The Sinner Page 2

  So it was a shock when she saw three faces staring at her from one of the windows. The nuns stood in a silent tableau, like dark-robed ghosts behind glass, watching the intruder make her way deeper into their sanctuary. Their gazes swerved in unison, following her as she moved past.

  The entrance to the chapel was draped with a strand of yellow crime scene tape, which had sagged in the doorway and hung crusted with sleet. She lifted the tape to step beneath it and pushed open the door.

  A camera flash exploded in her eyes and she froze, the door slowly hissing shut behind her, blinking away the afterimage that had seared her retinas. As her vision cleared, she saw rows of wooden pews, whitewashed walls, and at the front of the chapel, an enormous crucifix hanging above the altar. It was a coldly austere room, its gloom deepened by the stained glass windows, which admitted only a murky smear of light.

  “Hold it right there. Be careful where you step,” said the photographer.

  Maura looked down at the stone floor and saw blood. And footprints—a confusing jumble of them, along with medical debris. Syringe caps and torn wrappings. The leavings of an ambulance crew. But no body.

  Her gaze moved in a wider circle, taking in the piece of trampled white cloth lying in the aisle, the splashes of red on the pews. She could see her own breath in this frigid room, and the temperature seemed to drop even colder, her chill deepening as she read the bloodstains, saw the successive splashes moving up the rows of benches, and understood what had happened here.

  The photographer began to click off more shots, each one a visual assault on Maura’s eyes.

  “Hey Doc?” At the front of the chapel, a mop of dark hair popped up as Detective Jane Rizzoli rose to her feet and waved. “The vic’s up here.”

  “What about this blood here, by the door?”

  “That’s from the other victim, Sister Ursula. Med-Q boys took her to St. Francis. There’s more blood along that center aisle, and some footprints we’re trying to preserve, so you’d better circle around to your left. Stick close to the wall.”

  Maura paused to pull on paper shoe-covers, then edged along the perimeter of the room, hugging the wall. Only as she cleared the front row of pews did she see the nun’s body, lying faceup, the fabric of her habit a black pool blending into a larger lake of red. Both hands had already been bagged to preserve evidence. The victim’s youth took Maura by surprise. The nun who had let her in the gate, and those she had seen through the window, had all been elderly. This woman was far younger. It was an ethereal face, her pale blue eyes frozen in a look of eerie serenity. Her head was bare, the blond hair shorn to barely an inch long. Every terrible blow was recorded in the torn scalp, the misshapen crown.

  “Her name’s Camille Maginnes. Sister Camille. Hometown, Hyannisport,” said Rizzoli, sounding Dragnet-cool and businesslike. “She was the first novice they’ve had here in fifteen years. Planned to take her final vows in May.” She paused, then added: “She was only twenty,” and her anger cracked through the facade.

  “She’s so young.”

  “Yeah. Looks like he beat the shit out of her.”

  Maura pulled on gloves and crouched down to study the destruction. The death instrument had left raggedly linear lacerations on the scalp. Fragments of bone protruded through torn skin, and a clump of gray matter had oozed out. Though the facial skin was largely intact, it was suffused a dark purple.

  “She died facedown. Who turned her onto her back?”

  “The sisters who found her,” said Rizzoli. “They were looking for a pulse.”

  “What time were the victims discovered?”

  “About eight this morning.” Rizzoli glanced at her watch. “Nearly two hours ago.”

  “Do you know what happened? What did the sisters tell you?”

  “It’s been hard getting anything useful out of them. There are only fourteen nuns left now, and they’re all in a state of shock. Here they think they’re safe. Protected by God. And then some lunatic breaks in.”

  “There are signs of forced entry?”

  “No, but it wouldn’t be all that hard to get into the compound. There’s ivy growing all over the walls—you could hop right over without too much trouble. And there’s also a back gate, leading to a field, where they have their gardens. A perp could get in that way, too.”

  “Footprints?”

  “A few in here. But outside, they’d be pretty much buried under snow.”

  “So we don’t know that he actually broke in. He could have been admitted through that front gate.”

  “It’s a cloistered order, Doc. No one’s allowed inside the gates except for the parish priest, when he comes in to say Mass and hear confession. And there’s also a lady who works in the rectory. They let her bring her little girl when she can’t get child care. But that’s it. No one else comes in without the Abbess’s approval. And the sisters stay inside. They leave only for doctors’ appointments and family emergencies.”

  “Who have you spoken to so far?”

  “The Abbess, Mother Mary Clement. And the two nuns who found the victims.”

  “What did they tell you?”

  Rizzoli shook her head. “Saw nothing, heard nothing. I don’t think the others will be able to tell us much, either.”

  “Why not?”

  “Have you seen how old they are?”

  “It doesn’t mean they don’t have their wits about them.”

  “One of them’s gorked out by a stroke and two of them have Alzheimer’s. Most of them sleep in rooms facing away from the courtyard, so they wouldn’t have seen a thing.”

  At first Maura simply crouched over Camille’s body, not touching it. Granting the victim a last moment of dignity. Nothing can hurt you now, she thought. She began to palpate the scalp, and felt the crunch of shifting bone fragments beneath the skin. “Multiple blows. All of them landed on the crown or the back of the skull. . . .”

