The Sinner (21 page)

She paused, key in the ignition.

Suddenly thought about lepers’ hands, the fingers worn down
to
stumps.

And she remembered, vaguely, a question about a woman’s
hands.
Something mentioned in passing, that she had ignored at the time.

She said I was rude because I asked why that lady didn’t
have
any fingers.

She got out of her car and went back to the gate. Rang the bell
again
and again.

At last Sister Isabel appeared. The ancient face that gazed
through
the iron bars did not look pleased to see her.

“I need to speak to the girl,” Rizzoli said. “Mrs.
Otis’s
daughter.”

She found Noni sitting all alone in an old classroom at the end
of
the hall, her sturdy legs swinging from the chair, a rainbow of crayons splayed
out
on the battered teacher’s desk in front of her. It was warmer in the abbey
kitchen,
where Mrs. Otis was now preparing dinner for the sisters, and the aroma of
fresh-baked
chocolate chip cookies wafted even to this gloomy end of the wing, yet Noni had
chosen
to hole up in this cold room, away from her mother’s sharp tongue and
disapproving
looks. The girl did not even seem to notice the chill. She was clutching a
lime-green
crayon in a childish grip, her tongue sticking out in fierce concentration as
she
drew sparks shooting from a man’s head.

“It’s about to explode,” said Noni. “The death
rays are cooking his brain. That makes him blow up. Like when you cook things in
the microwave, and they blow up, just like that.”

“The death rays are green?” asked Rizzoli.

Noni looked up. “Are they supposed to be a different
color?”

“I don’t know. I always thought death rays would be, oh,
silver.”

“I don’t have any silver. Conrad took mine at school and
he never gave it back.”

“I guess green death rays will work, too.”

Reassured, Noni went back to her drawing. She picked up a blue
crayon
and added spikes to the rays, so they looked like arrows raining down on the
unfortunate
victim. There were many unfortunate victims on the desk. The array of drawings
showed
spaceships shooting fire and blue aliens chopping off heads. These were not
friendly
E.Ts. The girl who sat drawing them struck Rizzoli as an alien creature herself,
a little gremlin with gypsy brown eyes, hiding in a room where no one would
disturb
her.

She had chosen a depressing retreat. The classroom looked long
unused,
its stark walls marred by the scars of countless thumbtacks and yellowed Scotch
tape.
Ancient student desks were stacked up in a far corner, leaving bare the scuffed
wood
floor. The only light came from the windows, and it cast everything in wintry
shades
of gray.

Noni had begun the next drawing in her series of alien atrocities.
The victim of the lime-green death rays now had a gaping hole in his head, and
purplish
blobs were shooting out. A cartoon bubble appeared above him with his dying
exclamation.

AHHHHHH!

“Noni, do you remember the night we talked to you?”

The brown curls bobbed up and down in a nod. “You
haven’t
come back to see me.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been running around quite a bit.”

“You should stop running around. You should learn to sit down
and relax.”

There were echoes of an adult voice in that statement.
Stop
running
around, Noni!

“And you shouldn’t be so sad,” Noni added picking
up
a new crayon.

Rizzoli watched in silence as the girl drew gouts of bright red
shooting
from the exploding head. Jesus, she thought. This girl sees it. This fearless
little
gremlin sees more than anyone else does.

“You have very sharp eyes,” said Rizzoli. “You see
a
lot of things, huh?”

“I saw a potato blow up once. In the microwave.”

“You told us some things last time, about Sister Ursula. You
said
she scolded you.”

“She did.”

“She said you were rude, because you asked about a
woman’s
hands. Remember?”

Noni looked up, one dark eye peeking out from beneath the tumble
of
curls. “I thought you only want to know about Sister Camille.”

“I want to know about Ursula, too. And about the woman who
had
something wrong with her hands. What did you mean by that?”

“She didn’t have any fingers.” Noni picked up a
black
crayon and drew a bird above the exploding man. A bird of prey, with huge black
wings.
“Vultures,” she said. “They eat you when you’re dead.”

Here I am, thought Rizzoli, relying on the word of a girl who
draws
space aliens and death rays.

She leaned forward. Asked, quietly: “Where did you see this
woman,
Noni?”

Noni put down her crayon and gave a weary sigh. “Okay. Since
you
have
to know.” She jumped off the chair.

“Where are you going?”

“To show you. Where the lady was.”

Noni’s jacket was so big on her, she looked like a little
Michelin
man, tramping out into the snow. Rizzoli followed in the footprints made by
Noni’s
rubber boots, feeling like a lowly private marching behind a determined general.
Noni led her across the abbey courtyard, past the fountain where snow had piled
like
layers on a wedding cake. At the front gate, she stopped, and pointed.

“She was out there.”

“Outside the gate?”

“Uh-huh. She had a big scarf around her face. Like she was a
bank
robber.”

