Rizzoli & Isles 03 - The Sinner

  THE

  SINNER

  TESS GERRITSEN

  BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

  To my mother, Ruby J. C. Tom, with love.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My warmest thanks to:

  Peter Mars and Bruce Blake, for their insights into the Boston Police Department.

  Margaret Greenwald, M.D., for allowing me a look into the medical examiner’s world.

  Gina Centrello, for her unflagging enthusiasm.

  Linda Marrow, every writer’s dream editor.

  Selina Walker, my miracle worker on the other side of the Pond.

  Jane Berkey, Donald Cleary, and the wonderful team at the Jane Rotrosen Agency.

  Meg Ruley, my literary agent, champion, and guiding light. Nobody does it better.

  And to my husband Jacob, still my best friend after all these years.

  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 back
ed 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 remained 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.

  The intercom buzzed. “Dr. Isles?” It was Louise, her secretary.

  “Yes?”

  “Detective Rizzoli’s on line two for you. Can you take the call?”

  “I’ll pick up.”

  Maura peeled off her gloves and crossed to the wall phone. Yoshima, who’d been rinsing instruments in the sink, shut off the faucet. He turned to watch her with his silent tiger eyes, already knowing what a call from Rizzoli signified.

  When at last Maura hung up, she saw the question in his gaze.

  “It’s starting early today,” she said. Then she stripped off her gown and left the morgue, to usher another subject into her realm.

  The morning’s snowfall had turned into a treacherous mix of both snow and sleet, and the city plows were nowhere in sight. She drove cautiously along Jamaica Riverway, tires swishing through deep slush, windshield wipers scraping at hoar-frosted glass. This was the first winter storm of the season, and drivers had yet to adjust to the conditions. Already, several casualties had slid off the road, and she passed a parked police cruiser, its lights flashing, the patrolman standing beside a tow truck driver as they both gazed at a car that had tipped into a ditch.

  The tires of her Lexus began to slide sideways, the front bumper veering toward oncoming traffic. Panicking, she hit the brakes and felt the vehicle’s automatic skid control kick into action. She pulled the car back into her lane. Screw this, she thought, her heart thudding. I’m moving back to California. She slowed to a timid crawl, not caring who honked at her or how much traffic she held up. Go ahead and pass me, idiots. I’ve met too many drivers like you on my slab.

  The road took her into Jamaica Plain, a west Boston neighborhood of stately old mansions and broad lawns, of serene parks and river walks. In the summertime, this would be a leafy retreat from the noise and heat of urban Boston, but today, under bleak skies, with winds sweeping across barren lawns, it was a desolate neighborhood.

  The address she sought seemed the most forbidding of all, the building set back behind a high stone wall over which a smothering tangle of ivy had scrambled. A barricade to keep out the world, she thought. From the street, all she could see were the gothic peaks of a slate roof and one towering gable window which peered back at her like a dark eye. A patrol car parked near the front gate confirmed that she had found the correct address. Only a few other vehicles had arrived so far—the shock troops before the larger army of crime-scene techs arrived.

  She parked across the street and braced herself against the first blast of wind. When she stepped out of the car, her shoe skidded right out from under her, and she barely caught herself, hanging onto the vehicle door. Dragging herself back to her feet, she felt icy water trickle down her calves from the soaked hem of her coat, which had fallen into the slush. For a few seconds she just stood there, sleet stinging her face, shocked by how quickly it had all happened.

  She glanced across the street at the patrolman sitting in his cruiser, and saw that he was watching her, and had surely seen her slip. Her pride stung, she grabbed her kit from the front seat, swung the door shut, and made her way, with as much dignity as she could muster, across the rime-slicked road.

  “You okay, Doc?” the patrolman called out through his car window, a concerned inquiry she really did not welcome.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Watch yourself in those shoes. It’s even more slippery in the courtyard.”

  “Where’s Detective Rizzoli?”

  “They’re in the chapel.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “Can’t miss it. It’s the door with the big cross on it.”
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  She continued to the front gate, but found it locked. An iron bell hung on the wall; she tugged on the pull rope, and the medieval clang slowly faded into the softer tick, tick of falling sleet. Just beneath the bell was a bronze plaque, its inscription partially obscured by a strand of brown ivy.

  Graystones Abbey

  The Sisters of Our Lady of Divine Light

  “The harvest is indeed great, but the laborers are few.

  Pray, therefore, to send laborers

  Into the harvest.”

  On the other side of the gate, a woman swathed in black suddenly appeared, her approach so silent that Maura gave a start when she saw the face staring at her through the bars. It was an ancient face, so deeply lined it seemed to be collapsing in on itself, but the eyes were bright and sharp as a bird’s. The nun did not speak, posing her question with only her gaze.

  “I’m Dr. Isles from the Medical Examiner’s office,” said Maura. “The police called me here.”

  The gate squealed open.

  Maura stepped into the courtyard. “I’m looking for Detective Rizzoli. I believe she’s in the chapel.”

  The nun pointed directly across the courtyard. Then she turned and shuffled slowly into the nearest doorway, abandoning Maura to make her own way to the chapel.

  Snowflakes whirled and danced amid needles of sleet, like white butterflies circling their lead-footed cousins. The most direct route was to cross the courtyard, but the stones were glazed with ice, and Maura’s shoes, with their gripless soles, had already proven no match for such a surface. She ducked instead beneath the narrow covered walkway that ran along the courtyard’s perimeter. Though protected from the sleet, she found little shelter here from the wind, which sliced through her coat. She was shocked by the cold, reminded yet again of how cruel December in Boston could be. For most of her life, she had lived in San Francisco, where a glimpse of snowflakes was a rare delight, not a torment, like these stinging nettles that swirled under the overhang to nip her face. She veered closer to the building and hugged her coat tighter as she passed darkened windows. From beyond the gate came the faint swish of traffic on Jamaica Riverway. But here, within these walls, she heard only silence. Except for the elderly nun who had admitted her, the compound seemed abandoned.