I Know a Secret Page 5

  Or maybe it was the two bottles of Rioja we drank.

  I see the aftermath in the mirror: my puffy eyes, my scarecrow hair. I wet my hair and smooth it down into a semblance of my usual black bob. As disheveled as I am, I also look sated and thoroughly content, something I haven’t felt in a long time. Thank you, Blue Eyes.

  I open the medicine cabinet and survey the contents. Band-Aids, aspirin, SPF-30 sunscreen, and cough syrup. There are also two prescription pill bottles, which I take out for closer inspection. Vicodin and Valium, both prescribed for back pain. The bottles are two years old and each still contains about a dozen tablets, which tells me that he hasn’t been bothered by back pain recently.

  He won’t notice if a few pills go missing.

  I shake out four of each and slip them into my pocket. I’m no addict, but when the opportunity presents itself, why not avail myself of free pharmaceuticals that might come in useful someday? He’s obviously not in dire need of them. I replace the childproof caps and eye the name on the bottles. Everett J. Prescott. What a Brahmin-sounding name, surely someone who has a long and distinguished bloodline. Last night we never bothered to exchange full names. He has no idea what my last name is, which is for the best, since the chances are we’ll never see each other again.

  I get dressed in the bathroom and tiptoe back into the bedroom to put on my shoes. He sleeps through it all, one bare arm flung across the sheets. For a moment I pause to admire his arm, with its lean and sculpted muscles. They aren’t the overly bulging biceps of a gym rat; these look like honest muscles built with real labor. Last night he told me he was a landscape architect, and I picture him building stone walls and hauling bales of peat, even though I doubt that’s what landscape architects actually do. A shame I’ll never get to find out.

  It’s well past time for me to leave. I want to be long gone when he wakes up. This is the way I’ve always handled the morning after, because I’m no fan of awkward goodbyes and halfhearted promises of second dates. I usually break them anyway. This is the reason why I never bring men home to my own apartment. If they don’t know where I live, they can’t come knocking on my door.

  But something about Everett makes me reconsider my love-’em-and-leave-’em strategy. It’s not just the fact he was an extremely attentive lover, who was so eager to please my every whim, or that he’s easy on the eyes and he laughs at all my jokes. No, there’s something more to him: a depth, a sincerity that I seldom encounter in other people.

  Or maybe I’m just feeling that old oxytocin rush you get after a good and thorough fucking.

  Outside on the street, I look back at the red-brick townhouse. It’s a handsome building and no doubt historic, in a neighborhood that I could never afford to live in. Everett must be doing very well indeed, and for a moment I reconsider my decision to walk away so precipitously. Maybe I should have lingered a little longer. Maybe I should have told him my phone number, or at least my last name.

  Then I think of the downside. The invasion of my privacy. His inevitable expectations. The phone calls, ever more insistent, the clinging, the jealousy.

  No, it’s better just to walk away.

  But as I do, I commit his address to memory, so I’ll always know where to find him. Because you never know: A man like Everett Prescott might come in useful someday.

  “HOW LONG DID THEY WORK to resuscitate him?” said Maura as she cut through the ribs of Cassandra Coyle. Jane winced at the snap of the bone shears as Maura kept cutting, crack crack crack, like a carpenter in her workshop. The rib cage that had protected Cassandra’s heart and lungs was now just a bony palisade blocking their view of the secrets within, and Maura worked quickly and efficiently to clear away the barrier of ribs and breastplate.

  “It took them about fifteen, twenty minutes,” said Jane. “But they got his heart beating again. I called the hospital this morning and he’s still alive. For now.”

  Maura snapped another rib, and Jane saw Frost grimace at the sound of cracking bone. While the sights and smells of the morgue were familiar territory for Maura, this room would always be no-man’s-land to Frost, whose delicate stomach was legendary in the homicide unit. Cassandra Coyle was one of the fresher corpses they’d encountered, only a day old when she’d been discovered, but odors bloom quickly in a dead body at room temperature. Frost was getting enough of a whiff to make his face blanch, and he raised his arm to block the smell.