  “And the facial bruising? Is that just lividity?”

  “Yes. And it’s fixed.”

  “So the blows came from behind. And above.”

  “The attacker was probably taller.”

  “Or she was down on her knees. And he was standing over her.”

  Maura paused, hands touching cool flesh, arrested by the heartbreaking image of this young nun, kneeling before her attacker, blows raining down on her bowed head.

  “What kind of bastard goes around beating up nuns?” said Rizzoli. “What the fuck is wrong with this world?”

  Maura winced at Rizzoli’s choice of words. Though she couldn’t remember the last time she’d set foot in a church, and had ceased believing years ago, to hear such profanity in a sanctified place disturbed her. Such was the power of childhood indoctrination. Even she, for whom saints and miracles were now merely fantasies, would never utter a curse in full view of the cross.

  But Rizzoli was too angry to care what words came tumbling out of her mouth, even in this sacred place. Her hair was more disheveled than usual, a wild, black mane glistening with melted sleet. The bones of her face jutted out in sharp angles beneath pale skin. In the gloom of the chapel, her eyes were bright coals, lit with rage. Righteous anger had always been Jane Rizzoli’s fuel, the essence of what drove her to hunt monsters. Today, though, she seemed feverish with it, and her face was thinner, as though the fire was now consuming her from within.

  Maura did not want to feed those flames. She kept her voice dispassionate, her questions businesslike. A scientist dealing in facts, not emotions.

  She reached for Sister Camille’s arm and tested the elbow joint. “It’s flaccid. No rigor mortis.”

  “Less than five, six hours then?”

  “It’s also cold in here.”

  Rizzoli gave a snort, exhaling a puff of vapor in the frigid air. “No kidding.”

  “Just above freezing, I’d guess. Rigor mortis would be delayed.”

  “How long?”

  “Almost indefinitely.”

  “What about her face? Th
e fixed bruising?”

  “Livor mortis could have happened within half an hour. It doesn’t help us all that much with time of death.”

  Maura opened her kit and set out the chemical thermometer to measure ambient temperature. She eyed the victim’s many layers of clothing and decided not to take a rectal temperature until after the body had been transported to the morgue. The room was poorly lit—not a place in which she could adequately rule out sexual assault prior to the insertion of the thermometer. Wrestling off clothes might also dislodge trace evidence. Instead she took out syringes to withdraw vitreous fluid for postmortem potassium levels. It would give her one estimate for time of death.

  “Tell me about the other victim,” Maura said as she pierced the left eye and slowly withdrew vitreous fluid into the syringe.

  Rizzoli gave a groan of disgust at the procedure and turned away. “The vic found by the door was Sister Ursula Rowland, sixty-eight years old. Must be a tough old bird. They said she was moving her arms when they loaded her into the ambulance. Frost and I got here just as they were driving away.”

  “How badly injured was she?”

  “I didn’t see her. Latest report we got from St. Francis Hospital is that she’s in surgery. Multiple skull fractures and bleeding into the brain.”

  “Like this victim.”

  “Yeah. Like Camille.” The anger was back in Rizzoli’s voice.

  Maura rose to her feet and stood shivering. Her trousers had wicked freezing water from the soaked hem of her coat, and her calves felt encased in ice. She had been told on the phone that the death scene was indoors, so she had not brought her scarf or wool gloves from the car. This unheated room was scarcely warmer than the sleet-swept courtyard outside. She shoved her hands into her coat pockets, and wondered how Rizzoli, who was also without warm gloves and scarf, could linger so long in this frigid chapel. Rizzoli seemed to carry her own heat source within her, the fever of her outrage, and although her lips were turning blue, she did not seem in a hurry to seek a warmer room anytime soon.

  “Why is it so cold in here?” asked Maura. “I can’t imagine they’d want to hold Mass in this room.”

  “They don’t. This part of the building’s never used in winter—it’s too expensive to heat. There are so few of them still living here, anyway. For Mass, they use a small chapel off the rectory.”

  Maura thought of the three nuns she’d seen through the window, all of them elderly. These sisters were dying flames, flickering out one by one.

  “If this chapel’s not used,” she said, “what were the victims doing in here?”

  Rizzoli gave a sigh, exhaling a dragon’s breath of vapor. “No one knows. The Abbess says the last time she saw Ursula and Camille was at prayers last night, around nine. When they didn’t appear at morning prayers, the sisters went looking for them. They never expected to find them in here.”

  “All these blows to the head. It looks like sheer rage.”

  “But look at her face,” said Rizzoli, pointing to Camille. “He didn’t hit her face. He spared her face. That makes it seem a lot less personal. As if he’s not swinging at her specifically, but at what she is. What she stands for.”

  “Authority?” said Maura. “Power?”

  “Funny. I would have said something along the lines of faith, hope, and charity.”

  “Well, I went to a Catholic high school.”

  “You?” Rizzoli gave a snort. “Never would’ve guessed.”

