“Yes, but on some level, maybe you’re feeling something else, something you don’t even want to acknowledge. That you’re intrigued by these actions, not just as an intellectual puzzle. There’s something about it that fascinates you, even excites you.”
“The way it obviously excites you?”
O’Donnell took no offense at that retort. Instead she smiled, easily acknowledging Maura’s remark. “My interest is professional. It’s my job to study acts of murder. I’m just wondering about the reasons for your interest in Amalthea Lank.”
“Two days ago, I didn’t know who my mother was. Now I’m trying to come to grips with the truth. I’m trying to understand—”
“Who you are?” O’Donnell asked softly.
Maura met her gaze. “I know who I am.”
“Are you sure?” O’Donnell leaned closer. “When you’re in that autopsy lab, examining a victim’s wounds, describing a killer’s knife thrusts, don’t you ever feel just a whisper of a thrill?”
“What makes you think I would?”
“You are Amalthea’s daughter.”
“I’m an accident of biology. She didn’t raise me.”
O’Donnell settled back in the chair and studied her with coldly appraising eyes. “You’re aware there’s a genetic component to violence? That some families carry it in their DNA?”
Maura remembered what Rizzoli had told her about Dr. O’Donnell: She’s beyond curious. She wants to know what it’s like to cut skin and watch a victim bleed. What it’s like to enjoy that ultimate power. She’s hungry for details, the way a vampire’s hungry for blood. Maura could now see that glint of hunger in O’Donnell’s eyes. This woman enjoys communing with monsters, thought Maura. And she’s hoping she’s found another one.
“I came to talk about Amalthea,” said Maura.
“Isn’t that who we’ve been discussing?”
“According to MCI–Framingham, you’ve been to see her at least a dozen times. Why so often? Surely not for her benefit.”
“As a researcher, I’m interested in Amalthea. I want to understand what drives people to kill. Why they take pleasure from it.”
“You’re saying she did it for pleasure?”
“Well, do you know why she killed?”
“She’s clearly psychotic.”
“The vast majority of psychotics don’t kill.”
“But you do agree that she is?”
O’Donnell hesitated. “She would appear to be.”
“You don’t sound sure. Even after all the visits you’ve made?”
“There’s more to your mother than just psychosis. And there’s more to her crime than meets the eye.”
“What do you mean?”
“You say you already know what she did. Or at least, what the prosecution claims she did.”
“The evidence was solid enough to convict her.”
“Oh, there was plenty of evidence. Her license plate caught on camera at the service station. The women’s blood on the tire iron. Their wallets in the trunk. But you probably haven’t heard about this.” O’Donnell reached for one of the files on the coffee table and handed it to Maura. “It’s from the crime lab in Virginia, where Amalthea was arrested.”
Maura opened the folder and saw a photo of a white sedan with a Massachusetts license plate.
“That’s the car Amalthea was driving,” said O’Donnell.
Maura turned to the next page. It was a summary of the fingerprint evidence.
“There were a number of prints found inside that car,” said O’Donnell. “Both victims, Nikki and Theresa Wells, left their prints on the rear seat belt buckles, indicating they climbed into the backseat and strapped themselves in. There were fingerprints left by Amalthea, of course, on the steering wheel and gearshift.” O’Donnell paused. “And then, there’s the fourth set of fingerprints.”
“A fourth set?”
“It’s right there, in that report. They were found on the glove compartment. On both doors, and on the steering wheel. Those prints were never identified.”
“It doesn’t mean anything. Maybe a mechanic worked on her car and left behind his fingerprints.”
“A possibility. Now look at the hair and fiber report.”
Maura turned to the next page and saw that blond hairs had been found on the back seat. The hairs matched Theresa and Nikki Wells. “I see nothing surprising about this. We know the victims were in the car.”
“But you’ll notice that none of their hairs appear in the front seat. Think about it. Two women stranded at the side of the road. Someone pulls over, offers to give them a lift. And what do the sisters do? They both climb into the backseat. It seems a little rude, doesn’t it? Leaving the driver all alone up in front. Unless …”
Maura looked up at her. “Unless someone else was already sitting in that front seat.”
