Rizzoli & Isles: Listen to Me Page 4

  What secrets could a fifty-two-year-old widowed nurse be hiding? Jane wondered. Sofia had no criminal record, not even an outstanding parking ticket. Their search of her house had turned up no illicit drugs or stashes of cash, and her bank account was modest.

  Maybe the secret wasn’t about her.

  “What about her husband, Tony?” Jane asked. “What did he do for a living?”

  “He was a mail carrier,” said Mary Beth. “Thirty years on the job and he loved it. Loved talking to people on his route. He even loved all their dogs, and they loved him.”

  “No, they loved his dog biscuits,” said Fran Souza with a sad laugh. “Tony kept a bag of them in his mail truck.”

  “But he really did love dogs. They both did. After Tony died, Sofia was talking about getting one, maybe a big ol’ golden retriever. Then she thought it wouldn’t be fair to the dog, being left at home alone while she worked.” Mary Beth paused. “It’s too bad she didn’t have a dog. Maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”

  Fran asked, softly: “Was it quick? Did she suffer?”

  Jane thought of the smears of dried blood across the living room floor, evidence of Sofia’s desperate attempt to escape. Yes, she did suffer. Sofia had lived long enough to be terrified. To know she was about to die. “We’re waiting for the autopsy report,” was all she said.

  “Is Maura Isles doing it?” asked Antrim.

  Jane looked at him. “Do you know Dr. Isles?”

  “Oh yes. We both play in the same orchestra.”

  “She’s in an orchestra?”

  “It’s a doctors’ orchestra. We rehearse once a week at Brookline High School. She’s our pianist, and a very good one.”

  “I know she plays the piano, but I didn’t know about any orchestra.”

  “We’re just amateurs, but we have a good time. You should come to our concert in a few weeks. I’m a lowly second violinist, but Maura? She’s a real musician and will be our featured soloist.”

  And she never told me.

  What else had Maura kept from her? Jane wondered as she and Frost rode the elevator to the first floor, as they walked across the parking lot to her car. It was a small thing, yet it bothered her. She knew Maura was a private person, but they had been friends for years, had faced the worst together, and there was no more powerful bonding experience than facing death, side by side.

  She slid in behind the wheel and looked at Frost. “Why didn’t she tell us?”

  “Who?”

  “Maura. Why didn’t she mention she’s in an orchestra?”

  Frost shrugged. “Do you tell her everything?”

  “No, but this is different. A concert’s kind of a big deal.”

  “Maybe she’s embarrassed.”

  “That there’s one more thing she can do and I can’t?”

  He laughed. “See? You find that annoying, don’t you?”

  “I’m more annoyed she didn’t tell me about it.” Her cell phone rang with a nerve-jarring scream of violins. “Another thing to annoy me.”

  “You gonna answer her? ’Cause she’ll just call again.”

  Resignedly, Jane picked up the phone. “Hey, Ma. I’m in the middle of something right now.”

  “You’re always in the middle of something. When can we talk?”

  “Is this about Tricia Talley again?”

  “You know what that Revere detective said? He told Jackie that Tricia will come home when she runs out of money. Who says that to the mother of a missing kid? I’m telling you, the police are not taking this seriously.”

  “Unlike the last three times Tricia ran away from home?”

  “Poor Jackie’s a mess. She wants to talk to you.”

  “Revere PD needs to handle this, Ma. They won’t like it if I interfere.”

  “Interfere in what, their complete dereliction of duty? Jane, you’ve known the Talleys most of your life. You babysat that girl. You can’t ignore a missing-persons case just because you’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

  “A dead body isn’t a fish, Ma.”

  “Well, Tricia could be a dead body. Is that what it’ll take to get you interested?”

  Jane rubbed her temple, trying to stave off an incipient headache. “Okay, okay. I’ll come by tomorrow.”

  “When?”

  “Sometime in the afternoon. I’ve got to view an autopsy. And I have a lot of things I need to follow up on.”

