marriage were the arguments, the deep wounds that only a lover can inflict. The divorce had distorted her memories of him, turning him darker, angrier. She had nursed those memories, had fed off them for so long that seeing him now, unguarded, was a moment of startling recognition.

  I used to watch you sleep. I used to love you.

  She went to the closet for a blanket, and spread it over him. Reached out to touch his hair, then stopped, her hand hovering above his head.

  His eyes were open and watching her.

  “You’re awake,” she said.

  “I never meant to fall asleep. What time is it?”

  “Two thirty.”

  He groaned. “I was going to leave—”

  “You might as well stay. It’s snowing like crazy.”

  “I moved the car into the garage. I hope you don’t mind. The city plow was coming by—”

  “They would have towed you, if you hadn’t moved it. It’s okay.” She smiled, and said softly, “Go back to sleep.”

  They looked at each other for a moment. Caught between longing and doubt, she said nothing, knowing only too well the consequences of a wrong choice. Surely they were both thinking the same thing: that her bedroom was right up the hall. It took only a short walk, an embrace, and there she’d be, back again. In a place she’d worked so hard to escape.

  She rose, an act that took as much fortitude as if she was struggling out of quicksand. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said.

  Was that disappointment she saw in his eyes? she wondered. And couldn’t help feeling a small dart of happiness at that possibility.

  Lying in bed, she couldn’t sleep, knowing that he was under the same roof. Her roof, her territory. In San Francisco, they had lived in the house he’d owned before they married, and she had never really thought of it as hers. Tonight, the circumstances were reversed, and she was the one in control. What happened next was her choice.

  The possibilities tormented her.

  Only when she startled awake did she realize she had actually slept. Daylight already glowed in the window. She lay in bed for a moment, wondering what had awakened her. Wondering what she would say to him. Then she heard the garage door rumble open, and the growl of a car engine backing out her driveway.

  She climbed out of bed an
d looked out the window, just in time to see Victor’s car drive away and vanish around the corner.

  EIGHT

  JANE RIZZOLI AWAKENED in the early dawn. The street outside her apartment building was still quiet; the morning commute had not yet started in earnest. She stared up at the gloom, thinking: Come on, you gotta do it. You can’t keep your goddamn head stuck in the sand.

  She switched on the lamp and sat on the side of the bed, stomach cramping with nausea. Though the room was chilly, she was sweating, and her T-shirt clung to her damp underarms.

  It was time to face the music.

  She walked barefoot into the bathroom. The package lay on the counter, where she had left it the night before, to ensure that she wouldn’t forget to use it this morning. As if she needed any reminder. She opened the box, tore open the foil packet, and removed the test stick. Last night she had read the instructions several times, had practically committed them to memory. Nevertheless, she paused now to read them again. Stalling just a little longer.

  At last she sat down on the toilet. Holding the test stick between her thighs, she peed on the tip, soaking it in the stream of early morning urine.

  Wait two minutes, the instructions said.

  She set the test stick on the countertop, and went into the kitchen. Poured herself a glass of orange juice. The same hand that could grip a weapon and squeeze off shot after shot, hitting every target, was now shaking as she lifted the glass of juice to her lips. She stared at the kitchen clock, watching the second hand make its jerky revolution. Feeling her pulse quicken as the two minutes counted down to zero. She had never been a coward, had never shrunk from facing down the enemy, but this was a different sort of fear, private and gnawing. The fear that she would make the wrong decision, and would spend the rest of her life suffering for it.

  Goddamn it, Jane. Get on with it.

  Suddenly angry at herself, disgusted by her own cowardice, she set down the juice and walked back to the bathroom. Did not even pause in the doorway to steel herself, but crossed straight to the counter and picked up the test stick.

  She did not need to read the instructions to know what that purple line across the test window meant.

  She didn’t remember returning to the bedroom. She found herself sitting on the bed, the test stick on her lap. She’d never liked the color purple; it was too girly and flamboyant. Now the very sight of it made her sick. She thought she’d been fully prepared for the result, but she was not ready at all. Her legs went numb from sitting too long in the same position, yet she couldn’t seem to stir. Even her brain had shut down, every thought mired by shock and indecision. She could not think of what to do next. The first impulse that came to mind was childish and utterly irrational.

  I want my Mom.

  She was thirty-four years old and independent. She had kicked down doors and tracked down murderers. She had killed a man. And here she was, suddenly hungry for her mother’s arms.

  The phone rang.

  She looked at it in bewilderment, as though not recognizing what it was. On the fourth ring, she finally picked it up.

  “Hey, you still at home?” said Frost. “The team’s all here.”

  She struggled to focus on his words. The team. The pond. Turning to look at her bedside clock, she was startled to see it was already eight-fifteen.

  “Rizzoli? They’re ready to start dragging. You want us to go ahead?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be right there.” She hung up. The sound of the receiver thudding in the cradle was like the snap of a hypnotist’s fingers. She sat up straight, the trance broken, the job once again demanding her complete focus.

  She threw the test stick into the trash can. Then she got dressed, and went to work.

  The Rat Lady.

  This is what an entire lifetime gets distilled down to, thought Maura as she gazed down at the body lying on the table, its horrors concealed beneath a sheet. Nameless, faceless, your existence summed up in three words which only emphasize the indignity with which your life ended. As fodder for rodents.