“So you didn’t see her face?”

The girl shook her head, brown curls tossing.

“Did this lady talk to you?”

“No, the man did.”

Rizzoli stared at her. “There was a man with her?”

“He asked me to let them in, because they needed to speak to
Sister
Ursula. But it’s against the rules, and I told him so. If a sister breaks
the
rules, she gets kicked out. My mommy says the sisters don’t have anywhere
else
to go, so they
never
break the rules, because they’re afraid to go
outside.”
Noni paused. Looked up and said with a note of pride: “But I go outside all
the time.”

That’s because you’re not afraid of anything,
thought
Rizzoli.
You’re fearless.

Noni began to tramp a line in the snow, her little pink boots
marching
with a soldier’s precision. She cut one trough, then did an about-face and
marched
back, stamping out a parallel line. She thinks she’s invincible, thought
Rizzoli.
But she’s so small and vulnerable. Just a speck of a girl in a puffed-up
jacket.

“What happened then, Noni?”

The girl came clomp-clomping back through the snow and came to an
abrupt
halt, her gaze focused on her snow-crusted boots. “The lady pushed a letter
through the gate.” Noni leaned forward and whispered: “And I saw she
didn’t
have any fingers.”

“Did you give Sister Ursula that letter?”

The girl gave a nod that made her curls bounce like a head full of
Slinkies. “And she came out.
Right
out.”

“Did she talk to these people?”

A shake of the head.

“Why not?”

“Because when she came out, they were already gone.”

Rizzoli turned and stared at the sidewalk where the two visitors
had
stood, imploring a recalcitrant child to let them in the gate.

The hairs on the back of her neck suddenly bristled.

Rat Lady. She was here.

S
IXTEEN

R
IZZOLI STEPPED OFF
the hospital elevator, strode
past
the sign announcing
ALL VISITORS MUST CHECK IN
, and barrelled
straight
through the double doors into the intensive care unit. It was one
A
.
M
., and the unit lights were dimmed to allow the patients to
sleep.
Coming straight from the bright hallway, she confronted a room where nurses were
faceless silhouettes. Only one patient cubicle was brightly lit, and like a
beacon,
it drew her toward it.

The black woman cop standing outside the cubicle greeted Rizzoli.
“Hey,
Detective. You got here fast.”

“She said anything yet?”

“She can’t. She’s still got that breathing tube in
her
throat. But she’s definitely awake. Her eyes are open, and I heard the
nurse
say she’s following commands. Everyone seems really surprised that she woke
up at all.”

The squeal of the ventilator alarm made Rizzoli glance through the
cubicle doorway at the knot of medical personnel huddled around the bed. She
recognized
the neurosurgeon, Dr. Yuen, and the internist Dr. Sutcliffe, his blond ponytail
an
oddly disconcerting detail in that gathering of grim professionals.
“What’s
going on in there?”

“I don’t know. Something about the blood pressure. Dr.
Sutcliffe
got here just as things started to go haywire. Then Dr. Yuen showed up, and
they’ve
been fussing with her ever since.” The cop shook her head. “I
don’t
think it’s going well. Those machines’ve been beeping like
crazy.”

“Jesus, don’t tell me we’re gonna lose her just as
she
wakes up.”

Rizzoli squeezed into the cubicle, where lights shone down with a
brilliance
that was painful to her tired eyes. She could not see Sister Ursula, who was
hidden
within the tight circle of personnel, but she could see the monitors above the
bed,
the heart rhythm skittering like a stone across water.

“She’s trying to pull out the ET tube!” a nurse
said.

“Get that hand tied down tighter!”

“. . . Ursula, relax. Try to relax.”

“Systolic’s down to eighty—”

“Why is she so flushed?” said Yuen. “Look at her
face.”
He glanced sideways as the ventilator squealed.

“Too much airway resistance,” a nurse said.
“She’s
fighting the ventilator.”

“Her pressure’s dropping, Dr. Yuen. It’s eighty
systolic.”

“Let’s get a dopamine drip going. Now.”

A nurse suddenly noticed Rizzoli standing in the doorway.
“Ma’am,
you’re going to have to step out.”

“Is she conscious?” asked Rizzoli.

“Step
out
of the cubicle.”

“I’ll handle this,” said Sutcliffe.

He took Rizzoli by the arm, and his grasp was not gentle as he led
her out of the cubicle. He slid the curtain shut, cutting off all view of the
patient.
Standing in the gloom, she could feel the eyes of other nurses, watching her
from
their different stations in the ICU.

“Detective Rizzoli,” said Sutcliffe, “you need to
let
us do our jobs.”

“I’m trying to do mine as well. She’s our only
witness.”

“And she’s in critical condition. We need to get her
through
this crisis before anyone talks to her.”

“She is conscious, though?”

“Yes.”

“She understands what’s going on?”

