They stared at her blankly.
“This building,” she said again, pointing. “We need to go upstairs.”
“You know, talking louder doesn’t help,” said Frost. “I don’t think they understand English.”
Jane sighed. That’s Chinatown for you. “We need an interpreter.”
“District A-1’s got a new detective. I think he’s Chinese.”
“It’ll take too long to wait for him.” She climbed to the front entrance, scanned the tenant names, and pressed a button at random. Despite repeated buzzes, no one answered. She tried another button, and this time, a voice finally crackled over the intercom.
“Wei?” a woman said.
“It’s the police,” said Jane. “Can you let us into the building, please?”
“Wei?”
“Please open the door!”
A few minutes passed, then a child’s voice answered: “My grandma wants to know who you are.”
“Detective Jane Rizzoli, Boston PD,” said Jane. “We need to go up on the roof. Can you let us in the building?”
At last the lock buzzed open.
The building was at least a hundred years old, and the wooden steps groaned as Jane and Frost climbed the stairs. When they reached the second floor, a door swung open and Jane caught a glimpse into a cramped apartment, from which two girls stared out with curious eyes. The younger was about the same age as Jane’s daughter, Regina, and Jane paused to smile and murmur hello.
Instantly the smaller girl was snatched up into a woman’s arms and the door slammed shut.
“Guess we’re the big bad strangers,” said Frost.
They kept climbing. Past the fourth-floor landing and up a narrow set of steps to the roof. The exit was unlocked, but the door gave off a piercing squeal as they swung it open.
They stepped out into the predawn gloom, lit only by the diffuse glow of city lights. Shining her flashlight, Jane saw a plastic table and chairs, flowerpots of herbs. On a sagging clothesline, a full load of laundry danced like ghosts in the wind. Through the flapping sheets, she spotted something else, something that lay near the roof’s edge, beyond that curtain of linen.
Without saying a word, both she and Frost automatically took paper shoe covers from their pockets and bent down to pull them on. Only then did they duck under the hanging sheets and cross toward what they had glimpsed, their booties crackling over the tar-paper surface.
For a moment neither spoke. They stood together, flashlights trained on a congealed lake of blood. On what was lying in that lake.
“I guess we found the rest of her,” said Frost.
Chinatown sat in the very heart of Boston, tucked up against the financial district to the north and the green lawn of the Common to the west. But as Maura walked under the paifang gate, with its four carved lions, she felt as if she were entering a different city, a different world. She’d last visited Chinatown on a Saturday morning in October, when there had been groups of elderly men sitting beneath the gate, sipping tea and playing checkers as they gossiped in Chinese. On that cold day she’d met Daniel here for a dim sum breakfast. It was one of the last meals they would ever eat together, and the memory of that day now pierced like a dagger to the heart. Although this was a bright spring dawn, and the same checkers-playing men sat chattering in the morning chill, melancholy darkened everything she saw, turning sunshine to gloom.
She walked past restaurants where seafood tanks teemed with silvery fish, past dusty import shops crammed with rosewood furniture and jade bracelets and fake ivory carvings, into a thickening crowd of bystanders. She spotted a uniformed Boston PD cop towering over the mostly Asian crowd and worked her way toward him.
“Excuse me. I’m the ME,” she announced.
The cold look he gave her left no doubt that the police officer knew exactly who she was. Dr. Maura Isles, who’d betrayed the brotherhood of those tasked to serve and protect. Whose testimony might send one of their own to prison. He didn’t say a word, just stared at her, as if he had no idea what she expected of him.
She returned the stare, just as coldly. “Where is the deceased?” she asked.
“You’d have to ask Detective Rizzoli.”
He was not going to make this easy for her. “And where is she?”
Before he could answer, she heard someone call out: “Dr. Isles?” A young Asian man in a suit and tie crossed the street toward her. “They’re waiting for you up on the roof.”
“Which way up?”
“Come with me. I’ll walk you up the stairs.”
“Are you new to homicide? I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“Sorry, I should have introduced myself. I’m Detective Johnny Tam, with District A-1. Rizzoli needed someone from the neighborhood to translate, and since I’m the generic Chinese guy, I got pulled onto her team.”
