“I think it’s loose now,” said Daljeet. “Let’s lift it out.”
He laid out a plastic sheet, then reached deep into the hole. His hands emerged cradling the skull, the mandible partly anchored to it by helpful spirals of blackberry roots. He laid his treasure on the sheet.
For a moment, no one said anything. They were all staring at the shattered temporal bone.
Detective Yates pointed to the metallic glint of one of the molars. “Isn’t that a filling?” he said. “In that tooth?”
“Yes. But dentists were using amalgam fillings a hundred years ago,” said Daljeet.
“So it could still be an old burial.”
“But where are the coffin fragments? If this was a formal burial, there should be a coffin. And there’s this little detail.” Daljeet pointed to the crush fracture. He looked up at the two detectives bending over his shoulder. “Whatever the age of these remains, I think you have a crime scene here.”
The other men had crowded in around them, and suddenly the air felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of it. The buzz of mosquitoes seemed to grow to a pulsing roar. It’s so warm, she thought. She rose to her feet and walked on unsteady legs toward the edge of the woods, where the canopy of oak and maple cast a welcome shade. Sinking onto a rock, she dropped her head in her hands, thinking: This is what I get for not eating breakfast.
“Maura?” called Ballard. “Are you okay?”
“It’s just this heat. I need to cool down for a moment.”
“Would you like some water? I have some in my truck, if you don’t mind drinking from the same bottle.”
“Thank you. I could use some.”
She watched as he headed toward his vehicle, the back of his shirt stained with wings of sweat. He didn’t bother to pick his way delicately across the uneven field, but just forged ahead, boots tramping across broken soil. Purposeful. That’s the way Ballard walked, like a man who knew what needed to be done, and simply got on with it.
The bottle he brought back to her was warm from sitting in the truck. She took a greedy gulp, water trickling down her chin. Lowering the bottle, she found Ballard watching her. For a moment she didn’t notice the hum of insects, the murmur of men’s voices as they worked yards away. Here, in the green shadows beneath the trees, she could focus only on him. On the way his hand brushed hers as he took the bottle back. On the soft light dappling his hair, and the web of laugh lines around his eyes. She heard Daljeet call her name, but she didn’t answer, didn’t turn away; neither did Ballard, who seemed just as trapped in the moment. She thought: One of us has got to break the spell. One of us has got to snap back out of it. But I can’t seem to manage it.
“Maura?” Daljeet was suddenly standing right beside her; she hadn’t even heard his approach. “We have an interesting problem,” he said.
“What problem?”
“Come take another look at that ilium.”
Slowly she rose to her feet, feeling steadier now, her head clear. The drink of water, the few moments in the shade, had given her a second wind. She and Ballard followed Daljeet back to the hip bone, and she saw that Daljeet had already cleared away some of the soil, exposing more of the pelvis.
“I got it down to the sacrum on this side,” he said. “You can just see the pelvic outlet and the ischial tuberosity, here.”
She dropped to a crouch beside him. Said nothing for a moment, just stared at the bone.
“What’s the problem?” said Ballard.
“We need to expose the rest of this,” she said. She looked up at Daljeet. “Do you have another trowel?”
He passed one to her; it was like the slap of a scalpel handle in her palm. Suddenly she was at work, and all grim business. Kneeling side by side, trowels in hand, she and Daljeet cleared away more stony soil. Tree roots had woven through bony fossae, anchoring the bones to their grave, and they had to cut away the wiry tangle to free the pelvis. The deeper they dug, the faster her heart began to beat. Treasure hunters might dig for gold; she dug for secrets. For the answers that only a grave can reveal. With each trowelful of dirt they removed, more of the pelvis came into view. They worked feverishly now, tools probing deeper.
When at last they stared down at the exposed pelvis, they were both too stunned to speak.
Maura rose to her feet and walked back to look at the skull, still lying on the plastic sheet. Kneeling beside it, she pulled off her gloves and ran her bare fingers above the orbit, feeling the robust curve of the supraorbital ridge. Then she flipped over the skull, to examine the occipital protuberance.
