“Are you sure you feel safe staying here alone?” he asked.
“I’ll be fine.” And what’s the alternative? That you spend the night with me? Is that what you’re offering?
He turned toward the door.
“Who called you here, Daniel?” she asked. “How did you know?”
He looked back at her. “Detective Rizzoli did. She told me …” He paused. “You know, I get calls like this all the time from the police. A death in the family, someone needs a priest. I’m always willing to respond. But this time …” He paused. “Lock your doors, Maura,” he said. “I don’t ever want to go through another night like this one.”
She watched him walk out of her house and climb into his car. He did not immediately start the engine; he was waiting to make sure that she was safely inside for the night.
She closed the door and locked it.
Through the living room window, she watched Daniel drive away. For a moment she stared at the empty curb, feeling suddenly abandoned. Wishing, at that moment, that she could call him back. And what would happen then? What did she want to happen between them? Some temptations, she thought, are best kept beyond our reach. She scanned the dark street one last time, then stepped away from the window, aware that she was framed by the light in her living room. She closed the curtains and went from room to room, checking the locks and the windows. On this warm June night, she would normally sleep with her bedroom window open. But tonight, she left the windows closed and turned on the air conditioner.
In the early morning she awakened, shivering from the chill air blowing out the vent. Her dreams had been of Paris. Of strolling under blue skies, past buckets of roses and star-gazer lilies, and for a moment, she did not remember where she was. Not in Paris any longer, but in my own bed, she realized. And something terrible has happened.
It was only five A.M., yet she felt wide awake. It’s eleven A.M. in Paris, she thought. There the sun is shining and if I were there now, I would already have had my second cup of coffee. She knew that jet lag would catch up with her later today, that this burst of early morning energy would be gone by afternoon, but she could not force herself to sleep any longer.
She rose and got dressed.
The street in front of her house looked the same as it always had. The first streaks of dawn lit the sky. She watched the lights come on in Mr. Telushkin’s house next door. He was an early riser, usually heading off to work at least an hour before she did, but this morning, she’d been the first to awaken, and she saw her neighborhood with fresh eyes. Saw the automatic sprinklers come on across the street, water hissing circles on the lawn. She saw the paperboy cycle past, baseball cap turned backward, and heard the thump of The Boston Globe hitting her front porch. Everything seems the same, she thought, but it’s not. Death has paid a visit to my neighborhood, and everyone who lives here will remember it. They will look out their front windows at the curb where the Taurus was parked, and shudder at how close it came to touching any one of us.
Headlights swung around the corner, and a vehicle drove along the street, slowing down as it approached her house. A Brookline police cruiser.
No, nothing is the same, she thought as she watched the cruiser drive past.
Nothing ever is.
She arrived at work before her secretary did. By six, Maura was at her desk, tackling the large stack of transcribed dictations and lab reports that had accumulated in her in-box during the week she had been at the Paris conference. She was already a third of the way through when she heard footsteps, and she looked up to see Louise standing in the doorway.
“You’re here,” Louise murmured.
Maura greeted her with a smile. “Bonjour! I thought I’d get an early start on all this paperwork.”
Louise just stared at her for a moment, then she came into the room and sat down in the chair facing Maura’s desk, as though she was suddenly too tired to stand. Though fifty years old, Louise always seemed to have twice the stamina of Maura, who was ten years younger. But this morning, Louise looked drained, her face thin and sallow under fluorescent lights.
“Are you all right, Dr. Isles?” Louise asked quietly.
“I’m fine. A little jet-lagged.”
“I mean—after what happened last night. Detective Frost sounded so sure it was you, in that car …”
Maura nodded, her smile fading. “It was like being in the Twilight Zone, Louise. Coming home to find all those police cars in front of my house.”
“It was awful. We all thought …” Louise swallowed and looked down at her lap. “I was so relieved when Dr. Bristol called me last night. To let me know it was a mistake.”