  “Oh, and you know those new people across the street? The Greens?”

  “Are you still spying on them?”

  “There’s some kind of weird hammering going on in their house. You know what Homeland Security says. ‘If you see something, say something.’ Well, I’m just saying something.”

  Yeah, Ma. You always do.

  “How come you never told us you played in an orchestra?” said Jane. “It seems like something you might have mentioned.”

  Maura heard the note of accusation in Jane’s voice and she took her time before answering the question. Instead she remained focused on the body that was stretched out on the autopsy table. Sofia Suarez’s clothes had already been removed—blue hospital scrubs, a size-46B bra, white cotton underwear—and under the bright morgue lights every flaw, every scar acquired during the woman’s fifty-two years of life, was exposed. Maura did not yet focus on the shattered skull or the ruined face; instead she focused on the burn scar on the back of the left hand and the arthritic bulge of the right thumb. Souvenirs, perhaps, of hours spent in the kitchen, chopping and frying and kneading. Aging was a cruel process. Cellulite now dimpled thighs that once would have been slim and smooth. An appendectomy scar rippled the lower abdomen. On her neck and chest were freckles and skin tags and rough black seborrheic keratoses that the largest organ of the body so often acquires over the decades. Flaws that Maura was starting to find on her own skin, a depressing reminder that old age came for everyone, if you were lucky.

  Sofia Suarez had not been.

  Maura picked up the scalpel and began to cut.

  “We also heard you have a concert coming up,” said Frost. “Alice and I want to come. She’s really into classical music.”

  At last Maura looked up at Jane and Frost, who were watching her across the autopsy table. Frost’s sunburn was now in its ugly peeling phase, and above his paper mask, his forehead was flaky with dead skin. “Trust me, the concert is not going to be a big deal. Which is why I never bothered to mention it. How did you hear about it anyway?”

  “Dr. Antrim told us,” said Jane. “He worked with Sofia Suarez at Pilgrim Hospital.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “We interviewed her colleagues in the intensive care unit, and he told us you were going to be the star soloist at their concert.”

  “It’s only Mozart.” Maura picked up the rib shears and snapped through bone. “Piano Concerto Twenty-one.”

  “Well, that sounds fancy enough.”

  “It’s not a difficult piece.”

  “Alice loves Mozart,” Frost said. “She’ll definitely want to hear that.”

  “It’s not like I’m Lang Lang.” Maura cut through the last rib, freeing up the sternal shield. “We’re amateurs. Just doctors, playing together for fun.”

  “You still should have told us,” said Jane.

  “I joined them only a few months ago. After their pianist fell and broke her shoulder.”

  “And just like that, you can step in and play some complicated piece?”

  “I told you, it’s not that big a deal.”

  Jane snorted. “You keep saying that. And I keep not believing you.”

  “Hey, maybe we should start a band or something,” Frost said to Jane. “A police band. You used to play the trumpet, didn’t you?”

  “You do not want to hear me play the trumpet.”

  Maura reached into Sofia Suarez’s chest and frowned. “The surface of the right lung does not feel normal. There’s fibrosis here.”

  “Meaning?” asked Jane.

  “The clue’s in her chest films.” Maura nodded at the computer monitor where the chest X-ray was displayed. “It was in her medical records too. That’s scarring from COVID-19. She was an ICU nurse, so it’s not surprising she got infected. She never needed intubation but she was hospitalized for four days on oxygen. Quite a few people are walking around right now with X-rays that look like that, and they may not even know it.”

  Maura picked up a scalpel and once again reached into the chest cavity. For a moment the only sounds were the wet suck of organs as she pulled them from the cavity and the splash as they landed in the basin. The sounds of a butcher’s table.

  She turned her attention to the abdominal cavity and out came loops of bowel, stomach and liver, pancreas and spleen. She slit open the stomach and emptied the scant contents into a basin. “Her last meal was at least four hours prior to death,” she noted. “That would have been during her work shift.”

  “So she didn’t stop somewhere to eat on the way home,” said Jane. “Four hours. She must have been hungry.”

