“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.”
“So we’re not gonna have dental X rays for comparison.”
“I doubt this woman has seen a dentist in decades.”
Sleeper sighed. “No fingerprints. No face. No dental X rays. We’ll never I.D. her. Which may be the whole point.”
“But it doesn’t explain why he cut off the feet,” she said, her gaze still fixed on the anonymous skull glowing on the light box. “I think he did this for other reasons. Power, maybe. Rage. When you strip off a woman’s face, you’ve taken more than just a souvenir. You’ve stolen the essence of who she is. You’ve taken her soul.”
“Yeah, well, he scraped the bottom of the barrel for this one,” said Crowe. “Who’d want a woman with no teeth and sores all over her skin? If he’s gonna start collecting faces, you’d think he’d go after one that’d look nicer on the mantelpiece.”
“Maybe he’s just starting,” Sleeper said softly. “Maybe this is his first kill.”
Maura turned to the table. “Let’s get started.”
As Sleeper and Crowe tied on their masks, she peeled back the sheet, and caught a strong whiff of decay. She’d drawn vitreous potassium levels last night, and the results told her this victim had been dead approximately thirty-six hours prior to its discovery. Rigor mortis was still present, and the limbs were not easily manipulated. Despite the meat-locker chill at the death scene, decomposition had commenced. Bacteria had begun their work, breaking down proteins, bloating air spaces. Cold temperatures had only slowed, but not stopped, the process of decay.
Though she had already seen that ruined face, the sight of it startled her anew. So too did the many skin lesions, which, under the bright lights, stood out in dark, angry nodules punctuated by rat bites. Against that background of ravaged skin, the bullet wound seemed unimpressive—just a small entry hole at the left of the sternum. Glaser bullets were designed to minimize ricochet danger, while inflicting maximum damage once they have entered the body. A clean penetration is followed by the explosion of lead pellets contained within the Glaser’s copper jacket. This small wound gave no hint of the devastation inside the thorax.
“So what’s this skin crud?” asked Crowe.
Maura focused on the areas undamaged by rodent teeth. The purplish nodules were scattered across both torso and extremities, and some had crusted over.
“I don’t know what this is,” she said. “It certainly seems to be systemic. It could be a drug reaction. It could be a manifestation of cancer.” She paused. “It could also be bacterial.”
“You mean—infectious?” said Sleeper, taking a step back from the table.
“That’s why I suggested the masks.”
She ran a gloved finger across one of the crusted lesions, and a few white scales flaked off. “Some of these remind me a little of psoriasis. But the distribution is all wrong. Psoriasis usually affects primarily the elbows and knees.”
“Hey, isn’t there treatment for that?” said Crowe. “I used to see it advertised on TV. The heartbreak of psori
asis.”
“It’s an inflammatory disorder, so it responds to steroid creams. Ultraviolet light therapy helps, too. But look at her dentition. This woman didn’t have the money to pay for expensive creams or doctors’ bills. If it’s psoriasis, she probably went untreated for years.”
What a cruel affliction such a skin condition would have been, thought Maura, especially in the summertime. Even on the hottest days, she would have wanted to wear pants and long-sleeved shirts to conceal the lesions.
“Not only does our perp choose a victim who’s got no teeth,” said Crowe, “he whacks off a face with skin like this.”
“Psoriasis does tend to spare the face.”
“You think that’s significant? Maybe he only sliced off the parts where the skin was okay.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t begin to understand why anyone would do something like this.”
She turned her attention to the right wrist stump. White bone gleamed through raw flesh. Hungry rodents’ teeth had gnawed the open wound, destroying the cut marks left by the knife, but scanning electron microscopy of the cut surface of bone might reveal the blade’s characteristics. She lifted the forearm from the table, to examine the underside of the wound, and a fleck of yellow caught her eye.
“Yoshima, can you hand me the tweezers?” she said.
“What is it?” asked Crowe.
“There’s some kind of fiber adhering to the wound edge.”
Yoshima moved so silently, the tweezers seemed to magically appear in her hand. She swung the magnifying lens over the wrist stump. With the tweezers, she plucked the fragment from its crust of blood and dried flesh and laid it on a tray.
Through the magnifying lens, she saw a thick coil of thread, dyed a startling shade of canary yellow.
“From her clothes?” asked Crowe.
“It looks awfully coarse for a clothing fiber.”
“Carpet, maybe?”
“Yellow carpet? I can’t imagine.” She slipped the strand into an evidence bag that Yoshima was already holding open, and asked: “Was there anything at the death scene that would match this?”
“Nothing yellow,” said Crowe.
“Yellow rope?” said Maura. “He may have bound her wrists.”
“And then took the cut ropes away?” Sleeper shook his head. “Weird, how this guy’s so neat.”
Maura looked down at the corpse, small as a child. “He hardly needed to bind her wrists. She would have been easy to control.”
How simple it would have been, to take her life. Arms this thin could not have struggled long against an attacker’s grip; legs this short could not have outrun him.
You have already been so violated, she thought. And now my scalpel will make its mark on your flesh as well.
She worked with quiet efficiency, her knife slicing through skin and muscle. The cause of death was as obvious as the bits of shrapnel glowing on the X-ray box, and when at last the torso gaped open, and she saw the taut pericardial sac and the pockets of hemorrhage throughout the lungs, she was not surprised.
The Glaser bullet had punctured the thorax and then exploded, sending its deadly shrapnel throughout the chest. Metal had ripped through arteries and veins, punctured heart and lungs. And blood had poured into the sac that surrounded the heart, compressing it so that it could not expand, could not pump. A pericardial tamponade.
Death had been relatively swift.
The intercom buzzed. “Dr. Isles?”
