“You did tell us she was reclusive.”
“That’s an understatement.”
Rizzoli asked, “Did she have many friends, Mrs.
Maginnes?”
“If she did, she never brought any of them home to meet
us.”
“How about at school?” Rizzoli looked at the two boys,
who
glanced at each other.
Justin said, with unnecessary callousness, “Only the
wallflower
crowd.”
“I meant boyfriends.”
Lauren gave a startled laugh. “Boyfriends? When all she
dreamed
about was becoming the bride of Christ?”
“She was an attractive young woman,” said Rizzoli.
“Maybe
you didn’t see it, but I’m sure there were boys who noticed it. Boys
who
were interested in her.” She looked at Lauren’s sons.
“No one wanted to go out with her,” said Justin.
“They’d
get laughed at.”
“And when she came home, in March? Did she spend time with
any
friends? Did any men seem particularly interested in her?”
“Why do you keep asking about boyfriends?” said Lauren.
Rizzoli could think of no way to avoid revealing the truth.
“I’m
sorry to have to tell you this. But shortly before Camille was murdered, she
bore
a child. A baby who died at birth.” She looked at the brothers.
They stared back at her with equally stunned expressions.
For a moment, the only sound in the room was the wind whipping off
the sea, rattling the windows.
Lauren said, “Haven’t you been reading the news? All
those
terrible things the priests have been doing? She’s been in a convent for
the
last two years! She’s been under
their
supervision,
their
authority.
You should talk to
them
.”
“We’ve already questioned the one priest who had access
to
the convent. He willingly gave us his DNA. Those tests are pending.”
“So you don’t even know yet if he’s the father. Why
bother us with these questions?”
“The baby would have been conceived sometime in March, Mrs.
Maginnes.
The month she came home for that funeral.”
“And you think that it happened
here
?”
“You had a house full of guests.”
“What are you asking me to do? Call up every man who happened
to visit here that week? ‘Oh by the way, did you sleep with my
stepdaughter?’
”
“We have the infant’s DNA. With your help, we might be
able
to identify the father.”
Lauren shot to her feet. “I’d like you to leave
now.”
“Your stepdaughter’s dead. Don’t you want us to
find
her killer?”
“You’re looking in the wrong place.” She walked to
the
doorway and called out: “Maria! Can you show these policemen out?”
“DNA would give us the answer, Mrs. Maginnes. With just a few
swabs, we could put all suspicions to rest.”
Lauren turned and faced her. “Then start with the priests.
And
leave my family alone.”
Rizzoli slid into the car and pulled the door shut. As Frost
warmed
the engine, she gazed at the house, and remembered how impressed she’d been
when she’d caught her first glimpse of it.
Before she had met the people inside.
“Now I know why Camille left home,” she said.
“Imagine
growing up in that house. With those brothers. With that stepmother.”
“They seemed a lot more upset about our questions than about
the
girl’s death.”
As they drove through the granite pillars, Rizzoli took one last
backward
look at the house. Imagined a young girl, gliding like a wraith among those vast
rooms. A girl derided by her stepbrothers, ignored by her stepmother. A girl
whose
hopes and dreams are ridiculed by those who are supposed to love her. Every day
in
that house would bring another punishing blow to your soul, more painful than
the
sting of frostbite as you walk barefoot in the snow. You want to be closer to
God,
to know the unconditional warmth of His love. For that they laugh at you, or
pity
you, or tell you that you’re a candidate for the psychiatrist’s couch.
No wonder the walls of the convent had seemed so welcoming.
Rizzoli sighed and turned to look at the road that stretched
ahead.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
“This diagnosis has me stumped,” said Maura.
She laid out a series of digital photographs on the conference
room
table. Her four colleagues did not so much as flinch at the images, for they had
all seen far worse sights in the autopsy lab than these views of rat-bitten skin
and angry nodules. They seemed far more focused on the box of fresh blueberry
muffins
that Louise had brought in that morning for case conference, an offering that
the
doctors were happily devouring, even as they stared at stomach-turning photos.
Those
who work with the dead learn to keep the sights and smells of their jobs from
ruining
their appetites, and among the pathologists now seated at the table was one
known
to be particularly fond of seared foie gras, a pleasure undimmed by the fact he
dissected
human livers by day. Judging by his ample belly, nothing ruined Dr. Abe
Bristol’s
appetite, and he happily munched on his third muffin as Maura set down the last
of
the images.