He paused. In the low light of the ICU, she could not read his
expression.
All she could see was the silhouette of his broad shoulders and the reflection
of
his eyes, glinting green from the nearby monitor banks. “I’m not sure.
Frankly, I never expected her to regain consciousness at all.”

“Why is her blood pressure falling? Is this something
new?”

“A little while ago, she started to panic, probably because
of
the endotracheal tube. It’s a frightening sensation, to feel a tube in your
throat, but it has to stay in to help her breathe. We gave her some Valium when
her
pressure shot up. Then it suddenly started to crash.”

A nurse pulled back the cubicle curtain and called through the
doorway:
“Dr. Sutcliffe?”

“Yes?”

“Her pressure’s not responding, even on dopamine.”

Sutcliffe stepped back into the cubicle.

Through the open doorway, Rizzoli watched the drama playing out
only
a few feet away. The nun’s hands were balled up in fists, the tendons of
her
arms standing out in taut cords as she fought the restraints that bound her
wrists
to the bed rails. The crown of her head was encased in bandages, and her mouth
was
obscured by the protruding endotracheal tube, but her face was clearly visible.
It
looked swollen, the cheeks suffused a bright red. Trapped in that mummifying
mass
of gauze and tubes, Ursula had the eyes of a hunted animal, the pupils dilated
with
fear, her gaze frantically darting left, then right, as though in search of
escape.
The bed rails rattled like the bars of a cage as she yanked against the
restraints.
Her whole torso lifted off the bed, and the cardiac alarm suddenly squealed.

Rizzoli’s gaze shot to the monitor, where the line had gone
flat.

“It’s okay, it’s okay!” Sutcliffe said.
“She
just disconnected one of her leads.” He snapped the wire back in place, and
the rhythm reappeared onscreen. A rapid blip-blip-blip.

“Increase the dopamine drip,” said Yuen.
“Let’s
push fluids.”

Rizzoli watched as the nurse opened the IV full bore, unleashing a
flood of saline into Ursula’s vein. The nun’s gaze met Rizzoli’s
in
a final moment of awareness. Just before her eyes started to glaze over, before
the
last spark of consciousness flickered out, what Rizzoli saw, in that gaze, was
mortal
fear.

“Pressure’s still not coming up! It’s down to
sixty—”

The muscles of Ursula’s face slackened, and the hands fell
still.
Beneath drooping lids, the eyes were now unfocused. Unseeing.

“PVCs,” the nurse said. “I’m seeing
PVCs!”

Gazes shot straight to the cardiac monitor. The heart tracing,
which
had been ticking rapidly but evenly across the screen, was now distorted by
dagger
thrusts.

“V tach!” said Yuen.

“I can’t get any pressure! She’s not
perfusing.”

“Get that bed rail down. Come on, come on, let’s start
compressions.”

Rizzoli was shoved backwards, out of the doorway, as one of the
nurses
pushed toward the doorway and called out: “We’ve got a Code
Blue!”

Through the cubicle window, Rizzoli watched as the storm swirled
around
Ursula. She saw Yuen’s head bobbing up and down as he performed CPR.
Watched
as drug after drug was injected into IV ports, and sterile wrappings fluttered
to
the floor.

Rizzoli stared at the monitor. The tracing was now a line of
jagged
teeth cutting across the screen.

“Charged to two hundred!”

In the cubicle, everyone stepped back as a nurse leaned forward
with
the defibrillator paddles. Rizzoli had a clear view of Ursula’s bared
breasts,
the skin blotchy and red. It struck her as somehow startling, that a nun would
have
such generous breasts.

The paddles discharged.

Ursula’s torso jerked, as though tugged by strings.

The woman cop standing beside Rizzoli said softly: “I got a
bad
feeling. She’s not gonna make it.”

Sutcliffe glanced up, once again, at the monitor. Then his gaze
met
Rizzoli’s through the window. And he shook his head.

An hour later, Maura arrived at the hospital. After
Rizzoli’s
phone call, she had rolled straight out of bed, leaving Victor asleep on the
pillow
beside her, and had dressed without showering. Riding the elevator up to the
ICU,
she could smell his scent on her skin, and she ached from the rawness of the
night’s
lovemaking. She had come straight to the hospital while reeking gloriously of
sex,
her mind still focused on warm bodies, not cold. On the living, not the dead.
Leaning
back against the elevator wall, she closed her eyes and allowed herself to savor
the memories for just a while longer. One more moment of remembered pleasure.

The opening of the door startled her. She jerked straight,
blinking
at the two nurses who stood waiting to step in, and she quickly exited, her
cheeks
flushing.
Do they notice it?
she thought as she walked down the hall.
Surely
anyone can see, in my face, the guilty glow of sex.