  It was Darren Crowe who’d dubbed the corpse last night, while they had stood surrounded by vermin skittering just beyond the range of their flashlights. He had casually tossed off the nickname to the morgue retrieval crew, and by the next morning, when Maura walked into her office, her staff was calling the victim Rat Lady as well. She knew it was just a convenient moniker for a woman who’d otherwise be known merely as Jane Doe, but Maura could not help wincing when she heard even Detective Sleeper use it. This is how we get beyond the horror, she thought. How we keep these victims at arm’s length. We refer to them by a nickname, or a diagnosis, or a case file number. They don’t seem like people then, so their fates cannot break our hearts.

  She looked up as Crowe and Sleeper walked into the lab. Sleeper was exhausted from last night’s exertion, and the harsh light of the autopsy room cruelly emphasized his baggy eyes and his sagging jowls. Beside him, Crowe was like a young lion, tan and fit and confident. Crowe was not someone you ever wanted to humiliate; beneath the veneer of an arrogant man, cruelty usually lurked. He was looking down at the corpse with his lips curled in disgust. This would not be a pleasant autopsy, and even Crowe seemed to regard the prospect of this postmortem with a hint of trepidation.

  “The X rays are hanging,” said Maura. “Let’s go over them before we begin.”

  She crossed to the far wall and flipped on a switch. The light box flickered on, illuminating ghostly images of ribs and spine and pelvis. Scattered within the thorax, like a galaxy of stars spread across the lungs and heart, were bright metallic flecks.

  “That looks like shotshell,” said Sleeper.

  “That’s what I thought, at first,” said Maura. “But if you look here, next to this rib, you see this opaque shadow? It’s almost lost against the rib’s outline.”

  “Metal jacket?” said Crowe.

  “That’s what it looks like to me.”

  “So this isn’t a shotshell cartridge.”

  “No. This looks like Glaser ammo. Judging by the number of projectiles I see here, it’s most likely a blue-tip. Copper jacket, packed with number twelve shot.”

  Designed to produce far more devastating damage than a conventional bullet, Glaser-type ammo hit its target as a single unit, and then fragmented after impact. She did not need to cut open the torso to know that the damage caused by that single bullet was devastating.

  She took down the chest films and clipped up two new ones. These were somehow more disturbing images, because of what was missing from them. They were gazing at the right and left forearms. The radius and ulna, the two long bones of the forearm, normally extended from the elbow to the wrist, where they joined with the dense pebblelike carpal bones. But these arm bones ended abruptly.

  “The left hand was disarticulated here, right at the joint between the styloid process of the radius and the scaphoid bone,” she said. “The killer removed all the carpal bones, along with the hand. You can even see some of the nick marks, on the other views, where he scraped along the edge of the styloid process. He separated the hand just where the arm bones meet the wrist bones.” She pointed to the other X ray. “Now look at the right hand. Here, he wasn’t quite as neat. He didn’t slice straight across the wrist joint, and when he removed the hand, he left the hamate bone behind. You can see how the knife made a cut here. It looks like he couldn’t quite find the joint, and he ended up sawing around blindly, till he found it.”

  “So these hands weren’t just chopped off, say, with an axe,” said Sleeper.

  “No. It was done with a knife. He cut off the hands the way you’d disjoint a chicken. You flex the limb to expose the joint space, and cut through the ligaments. That way, you don’t have to saw through bone itself.”

  Sleeper grimaced. “I don’t think I’ll be eating chicken tonight.”

  “What kind of knife did he use?” asked Crowe.

  “It could be a boning knife, it could be a scalpel. The stump’s been too
chewed up by rats, so we can’t tell by the wound margin. We’ll need to boil off the soft tissues and see how the cut marks look under the microscope.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be eating soup tonight either,” said Sleeper.

  Crowe glanced at his partner’s ample belly. “Maybe you ought to hang around the morgue more often. Might lose some of that tire.”

  “You mean, instead of wasting my life in the gym?” Sleeper shot back.

  Maura glanced at him, surprised by the retort. Even the usually tractable Sleeper could only take so much of his partner.

  Crowe merely laughed, oblivious to the irritation he stirred in others. “Hey, when you’re ready to bulk up—I mean, above the waist—you’re welcome to join me.”

  “There are other X rays to look at,” cut in Maura, pulling down the films with businesslike efficiency. Yoshima handed her the next films, and she slid them under the mounting clips. Images of the Rat Lady’s head and neck glowed from the light box. Last night, looking at the corpse’s face, she’d seen only raw meat, ravaged even more by hungry scavengers. But beneath the stripped flesh, the facial bones were eerily intact, except for the missing tip of the nasal bone, which had been sheared off when the killer had peeled off his trophy of flesh.

  “The front teeth are missing,” said Sleeper. “You don’t think he took those, too?”

  “No. These look like atrophic changes. And that’s what surprises me.”

  “Why?”

  “These changes are usually associated with advanced age and bad dentition. But that doesn’t fit a woman who otherwise appears fairly young.”

  “How can you tell, with her face gone?”

  “Her spine films show no evidence of the degenerative changes you usually see with age. She has no gray hairs, either on her head or her pubis. And no arcus senilis in her eyes.”

  “How old would you say she is?”

  “I would have put her age at no older than forty.” Maura looked at the X ray hanging on the light box. “But these films are more consistent with a woman of advanced age. I’ve never seen such severe bony resorption in anyone, much less a young woman. She wouldn’t have been able to wear dentures, even if she could afford them. Clearly, this woman didn’t get even basic dental care.”