  Maura took a deep breath of chilly air and looked up at the cross, remembering her years at Holy Innocents Academy. And the special torments meted out by Sister Magdalene, who had taught history. The torment had not been physical but emotional, dispensed by a woman who was quick to identify which girls had, in her opinion, an unseemly excess of confidence. At the age of fourteen, Maura’s best friends had not been people, but books. She’d easily mastered all her classwork, and had been proud of it, too. That was what had brought Sister Magdalene’s wrath down upon her shoulders. For Maura’s own good, that unholy pride in her own intellect needed to be beaten into humility. Sister Magdalene went about the task with vicious gusto. She had held Maura up to ridicule in class, had written cutting comments in the margins of her immaculate papers, and sighed loudly whenever Maura raised her hand to ask a question. In the end, Maura had been reduced to conquered silence.

  “They used to intimidate me,” said Maura. “The nuns.”

  “I didn’t think anything scared you, Doc.”

  “Lots of things scare me.”

  Rizzoli laughed. “Just not dead bodies, huh?”

  “There are far scarier things in this world than dead bodies.”

  They left the body of Camille lying on her bed of cold stone and moved back around the room’s perimeter, toward the bloodstained floor where Ursula had been found, still alive. The photographer had completed his work and departed; only Maura and Rizzoli remained in the chapel, two lone women, their voices echoing off stark walls. Maura had always thought of chapels as universal sanctuaries, where even the spirit of the unbeliever might be comforted. But she found no comfort in this bleak place, where Death had walked, contemptuous of holy symbols.

  “They found Sister Ursula right here,” said Rizzoli. “She was lying with her head pointed toward the altar, her feet toward the door.”

  As though prostrating herself before the crucifix.

  “This guy’s a fucking animal,” said Rizzoli, the angry words clipped off like shards of ice. “That’s what we’re dealing with. Out of his mind. Or some coked-up asshole looking for something to steal.”

  “We don’t know it’s a man.”

  Rizzoli waved toward the body of Sister Camille. “You think a woman did that?”

  “A woman can swing a hammer. Crush a skull.”

  “We found a footprint. There, halfway up the aisle. Looked to me like a man’s size twelve.”

  “One of the ambulance crew?”

  “No, you can see the Med-Q team’s footprints here, near the door. That one in the aisle’s different. That one’s his.”

  The wind blew, rattling the windows, and the door creaked as though invisible hands were tugging at it, desperate to get in. Rizzoli’s lips had chilled to blue, and her face had taken on a corpselike pallor, but she showed no intention of seeking a warmer room. That was Rizzoli, too stubborn to be the first to capitulate. To admit she had reached her limit.

  Maura looked down at the stone floor where Sister Ursula had been lying, and she could not disagree with Rizzoli’s instincts, that this attack was an act of insanity. This was madness she saw here, in these bloodstains. In the blows slammed into Sister Camille’s skull. Either madness, or evil.

  An icy draft seemed to blow straight up her spine. She straightened, shivering, and her gaze fixed on the crucifix. “I’m freezing,” she said. “Can we get warm somewhere? Get a cup of coffee?”

  “Are you finished here?”

  “I’ve seen what I need to. The autopsy will tell us the rest.”

  TWO

  THEY EMERGED from the chapel, stepping over the strand of police tape which by now had fallen from the doorway and lay encased in ice. The wind flapped their coats and whipped their faces as they headed beneath the walkway, their eyes narrowed against rebel gusts of snowflakes. As they stepped into a gloomy entranceway, Maura registered barely a whisper of warmth against her numb face. She smelled eggs and old paint and the mustiness of an ancient heating system, radiating dust.

  The clatter of chinaware drew them down a dim hallway, into a room awash in fluorescent light, a disconcertingly modern detail. It glared down, stark and unflattering, on the deeply lined faces of the nuns seated around a battered rectory table. Thirteen of them—an unlucky number. Their attention was focused on squares of bright floral cloth and silk ribbons and trays of dried lavender and rose petals. Craft time, thought Maura, watching as arthritic hands scooped up herbs and wound ribbon around sachets. One of the nuns sat slumped in a wheelchair. She w
as tilted to the side, her left hand curled into a claw on the armrest, her face sagging like a partly melted mask. The cruel aftermath of a stroke. Yet she was the first to notice the two intruders, and she gave a moan. The other sisters looked up, turning toward Maura and Rizzoli.

  Gazing into those wizened faces, Maura was startled by the frailty she saw there. These were not the stern images of authority she remembered from her girlhood, but the gazes of the bewildered, looking to her for answers to this tragedy. She was uneasy with her new status, the way a grown child is uneasy when he first realizes that he and his parents have reversed roles.

  Rizzoli asked, “Can someone tell me where Detective Frost is?”

  The question was answered by a harried-looking woman who had just come out of the adjoining kitchen, carrying a tray of clean coffee cups and saucers. She was dressed in a faded blue jumper stained with grease, and a tiny diamond glinted through the bubbles of dishwater on her left hand. Not a nun, thought Maura, but the rectory employee, tending to this ever more infirm community.

  “He’s still talking to the Abbess,” the woman said. She cocked her head toward the doorway, and a strand of brown hair came loose, curling over her frown-etched forehead. “Her office is down the hall.”