  “Statistics show that you have about a forty percent chance of surviving a cardiac arrest in the hospital. A twenty percent chance of eventually leaving the hospital alive,” said Maura, matter-of-factly quoting statistics as she cut through the last few ribs. “Is he awake yet?”

  “No. He’s still comatose.”

  “Then I’m afraid his prognosis is poor. Even if Mr. Coyle does survive, he probably suffered anoxic brain damage.”

  “Meaning he could be a vegetable.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s a possible outcome.”

  The ribs were now split, and Maura pried up the breastplate. Frost backed away as the stench of body fluids rose from the exposed cavity, but Maura simply leaned closer to peer at the thoracic organs.

  “These lungs look edematous. Heavy with fluid.” Maura reached for a scalpel.

  “And what does that tell us?” asked Frost, voice muffled.

  “It’s a nonspecific finding. It could mean a number of things.” Maura glanced up and said to her assistant, “Yoshima, could you make sure the drug and tox screen is expedited?”

  “Already done,” Yoshima said, always the calm voice of efficiency. “I ordered both an AxSYM and Toxi-Lab A, plus GC-MS for quantitation. That should cover pretty much every known drug.”

  Rooting deep inside the thorax, Maura lifted out the dripping lungs. “These are definitely heavy. I see no obvious lesions, only a few petechiae. Again, a nonspecific finding.” She placed the severed heart on a tray and, with gloved fingers, traced the coronary arteries. “Interesting.”

  “Aw, you say that to every corpse,” said Jane.

  “Because every corpse tells a story, but this one isn’t revealing any secrets. The neck dissection and X-rays were normal. Her hyoid bone is intact. And look how clean her coronaries are, with no evidence of thrombosis or infarction. This was a perfectly healthy heart in what seems to be a perfectly healthy young woman.”

  A woman who looked lean and fit and certainly capable of putting up a good fight, thought Jane. Yet Cassandra Coyle had no torn fingernails, no bruises on her hands, nothing to indicate she’d offered any resistance whatsoever against her attacker.

  Maura moved on to the abdomen. Methodically, she excised liver and spleen, pancreas and intestines, but it was the stomach she was most interested in. She lifted it out as gingerly as if she were delivering a newborn and set it on the dissection tray. This was the part of the postmortem that Jane always quailed from. Whatever the victim had last eaten would now be two days old, a putrid stew of stomach acid and partly digested food. Both she and Frost retreated a few paces as Maura picked up the scalpel. Above his paper mask, Frost’s eyes narrowed in anticipation of the stench.

  But when Maura sliced open the stomach, all that dribbled out was purplish liquid.

  “Do you smell that?” Maura asked.

  “I’d rather not,” said Jane.

  “I think it’s wine. Judging by how dark it is, I’m guessing something heavy like a cabernet or a zinfandel.”

  “What, you’re not gonna tell us the vintage? What about the label?” Jane snorted. “You’re slipping, Maura.”

  Maura probed the stomach cavity. “I don’t see any food in here, which means she hadn’t eaten anything for at least a few hours before she died.” Maura looked up. “Did you find open wine bottles in her apartment?”

  “No,” said Frost. “And there were no dirty wineglasses on the counter or in the sink.”

  “Maybe she had a drink somewhere else,” said Jane. “You think she met her killer at a bar?”


  “It would have been just before getting home. Liquids pass pretty quickly into the jejunum, yet she still has wine in her stomach.”

  Frost said, “She left her film studio around six P.M. It’s only a ten-minute walk to her residence. I’ll check the bars in the area.”

  Maura emptied the scant stomach contents into a specimen jar, then moved to the corpse’s head. There she stood frowning at Cassandra Coyle’s empty eye sockets. She had already examined the enucleated globes, which were now soaking in a jar of preservative, like two grotesque olives bobbing in gin.

  “So she stops somewhere to have a glass of wine,” said Jane, trying to piece together the sequence of events. “Then she brings her killer home. Or he follows her there. But what happens next? How did he kill her?”

