The Sinner (10 page)

Maura stood up, her dislike for Crowe suddenly so strong she found
it hard to be near him. She waved her flashlight around the room, her beam
streaking
across sinks and urinals.

“There’s blood there, on the wall.”

“I’d say he whacked her right in here,” said Crowe.
“Dragged her in, shoves her up against the wall, and pulls the trigger.
Then
he does the amputations, right where she falls.”

Maura stared down at blood on the tiles. Only a few smears,
because
by then the victim is already dead. Her heart has stopped beating, stopped
pumping.
She feels nothing as the killer crouches beside her, and his blade sinks deep
into
her wrist, prying apart joints. As he slices through her flesh, peeling away her
face as though he is skinning a bear. And when he is done collecting his prizes,
he leaves her here, like a discarded carcass, an offering to the scavengers that
infest this abandoned building.

Within a few days, with no clothing to hinder sharp teeth, the
rats
would have been down to muscle.

Within a month, down to bone.

She looked up at Crowe. “Where are her clothes?”

“All we found was a single shoe. Tennis shoe, size four. I
think
he dropped it on the way out. It was lying in the kitchen.”

“Was there blood on it?”

“Yeah. Got splattered across the top.”

She looked down at the stump where the right foot should have
been.
“So he undressed her here, in this room.”

“Postmortem sexual assault?” said Sleeper.

Crowe snorted. “Who’d want to screw a woman with this
creeping
crud all over her skin? What is that rash, anyway? It’s not infectious, is
it?
Like smallpox or something?”

“No, these lesions look chronic, not acute. See how some of
them
are crusted over?”

“Well, I can’t see anyone wanting to touch her, much
less
screw her.”

“It’s always a possibility,” said Sleeper.

“Or he may have undressed her just to expose the
corpse,”
said Maura. “To speed up its destruction by scavengers.”

“Why bother to take the clothes with him?”

“It could be one more way to strip her identity.”

“I think he just wanted them,” said Crowe.

Maura looked at him. “Why?”

“For the same reason he took the hands and the feet and the
face.
He wanted souvenirs.” Crowe looked at Maura, and in the slanting shadows,
he
seemed taller. Threatening. “I think our boy’s a collector.”

Her porch light was on; she could see its yellowish glow through
the
lace of falling snow. Hers was the only house on the block lit up at this hour.
So
many other nights, she had returned to a house where the lamps were turned on
not
by human hands but by electric timers. Tonight, she thought, someone is actually
waiting for me.

Then she saw that Victor’s car was no longer parked in front
of
her house. He’s left, she thought. I’m coming home, as usual, to an
empty
house. The glowing porch light, which had seemed so welcoming, now struck her as
coldly anonymous.

Her chest felt hollow with disappointment as she turned into her
driveway.
What disturbed her most was not that he had left; it was her reaction to it.
Just
one evening with him, she thought, and I’m back where I was three years
ago,
my resolve shaken, my independence cracking.

She pressed the garage remote. The door rumbled open and she gave
a
startled laugh as a blue Toyota was revealed, parked in the left stall.

Victor had simply moved his car into the garage.

She pulled in beside the rented Toyota, and as the garage door
shut
behind her, she sat for a moment, acutely aware of her own quickening pulse, of
anticipation
roaring through her bloodstream like a drug. From despair to jubilation in ten
seconds
flat. She had to remind herself that nothing had changed between them. That
nothing
could
change between them.

She stepped out of the car, took a deep breath, and walked into
the
house.

“Victor?”

There was no answer.

She glanced in the living room, then went up the hall to the
kitchen.
The coffee cups had been washed and put away, all evidence of his visit erased.
She
peeked in the bedrooms and her study—still no Victor.

Only when she returned to the living room did she spot his feet,
clad
in sensible white socks, protruding from one end of the couch. She stood and
watched
him as he slept, his arm trailing limp toward the floor, his face at peace. This
was not the Victor she recalled, the man whose volcanic passions had first
attracted
her, and then driven her away. What she remembered of their marriage were the
arguments,
the deep wounds that only a lover can inflict. The divorce had distorted her
memories
of him, turning him darker, angrier. She had nursed those memories, had fed off
them
for so long that seeing him now, unguarded, was a moment of startling
recognition.

I used to watch you sleep. I used to love you.

She went to the closet for a blanket, and spread it over him.
Reached
out to touch his hair, then stopped, her hand hovering above his head.

His eyes were open and watching her.

“You’re awake,” she said.

“I never meant to fall asleep. What time is it?”

“Two thirty.”

