“Is there a better way?”
She raises an eyebrow, as though she’s not quite sure if I’m serious. I am.
“You refer to him as a brother,” she says. “What do you mean by that?”
“We had a bond, the two of us. A sacred bond. It’s so hard to find people who completely understand me.”
“I can imagine.”
I’m alert to the merest hint of sarcasm, but I don’t hear it in her voice, or see it in her eyes.
“I know there must be others like us out there,” I say. “The challenge is to find them. To connect. We all want to be with our own kind.”
“You talk as though you’re a separate species.”
“Homo sapiens reptilis,” I quip.
“Excuse me?”
“I’ve read that there’s a part of our brain that dates back to our reptilian origins. It controls our most primitive functions. Fight and flight. Mating. Aggression.”
“Oh. You mean the Archipallium.”
“Yes. The brain we had before we became human and civilized. It holds no emotions, no conscience. No morals. What you see when you look in the eyes of a cobra. The same part of our brain that responds directly to olfactory stimulation. It’s why reptiles have such a keen sense of smell.”
“That’s true. Neurologically speaking, our olfactory system is closely related to the Archipallium.”
“Did you know I’ve always had an extraordinary sense of smell?”
For a moment she simply gazes at me. Again, she does not know if I am serious or I am spinning this theory for her because she is a neuropsychiatrist and I know she will appreciate it.
Her next question reveals she has decided to take me seriously: “Did John Stark also have an extraordinary sense of smell?”
“I don’t know.” My stare is intent. “Now that he’s dead, we’ll never know.”
She studies me like a cat about to pounce. “You look angry, Warren.”
“Don’t I have reason to be?” My gaze drops to my useless body, lying inert on the sheepksin pad. I don’t even think of it as my body any longer. Why should I? I can’t feel it. It is just a lump of alien flesh.
“You’re angry at the policewoman,” she says.
Such an obvious statement does not even deserve a response, so I give none.
But Dr. O’Donnell is trained to zero in on feelings, to peel away scar tissue and expose the raw and bloody wound beneath. She has sniffed the aroma of festering emotions and now she moves in to tweeze and scrape and dig.
“Do you still think about Detective Rizzoli?” she asks.
“Every day.”
“What sort of thoughts?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“I’m trying to understand you, Warren. What you think, what you feel. What makes you kill.”
“So I’m still your little lab rat. I’m not your friend.”
A pause. “Yes, I can be your friend—”
“It’s not why you come here, though.”
“To be honest, I come here because of what you can teach me. What you can teach all of us about why men kill.” She leans even closer. Says, quietly: “So tell me. All your thoughts, however disturbing they may be.”
There is a long silence. Then I say, softly, “I have fantasies.…”
“What fantasies?”
“About Jane Rizzoli. About what I would like to do to her.”
“Tell me.”
“They’re not nice fantasies. I’m sure you’ll find them disgusting.”
“Nevertheless, I would like to hear them.”
Her eyes have a strange glow to them, as though they are lit from within. The muscles of her face have tensed with anticipation. She is holding her breath.
I stare at her and I think: Oh yes, she would like to hear them. Like everyone else, she wants to hear every dark detail. She claims her interest is merely academic, that what I tell her is only for her research. But I see the spark of eagerness in her eyes. I sniff her pheromonal scent of excitement.
I see the reptile, stirring in its cage.
She wants to know what I know. She wants to walk in my world. She is finally ready for the journey.
It’s time to invite her in.
To Terrina and Mike
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Throughout the writing of this book, I’ve had a wonderful team cheering me on, offering advice, and providing me with the emotional nourishment I needed to keep forging ahead. Many, many thanks to my agent, friend, and guiding light, Meg Ruley, and to Jane Berkey, Don Cleary, and the fabulous folks at the Jane Rotrosen Agency. I owe thanks as well to my superb editor, Linda Marrow, to Gina Centrello, for her unflagging enthusiasm, to Louis Mendez, for keeping me on top of things, and to Gilly Hailparn and Marie Coolman, for supporting me through the sad, dark days after September 11th, and guiding me safely home. Thanks also to Peter Mars for his information on the Boston P.D., and to Selina Walker, my cheerleader on the other side of the pond.
Finally, my deepest thanks to my husband, Jacob, who knows just how difficult it is to live with a writer—and sticks with me anyway.
The Sinner is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2003 by Tess Gerritsen
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress
eISBN: 978-0-345-46445-3
v3.0_r1
Contents
Master - Table of Contents
The Sinner
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
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
Dedication
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
Andhra Pradesh
India
The driver refused to take him any farther.
A mile back, right after they passed the abandoned Octagon chemical plant, the pavement had given way to an overgrown dirt road. Now the driver complained that his car was getting scraped by underbrush, and with the recent rains, there were muddy spots where their tires could get mired. And where would that leave them? Stranded, 150 kilometers from Hyderabad. Howard Redfield listened to the long litany of objections, and knew they were merely a pretext for the real reason the driver did not wish to proceed. No man easily admits that he is afraid.
