Ice Cold Page 2

  Knuckles rapped on the windshield, and she looked up to see an airport policeman glaring at them. “This is only for unloading,” he barked. “You have to move the vehicle.”

  Daniel slid down the window. “I’m just dropping her off.”

  “Well, don’t take all day.”

  “I’ll get your luggage,” Daniel said. He stepped out of the car.

  For a moment they stood shivering together on the curb, silent amid the cacophony of rumbling buses and traffic whistles. If he were my husband, she thought, we would kiss each other goodbye right here. But for too long, they had scrupulously avoided any public displays of affection, and although he was not wearing his clerical collar this morning, even a hug felt dangerous.

  “I don’t have to go to this conference,” she said. “We could spend the week together.”

  He sighed. “Maura, I can’t just disappear for a week.”

  “When can you?”

  “I need time to arrange a leave. We’ll get away, I promise.”

  “It always has to be someplace else, though, doesn’t it? Someplace where no one knows us. For once, I’d like to spend a week with you without having to go away.”

  He glanced at the policeman, who was moving back in their direction. “We’ll talk about it when you get back next week.”

  “Hey, mister!” the cop yelled. “Move your car now.”

  “Of course we’ll talk.” She laughed. “We’re good at talking about it, aren’t we? It’s all we ever seem to do.” She grabbed her suitcase.

  He reached for her arm. “Maura, please. Let’s not walk away from each other like this. You know I love you. I just need time to work this through.”

  She saw the pain carved on his face. All the months of deception, the indecision and guilt, had left their scars, had darkened whatever joy he’d found with her. She could have comforted him with just a smile, a reassuring squeeze of his arm, but at that moment she could not see past her own pain. All she could think of was retaliation.

  “I think we’ve run out of time,” she said, and walked away, into the terminal. The instant the glass doors whooshed shut behind her, she regretted her words. But when she stopped to look back through the window, he was already climbing into his car.

  THE MAN’S LEGS were splayed apart, exposing ruptured testicles and the seared skin of buttocks and perineum. The morgue photo had flashed onto the screen without any advance warning from the lecturer, yet no one sitting in the darkened hotel conference room gave so much as a murmur of dismay. This audience was inured to the sight of ruined and broken bodies. For those who have seen and touched charred flesh, who are familiar with its stench, a sterile slide show holds few horrors. In fact, the white-haired man seated beside Maura had dozed off several times, and in the semi-darkness she could see his head bob as he struggled between sleep and wakefulness, impervious to the succession of gruesome photos glowing on the screen.

  “What you see here are typical injuries sustained from a car bomb. The victim was a forty-five-year-old Russian businessman who climbed into his Mercedes one morning—a very nice Mercedes, I might add. When he turned the ignition key, he set off the booby trap of explosives that had been placed underneath his seat. As you can see from the X-rays …” The speaker clicked the computer mouse, and the next PowerPoint slide appeared on screen. It was a radiograph of a pelvis that was sheared apart at the pubis. Shards of bone and metal had been blasted throughout the soft tissues. “The force of the explosion blew car fragments straight up into his perineum, rupturing the scrotum and shearing off the ischial tuberosities. I’m sorry to say that we’re becoming more and more familiar with explosive injuries like these, especially in this era of terrorist attacks. This was quite a small bomb, meant to kill only the driver. When you move into terrorism, you’re talking about far more massive explosions with multiple casualties.”

  Again he clicked the mouse, and a photo of excised organs appeared, glistening like butcher shop offerings on a green surgical drape.

  “Sometimes you may not find much evidence of external damage, even when the internal damage is fatal. This is the result of a suicide bombing in a Jerusalem café. The fourteen-year-old female sustained massive concussive injuries to the lungs, as well as perforated abdominal viscera. Yet her face was untouched. Almost angelic.”

  The photo that next appeared drew the first audible reaction from the audience, murmurs of sadness and disbelief. The girl appeared serenely at rest, her flawless face unlined and unworried, dark eyes peering from beneath thick lashes. In the end, it was not gore that shocked that room of pathologists, but beauty. At fourteen, at the moment of her death, she would have been thinking about a school assignment, perhaps. Or a pretty dress. Or a boy she’d glimpsed on the street. She would not have imagined that her lungs and liver and spleen would soon be laid out on an autopsy table, or that a room of two hundred pathologists would one day be gawking at her image.

  As the lights came up, the audience was still subdued. While the others filed out, Maura remained in her seat, staring down at the notes that she’d jotted on her pad about nail bombs and parcel bombs, car bombs and buried bombs. When it came to causing misery, man’s ingenuity knew no limits. We are so good at killing each other, she thought. Yet we fail so miserably at love.

  “Excuse me. You wouldn’t happen to be Maura Isles?”

  She looked up at the man who’d risen from his seat two rows ahead. He was about her age, tall and athletic, with a deep tan and sun-streaked blond hair that made her automatically think: California boy. His face seemed vaguely familiar, but she could not recall where she’d met him, which was surprising. His was a face that any woman would certainly remember.

  “I knew it! It is you, isn’t it?” He laughed. “I thought I spotted you as you came into the room.”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry. This is really embarrassing, but I’m having trouble placing you.”