  Maura didn’t answer. Instead, she once again picked up the scalpel. Starting behind one ear, she cut into the scalp and sliced all the way across the top of the head to behind the opposite ear.

  How easily the most recognizable feature of a human being can be obliterated, thought Jane, as she watched Maura peel the scalp forward in one limp flap. Cassandra Coyle’s pretty face collapsed in a fleshy mask, dyed black hair flopping forward to conceal it like a fringed curtain. The whine of the oscillating saw cut off any conversation, and Jane turned away at the smell of bone dust. The skull, at least, was impersonal. It could be anyone’s cranium being sawed open, anyone’s brain about to be exposed.

  Maura pried off the cranial cap and revealed the glistening surface of gray matter. Here was what had made Cassandra a unique human being. Stored in this three-pound organ had been every memory, every experience, everything Cassandra had ever known or felt or loved. Gently, Maura lifted the lobes and sliced through nerves and arteries before easing the brain out of its cranial bed. “No obvious hemorrhages,” she noted. “No contusions. No edema.”

  “So it looks normal?” asked Frost.

  “Yes, it does. On the surface, at least.” Maura gingerly lowered the organ into a bucket of formalin. “This is a young woman with a healthy-looking heart and lungs and brain. She hasn’t been strangled. She hasn’t been sexually assaulted. There are no bruises, no needle marks, no apparent trauma at all, except for the eyes. And those were removed postmortem.”

  “Then what happened to her? What killed her?” said Jane.

  For a moment Maura didn’t answer. Her gaze remained on the brain, submerged in the bucket of formalin. A brain that had offered up no answers. She glanced at Jane and said, “I don’t know.”

  The cell phone buzzed in Jane’s pocket. She stripped off her gloves, reached under the protective gown to fish it out, and saw a number she didn’t recognize.

  “Detective Rizzoli,” she answered.

  “Hey, sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner,” a man said. “But I just got home from Boca Raton and, man, I’m sorry I did. This weather sucks.”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Benny Lima. You know, the Lima Travel Agency? You left a message on my phone last night, asking about my security camera. The one that’s pointed toward Utica Street.”

  “Is your camera operational?”

  “Sure is. Last year we caught a kid throwing rocks through the window.”

  The word camera had caught Frost’s attention, and he was watching the conversation with sudden interest.

  “We need whatever footage you have from Monday night,” Jane said. “Do you still have it?”

  “It’s right here, waiting for you.”

  FREEZING RAIN WAS SPITTING FROM the sky, and it pricked Jane’s face like needles as she and Frost stepped out of their car and dashed across the street to the Lima Travel Agency. They ducked inside, and a bell tinkled as the door slammed shut, announcing their arrival.

  “Hello?” Jane called. “Mr. Lima?”

  The office appeared deserted. Judging by the dusty plastic philodendron and the faded cruise-ship posters, no one had bothered to redecorate in decades. On the desk computer, the screen saver cycled through seductive photos of tropical beaches, exactly where every Bostonian longed to be on this gray and miserable day.

  Somewhere in back, a toilet flushed. A moment later a man waddled out of the rear office. Not merely a man—a mountain of flesh lumbered toward them, with one damp hand already extended in greeting.

  “You’re the Boston PD folks, right?” He gave Jane a doughy and enthusiastic handshake. “Benny Lima. I would’ve returned your call earlier, but, like I told you on the phone, I just got back from—”

  “Boca,” said Jane.

  “Yeah. Went down for my uncle Carlo’s funeral. Big deal, real big deal. He was like a celebrity in that retirement community down there. Anyways, I didn’t hear your voicemail till I got in to the office this morning. I am delighted to help Boston PD in any way I can.”

  “You said you had security video, Mr. Lima?” asked Frost.

  “Yeah. Our system only holds forty-eight hours of footage, but if you need something in that time frame, it should still be there.”

  “We need whatever was recorded on Monday night.”

  “Should still be on there. Come on back, let me show you our setup.”