He groaned. “I was going to leave—”

“You might as well stay. It’s snowing like crazy.”

“I moved the car into the garage. I hope you don’t mind.
The city plow was coming by—”

“They would have towed you, if you hadn’t moved it.
It’s
okay.” She smiled, and said softly, “Go back to sleep.”

They looked at each other for a moment. Caught between longing and
doubt, she said nothing, knowing only too well the consequences of a wrong
choice.
Surely they were both thinking the same thing: that her bedroom was right up the
hall. It took only a short walk, an embrace, and there she’d be, back
again.
In a place she’d worked so hard to escape.

She rose, an act that took as much fortitude as if she was
struggling
out of quicksand. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said.

Was that disappointment she saw in his eyes? she wondered. And
couldn’t
help feeling a small dart of happiness at that possibility.

Lying in bed, she couldn’t sleep, knowing that he was under
the
same roof. Her roof, her territory. In San Francisco, they had lived in the
house
he’d owned before they married, and she had never really thought of it as
hers.
Tonight, the circumstances were reversed, and she was the one in control. What
happened
next was her choice.

The possibilities tormented her.

Only when she startled awake did she realize she had actually
slept.
Daylight already glowed in the window. She lay in bed for a moment, wondering
what
had awakened her. Wondering what she would say to him. Then she heard the garage
door rumble open, and the growl of a car engine backing out her driveway.

She climbed out of bed and looked out the window, just in time to
see
Victor’s car drive away and vanish around the corner.

E
IGHT

J
ANE
R
IZZOLI AWAKENED
in the early
dawn.
The street outside her apartment building was still quiet; the morning commute
had
not yet started in earnest. She stared up at the gloom, thinking: Come on, you
gotta
do it. You can’t keep your goddamn head stuck in the sand.

She switched on the lamp and sat on the side of the bed, stomach
cramping
with nausea. Though the room was chilly, she was sweating, and her T-shirt clung
to her damp underarms.

It was time to face the music.

She walked barefoot into the bathroom. The package lay on the
counter,
where she had left it the night before, to ensure that she wouldn’t forget
to
use it this morning. As if she needed any reminder. She opened the box, tore
open
the foil packet, and removed the test stick. Last night she had read the
instructions
several times, had practically committed them to memory. Nevertheless, she
paused
now to read them again. Stalling just a little longer.

At last she sat down on the toilet. Holding the test stick between
her thighs, she peed on the tip, soaking it in the stream of early morning
urine.

Wait two minutes, the instructions said.

She set the test stick on the countertop, and went into the
kitchen.
Poured herself a glass of orange juice. The same hand that could grip a weapon
and
squeeze off shot after shot, hitting every target, was now shaking as she lifted
the glass of juice to her lips. She stared at the kitchen clock, watching the
second
hand make its jerky revolution. Feeling her pulse quicken as the two minutes
counted
down to zero. She had never been a coward, had never shrunk from facing down the
enemy, but this was a different sort of fear, private and gnawing. The fear that
she would make the wrong decision, and would spend the rest of her life
suffering
for it.

Goddamn it, Jane. Get on with it.

Suddenly angry at herself, disgusted by her own cowardice, she set
down the juice and walked back to the bathroom. Did not even pause in the
doorway
to steel herself, but crossed straight to the counter and picked up the test
stick.

She did not need to read the instructions to know what that purple
line across the test window meant.

She didn’t remember returning to the bedroom. She found
herself
sitting on the bed, the test stick on her lap. She’d never liked the color
purple;
it was too girly and flamboyant. Now the very sight of it made her sick. She
thought
she’d been fully prepared for the result, but she was not ready at all. Her
legs went numb from sitting too long in the same position, yet she couldn’t
seem to stir. Even her brain had shut down, every thought mired by shock and
indecision.
She could not think of what to do next. The first impulse that came to mind was
childish
and utterly irrational.

I want my Mom.

She was thirty-four years old and independent. She had kicked down
doors and tracked down murderers. She had killed a man. And here she was,
suddenly
hungry for her mother’s arms.

The phone rang.

She looked at it in bewilderment, as though not recognizing what
it
was. On the fourth ring, she finally picked it up.

“Hey, you still at home?” said Frost. “The
team’s
all here.”

She struggled to focus on his words. The team. The pond. Turning
to
look at her bedside clock, she was startled to see it was already eight-fifteen.

“Rizzoli? They’re ready to start dragging. You want us
to
go ahead?”

“Yeah. I’ll be right there.” She hung up. The sound
of the receiver thudding in the cradle was like the snap of a hypnotist’s
fingers.
She sat up straight, the trance broken, the job once again demanding her
complete
focus.