Redfield had no choice; from here, he would have to walk.
He leaned forward to speak in the driver’s ear, and caught a gamey whiff of the man’s sweat. In the rearview mirror, where rattling beads dangled, he saw the driver’s dark eyes staring at him. “You’ll wait here for me, won’t you?” Redfield asked. “Stay right here, on the road.”
“How long?”
“An hour, maybe. As long as it takes.”
“I tell you,
there is nothing to see. No one is there anymore.”
“Just wait here, okay? Wait. I’ll pay you double when we get back to the city.”
Redfield grabbed his knapsack, stepped out of the air-conditioned car, and was instantly swimming in a sea of humidity. He hadn’t worn a knapsack since he was a college kid, wandering through Europe on a shoestring, and it felt a little would-be, at age fifty-one, to be slinging one over his flabby shoulders. But he was damned if he went anywhere in this steamhouse of a country without his bottle of purified drinking water and his insect repellant and his sunscreen and diarrhea medicine. And his camera; he could not leave behind the camera.
He stood sweating in the late afternoon heat, looked up at the sky, and thought: Great, the sun is going down, and all the mosquitoes come out at dusk. Here comes dinner, you little buggers.
He set off down the road. Tall grass obscured the path, and he stumbled into a rut, his walking shoes sinking ankle-deep in mud. Clearly no vehicle had come this way in months, and Mother Nature had quickly moved in to reclaim her territory. He paused, panting and swatting at insects. Glancing back, he saw that the car was no longer in sight, and that made him uneasy. Could he trust the driver to wait for him? The man had been reluctant to bring him this far, and had grown more and more nervous as they’d bounced along the increasingly rough road. Bad people were out here, the driver had said, and terrible things happened in this area. They could both disappear, and who would bother to come looking for them?
Redfield pressed onward.
The humid air seemed to close in around him. He could hear the water bottle sloshing in his knapsack, and already he was thirsty, but he did not stop to drink. With only an hour or so left of daylight, he had to keep moving. Insects hummed in the grass, and he heard what he thought must be birds calling in the canopy of trees all around him, but it was unlike any birdsong he’d ever heard before. Everything about this country felt strange and surreal, and he trudged in a dreamlike trance, sweat trickling down his chest. The rhythm of his own breathing accelerated with each step. It should be only a mile and a half, according to the map, but he seemed to walk forever, and even a fresh application of insect repellant did not discourage the mosquitoes. His ears were filled with their buzzing, and his face was an itching mask of hives.
He stumbled into another deep rut and landed on his knees in tall grass. Spat out a mouthful of vegetation as he crouched there, catching his breath, so discouraged and exhausted that he decided it was time to turn around. To get back on that plane to Cincinnati with his tail tucked between his legs. Cowardice, after all, was far safer. And more comfortable.
He heaved a sigh, planted his hand on the ground to push himself to his feet, and went very still, staring down at the grass. Something gleamed there among the green blades, something metallic. It was only a cheap tin button, but at that moment, it struck him as a sign. A talisman. He slipped it in his pocket, rose to his feet, and kept walking.
Only a few hundred feet farther, the road suddenly opened up into a large clearing, encircled by tall trees. A lone structure stood at the far edge, a squat cinder block building with a rusting tin roof. Branches clattered and grass waved in the gentle wind.
This is the place, he thought. This is where it happened.
His breathing suddenly seemed too loud. Heart pounding, he slipped off his knapsack, unzipped it, and pulled out his camera. Document everything, he thought. Octagon will try to make you out as a liar. They will do everything they can to discredit you, so you have to be ready to defend yourself. You have to prove that you are telling the truth.
He moved into the clearing, toward a heap of blackened branches. Nudging the twigs with his shoe, he stirred up the stench of charred wood. He backed away, a chill crawling up his spine.
It was the remains of a funeral pyre.
With sweating hands, he took off his lens cap and began to shoot photos. Eye pressed to the viewfinder, he snapped image after image. The burned remains of a hut. A child’s sandal, lying in the grass. A bright fragment of cloth, torn from a sari. Everywhere he looked, he saw Death.
He swung to the right, a tapestry of green sweeping past his viewfinder, and was about to click off another photo when his finger froze on the button.
A figure skittered past the edge of the frame.
He lowered the camera from his eye and straightened, staring at the trees. He saw nothing now, only the sway of branches.
There—was that a flash of movement, at the very periphery of his vision? He’d caught only a glimpse of something dark, bobbing among the trees. A monkey?
He had to keep shooting. The daylight was going fast.