There was a silence, heavy with reproach. It suddenly dawned on Maura that she should have been the one to call her own secretary. She should have realized that Louise was shaken, and would want to hear her voice. I’ve been living alone and unattached for so long, she thought, that it doesn’t even occur to me that there are people in this world who might care what happens to me.
Louise stood up to leave. “I’m so glad to see you back, Dr. Isles. I just wanted to tell you that.”
“Louise?”
“Yes?”
“I brought you a little something back from Paris. I know this sounds like a lame excuse, but it’s packed in my suitcase. And the airline lost it.”
“Oh.” Louise laughed. “Well, if it’s chocolate, my hips certainly don’t need it.”
“Nothing caloric, I promise.” She glanced at the clock on her desk. “Is Dr. Bristol in yet?”
“He just got here. I saw him in the parking lot.”
“Do you know when he’s doing the autopsy?”
“Which one? He has two today.”
“The gunshot from last night. The woman.”
Louise gave her a long look. “I think that one is second on his schedule.”
“Do they know anything more about her?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Dr. Bristol.”
THREE
Although she had no autopsies on her own schedule that day, at two o’clock Maura headed downstairs and changed into a scrub suit. She was alone in the women’s locker room, and she took her time removing her street clothes, folding her blouse and slacks and placing them in a tidy pile inside the locker. The scrubs felt crisp against her bare skin, like freshly laundered sheets, and she found comfort in the familiar routine of tightening the trouser drawstrings and tucking her hair into a cap. She felt contained and protected by laundered cotton, and by the role she donned along with the uniform. She glanced in the mirror, at a reflection as cool as a stranger’s, all emotions shielded from sight. She left the locker room, walked down the hall, and pushed into the autopsy suite.
Rizzoli and Frost were already standing beside the table, both of them gowned and gloved, their backs obstructing Maura’s view of the victim. It was Dr. Bristol who first spotted Maura. He stood facing her, his generous girth filling the extra-large surgical gown, and he met her gaze as she entered the room. His eyebrows pinched into a frown above the surgical mask, and she saw the question in his eyes.
“I thought I’d drop in to watch this one,” she said.
Now Rizzoli turned to look at her. She, too, was frowning. “Are you sure you want to be here?”
“Wouldn’t you be curious?”
“But I’m not sure I’d want to watch. Considering.”
“I’m just going to observe. If that’s okay with you, Abe.”
Bristol shrugged. “Well hell, I guess I’d be curious, too,” he said. “Join the party.”
She moved around to Abe’s side of the table and at her first unobstructed view of the corpse, her throat went dry. She had seen her share of horrors in this lab, had gazed at flesh in every stage of decay, at bodies so damaged by fire or trauma that the remains could scarcely be categorized as human. The woman on the table was, in the scope of her experience, remarkably intact. The blood had been washed away, and the bullet’s entry wound, in
the left scalp, was obscured by her dark hair. The face was undamaged, the torso marred only by dependent mottling of the skin. There were fresh puncture marks in the groin and neck, where the morgue assistant Yoshima had drawn blood for lab tests, but the torso was otherwise untouched; Abe’s scalpel had yet to make a single slice. Had the chest already been split open, the cavity exposed, the body would have struck her as a far less disturbing sight. Opened corpses are anonymous. Hearts and lungs and spleens are merely organs, so lacking in individuality that they can be transplanted, like spare auto parts, between bodies. But this woman was still whole, her features startlingly recognizable. Last night, Maura had seen the corpse fully clothed and in shadow, lit only by the beam of Rizzoli’s Maglite. Now the features were harshly lit by autopsy lamps, the clothes stripped off to reveal the naked torso, and those features were more than merely familiar.
Dear god, that’s my own face, my own body, on the table.
Only she knew just how close the resemblance was. No one else in that room would have seen the shape of Maura’s bare breasts, the curve of her thighs. They knew only what she allowed them to see, her face, her hair. They could not possibly know that the similarities between her and this corpse were as intimate as the flecks of reddish brown in the pubic hair.