She threw the test stick into the trash can. Then she got dressed,
and went to work.

The Rat Lady.

This is what an entire lifetime gets distilled down to, thought
Maura
as she gazed down at the body lying on the table, its horrors concealed beneath
a
sheet. Nameless, faceless, your existence summed up in three words which only
emphasize
the indignity with which your life ended. As fodder for rodents.

It was Darren Crowe who’d dubbed the corpse last night, while
they had stood surrounded by vermin skittering just beyond the range of their
flashlights.
He had casually tossed off the nickname to the morgue retrieval crew, and by the
next morning, when Maura walked into her office, her staff was calling the
victim
Rat Lady as well. She knew it was just a convenient moniker for a woman
who’d
otherwise be known merely as Jane Doe, but Maura could not help wincing when she
heard even Detective Sleeper use it. This is how we get beyond the horror, she
thought.
How we keep these victims at arm’s length. We refer to them by a nickname,
or
a diagnosis, or a case file number. They don’t seem like people then, so
their
fates cannot break our hearts.

She looked up as Crowe and Sleeper walked into the lab. Sleeper
was
exhausted from last night’s exertion, and the harsh light of the autopsy
room
cruelly emphasized his baggy eyes and his sagging jowls. Beside him, Crowe was
like
a young lion, tan and fit and confident. Crowe was not someone you ever wanted
to
humiliate; beneath the veneer of an arrogant man, cruelty usually lurked. He was
looking down at the corpse with his lips curled in disgust. This would not be a
pleasant
autopsy, and even Crowe seemed to regard the prospect of this postmortem with a
hint
of trepidation.

“The X rays are hanging,” said Maura. “Let’s
go
over them before we begin.”

She crossed to the far wall and flipped on a switch. The light box
flickered on, illuminating ghostly images of ribs and spine and pelvis.
Scattered
within the thorax, like a galaxy of stars spread across the lungs and heart,
were
bright metallic flecks.

“That looks like shotshell,” said Sleeper.

“That’s what I thought, at first,” said Maura.
“But
if you look here, next to this rib, you see this opaque shadow? It’s almost
lost against the rib’s outline.”

“Metal jacket?” said Crowe.

“That’s what it looks like to me.”

“So this isn’t a shotshell cartridge.”

“No. This looks like Glaser ammo. Judging by the number of
projectiles
I see here, it’s most likely a blue-tip. Copper jacket, packed with number
twelve
shot.”

Designed to produce far more devastating damage than a
conventional
bullet, Glaser-type ammo hit its target as a single unit, and then fragmented
after
impact. She did not need to cut open the torso to know that the damage caused by
that single bullet was devastating.

She took down the chest films and clipped up two new ones. These
were
somehow more disturbing images, because of what was missing from them. They were
gazing at the right and left forearms. The radius and ulna, the two long bones
of
the forearm, normally extended from the elbow to the wrist, where they joined
with
the dense pebblelike carpal bones. But these arm bones ended abruptly.

“The left hand was disarticulated here, right at the joint
between
the styloid process of the radius and the scaphoid bone,” she said.
“The
killer removed all the carpal bones, along with the hand. You can even see some
of
the nick marks, on the other views, where he scraped along the edge of the
styloid
process. He separated the hand just where the arm bones meet the wrist
bones.”
She pointed to the other X ray. “Now look at the right hand. Here, he
wasn’t
quite as neat. He didn’t slice straight across the wrist joint, and when he
removed the hand, he left the hamate bone behind. You can see how the knife made
a cut here. It looks like he couldn’t quite find the joint, and he ended up
sawing around blindly, till he found it.”

“So these hands weren’t just chopped off, say, with an
axe,”
said Sleeper.

“No. It was done with a knife. He cut off the hands the way
you’d
disjoint a chicken. You flex the limb to expose the joint space, and cut through
the ligaments. That way, you don’t have to saw through bone itself.”

Sleeper grimaced. “I don’t think I’ll be eating
chicken
tonight.”

“What kind of knife did he use?” asked Crowe.

“It could be a boning knife, it could be a scalpel. The
stump’s
been too chewed up by rats, so we can’t tell by the wound margin.
We’ll
need to boil off the soft tissues and see how the cut marks look under the
microscope.”

“I don’t think I’ll be eating soup tonight
either,”
said Sleeper.

Crowe glanced at his partner’s ample belly. “Maybe you
ought
to hang around the morgue more often. Might lose some of that tire.”

“You mean, instead of wasting my life in the gym?”
Sleeper
shot back.