This did not make sense.
She rocked back on her knees. Her blouse was sweat-soaked in the cloying air. Except for the buzz of insects, the clearing had gone silent. Trees loomed on all sides, guarding this secret enclosure. Gazing at that impenetrable wall of green, she felt eyes staring back, as though the forest itself was watching her. Waiting for her next move.
“What’s going on, Dr. Isles?”
She looked up at Detective Corso. “We have a problem,” she said. “This skull—”
“What about it?”
“You see the heavy ridges here, above the eye sockets? And look back here, at the base of the skull. If you run your finger across it, you can feel a bump. It’s called the occipital protuberance.”
“So?”
“It’s where the ligamentum nuchae attaches, anchoring the muscles from the back of the neck to the cranium. The fact that bump is so prominent tells me this individual had robust musculature. This is almost certainly a man’s skull.”
“What’s the problem?”
“That pelvis over there is from a woman.”
Corso stared at her. Turned to look at Dr. Singh.
“I completely agree with Dr. Isles,” said Daljeet.
“But that would mean …”
“We have the remains of two different individuals here,” said Maura. “One male, one female.” She stood up and met Corso’s gaze. “The question is, how many others are buried out here?”
For a moment, Corso seemed too startled to respond. Then he turned and slowly scanned the clearing, as though really seeing it for the first time.
“Chief Gresham,” he said, “we’re going to need volunteers. A lot of them. Cops, firemen. I’ll call in our team from Augusta, but it won’t be enough. Not for what we need to do.”
“How many people are you talking about?”
“Whatever it takes to walk this site.” Corso was staring at the surrounding trees. “We’re going to comb every square inch of this place. The clearing, the woods. If there’s more than two people buried here, I’m going to find them.”
TWELVE
Jane Rizzoli had grown up in the suburb of Revere, just over the Tobin Bridge from downtown Boston. It was a working-class neighborhood of boxy homes on postage-stamp lots, a place where, every fourth of July, hot dogs sizzled on backyard grills and American flags were proudly displayed on front porches. The Rizzoli family had known its share of ups and downs, including a few terrible months when Jane was ten years old, and her father had lost his job. She’d been old enough to sense her mother’s fear and absorb her father’s angry desperation. She and her two brothers knew what it was like to live on that knife edge between comfort and ruin, and even though she enjoyed a steady paycheck, she could never quite silence the whispers of insecurity from her childhood. She would always think of herself as the girl from Revere who’d grown up dreaming of one day having a big house in a grander neighborhood, a house with enough bathrooms so she wouldn’t have to pound on the door every morning, demanding her turn in the shower. It would have to have a brick chimney and a double front door and a brass knocker. The house she was now staring at from her car had all those features and more: the brass knocker, the double front door, and not one chimney, but two. Everything she’d dreamed about.
But it was the ugliest house she’d ever seen.
The other homes on this East Dedham street were what you’d e
xpect to find in a comfortable middle-class neighborhood: two-car garages and neatly kept front yards. Late-model cars parked in driveways. Nothing fancy, nothing that demanded look at me. But this house—well, it didn’t just demand your attention. It shrieked for it.
It was as if Tara, the plantation house from Gone with the Wind, had been whooshed up in a tornado and plopped down on a city lot. It had no yard to speak of, just a rim of land along the sides so narrow you could barely push a lawnmower between the wall and the neighbor’s fence. White columns stood sentinel on a porch where Scarlett O’Hara could have held court in full view of the traffic on Sprague Street. The house made her think of Johnny Silva in the old neighborhood, and how he had blown his first paycheck on a cherry-red Corvette. “Trying to pretend he’s not a loser,” her father had said. “Boy hasn’t even gotten around to moving outa his parents’ basement, and he buys himself a fancy sports car. The biggest losers buy the biggest cars.”
Or build the biggest house in the neighborhood, she thought, staring at Tara-on-Sprague-Street.