“This is your Jane Doe?” asked Dr. Costas.
Maura nodded. “Female, approximate age thirty to forty-five,
with
a gunshot wound to the chest. She was found about thirty-six hours after death
inside
an abandoned building. There was postmortem excision of the face, as well as
amputations
of the hands and the feet.”
“Whoa. There’s a sick boy for you.”
“It’s these skin lesions that stump me,” she said,
gesturing
to the array of photos. “The rodents did some damage, but there’s
enough
intact skin left to see the gross appearance of these underlying lesions.”
Dr. Costas picked up one of the photos. “I’m no
expert,”
he said solemnly, “but I’d call this a classic case of red
bumps.”
Everyone laughed. Physicians flummoxed by skin lesions often
resorted
to simply describing the skin’s appearance, without knowing its cause. Red
bumps
could be caused by anything from a viral infection to autoimmune disease, and
few
skin lesions are unique enough to point to an immediate diagnosis.
Dr. Bristol stopped chewing his muffin long enough to point to one
of the photos and say, “You’ve got some ulcerations here.”
“Yes, some of the nodules have shallow ulcerations with crust
formation. And a few have the silvery scales you’d see in psoriasis.”
“Bacterial cultures?”
“Nothing unusual is growing out. Just
Staph. epidermidis
.”
Staph epi was a common skin bacteria, and Bristol merely shrugged.
“Contaminant.”
“What about the skin biopsies?” asked Costas.
“I looked at the slides yesterday,” said Maura.
“There
are acute inflammatory changes. Edema, infiltration by granulocytes. Some deep
micro-abscesses.
There are also inflammatory changes in the blood vessels as well.”
“And you have no bacteria growing?”
“Both the Gram stain and Fite Faraco stains are negative for
bacteria.
These are sterile abscesses.”
“You already know the cause of death, right?” said
Bristol,
his dark beard catching the crumbs of his muffin. “Does it really matter
what
these nodules are?”
“I hate to think I’m missing something obvious here. We
have
no identification on this victim. We don’t know anything about her, except
for
the cause of death and the fact she was covered with these lesions.”
“Well, what’s
your
diagnosis?”
Maura looked down at the ugly swellings, like a mountain range of
carbuncles
across the victim’s skin. “Erythema nodosum,” she said.
“Cause?”
She shrugged. “Idiopathic.” Meaning, quite simply, cause
unknown.
Costas laughed. “There’s a wastebasket diagnosis for
you.”
“I don’t know what else to call it.”
“Neither do we,” said Bristol. “Erythema nodosum
works
for me.”
Back at her desk, Maura reviewed the typed autopsy report for Rat
Lady,
which she had dictated earlier, and felt dissatisfied as she signed it. She knew
the victim’s approximate time of death, and the cause of death. She knew
the
woman was most likely poor, and that she had surely suffered from the
humiliation
of her appearance.
She looked down at the box of biopsy slides, labeled with the name
Jane Doe and the case number. She pulled out one of the slides and slid it under
the microscope lens. Swirls of pink and purple came into focus through the
eyepiece.
It was a hematoxylin and eosin stain of the skin. She saw the dark stipples of
acute
inflammatory cells, saw the fibrous circle of a blood vessel infiltrated by
white
cells, signs that the body was fighting back, sending its soldiers of immune
cells
into battle against . . . what?
Where was the enemy?
She sat back in her chair, thinking of what she’d seen on
autopsy.
A woman with no hands or face, mutilated by a killer who harvested identities as
well as lives.
But why the feet? Why did he take the feet?
This is a killer who seems to operate with cool logic, she
thought,
not twisted perversions. He shoots to kill, using an efficiently lethal bullet.
He
strips the victim but does not sexually abuse her. He amputates the hands and
feet
and peels off the face. Then he leaves the corpse in a place where its skin will
soon be gnawed away by scavengers.
It kept coming back to the feet. The removal of the feet was not
logical.