  Benny led them at a maddeningly leisurely pace to the back office, which was scarcely large enough to hold all three of them. Frost squeezed past Benny’s massive bulk and sat down at the computer.

  “We had the system installed three years ago, after we had three break-ins in one month. It’s not like we keep any cash in the place, but those assholes kept making off with our computers. Camera finally caught one of ’em in the act. Can you believe it—the kid lived right around the corner. What a little shit.”

  Frost tapped the keyboard, and the view from the surveillance camera appeared onscreen. The camera was pointed toward the entrance to narrow Utica Street, where Cassandra Coyle’s residence was located. The view was only partial and not particularly high res, but of all the security cameras in the neighborhood, this was the only one that might have recorded anyone entering or leaving the south end of Utica Street. The video they were now looking at was taken in daylight, with three pedestrians in the frame. According to the time stamp, this was recorded on Monday at 10:00 A.M.

  When Cassandra Coyle was still alive.

  “That’s the very beginning of the recording,” said Benny. “As soon as I heard your message, I hit SAVE, so it wouldn’t record over what you wanted.”

  Frost clicked on the FAST-FORWARD icon. “Let’s move ahead to Monday evening.”

  Benny looked at Jane. “Is this about that gal who got murdered down the street? I saw the news on TV. Not the kinda thing that happens in this neighborhood.”

  “This kind of thing could happen in any neighborhood,” said Jane.

  “But I’ve been here forever. My uncle started this travel agency in the seventies, back when folks appreciated a little guidance in their travel planning. We used to book a lot of trips to Hong Kong and Taiwan, what with Chinatown right down the street. Now everyone just goes online and gets whatever crappy deal pops up on their computer. This is a safe neighborhood, and I don’t remember any murders around here. I mean, except for that shooting across the way on Knapp Street.” He paused. “And that guy who got whacked in the warehouse.” Another pause. “And, oh, yeah, there was the time when—”

  “Here we go,” said Frost.

  Jane focused on the screen, where the time stamp now said 5:05 P.M. “You see anything?”

  “Not yet,” said Frost.

  “At that particular time, I was in Boca Raton,” Benny said. “Got my airline receipts and everything, in case you want to see them.”

  Jane did not want to see them. She pulled up a chair next to Frost and sat down. Watching surveillance video was one of those mind-numbing tasks that promised hours of boredom and the occasional adrenaline jolt of eureka. According to Cassandra’s three colleagues, she had left the Crazy Ruby Films studio at around 6:00 P.M., after spending all day working on the edits of Mr. Simia
n. From the studio, it was only a ten-minute walk home to Utica Street. If she entered Utica from Beach Street, she would have walked right past this camera.

  So where was she?

  Frost sped up the video, and the minutes ticked by in double time. Cars glided past. Pedestrians moved in and out of the frame in jerky fast-forward. No one turned onto Utica Street.

  “Six-thirty,” said Frost.

  “So she didn’t go straight home from work.”

  “Or we missed her,” said Benny, as if he were now part of the team. He was looming right behind Jane, staring over her shoulder. “She could have entered the other end of Utica, from Kneeland Street. In which case my camera wouldn’t catch her.”

  That was not what Jane wanted to hear, but Benny was right; Cassandra might have entered Utica unseen by this or any camera.

  Benny was breathing right on her neck, and his snuffling breaths made her think of winter viruses. She tried to ignore him and stay focused on the video. Monday night had been frigid, only sixteen degrees, and the pedestrians walking past the camera were all dressed for the cold in bulky coats and scarves and hats. If one of the passersby was Cassandra, would they even be able to identify her? As Jane leaned closer, so did Benny, spewing germs on her neck with every breath.

  “Mr. Lima, could you do us a big favor?” she said.

  “Yeah. Sure!”

  “I noticed a coffee shop right down the street. My partner and I could really use some coffee right now.”

  “Whaddya want? Lattes? Cappuccinos? They got all kinds.”

  She dug a twenty-dollar bill out of her purse and handed it to him. “Black with sugar. For both of us.”