  Maura sealed a sample of stomach contents for analysis. “Any matches from AFIS?”

  “No hit on any of the fingerprints,” said Frost. “The ones we ID’d matched her neighbor Mrs. Leong and Jamal Bird, the computer whiz kid down the street. Assuming neither of them did it, it looks like our perp wore gloves.”

  “And the footwear?”

  “Standard garden boots, men’s size eight and a half. Like you can buy in any Walmart. We’re still waiting for her phone records, but that won’t help us if this was someone she didn’t know.”

  “What about those recent break-ins in the neighborhood? Do any of those details match?” Maura looked up at Jane, who shook her head.

  “That burglar wore Nikes, size ten, and his fingerprints didn’t turn up in Sofia’s house. It would make this case way too easy if it’s the same neighborhood burglar.”

  Maura moved on to the pelvis and now her scalpel laid open the uterus, revealing yet another sad secret. “Endometrial scarring. Almost the entire wall.”

  “She never had children,” said Jane.

  “This may be the reason why.”

  As Maura placed the resected uterus into the basin, she thought of the wedding photo hanging in the victim’s house, the bride and groom both beaming with joy. When they’d married, Sofia and Tony were already in their forties, no longer young; perhaps that had made their marriage all the sweeter, because they’d found each other so late in life. But too late for children.

  She turned at last to the injuries that had brought Sofia Suarez to this table. So far Maura had examined the heart and lungs, stomach and liver, but those were faceless organs, as impersonal as pig offal at the butcher shop. Now she had to look at Sofia’s face, which had been cruelly transformed into a distorted version by Picasso. Maura had already examined the skull X-rays, had seen the fractures of the cranium and facial bones, and even before she peeled away the scalp and opened the skull, she knew the damage she would find inside.

  “There’s a depressed fracture of the parietotemporal bone,” she said. “The shape of the cranial lesion is well-defined and circular, with a sharply regular edge of the wound on the outer table of the skull. On X-ray, it’s clear there’s bony penetration from a rupture of the outer table with comminuted fragmentation of the inner table. This is all consistent with blunt-force trauma from a hammer. The initial blow was most likely delivered from behind, with the attacker swinging at an angle to the victim.”

  “Right-handed?” asked Frost.

  “Likely. Someone who swung it over his right shoulder. That same impact also caused a fissured fracture that ran obliquely across the temporal bone. This was all powerful enough to certainly stun her, but we know it didn’t immediately kill her. The trail of blood across the living room tells us she was able to crawl away for some distance…”

  “Seventeen feet,” said Frost. “It must have seemed like miles.”

  As Maura reflected back the scalp, peeling the hair and skin from bone, she imagined Sofia’s terrifying last moments. The crushing pain, the seeping blood. The floor slippery beneath her hands as she dragged herself away from the front door. Away from the killer.

  But she cannot crawl fast enough. He follows her, past the aquarium with the mermaid in her lavish pink castle. Past the bookcase with the romance novels. By now her vision would be fading, her limbs growing numb. She knows she can’t escape, cannot fend off the attack. Finally she can go no further and here is where it ends. She curls up on her side into a fetal position, embracing herself as the last blow falls.

  It lands on her right temple, where the bone is thinnest. It crushes her cheekbone, collapsing the bony orbit of her eye. All this had been revealed in the X-rays and in this exposed surface of skull. Even before Maura turned on the bone saw and opened the cranium, she knew that the transmitted force of the blows had displaced bone fragments, sheared blood vessels, and lacerated gray matter. She knew the catastrophic results when blood displaced brain and axons were stretched and crushed.

  What she did not know was what the victim was thinking in her final moments. Sofia was surely terrified, but did she feel surprised? Betrayed? Did she recognize the face staring down at her? This was the limit of the pathologist’s knife. Maura could dissect a body, examine its tissues all the way down to the cellular level, but what the dead knew and saw and felt as the lights blinked out would remain a mystery.