He walked past a stone well and crossed toward the tin-roofed building, his pants swishing through grass, glancing left and right as he moved. The trees seemed to have eyes, and they were watching him. As he drew near the building, he saw that the walls were scorched by fire. In front of the doorway was a mound of ashes and blackened branches. Another funeral pyre.
He stepped around it, and looked into the doorway.
At first, he could make out very little in that gloomy interior. Daylight was rapidly fading, and inside, it was even darker, a palette of blacks and grays. He paused for a moment as his eyes adjusted. With growing bewilderment, he registered the glint of fresh water in an earthenware jar. The scent of spices. How could this be?
Behind him, a twig snapped.
He spun around.
A lone figure was standing in the clearing. All around them, the trees had gone still, and even the birds were silent. The figure came toward him, moving with a strange and jerky gait, until it stood only a few feet away.
The camera tumbled from Redfield’s hands. He backed away, staring in horror.
It was a woman. And she had no face.
ONE
They called her the Queen of the Dead.
Though no one ever said it to her face, Dr. Maura Isles sometimes heard the nickname murmured in her wake as she traveled the grim triangle of her job between courtroom and death scene and morgue. Sometimes she would detect a note of dark sarcasm: Ha ha, there she goes, our Goth goddess, out to collect fresh subjects. Sometimes the whispers held a tremolo of disquiet, like the murmurs of the pious as an unholy stranger passes among them. It was the disquiet of those who could not understand why she chose to walk in Death’s footsteps. Does she enjoy it, they wonder? Does the touch of cold flesh, the stench of decay, hold such allure for her that she has turned her back on the living? They think this cannot be normal, and they cast uneasy glances her way, noting details that only reinforce their beliefs that she is an odd duck. The ivory skin, the black hair with its blunt Cleopatra cut. The red slash of lipstick. Who else wears lipstick to a death scene? Most of all, it’s her calmness that disturbs them, her coolly regal gaze as she surveys the horrors that they themselves can barely stomach. Unlike them, she does not avert her gaze. Instead she bends close and stares, touches. She sniffs.
And later, under bright lights in her autopsy lab, she cuts.
She was cutting now, her scalpel slicing through chilled skin, through subcutaneous fat that gleamed a greasy yellow. A man who liked his hamburgers and fries, she thought as she used pruning shears to cut through the ribs and lifted the triangular shield of breastbone the way one opens a cupboard door, to reveal its treasured contents.
The heart lay cradled in its spongey bed of lungs. For fifty-nine years, it had pumped blood through the body of Mr. Samuel Knight. It had grown with him, aged with him, transforming, as he had, from the lean muscle of youth to this well-larded flesh. All pumps eventually fail, and so had Mr. Knight’s as he’d sat in his Boston hotel room with the TV turned on and a glass of whiskey from the minibar sitting beside him on the nightstand.
She did not pause to wonder what his final thoughts might have been, or whether he had felt pain or fear. Though she explored his most intimate recesses, though she flayed open his skin and held his heart in her hands, Mr. Samuel Knight rem
ained a stranger to her, a silent and undemanding one, willingly offering up his secrets. The dead are patient. They do not complain, nor threaten, nor cajole.
The dead do not hurt you; only the living do.
She worked with serene efficiency, resecting the thoracic viscera, laying the freed heart on the cutting board. Outside, the first snow of December swirled, white flakes whispering against windows and slithering down alleys. But here in the lab, the only sounds were of running water and the hiss of the ventilator fan. Her assistant Yoshima moved in uncanny silence, anticipating her requests, materializing wherever she needed him. They had worked together only a year and a half, yet already they functioned like a single organism, linked by the telepathy of two logical minds. She did not need to ask him to redirect the lamp; it was already done, the light shining down on the dripping heart, a pair of scissors held out and waiting for her to take them.
The darkly mottled wall of the right ventricle, and the white apical scar, told her this heart’s sad story. An old myocardial infarction, months or even years old, had already destroyed part of the left ventricular wall. Then, sometime in the last twenty-four hours, a fresh infarction had occurred. A thrombus had blocked off the right coronary artery, strangling the flow of blood to the muscle of the right ventricle.
She resected tissue for histology, already knowing what she would see under the microscope. Coagulation and necrosis. The invasion of white cells, moving in like a defending army. Perhaps Mr. Samuel Knight thought the discomfort in his chest was just a bout of indigestion. Too much lunch, shouldn’t have eaten all those onions. Maybe Pepto-Bismol would do the trick. Or perhaps there’d been more ominous signs which he chose to ignore: the weight on his chest, the shortness of breath. Surely it did not occur to him that he was having a heart attack.
That, a day later, he would be dead of an arrhythmia.
The heart now lay open and sectioned on the board. She looked at the torso, missing all its organs. So ends your business trip to Boston, she thought. No surprises here. No foul play, except for the abuse you heaped on your own body, Mr. Knight.
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