“Your first time working with homicide?”
“Yes, ma’am. Always been a dream of mine. I only made detective two months ago, so I’m really psyched.” Briskly ordering onlookers aside, he cleared a path for her through the crowd and opened a door to a building that smelled of garlic and incense.
“I notice you speak Mandarin. Do you speak Cantonese, too?” she said.
“You can hear the difference?”
“I used to live in San Francisco. A number of my colleagues were Chinese.”
“I wish I could speak Cantonese, but it’s like Greek to me,” he said as they climbed up the stairwell. “I’m afraid my Mandarin’s not very useful around here. Most of these old-timers speak Cantonese or the Toisan dialect. Half the time, I need an interpreter myself.”
“So you aren’t from Boston.”
“Born and raised in New York City. My parents came over from Fujian province.”
They reached the rooftop door and stepped outside, into the glare of the early-morning sun. Squinting against the brightness, Maura saw crime scene unit personnel combing the rooftop and heard someone call out: “Found another bullet casing over here.”
“What is that, five?”
“Mark it and bag it.”
Suddenly the voices went silent and Maura realized they’d noticed her arrival and were all looking at her. The traitor had arrived.
“Hey, Doc,” called out Jane, crossing toward her, the wind scrambling her dark hair. “I see Tam finally found you.”
“What’s this about bullet casings?” asked Maura. “On the phone, you said it was an amputation.”
“It is. But we found a Heckler and Koch automatic down in the alley below. Looks like someone fired off a few rounds up here. At least five.”
“Were there reports of gunshots? Do we have an approximate time?”
“Gun had a suppressor, so no one heard a thing.” Jane turned. “Victim’s over here.”
Maura pulled on shoe covers and gloves and followed Jane to the shrouded body lying near the roof’s edge. Bending down, she lifted the plastic sheet and stared, unable to speak for a moment.
“Yeah. It kind of took our breath away, too,” said Jane.
The woman was a Caucasian in her early thirties, slim and athletic, dressed all in black in a hoodie sweatshirt and leggings. The body was in full rigor mortis. She lay on her back, face staring up at the sky, as though she’d stretched out to admire the stars. Her hair, a rich auburn, was gathered at the nape of her neck in a simple ponytail. Her skin was pale and flawless and she had a model’s jutting cheekbones, faintly Slavic. But it was the wound that Maura focused on, a slash so deep that it divided skin and muscle and cartilage, severing the lumen of the trachea and exposing the pearly surface of the cervical spine. The arterial gush that had resulted was powerful enough to spray blood in a shockingly wide radius that left splatters across the curtain of sheets hanging on a nearby clothesline.
“The amputated hand fell in the alley right below,” said Jane. “So did the Heckler and Koch. My guess is, her fingerprints are on the grip. And we’re gonna find gunshot residue on that hand.”
> Maura tore her gaze away from the neck and focused on the right wrist, which had been cleanly divided, and she tried to picture what sort of instrument could have so efficiently slashed through cartilage and bone. It had to be appallingly sharp, wielded without hesitation. She imagined the slash of the blade and the hand falling away, tumbling over the roof’s edge. Imagined that same blade slicing across that slender neck.
Shuddering, she rose to her feet and stared down from the roof at the police officers standing at the far end of Knapp Street, holding back onlookers. The crowd looked twice as large as it had only moments before, and the day was still early. The curious, ever relentless, can always smell blood.
“Are you sure you really want to be here, Maura?” Jane asked quietly.
Maura turned to her. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I’m just wondering if it’s too soon for you to be back in rotation. I know it’s been a tough week for you, with the trial and all.” Jane paused. “It’s not looking too good for Graff right now.”
“It shouldn’t look good. He killed a man.”
“And that man killed a cop. A good cop, who had a wife and kids. I have to admit, I might’ve lost it, too.”
“Please, Jane. Don’t tell me you’re defending Officer Graff.”