O’Donnell sat back, a satisfied smile on her lips. “That’s the tantalizing question. A question that was never answered at trial. It’s the reason I keep going back, again and again, to see your mother. I want to learn what the police never bothered to find out: Who was sitting in the front seat with Amalthea?”
“She hasn’t told you?”
“Not his name.”
Maura stared at her. “His?”
“I’m only guessing the sex. But I do believe that someone was in the car with Amalthea at the moment she spotted those two women on the road. Someone helped her control those victims. Someone who was strong enough to help her stack those bodies in the shed and helped her set them on fire.” O’Donnell paused. “He’s the one I’m interested in, Dr. Isles. He’s the one I want to find.”
“All your visits to Amalthea—they weren’t even about her.”
“Insanity doesn’t interest me. Evil does.”
Maura stared at her, thinking: Yes, it would. You enjoy getting close enough to brush against it, sniff it. Amalthea isn’t what attracts you. She’s only the go-between, the one who can introduce you to the real object of your desire.
“A partner,” said Maura.
“We don’t know who he is, or what he looks like. But your mother knows.”
“Then why won’t she say his name?”
“That’s the question—why is she hiding him? Is she afraid of him? Is she protecting him?”
“You don’t know if this person even exists. All you have are some unidentified fingerprints. And a theory.”
“More than a theory. The Beast is real.” O’Donnell leaned forward and said, quietly, almost intimately: “That’s the name she used when she was arrested in Virginia. When the police there interrogated her. She said, quote: ‘The Beast told me to do it,’ unquote. He told her to kill those women.”
In the silence that followed, Maura heard the sound of her own heart, like the quickening beat of a drum. She swallowed. Said, “We’re talking about a schizophrenic. A woman who’s probably having auditory hallucinations.”
“Or she’s talking about someone real.”
“The Beast?” Maura managed a laugh. “A personal demon, maybe. A monster from her nightmares.”
“Who leaves behind fingerprints.”
“That didn’t seem to impress the jury.”
“They ignored that evidence. I was at that trial. I watched the prosecution build its case against a woman so psychotic, even the prosecution had to know she wasn’t responsible for her actions. But she was the easy target, the easy conviction.”
“Even though she was clearly insane.”
“Oh, no one doubted she was psychotic and hearing voices. Those voices might’ve screamed at you to crush a woman’s skull, to burn her body, but the jury still assumes you know right from wrong. Amalthea was a prosecutor’s slam dunk, so that’s what they did. They got it wrong. They missed him.” O’Donnell leaned back in her chair. “And your mother is the only one who knows who he is.”
It was almost six by the time Maura pulled up behind the medical examiner’s building. Two cars were still park
ed in the lot—Yoshima’s blue Honda and Dr. Costas’s black Saab. There must be a late autopsy, she thought, with a twinge of guilt; today would have been her day on call, but she had asked her colleagues to cover for her.
She unlocked the back door, walked into the building, and headed straight to her office, meeting no one on the way. On her desk she found what she’d come in to retrieve: two folders, with an attached yellow Post-it note, on which Louise had written: The files you requested. She sat down at her desk, took a deep breath, and opened the first folder.
It was the file for Theresa Wells, the older sister. The cover sheet listed the victim’s name and case number and the date of the postmortem. She didn’t recognize the name of the pathologist, Dr. James Hobart, but then she had joined the medical examiner’s office only two years ago, and this autopsy report was five years old. She turned to Dr. Hobart’s typed dictation.
The deceased is a well-nourished female, age indeterminate, measuring five foot five inches in height and weighing one hundred fifteen pounds. Definitive ID established through dental X-rays; fingerprints unobtainable. Noted are extensive burn injuries to the trunk and extremities, with severe charring of skin and exposed areas of musculature. Face and front of torso are somewhat spared. Clothing remnants are in place, consisting of size eight Gap blue jeans with closed zipper and snaps still fastened, as well as charred white sweater and bra, hooks still fastened as well. Examination of the airways revealed no soot deposition, and blood carboxyhemoglobin saturation was minimal.