Maura looked at the woman’s hands, the fingers long and slender like her own. A pianist’s hands. The fingers had already been inked. Skull and dental X-rays had been completed as well; the dental panograph was now displayed on the light box, two white rows of teeth glowing in a Cheshire cat’s grin. Is that how my X-rays would look? she wondered. Are we the same, right down to the enamel on our teeth?
She asked, in a voice that struck her as unnaturally calm, “Have you learned anything else about her?”
“We’re still checking on that name, Anna Jessop,” said Rizzoli. “All we have so far is that Massachusetts driver’s license, issued four months ago. It says she’s forty years old. Five foot seven, black hair, green eyes. A hundred twenty pounds.” Rizzoli eyed the corpse on the table. “I’d say she fits that description.”
So do I, thought Maura. I’m forty years old and five foot seven. Only the weight is different; I weigh a hundred twenty-five. But what woman doesn’t lie about her weight on her driver’s license?
She watched, wordless, as Abe completed his surface exam. He jotted occasional notations on the preprinted diagram of a female body. Bullet wound in the left temple. Dependent mottling of the lower torso and thighs. Appendectomy scar. Then he set down the clipboard and moved to the foot of the table to collect vaginal swabs. As he and Yoshima rotated the thighs to expose the perineum, it was the corpse’s abdomen that Maura focused on. She stared at the appendectomy scar, a thin white line tracing across ivory skin.
I have one, too.
Swabs collected, Abe moved to the instrument tray and picked up the scalpel.
The first cut was almost unbearable to watch. Maura actually lifted her hand to her chest, as though she could feel the blade slice into her own flesh. This was a mistake, she thought as Abe made his Y incision. I don’t know if I can watch this. But she remained rooted to her spot, trapped by appalled fascination as she saw Abe reflect back the skin from the chest wall, swiftly peeling it away as though skinning game. He worked unaware of her horror, his attention focused only on the task of opening up the torso. An efficient pathologist can complete an uncomplicated autopsy in under an hour, and at this stage of the postmortem, Abe wasted no time on needlessly elegant dissection. Maura had always thought Abe a likable man, with his hearty appetite for food and drink and opera, but at this moment, with his bulging abdomen and his neck thick as a bull’s, he looked like a fat butcher, his knife tearing through flesh.
The skin of the chest was now flayed open, the breasts concealed beneath the peeled-back flaps, the ribs and muscles exposed. Yoshima leaned forward with pruning shears and cut through the ribs. Each snap made Maura wince. How easily a human bone is cracked, she thought. We think of our hearts as protected within a sturdy cage of ribs, yet all it takes is the squeeze of a handle, the scissoring of blades, and one by one, the ribs surrender to tempered steel. We are made of such fragile material.
Yoshima snipped through the last bone, and Abe sliced the last strands of gristle and muscle. Together they removed the breastplate, as though lifting off the lid of a box.
Inside the open thorax, the heart and lungs glistened. Young organs, was Maura’s first thought. But no, she realized; forty years old wasn’t so young, was it? It was not easy to acknowledge that, at age forty, she was at the halfway mark in her life. That she, like this woman on the table, could no longer be considered young.
The organs she saw in the open chest appeared normal, without obvious signs of pathology. With a few swift cuts, Abe excised the lungs and heart and placed them in a metal basin. Under bright lights he made a few slices to view the lung parenchyma.
“Not a smoker,” he said to the two detectives. “No edema. Nice healthy tissue.”
Except for the fact it was dead.
He dropped the lungs back into the basin, where they formed a pink mound, and he picked up the heart. It rested easily in his massive hand. Maura was suddenly aware of her own heart, thumping in her chest. Like this woman’s heart, it would fit in Abe’s palm. She felt a twinge of nausea at the thought of him holding it, turning it over to inspect the coronary vessels as he was doing now. Though mechanically just a pump, the heart sits at the very core of one’s body, and to see this one so exposed to view made her own chest feel hollow. She took a breath, and the scent of blood made her nausea worse. She turned away from the corpse and found herself meeting Rizzoli’s gaze. Rizzoli, who saw too much. They had known each other almost two years now, had worked enough cases together to have developed the highest regard for each other as professionals. But along with that regard came a measure of respectful wariness. Maura knew just how acute were Rizzoli’s instincts, and as they looked at each other across the table, she knew that the other woman must surely see how close Maura was to bolting from the room. At the unspoken question in Rizzoli’s eyes, Maura simply squared her jaw. The Queen of the Dead reasserted her invincibility.