“I worked with Graff, and you couldn’t ask for a better man to watch your back. You do know what happens to cops who end up in prison, don’t you?”
“I shouldn’t have to defend myself on this. I’ve gotten enough hate mail about it. Don’t you join in the chorus.”
“I’m just saying, it’s a sensitive time right now. We all respect Graff, and we can understand how he lost it that night. A cop killer’s dead, and maybe that’s a kind of justice all its own.”
“It’s not my job to deliver justice. I just deliver the facts.”
Jane’s laugh was biting. “Yeah, you’re all about the facts, aren’t you?”
Maura turned and looked across the rooftop at the criminalists scouring the scene. Let it roll off and focus on your job. You’re here to speak for this dead woman, and no one else. “What was she doing on this roof?” she asked.
Jane looked down at the body. “No idea.”
“Do we know how she gained access?”
“Could’ve been a fire escape or a stairwell. Once you’re on one roof, you can access all the roofs on this block, from Harrison Avenue to Knapp Street. She could have entered any of these buildings. Or been dropped from a helicopter, for that matter. No one we’ve spoken to remembers seeing her last night. And we know it happened last night. When we found her, rigor mortis was just starting to set in.”
Maura focused on the victim again, and frowned at her clothes. “It’s strange, how she’s dressed all in black.”
“Goes with everything, as they say.”
“ID?”
“No ID. All we found in her pockets was three hundred bucks and a Honda car key. We’re searching the area for the vehicle.” Jane shook her head. “Too bad she didn’t drive a Yugo. This is like looking for a needle in a whole damn haystack of Hondas.”
Maura replaced the sheet, and the gaping wound vanished once more beneath plastic. “Where is the hand?”
“It’s already bagged.”
“Are you sure it belongs to this body?”
Jane gave a startled laugh. “What are the odds it doesn’t?”
“I never make assumptions. You know that.” She turned.
“Maura?”
Once again, she looked at Jane. They stood face-to-face in that blinding sunshine, where it felt as if all of Boston PD could see them, hear them.
“About the trial. I do understand where you’re coming from,” said Jane. “You know that.”
“And you don’t approve.”
“But I understand. Just as I hope you understand that it’s guys like Graff who have to deal with the real world. They’re the ones on the front lines. Justice isn’t as clean as a science experiment. Sometimes it’s pretty damn messy and the facts just make things messier.”
“So I should have lied instead?”
“Just don’t forget who the real bad guys are.”
“That’s not in my job description,” said Maura. She left the rooftop and retreated into the stairwell, relieved to escape the sharp glare of the sun and the eyes of Boston PD personnel. But when she emerged on the ground floor, she came face-to-face once again with Detective Tam.
“It’s pretty bloody up there, isn’t it?” he said.
“Bloodier than most.”
“So when’s the autopsy?”
“I’ll do it tomorrow morning.”
“May I observe?”
“You’re welcome to be there, if you have the stomach for it.”
“I watched a few while I was at the academy. Managed not to keel over.”
She paused to regard him for a moment. Saw humorless dark eyes and sharply handsome features, but no hostility. On a morning when all of Boston PD seemed to regard her as the enemy, Detective Johnny Tam was the only cop who didn’t seem to stand in judgment of her.
“Eight AM,” she said. “I’ll see you there.”
Maura did not sleep well that night. After a heavy meal of lasagna, washed down with three glasses of wine, she climbed into bed exhausted. She awakened a few hours later, painfully aware of the empty space beside her. Reaching out, she touched cold sheets and wondered, as she had on so many other nights over these past four months, if Daniel Brophy was also lying awake, also lonely. If he, too, was desperate to pick up the telephone and break this silence between them. Or did he sleep soundly, without regrets, relieved their affair had finally ended? While she might be her own woman again, freedom came with a price. An empty bed, sleepless nights, and the unanswerable question: Am I better with him or without him?