At the time her body was set afire, Theresa Wells was not breathing. The cause of death was apparent from Dr. Hobart’s X-ray interpretation.
Lateral and AP skull films reveal depressed and comminuted right parietal fracture with four-centimeter-wide wedge-shaped fragment.
A blow to the head had most likely killed her.
At the bottom of the typed report, below Dr. Hobart’s signature, Maura saw a familiar set of initials. Louise had transcribed the dictation. Pathologists might come and go, but in this office, Louise was forever.
Maura flipped through the next pages in the file. There was an autopsy worksheet listing all the X-rays that had been taken, which blood and fluid and trace evidence had been collected. Administrative pages recorded chain of custody, personal possessions, and the names of those present at the autopsy. Yoshima had been Hobart’s assistant. She did not recognize the name of the Fitchburg police officer who’d attended the procedure, a Detective Swigert.
She flipped to the end of the file, to a photograph. Here she stopped, recoiling at the image. The flames had charred Theresa Wells’s limbs, and had laid bare the muscles of her torso, but her face was strangely intact, and undeniably a woman’s. Only thirty-five years old, thought Maura. Already I have outlived Theresa Wells by five years. She would be my age today, had she lived. Had her tire not gone flat on that day in November.
She closed Theresa’s file and reached for the next one. Again she paused before opening the folder, reluctant to view the horrors it contained. She thought of the burn victim she herself had autopsied a year ago, and the odors that had permeated her hair and clothes even after she’d left the room. For the rest of that summer, she’d avoided lighting her backyard grill, unable to tolerate the smell of barbecued meat. Now, as she opened the file for Nikki Wells, she could almost smell that odor again, wafting back through her memory.
While Theresa’s face had been largely spared by the fire, the same could not be said for her younger sister. The flames that had only partially consumed Theresa had focused all their rage instead on the flesh of Nikki Wells.
Subject is severely charred, with portions of the chest and abdominal wall completely burned away, revealing exposed viscera. Soft tissues of the face and scalp are burned away as well. Areas of cranial vault are visible, as are crush injuries of the facial bones. No fragments of clothing remain, but small metallic densities are visible on X-ray at the level of the fifth rib which may represent fasteners from a brassiere, as well as a single metallic fragment overlying the pubis. X-ray of abdomen also reveals additional skeletal remains representing a fetus, skull diameter compatible with gestation of about thirty-six weeks …
Nikki Wells’s pregnancy would have been clearly evident to her killer. Yet her condition had brought her and her unborn child no pity, no concessions. Only a shared funeral pyre in the woods.
She turned the page. Paused, frowning, at the next sentence in the autopsy report:
Notably absent on X-ray are the fetus’s right tibia, fibula, and tarsal bones.
An asterisk had been added in pen, with the scrawled note: “See addendum.” She flipped to the attached page and read:
*Fetal anomaly was noted in subject’s outpatient obstetric record dated three months earlier. Ultrasound performed during second trimester revealed fetus was missing its right lower limb, most likely due to amniotic band syndrome.
A fetal malformation. Months before her death, Nikki Wells had been told that her baby would be born without its right leg, yet she had chosen to continue the pregnancy. To keep her baby.
The final pages in the file, Maura knew, would be the hardest to confront. She had no stomach for the photograph, but she forced herself to turn to it anyway. Saw blackened limbs and torso. No pretty woman here, no rosy glow of pregnancy, just a skull’s visage, peering through a charred mask, the facial bones caved in by the killing blow.
Amalthea Lank did this. My mother. She crushed their skulls and dragged the bodies into a shed. As she poured gasoline over the corpses, as she struck the match, did she feel a thrill, watching the flames whoosh to life? Did she linger by the burning shed to inhale the stench of singed hair and flesh?