She focused, once again, on the corpse.
Abe, oblivious to the undercurrent of tension in the room, had sliced open the heart’s chambers. “Valves all look normal,” he commented. “Coronaries are soft. Clean vessels. Geez, I hope my heart looks this good.”
Maura glanced at his enormous belly and doubted it, knowing his passion for foie gras and buttery sauces. Enjoy life while you can, was Abe’s philosophy. Indulge your appetites now, because we all end up, sooner or later, like our friends on the table. What good are clean coronaries if you’ve lived a life deprived of pleasures?
He set the heart in the basin and went to work on the contents of the abdomen, his scalpel slicing deep, through peritoneum. Out came the stomach and liver, spleen and pancreas. The odor of death, of chilled organs, was familiar to Maura, yet this time so disturbing. As if she was experiencing an autopsy for the very first time. No longer the jaded pathologist, she watched Abe cut with scissors and knife, and the brutality of the procedure appalled her. Dear god, this is what I do every day, but when my scalpel cuts, it’s through the unfamiliar flesh of strangers.
This woman does not feel like a stranger.
She slipped into a numb void, watching Abe work as though from a distance. Fatigued by her restless night, by jet lag, she felt herself recede from the scene unfolding on the table, retreating to some safer vantage point from which she could watch with dulled emotions. It was just a cadaver on the table. No connection, no one she knew. Abe quickly freed the small intestines and dropped the coils into the basin. With scissors and kitchen knife, he gutted the abdomen, leaving only a hollow shell. He carried the basin, now heavy with entrails, to the stainless steel countertop, where he lifted out the organs one by one for closer examination.
On the cutting board, he slit open the stomac
h and drained the contents into a smaller basin. The smell of undigested food made Rizzoli and Frost turn away, their faces grimacing in disgust.
“Looks like the remains of supper here,” said Abe. “I’d say she had a seafood salad. I see lettuce and tomatoes. Maybe shrimp …”
“How close to the time of death was her last meal?” asked Rizzoli. Voice oddly nasal, her hand over her face, blocking the smells.
“An hour, maybe more. I’m guessing she ate out, since seafood salad’s not the kind of meal I’d fix for myself at home.” Abe glanced at Rizzoli. “You find any restaurant receipts in her purse?”
“No. She could’ve paid cash. We’re still waiting for her credit card info.”
“Jesus,” said Frost, still averting his gaze. “This just about kills any appetite I ever had for shrimp.”
“Hey, you can’t let that bother you,” said Abe, now slicing into the pancreas. “When you get right down to it, we’re all made up of the same basic building blocks. Fat, carbohydrates, and protein. You eat a juicy steak, you’re eating muscle. You think I’d ever swear off steak, just because that’s the tissue I dissect every day? All muscle has the same biochemical ingredients, but sometimes it just smells better than at other times.” He reached for the kidneys. Made neat slices into each, and dropped small tissue samples into a jar of formalin. “So far, everything looks normal,” he said. He glanced at Maura. “You agree?”
She gave a mechanical nod but said nothing, suddenly distracted by the new set of X-rays that Yoshima was now hanging on the light box. They were skull films. On the lateral view, the outline of soft tissue could be seen, like a semitransparent ghost of a face in profile.
Maura crossed to the light box and stared at the star-shaped density, startlingly bright against the softer shadow of bone. It had lodged up against the skull table. The bullet’s deceptively small entrance wound in the scalp gave little indication of the damage this devastating projectile could do to the human brain.
The Rizzoli & Isles Series 10-Book Bundle Page 96