Rizzoli was in the ICU waiting room, slouched on the sofa and
sipping
from a Styrofoam cup of coffee. As Maura walked in, Rizzoli gave her a long
look,
as though she too detected something different about Maura. An unseemly flush to
her face, on this night when tragedy had called them together.

“They’re saying she had a heart attack,” said
Rizzoli.
“It doesn’t look good. She’s on life support.”

“What time did she code?”

“Around one. They worked on her for almost an hour, and
managed
to get a heart rhythm back. But she’s comatose now. No spontaneous
breathing.
Unreactive pupils.” She shook her head. “I don’t think
there’s
anyone home anymore.”

“What do the doctors say?”

“Well, that’s the controversy. Dr. Yuen isn’t ready
to pull the plug yet. But hippie boy thinks she’s brain dead.”

“You mean Dr. Sutcliffe?”

“Yeah. The hunk with the ponytail. He’s ordered an EEG
in
the morning, to check for brain activity.”

“If there’s none, it’ll be hard to justify
maintaining
life support.”

Rizzoli nodded. “I thought you’d say that.”

“Was the cardiac arrest witnessed?”

“What?”

“Were medical personnel present when her heart stopped?”

Rizzoli looked irritated now, put off by Maura’s
matter-of-fact
questions. She set down the cup, sloshing coffee onto the table. “A whole
crowd
of ’em, in fact. I was there, too.”

“What led up to the code?”

“They said her blood pressure shot up first and her pulse
went
crazy. By the time I got here, her pressure was already falling. And then her
heart
stopped. So yeah, the whole event was witnessed.”

A moment passed. The TV was turned on, but the volume was muted.
Rizzoli’s
gaze drifted to the CNN news banner scrolling across the bottom of the screen.
Disgruntled
employee shoots four in North Carolina auto plant. . . . Toxic chemical spill in
Colorado train derailment . . .
A running tally of disasters across the
county,
and here we are, two tired women, struggling just to make it through this night.

Maura sat down on the couch beside Rizzoli. “How’re you
doing,
Jane? You look wiped out.”

“I feel like hell. Like it’s sucking up every ounce of
my
energy. And there’s nothing left for me.” She drained her coffee in
one
last gulp and threw the empty cup at the trash can. It missed. She simply stared
at it, too tired to get up and retrieve it from the floor.

“The girl ID’d him,” said Rizzoli.

“What?”

“Noni.” She paused. “Gabriel was so good with her.
It
kind of surprised me. Somehow, I didn’t expect that he’d be good with
kids.
You know how he is, so hard to read. So uptight. But he sat right down with her
and
had her eating out of his hand. . . .” She looked off wistfully, then gave
herself
a shake. “She recognized Howard Redfield’s photo.”

“He was the man who came to Graystones? The one with Jane
Doe?”

Rizzoli nodded. “They were both there together. Trying to get
in, to see her.”

Maura shook her head. “I don’t get it. What on earth did
these three people have to do with each other?”

“That’s a question only Urusla could have
answered.”
Rizzoli rose and pulled on her coat. She turned toward the door, then stopped.
Looked
back at Maura. “She was awake, you know.”

“Sister Ursula?”

“Just before she coded, she opened her eyes.”

“Do you think she was actually conscious? Aware of what was
going
on?”

“She squeezed the nurse’s hand. She was following
commands.
But I never got the chance to talk to her. I was standing right there, and she
looked
at me, just before . . .” Rizzoli paused, as though shaken by that thought.
“I’m the last person she saw.”

Maura walked into the ICU, past monitors pulsing with green heart
tracings, past nurses who stood whispering outside curtained patient cubicles.
As
an intern on critical care rotation, her late-night visits to Intensive Care had
always been occasions for anxiety—a patient in extremis, a crisis that
required
her swift decision. Even all these years later, walking at this hour into an ICU
made her pulse quicken. But no medical crisis awaited her tonight; she was here
to
view the aftermath.

She found Dr. Sutcliffe standing beside Ursula’s bed, writing
in the chart. His pen slowly came to a stop, the tip pressed against the page,
as
though he was having trouble forming the next sentence.

“Dr. Sutcliffe?” she said.

He looked at her, his tanned face creased with new lines of
fatigue.

“Detective Rizzoli asked me to come in. She said you were
planning
to withdraw life support.”

“You’re a little premature, once again,” he said.
“Dr.
Yuen’s decided to hold off for a day or two. He wants to see an EEG
first.”
He looked down, once again, at his notes. “It’s ironic, isn’t it?
How there are pages and pages devoted to her last few days on earth. But her
entire
life takes up only one short paragraph. There’s something wrong about that.
Something obscene.”

“At least you get to know your patients while they’re
still
breathing. I don’t even have that privilege.”

“I don’t think I’d like your job, Dr. Isles.”

“There are days I don’t care for it, either.”

“Then why do you choose it? Why the dead over the
living?”

“They deserve attention. They’d want us to know why they
died.”