She maneuvered her belly out from behind the steering wheel. Felt the baby tap-dance on her bladder as she walked up the porch steps. First things first, she thought. Ask to use the restroom. The doorbell didn’t just ring; it bonged, like a cathedral bell calling the faithful to worship.
The blond woman who opened the door appeared to have wandered into the wrong residence. Rather than Scarlett O’Hara, she was your classic Bambi—big hair, big boobs, body sausaged into a pink spandex exercise outfit. A face so unnaturally blank of expression that it had to be Botoxed.
“I’m Detective Rizzoli, here to see Terence Van Gates. I called earlier.”
“Oh yeah, Terry’s expecting you.” A girlish voice, high and sweet. Okay in small doses, but after an hour, it would be like fingernails scraping across a chalkboard.
Rizzoli stepped into the foyer and was immediately confronted with a mammoth oil painting on the wall. It was Bambi dressed in a green evening gown, standing beside an enormous vase of orchids. Everything in this house seemed oversized. The paintings, the ceilings, the breasts.
“They’re renovating his office building, so he’s working from home today. Down the hall, on your right.”
“Excuse me—I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”
“Bonnie.”
Bonnie, Bambi. Close enough.
“That would be … Mrs. Van Gates?” asked Rizzoli.
“Uh-huh.”
Trophy wife. Van Gates had to be close to seventy.
“May I use your restroom? I seem to need one every ten minutes these days.”
For the first time, Bonnie seemed to notice that Rizzoli was pregnant. “Oh, honey! Of course you can. The powder room’s right there.”
Rizzoli had never seen a bathroom painted candy-cane pink. The toilet sat high on a platform, like a throne, with a telephone mounted on the wall beside it. As if anyone would want to conduct business while, well, doing their business. She washed her hands with pink soap in the pink marble basin, dried them with pink towels, and fled the room.
Bonnie had vanished, but Rizzoli could hear the beat of exercise music, and the thumps of feet bouncing upstairs. Bonnie going through her exercise routine. I should get in shape one of these days too, thought Rizzoli. But I refuse to do it in pink spandex.
She headed down the hall in search of Van Gates’s office. She peeked first into a vast living room with a white grand piano and a white rug and white furniture. White room, pink room. What came next? She passed another painting of Bonnie in the hallway, this time posed as a Greek goddess in a white gown, nipples showing through diaphanous fabric. Man, these people belonged in Vegas.
At last she came to an office. “Mr. Van Gates?” she said.
The man sitting behind the cherry desk looked up from his papers, and she saw watery blue eyes, a face gone soft and jowly with age, and hair that was—what was that shade? Somewhere between yellow and orange. Surely not intentional, just a dye job gone wrong.
“Detective Rizzoli?” he said, and his gaze fell to her abdomen. Got stuck there, as though he’d never seen a pregnant cop before.
Talk to me, not the belly. She crossed to his desk and shook his hand. Noticed the telltale transplant plugs dotting his scalp, sprouting hair like little tufts of yellow grass in a last desperate stand of virility. That’s what you deserved for marrying a trophy wife.
“Sit down, sit down,” he said.
She settled into a slick leather chair. Glancing around the room, she noticed that the decor in here was radically different from the rest of the house. It was done up in Traditional Lawyer, with dark wood and leather. Mahogany shelves were filled with law journals and textbooks. Not a whisper of pink. Clearly this was his domain, a Bonnie-free zone.
“I don’t really know how I can help you, Detective,” he said. “The adoption you’re asking about was forty years ago.”
“Not exactly ancient history.”
He laughed. “I doubt you were even born then.”
Was that a little poke? His way of saying she was too young to be bothering him with these questions?
“You don’t recall the people involved?”
“I’m just saying that it was a long time ago. I would’ve been just out of law school then. Working out of a rented office with rented furniture and no secretary. Answered my own phone. I took every case that came in—divorces, adoptions, drunk driving. Whatever paid the rent.”
“And you still have all those files, of course. From your cases back then.”