  * * *

  —

  A sense of dissatisfaction hung over Maura as she drove home that evening. She walked in her front door and could not help thinking about Sofia, who a few days ago had walked in her own front door to find death waiting for her. In truth, it was waiting for everyone; the only question was the time and place of the rendezvous.

  Maura went straight to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of cabernet. Carried it into the living room and sat down at the piano. The score of Mozart’s Concerto no. 21 was already open and staring at her, a reminder of yet another commitment she’d taken on, one that carried the risk of abject humiliation if she failed.

  She took a sip of wine, set the glass down on an end table, and began to play.

  The andante solo was quiet and uncomplicated and did not require the skill that the more frantic sections did, and it was a soothing place to start. A way to focus on tempo and melody instead of Sofia Suarez’s death. She felt her tension ease and the dark clouds lifted from her mood. Music was her safe space, where death did not intrude, a universe away from the scalpel and the bone saw. She had not told Jane about the orchestra because she’d wanted to preserve this distance between the two universes, did not want the purity of music to be polluted by her other life.

  She reached the end of the andante and launched straight into the allegro, her now-warmed-up fingers racing across the keys. She kept on playing, even when she heard the front door open. Even when Father Daniel Brophy walked into the living room. He did not say a word, but listened in silence as he peeled off his priest’s collar, shedding the uniform of his calling, a calling that forbade any intimate bond between them.

  Yet here he was, smiling.

  She came to the end of the concerto. As her hands fell away from the keys, he wrapped his arms around her shoulders and breathed a warm kiss on the back of her neck.

  “It sounds wonderful,” he said.

  “Not as clumsy as it did last week anyway.”

  “Can’t you ever just accept a compliment?”

  “Only when I deserve it.”

  He sat down beside her on the piano bench and pressed a kiss to her lips. “You’ll be spectacular, Maura. And don’t start pointing out all your mistakes because I can’t hear them anyway. And neither will the audience.”

  “Jane will be there. And Frost is bringing his wife, who’s supposed to be some classical music expert.”

  “They’re going to the concert? I thought you weren’t going to tell them about it.”

  “They found out. They are detectives, after all.”

  “I never understood why you didn’t tell them. They’re your friends. It’s like you’re embarrassed about it.”

  “Embarrassed that I might screw up.”

  “That’s the perfectionist talking again. You know, no one really cares that you aren’t perfect.”

  “I do.”

  “What a heavy cross to bear.” He smiled. “So far, you’ve managed to fool us all.”

  “I almost regret agreeing to this performance.”

  “And after it’s over, you’ll be so happy you did.”

  They smiled at each other, two unlikely lovers who should never have found each other. Who had tried to stay apart, tried to deny their need for each other, and had failed.

  He noticed the empty wineglass on the table beside her. “Need a refill?”

  “Definitely. I’m done practicing anyway.”

  She followed him into the kitchen and watched him pour wine into her glass. The cabernet was rich and meaty, one of her expensive indulgences, but when she saw he didn’t pour a glass for himself, she suddenly lost her craving for that second drink and she put it down after only one sip. “You’re not having any,” she said.

  “I wish I could, but I can’t stay tonight. There’s a parish finance council meeting at eight. And then I have our immigration outreach committee, which will probably go till ten.” He shook his head. “There just aren’t enough hours in the day.”

  “Oh, well. More piano practice for me tonight.”

  “But I’ll be here tomorrow night.” He leaned in for a kiss. “You’re not too disappointed?”

  “It is what it is.”

  He reached out to cup her face. “I love you, Maura.”

  Over the years she’d watched as more and more silver streaked Daniel’s dark hair, as lines deepened around his eyes, the same changes she saw in her own face. He would always be the man she loved, but with that love came regrets as well. Regrets that they would never live as a normal couple or sleep under the same roof every night. They would never walk hand in hand in public, their love displayed to the entire world. This was the bargain they’d made with each other, and with his god. And it would have to be enough, she thought, as she heard him walk out her front door.