She retrieved Rat Lady’s X-ray envelope and slid the ankle
films
onto the light box. Once again, the abrupt demarcation of severed flesh shocked
her,
but she saw nothing new here, no clues that would explain the killer’s
motive
for the amputation.
She took the films down, replaced them with the skull films,
frontal
and lateral views. She stood gazing at the bones of Rat Lady’s face, and
tried
to envision what that face might have looked like. No older than forty-five, she
thought, yet already you have lost your upper teeth. Already, you have the jaw
of
an elderly woman, the bones of your face rotting from within, your nose sinking
into
a widening crater. And scattered across your torso and limbs are ugly nodules.
Just
a glance in the mirror would be painful. And then to step outside, into the eyes
of the public . . .
She stared at the bones, glowing on the light box. And she
thought:
I know why the killer took the feet.
It was only two days before Christmas, and when Maura walked onto
the Harvard campus, she found it almost deserted, the Yard a broad expanse of
white,
scarcely marred by footprints. She tramped along the walkway, carrying her
briefcase
and a large envelope of X rays, and could smell, in the air, the metallic tang
of
a coming snowfall. A few dead leaves clung, shivering, to bare trees. Some would
view this scene as a holiday postcard with a
Season’s Greeting
caption,
but she saw only the monotonous grays of winter, a season she was already weary
of.
By the time she reached Harvard’s Peabody Museum of
Archaeology,
cold water had seeped into her socks and the hems of her pant legs were soaked.
She
stomped off the snow and walked into a building that smelled of history. Wooden
steps
creaked as she went down the stairwell to the basement.
The first thing she noticed, as she stepped inside the dim office
of
Dr. Julie Cawley, were the human skulls—at least a dozen of them, lining
the
shelves. A lone window, set high in the wall, was half covered by snow, and the
light
that managed to seep through shone down directly on Dr. Cawley’s head. She
was
a handsome woman, with upswept gray hair that looked pewter in the wintry light.
They shook hands, an oddly masculine greeting between two women.
“Thank you for seeing me,” said Maura.
“I’m rather looking forward to what you have to show
me.”
Dr. Cawley turned on a lamp. In its yellowish glow, the room suddenly seemed
warmer.
Cosier. “I like to work in the dark,” she said, indicating the glow of
the laptop on her desk. “It keeps me focused. But is hard on these
middle-aged
eyes.”
Maura opened her briefcase and removed a folder of digital prints.
“These are the photos I took of the deceased. I’m afraid they’re
not
very pleasant to look at.”
Dr. Cawley opened the folder and paused, staring at the photo of
Rat
Lady’s mutilated face. “It’s been a while since I’ve
attended
an autopsy. I certainly never enjoyed it.” She sat down behind the desk and
took a deep breath. “Bones seem so much cleaner. Somehow less personal.
It’s
the sight of flesh that turns the stomach.”
“I also brought her X rays, if you’d rather look at
those
first.”
“No, I do need to look at these. I need to see the
skin.”
Slowly she flipped to the next photo. Stopped and stared in horror. “Dear
god,”
she murmured. “What happened to the hands?”
“They were removed.”
Cawley shot her a bewildered look. “By whom?”
“The killer, we assume. Both hands were amputated. So were
parts
of the feet.”
“The face, the hands, the feet—those are the first
things
I’d look at to make this diagnosis.”
“Which could be the reason why he removed them. But there are
other photos in there that might help you. The skin lesions.”
Cawley turned to the next set of images. “Yes,” she
murmured,
as she slowly flipped through them. “This certainly could be . . .”
Maura’s gaze lifted to the row of skulls on the shelf, and
she
wondered how Cawley could work in this office, with all those empty eye sockets
staring
down at her. She thought of her own office, with its potted plants and floral
paintings—nothing
on the walls to remind her of death.
But Cawley had chosen to surround herself with the evidence of her
own mortality. A professor of medical history, she was a physician as well as an
historian, a woman who could read a lifetime’s worth of miseries etched in
the
bones of the dead. She could look at the skulls on her shelf and see, in each, a
personal history of pain. An old fracture or an impacted wisdom tooth or a
jawbone
infiltrated by tumor. Long after the flesh melts away, the bones still tell
their
stories. And judging by the many photos of Dr. Cawley taken at archaeological
dig
sites around the world, she had been mining these stories for decades.