  “That’s because it was a long time ago. And I no longer have my ponytail. Doug Comley, Stanford pre-med. It’s been, what? Twenty years? I’m not surprised you’ve forgotten me. Hell, I would’ve forgotten me.”

  Suddenly a memory popped into her head, of a young man with long blond hair and protective goggles perched on his sunburned nose. He’d been far lankier then, a whippet in blue jeans. “Were we in a lab together?” she said.

  “Quantitative analysis. Junior year.”

  “You remember that, even after twenty years? I’m amazed.”

  “I don’t remember a damn thing about quant analysis. But I do remember you. You had the lab bench right across from me, and you got the highest score in class. Didn’t you end up at UC San Francisco med school?”

  “Yes, but I’m living in Boston now. What about you?”

  “UC San Diego. I just couldn’t bring myself to leave California. Addicted to sun and surf.”

  “Which sounds pretty good to me right now. Only November, and I’m already tired of the cold.”

  “I’m kind of digging this snow. It’s been a lot of fun.”

  “Only because you don’t have to live in it four months out of the year.”

  By now the conference room had emptied out, and hotel employees were packing up the chairs and wheeling out the sound equipment. Maura stuffed her notes into her tote bag and stood up. As she and Doug moved down parallel rows toward the exit, she asked him: “Will I see you at the cocktail party tonight?”

  “Yeah, I think I’ll be there. But dinner’s on our own, right?”

  “That’s what the schedule says.”

  They walked out of the room together, into a hotel lobby crowded with other doctors wearing the same white name tags, carrying the same conference tote bags. Together they waited at the elevators, both of them struggling to keep the conversation flowing.

  “So, are you here with your husband?” he asked.

  “I’m not married.”

  “Didn’t I see your wedding announcement in the alumni magazine?”

/>   She looked at him in surprise. “You actually keep track of things like that?”

  “I’m curious about where my classmates end up.”

  “In my case, divorced. Four years ago.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged. “I’m not.”

  They rode the elevator to the third floor, where they both stepped off.

  “See you at the cocktail party,” she said with a goodbye wave, and pulled out her hotel keycard.

  “Are you meeting anyone for dinner? Because I just happen to be free. If you want to join me, I’ll hunt down a good restaurant. Just give me a call.”

  She turned to answer him, but he was already moving down the hallway, the tote bag slung over his shoulder. As she watched him walk away, another memory of Douglas Comley suddenly flashed into her head. An image of him in blue jeans, hobbling on crutches across the campus quadrangle.

  “Didn’t you break your leg that year?” she called out. “I think it was right before finals.”

  Laughing, he turned to her. “That’s what you remember about me?”

  “It’s all starting to come back to me now. You had a skiing accident or something.”

  “Or something.”

  “It wasn’t a skiing accident?”

  “Oh man.” He shook his head. “This is way too embarrassing to talk about.”

  “That’s it. Now you have to tell me.”

  “If you’ll have dinner with me.”

  She paused as the elevator opened and a man and woman emerged. They walked up the hall, arms linked, clearly together and unafraid to show it. The way couples should act, she thought, as the pair stepped into a room and the door closed behind them.

  She looked at Douglas. “I’d like to hear that story.”

  THEY FLED THE PATHOLOGISTS’ COCKTAIL PARTY EARLY AND DINED at the Four Seasons Resort in Teton Village. Eight straight hours of lectures about stabbings and bombings, bullets and blowflies, had left Maura overwhelmed by talk of death, and she was relieved to escape back to the normal world, where casual conversation didn’t include talk of putrefaction, where the most serious issue of the evening was choosing between a red or a white wine.

  “So how did you break your leg at Stanford?” she asked as Doug swirled Pinot Noir in his glass.

  He winced. “I was hoping you’d forget about that subject.”

  “You promised to tell me. It’s the reason I came to dinner.”

  “Not because of my scintillating wit? My boyish charm?”

  She laughed. “Well, that, too. But mostly the tale behind the broken leg. I have a feeling it’s going to be a doozy.”

  “Okay.” He sighed. “The truth? I was fooling around on the rooftop of Wilbur Hall and I fell off.”

  She stared at him. “My God, that’s a really long drop.”

  “As I found out.”

  “I assume alcohol was involved?”

  “Of course.”

  “So it was just a typical dumb college stunt.”

  “Why do you sound so disappointed?”

  “I expected something a little more, oh, unconventional.”

  “Well,” he admitted, “I left out a few details.”

  “Such as?”

  “The ninja outfit I was wearing. The black mask. The plastic sword.” He gave an embarrassed shrug. “And the very humiliating ambulance ride to the hospital.”

  She regarded him with a calmly professional gaze. “And do you still like to dress up as a ninja these days?”

  “You see?” He barked out a laugh. “That’s what makes you so intimidating! Anyone else would have been laughing at me. But you respond with a very logical, very sober question.”

  “Is there a sober answer?”

  “Not a single damn one.” He lifted his glass in a toast. “Here’s to stupid college pranks. May we never live them down.”