Maura turned toward the speaker. “Yes, Louise?”
“Detective Rizzoli is on line one. Can you answer?”
Maura stripped off her gloves and crossed to the phone. “Rizzoli?” she said.
“Hey, Doc. It looks like we need you here.”
“What is it?”
“We’re at the pond. It took us a while to scoop off all the ice.”
“You’ve finished dragging it?”
“Yeah. We found something.”
NINE
Wind sliced across the open field, whipping Maura’s coat and wool scarf as she walked out the rear cloister gate and started toward the somber gathering of cops who waited for her at the pond’s edge. A layer of ice had formed over the fallen snow, and it cracked beneath her boots like a sugar crust. She felt everyone’s gaze marking her progress across the field, the nuns watching from the gate behind her, and the police awaiting her approach. She was the lone figure moving across that white world, and in the stillness of that afternoon, every sound seemed magnified, from the crunch of her boots, to the rush of her own breath.
Rizzoli emerged from the knot of personnel and came forward to greet her. “Thanks for getting here so quick.”
“So Noni was right about the duck pond.”
“Yeah. Since Camille spent a lot of time out here, it’s not too surprising she thought of using the pond. The ice was still pretty thin. Probably froze over only in the last day or two.” Rizzoli looked at the water. “We snagged it on the third pass.”
It was a small pond, a flat black oval that in the summertime would reflect clouds and blue sky and the passage of birds. At one end, cattails protruded, like ice-encrusted stalagmites. All around the perimeter, the snow was thoroughly trampled, its whiteness churned with mud.
At the water’s edge, a small form lay covered by a disposable sheet. Maura crouched down beside it, and a grim-faced Detective Frost peeled back the sheet to reveal the swaddling, caked in wet mud.
“It felt like it was weighed down with rocks,” said Frost. “That’s why it’s been sitting on the bottom. We haven’t unwrapped it yet. Thought we’d wait for you.”
Maura pulled off her wool gloves and pulled on latex ones. They offered no protection against the cold, and her fingers quickly chilled as she peeled back the outer layer of muslin. Two fist-sized stones dropped out. The next layer was equally soaked, but not muddy. It was a woolen blanket of powder blue. A color one would swaddle an infant in, she thought. A blanket to keep him safe and warm.
By now her fingers were numb and clumsy. She peeled back a corner of the blanket, just enough to catch a glimpse of a foot. Tiny, almost doll-like, the skin a dusky and marbled blue.
That was all she needed to see.
She covered it again, with the sheet. Rising to her feet, she looked at Rizzoli. “Let’s move it directly to the morgue. We’ll finish unwrapping it there.”
Rizzoli merely nodded, and gazed down in silence at the tiny bundle. The wet wrappings were already starting to crust over in the icy wind.
It was Frost who spoke. “How could she do it? Just toss her baby in the water like that?”
Maura stripped off the latex gloves and thrust numb fingers into the woolen ones. She thought of the light blue blanket wrapped around the infant. Warm wool, like her gloves. Camille could have wrapped the baby in anything—newspapers, old sheets, rags—but she had chosen to wrap it in a blanket, as though to protect it, to insulate it from the frigid water of the pond.
“I mean, drowning her own kid,” said Frost. “She’d have to be out of her mind.”
“The infant may already have been dead.”
“Okay, so she killed it first. She’d still have to be crazy.”
“We can’t assume anything. Not until the autopsy.” Maura glanced toward the abbey. Three nuns stood like dark-robed wraiths beneath the archway, watching them. She said to Rizzoli: “Have you told Mary Clement yet?”
Rizzoli didn’t answer. Her gaze was still fixed on what the pond had yielded up to them. It took only one pair of hands to slip the bundle into the oversize body bag, to seal it with an efficient tug of the zipper. She winced at the sound.
Maura asked, “Do the sisters know?”
At last Rizzoli looked at her. “They’ve been told what we found.”
“They must have an idea who the father is.”
“They deny it’s even possible she was pregnant.”
“But the evidence is right here.”
Rizzoli gave a snort
. “Faith is stronger than evidence.”
Faith in what? Maura wondered. A young woman’s virtue? Was there any house of cards more rickety than the belief in human chastity?
They fell silent as the body bag was carried away. There was no need to bring a stretcher through the snow; the attendant had scooped the bag into his arms as tenderly as though he was lifting his own child, and now he walked with grim purpose across the windy field, toward the abbey.
Maura’s cell phone rang, violating the mournful silence. She flipped it open and answered quietly: “Dr. Isles.”
“I’m sorry I had to leave without saying goodbye this morning.”
She felt her face flush and her heartbeat go into double time. “Victor.”
“I had to get to my meeting in Cambridge. I didn’t want to wake you. I hope you didn’t think I was running out on you.”
“Actually, I did.”
“Can we meet later, for dinner?”
She paused, suddenly aware that Rizzoli was watching her. Aware, too, of her own physical reaction to Victor’s voice. The quickened pulse, the happy anticipation. Already he’s worked his way back into my life, she thought. Already, I’m thinking of the possibilities.
She turned from Rizzoli’s gaze, and her voice dropped to a murmur. “I don’t know when I’ll be free. There’s so much going on right now.”
“You can tell me all about your day over dinner.”
“It’s already turning into a doozy.”
“You have to eat sometime, Maura. Can I take you out? Your favorite restaurant?”
She answered too quickly, too eagerly. “No, I’ll meet you at my house. I’ll try to be home by seven.”
“I don’t expect you to cook for me.”
“Then I’ll let you do the cooking.”
He laughed. “Brave woman.”
“If I’m late, you can get in through the side door to the garage. You probably know where the key is.”
The Rizzoli & Isles Series 11-Book Bundle Page 74