Maura glanced at him, surprised by the retort. Even the usually
tractable
Sleeper could only take so much of his partner.

Crowe merely laughed, oblivious to the irritation he stirred in
others.
“Hey, when you’re ready to bulk up—I mean,
above
the
waist—you’re
welcome to join me.”

“There are other X rays to look at,” cut in Maura,
pulling
down the films with businesslike efficiency. Yoshima handed her the next films,
and
she slid them under the mounting clips. Images of the Rat Lady’s head and
neck
glowed from the light box. Last night, looking at the corpse’s face,
she’d
seen only raw meat, ravaged even more by hungry scavengers. But beneath the
stripped
flesh, the facial bones were eerily intact, except for the missing tip of the
nasal
bone, which had been sheared off when the killer had peeled off his trophy of
flesh.

“The front teeth are missing,” said Sleeper. “You
don’t
think he took those, too?”

“No. These look like atrophic changes. And that’s what
surprises
me.”

“Why?”

“These changes are usually associated with advanced age and
bad
dentition. But that doesn’t fit a woman who otherwise appears fairly
young.”

“How can you tell, with her face gone?”

“Her spine films show no evidence of the degenerative changes
you usually see with age. She has no gray hairs, either on her head or her
pubis.
And no arcus senilis in her eyes.”

“How old would you say she is?”

“I would have put her age at no older than forty.” Maura
looked at the X ray hanging on the light box. “But these films are more
consistent
with a woman of advanced age. I’ve never seen such severe bony resorption
in
anyone, much less a young woman. She wouldn’t have been able to wear
dentures,
even if she could afford them. Clearly, this woman didn’t get even basic
dental
care.”

“So we’re not gonna have dental X rays for
comparison.”

“I doubt this woman has seen a dentist in decades.”

Sleeper sighed. “No fingerprints. No face. No dental X rays.
We’ll
never I.D. her. Which may be the whole point.”

“But it doesn’t explain why he cut off the feet,”
she
said, her gaze still fixed on the anonymous skull glowing on the light box.
“I
think he did this for other reasons. Power, maybe. Rage. When you strip off a
woman’s
face, you’ve taken more than just a souvenir. You’ve stolen the
essence
of who she is. You’ve taken her soul.”

“Yeah, well, he scraped the bottom of the barrel for this
one,”
said Crowe. “Who’d want a woman with no teeth and sores all over her
skin?
If he’s gonna start collecting faces, you’d think he’d go after
one
that’d look nicer on the mantelpiece.”

“Maybe he’s just starting,” Sleeper said softly.
“Maybe
this is his first kill.”

Maura turned to the table. “Let’s get started.”

As Sleeper and Crowe tied on their masks, she peeled back the
sheet,
and caught a strong whiff of decay. She’d drawn vitreous potassium levels
last
night, and the results told her this victim had been dead approximately
thirty-six
hours prior to its discovery. Rigor mortis was still present, and the limbs were
not easily manipulated. Despite the meat-locker chill at the death scene,
decomposition
had commenced. Bacteria had begun their work, breaking down proteins, bloating
air
spaces. Cold temperatures had only slowed, but not stopped, the process of
decay.

Though she had already seen that ruined face, the sight of it
startled
her anew. So too did the many skin lesions, which, under the bright lights,
stood
out in dark, angry nodules punctuated by rat bites. Against that background of
ravaged
skin, the bullet wound seemed unimpressive—just a small entry hole at the
left
of the sternum. Glaser bullets were designed to minimize ricochet danger, while
inflicting
maximum damage once they have entered the body. A clean penetration is followed
by
the explosion of lead pellets contained within the Glaser’s copper jacket.
This
small wound gave no hint of the devastation inside the thorax.

“So what’s this skin crud?” asked Crowe.

Maura focused on the areas undamaged by rodent teeth. The purplish
nodules were scattered across both torso and extremities, and some had crusted
over.

“I don’t know what this is,” she said. “It
certainly
seems to be systemic. It could be a drug reaction. It could be a manifestation
of
cancer.” She paused. “It could also be bacterial.”

“You mean—infectious?” said Sleeper, taking a step
back
from the table.

“That’s why I suggested the masks.”

She ran a gloved finger across one of the crusted lesions, and a
few
white scales flaked off. “Some of these remind me a little of psoriasis.
But
the distribution is all wrong. Psoriasis usually affects primarily the elbows
and
knees.”

“Hey, isn’t there treatment for that?” said Crowe.
“I
used to see it advertised on TV. The heartbreak of psoriasis.”