“They’d be in storage.”
“Where?”
“File-Safe, out in Quincy. But before we go any further, I have to tell you. The parties involved in this particular case requested absolute privacy. The birth mother did not want her name revealed. Those records were sealed years ago.”
“This is a homicide case, Mr. Van Gates. One of the two adoptees is now dead.”
“Yes, I know. But I fail to see what that has to do with her adoption forty years ago. How is it relevant to your investigation?”
“Why did Anna Leoni call you?”
He looked startled. Nothing he said after that could cover up that initial reaction, that expression of uh-oh. “Excuse me?” he said.
“The day before she was murdered, Anna Leoni called your law office from her room at the Tremont Hotel. We just got her phone record. The conversation lasted thirty-seven minutes. Now, you two must have talked about something during those thirty-seven minutes. You couldn’t have kept the poor woman on hold all that time?”
He said nothing.
“Mr. Van Gates?”
“That—that conversation was confidential.”
“Ms. Leoni was your client? You billed her for that call?”
“No, but—”
“So you’re not bound by attorney-client privilege.”
“But I am bound by another client’s confidentiality.”
“The birth mother.”
“Well, she was my client. She gave up her babies on one condition—that her name never be revealed.”
“That was forty years ago. She may have changed her mind.”
“I have no idea. I don’t know where she is. I don’t even know if she’s still alive.”
“Is that why Anna called you? To ask about her mother?”
He leaned back. “Adoptees are often curious about their origins. For some of them it becomes an obsession. So they go on document hunts. Invest thousands of dollars and a lot of heartache searching for mothers who don’t want to be found. And if they do find them, it’s seldom the fairy-tale ending they expected. That’s what she was looking for, Detective. A fairy-tale ending. Sometimes they’re better off just forgetting it, and moving on with their lives.”
Rizzoli thought of her own childhood, her own family. She had always known who she was. She could look at her grandparents, her parents, and see her own bloodline engraved on their faces. She was one of them, right down t
o her DNA, and no matter how much her relatives might annoy her or embarrass her, she knew they were hers.
But Maura Isles had never seen herself in the eyes of a grandparent. When Maura walked down a street, did she study the faces of passing strangers, searching for a hint of her own features? A familiar curve to the mouth or slope of the nose? Rizzoli could perfectly understand the hunger to know your own origins. To know that you’re not just a loose twig, but one branch of a deeply rooted tree.
She looked Van Gates in the eye. “Who is Anna Leoni’s mother?”
He shook his head. “I’ll say it again. This is not relevant to your—”
“Let me decide that. Just give me the name.”
“Why? So you can disrupt the life of a woman who may not want to be reminded of her youthful mistake? What does this have to do with the murder?”
Rizzoli leaned closer, placing both her hands on his desk. Aggressively trespassing on his personal property. Sweet little Bambis might not do this, but girl cops from Revere weren’t afraid to.
“We can subpoena your files. Or I can ask you politely.”
They stared at each other for a moment. Then he released a sigh of capitulation. “Okay, I don’t need to go through this again. I’ll just tell you, okay? The mother’s name was Amalthea Lank. She was twenty-four years old. And she needed money—badly.”
Rizzoli frowned. “Are you telling me she got paid for giving up her babies?”
“Well …”
“How much?”
“It was substantial. Enough for her to get a fresh start in life.”
“How much?”
He blinked. “It was twenty thousand dollars, each.”
“For each baby?”
“Two happy families walked away with a child. She walked away with cash. Believe me, adoptive parents pay a lot more today. Do you know how hard it is to adopt a healthy Caucasian newborn these days? There just aren’t enough to go around. It’s supply and demand, that’s all.”
Rizzoli sank back, appalled that a woman would sell her babies for cold hard cash.
“Now that’s all I can tell you,” said Van Gates. “If you want to find out more, well, maybe you cops should try talking to each other. You’d save a lot of time.”
The Rizzoli & Isles Series 11-Book Bundle Page 105