Unable to bear the image any longer, she closed the file. Turned her attention to the two large X-ray envelopes also lying on her desk. She carried them to the viewing box and inserted Theresa Wells’s head and neck films under the clips. The lights flickered on, illuminating the ghostly shadows of bone. X-rays were far easier to stomach than photographs. Stripped of recognizable flesh, corpses lose their power to horrify. One skeleton looks like any other. The skull she now saw on the light box might be any woman’s, loved one or stranger. She stared at the fractured cranial vault, at the triangle of bone that had been forced beneath the skull table. This had been no glancing blow; only a deliberate and savage swing of the arm could have driven that shard so deeply into the parietal lobe.
She took down Theresa’s films, reached into the second envelope for a new pair of X-rays, and clipped them onto the light box. Another skull—this one Nikki’s. Like her sister, Nikki had been struck in the head, but this blow had landed on the forehead, caving in the frontal bone, crushing both orbits so severely the eyes would have ruptured in their sockets. Nikki Wells must have seen the blow coming.
Maura removed the skull films and clipped up another pair of X-rays, showing Nikki’s spine and pelvis, startlingly intact beneath the fire-ravaged flesh. Overlying the pelvis were the fetal bones. Though the flames had melded mother and child to a single charred mass, on X-ray, Maura could see they were separate individuals. Two sets of bones, two victims.
She saw something else, as well: a bright speck that stood out, even in the tangle of interlocking shadows. It was just a needle-thin sliver over Nikki Wells’s pubic bone. A tiny shard of metal? Perhaps something from her overlying clothing—a zipper, a fastener—that had adhered to burned skin?
Maura reached into the envelope and found a lateral torso view. She clipped it up beside the frontal view. The metallic sliver was still there on the lateral shot, but she could now see that it was not overlying the pubis; it seemed to be wedged within the bone.
She pulled all the X-rays from Nikki’s envelope and clipped them up, two at a time. She spotted the densities that Dr. Hobart had seen on the chest X-ray, metallic loops that represented brassiere hook and eye fasteners. On the lateral films, those same loops of metal were clearly in the overlying soft tissue. She put up the pel
vic films again and stared at that metallic sliver embedded in Nikki Wells’s pubic bone. Although Dr. Hobart had mentioned it in his report, he had said nothing further about it in his conclusions. Perhaps he’d thought it a trivial finding. And why wouldn’t he, in light of all the other horrors inflicted on this victim?
Yoshima had assisted Hobart at the autopsy; perhaps he would remember the case.
She left her office, headed down the stairwell, and pushed through the double doors, into the autopsy suite. The lab was deserted, the counters wiped clean for the night.
“Yoshima?” she called.
She pulled on shoe covers and walked through the lab, past the empty stainless steel tables, and pushed through yet another set of double doors, to the delivery bay. Swinging open the door to the cold locker, she glanced inside. Saw only the deceased, two white body pouches on side-by-side gurneys.
She closed the door and stood for a moment in the deserted bay, listening for voices, footsteps, anything to tell her that someone else was still in the building. But she heard only the rumble of the refrigerator and, faintly, the whine of an ambulance on the street outside.
Costas and Yoshima must have gone home for the night.
When she walked out of the building fifteen minutes later, she saw that the Saab and the Toyota were indeed gone; except for her black Lexus, the only other vehicles in the parking lot were the three morgue vans, stenciled with the words: OFFICE OF THE MEDICAL EXAMINER, COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS. Darkness had fallen, and her car sat isolated under a yellow pool of light cast by the streetlamp.
The images of Theresa and Nikki Wells still haunted her. As she walked toward the Lexus, she was alert to every shadow around her, to every stray noise, every hint of movement. A few paces from her car she came to a halt and stared at the passenger door. The hairs on the back of her neck suddenly stood up. The bundle of files she was carrying slid from her numb hands, papers scattering across the pavement.
Three parallel scratches marred her car’s gleaming finish. A claw mark.
Get away. Get inside.
She spun around and ran back to the building. Stood at the locked door, fumbling through her keys. Where was it, where was the right one? Finally she found it, thrust it into the lock, and pushed through, slamming the door behind her. She threw her weight against it as well, as though to reinforce the barricade.
The Rizzoli & Isles Series 10-Book Bundle Page 110