  She sipped and set down her wine. “What did you mean when you said that I’m intimidating?”

  “You always have been. There I was, this goofy kid ambling my way through college. Partying too hard and sleeping too late. But you—you were so focused, Maura. You knew exactly what you wanted to be.”

  “And that made me intimidating?”

  “Even a little scary. Because you had it all together, and I sure as hell didn’t.”

  “I had no idea I had that effect on people.”

  “You still do.”

  She considered that statement. She thought about the police officers who always fell silent whenever she walked into a crime scene. She thought about the Christmas party where she’d so responsibly limited herself to a single flute of champagne while everyone else grew raucous. The public would never see Dr. Maura Isles drunk or loud or reckless. They would see only what she allowed them to see. A woman in control. A woman who scares them.

  “It’s not as if being focused is some sort of flaw,” she said, in her own defense. “It’s the only way anything gets accomplished in this world.”

  “Which is probably why it took me so long to accomplish anything.”

  “You made it to medical school.”

  “Eventually. After I spent two years bumming around, which drove my dad totally nuts. I worked as a bartender in Baja. Taught surfing in Malibu. Smoked too much pot and drank a lot of bad wine. It was great.” He grinned. “You, Dr. Isles, wouldn’t have approved.”

  “It’s not something I would have done.” She took another sip of wine. “Not then, anyway.”

  His eyebrow tilted up. “Meaning you’d do it now?”

  “People do change, Doug.”

  “Yeah, look at me! I never dreamed I’d one day end up a boring pathologist, trapped in the hospital basement.”

  “So how did that happen? What made you transform from a beach bum into a respectable doctor?”

  Their conversation paused as the waiter brought their entrées. Roast duck for Maura, lamb chops for Doug. They sat through the obligatory grinding of the pepper, the refilling of their wineglasses. Only after the waiter left did Douglas answer her question.

  “I got married,” he said.

  She had not noticed a wedding ring on his finger, and this was the first time he’d said anything about being in a relationship. The revelation made her glance up in surprise, but he was not looking at her; he was gazing at another table, at a family with two little girls.

  “It was a bad match from the start,” he admitted. “Met her at a party. Gorgeous blonde, blue eyes, legs up to here. She heard I was applying to med school and she had visions of being a rich doctor’s wife. She didn’t realize she’d end up spending weekends alone while I was working in the hospital. By the time I finished my pathology residency, she’d found someone else.” He sliced into his lamb chop. “But I got to keep Grace.”

  “Grace?”

  “My daughter. Thirteen years old and every bit as gorgeous as her mom. I’m just hoping to turn her in a more intellectual direction than her mom went.”

  “Where’s your ex-wife now?”

  “She got remarried, to a banker. They live in London, and we’re lucky if we hear from her twice a year.” He set down his knife and fork. “So that’s how I became Mr. Mom. I’ve now got a daughter, a mortgage, and a job at the VA in San Diego. Who could ask for anything more?”

  “And are you happy?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not the life I imagined when I was at Stanford, playing ninja on the rooftops. But I can’t complain. Life happens, and you adjust.” He smiled at her. “Lucky you, you’re exactly what you envisioned. You always wanted to be a pathologist, and here you are.”

  “I also wanted to be married. I failed miserably at that.”

  He studied her. “I find it so hard to believe that there’s no man in your life right now.”

  She pushed pieces of duck around on her plate, her appetite suddenly gone. “Actually, I am seeing someone.”

  He leaned in, focusing intently. “Tell me more.”

  “It’s been about a y
ear.”

  “That sounds serious.”

  “I’m not sure.” His gaze made her uneasy, and she dropped her attention back to her meal. She could feel him studying her, trying to read what she wasn’t telling him. What started as a lighthearted conversation had suddenly turned deeply personal. The dissection knives were out and secrets were spilling.

  “Is it serious enough that there might be wedding bells?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She looked at him. “Because he’s not available.”

  He leaned back, clearly surprised. “I never thought someone as levelheaded as you would fall for a married man.”

  She started to correct him, then stopped herself. Practically speaking, Daniel Brophy was indeed a married man, married to his church. There was no spouse more jealous, more demanding. She would have a better chance of claiming him if he’d been bound to merely another woman.

  “I guess I’m not as levelheaded as you thought,” she said.

  He gave a surprised laugh. “You must have a wild streak I never knew about. How did I miss it back at Stanford?”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Basic personalities don’t really change much.”

  “You’ve changed.”

  “No. Beneath this Brooks Brothers blazer still beats the heart of a beach bum. Medicine’s just my job, Maura. It pays the bills. It’s not who I am.”

  “And what do you imagine I am?”

  “The same person you were at Stanford. Competent. Professional. Not one to make mistakes.”

  “I wish that were true. I wish I didn’t make mistakes.”

  “This man you’re seeing, is he a mistake?”

  “I’m not ready to admit that.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  His question made her pause, not because she was unsure of the answer. She knew she was not happy. Yes, there were moments of bliss when she’d hear Daniel’s car in the driveway or his knock on her door. But there were also the nights when she sat alone at her kitchen table, drinking too many glasses of wine. Nursing too many resentments.