The next morning, she arrived at work groggy and nauseated from all the coffee she’d consumed to make herself alert. As she stood in the morgue anteroom donning mask and paper cap and shoe covers, she looked through the viewing window and saw that Jane was already standing by the table, waiting for her. Yesterday they had not parted on the most congenial of terms, and Maura still felt stung by Jane’s sarcastic retort: You’re all about the facts, aren’t you? Yes, facts mattered to her. They were immutable things that could not be denied, even when they threatened a friendship. The trial of Officer Graff had driven a wedge between her and Jane, reminding Maura how unlikely their friendship had been from the start. As she tied on her gown, it was not the corpse she dreaded confronting, but Jane.
With a deep breath, she pushed through the door.
Her assistant, Yoshima, had already transferred the body bag onto the table. On a tray beside it was the severed hand, covered by a drape. Acutely aware that Yoshima was listening to their conversation, Maura gave Jane a businesslike nod and said, “Isn’t Frost joining us?”
“He’s going to miss this one, but Johnny Tam’s on his way here. In fact, I think he can’t wait to watch you start slicing.”
“Detective Tam seems eager to prove himself.”
“I think he’s got his eye on joining homicide. From what I’ve seen so far, he may have what it takes.” She glanced up. “Speak of the devil.”
Through the viewing window, Maura saw that Tam had arrived and was tying on a surgical gown. A moment later he entered, jet-black hair hidden beneath a paper cap. He approached the table, his gaze calm and impassive as he focused on the draped body.
“Before we start, Tam,” said Jane, “I just want to point out to you that the barf sink is right over there.”
He shrugged. “I won’t need it.”
“You say that now.”
“We’ll start with the easy part,” said Maura, and she uncovered the tray with the severed hand. It looked plastic. No wonder the Chinatown tour group had mistaken it for a Halloween prop with fake blood. It had already been swabbed and found positive for gunshot residue. Fingerprints from this hand were found on the grip of the Heckler &
Koch, leaving no doubt that the victim had fired the bullets, scattering five casings on the rooftop. Maura swung the magnifier over the hand and examined the severed wrist.
“The cut sliced right between the distal radius and the lunate bone,” she said. “But I can see a good chunk of the triquetral here.”
“And that would mean?” asked Jane.
“Whatever made this cut divided a carpal bone. And these bones are very dense.”
“So it had to be a sharp blade.”
“Sharp enough to amputate with a single slice.” Maura looked up. “I don’t see any secondary cut marks.”
“Just tell me this hand matches that body.”
Maura turned to the table and unzipped the body bag. The plastic parted, releasing the stomach-turning smell of refrigerated meat and stale blood. The cadaver inside was still fully clothed, the head tipped backward, exposing the gaping wound in her neck. As Yoshima took photos, Maura’s gaze was drawn to the woman’s auburn hair, caked in blood. Beautiful hair, she thought, and a beautiful woman. A woman who was armed and shooting at someone on that rooftop.
“Dr. Isles, we’ve got some hair and fiber evidence staring at us,” said Yoshima. He was bending over the corpse’s black sweatshirt, peering at a single pale strand that clung to the sleeve.
With a pair of tweezers, Maura plucked up the hair and examined it under the light. It was about two inches long, silvery gray and slightly curved. She glanced at the cadaver. “This obviously is not her hair.”
“Look, there’s another one,” said Jane, pointing to a second strand clinging to the victim’s black leggings.
“Maybe animal hairs,” said Yoshima. “Could be a golden retriever.”
“Or maybe she got whacked by a gray-haired grandpa.”
Maura slipped the strands into separate evidence envelopes and set them aside. “Okay, let’s undress her.”
First they removed the only item of jewelry she was wearing, a black Swiss Hanowa watch, from her left wrist. Next came the shoes, black Reeboks, followed by the hoodie sweatshirt and a long-sleeved T-shirt, leggings, cotton panties, and an athletic bra. What emerged was a well-toned body, slim but muscular. Maura had once heard a pathology professor assert that in his many years of performing autopsies, he’d never come across an attractive corpse. This woman proved there could be exceptions to that rule. Despite the gaping wound and dependent mottling of her back and buttocks, despite the glassy eyes, she was still a stunningly beautiful woman.
The Rizzoli & Isles Series 10-Book Bundle Page 249