“It’s around that corner.” Crowe picked his way with athletic confidence past tables and stacked chairs. “Stay to this side. There are some footprints we’re trying to preserve. Someone tracked blood away from the body. They fade out right about there.”
He led her into a short hallway. Faint light spilled out a doorway at the end. It came from the men’s restroom.
“Doc’s here,” Crowe called out.
Another flashlight beam appeared in the doorway. Crowe’s partner, Ed Sleeper, stepped out of the restroom and gave Maura a tired wave of his gloved hand. Sleeper was the oldest detective in the Homicide Unit, and every time she saw him, his shoulders seemed to be sagging a little deeper. She wondered how much of his dispiritedness had to do with being paired with Crowe. Neither wisdom nor experience could trump youthful aggression, and Sleeper had long since ceded control to his overbearing partner.
“It’s not a pretty sight,” said Sleeper. “Just be glad it’s not July. I don’t want to think about what it’d smell like if it wasn’t so damn cold in here.”
Crowe laughed. “Sounds like someone’s ready for Florida.”
“Hey, I got a nice little condo all picked out. Only one block from the beach. I’m gonna wear nothing but swim trunks all day. Let it all hang out.”
Warm beaches, thought Maura. Sugary sand. Wouldn’t they all love to be there right now, instead of in this grim little hallway, lit only by their trio of flashlights.
“All yours, Doc,” said Sleeper.
She moved to the doorway. Her flashlight beam fell on dirty floor tiles, laid in a black-and-white checkerboard pattern. It was tracked over with footprints and dried blood.
“Stay along the wall,” said Crowe.
She stepped into the room and instantly jerked backwards, startled by a streak of movement near her feet. “Jesus,” she said, and gave a startled laugh.
“Yeah, those rats are big mothers,” said Crowe. “And they’ve had themselves a little feast in there.”
She saw a tail slither beneath the door of a bathroom stall, and thought of the old urban legend of rats swimming through sewer systems and popping out of toilets.
Slowly, she played her beam past two sinks with missing faucets, past a urinal, its drain clogged by trash and cigarette butts. Her beam dropped, to the nude body lying on its side beneath the urinal. The gleam of exposed facial bones peeked through tangled black hair. Scavengers had already been gorging on this bounty of fresh meat, and the torso was punctured by numerous rat bites. But it was not the damage caused by sharp teeth that horrified her most; it was the diminutive size of the corpse.
A child?
Maura dropped to a crouch beside the body. It lay with its right cheek pressed against the floor. As she bent closer, she saw fully developed breasts—not a child at all, she thought, but a mature woman of small stature, her features obliterated. Feasting scavengers had gnawed hungrily on the exposed left side of the face, devouring skin and even nasal cartilage. The skin still remaining on the torso was deeply pigmented. Hispanic? she wondered, her light beam moving across bony shoulders, and down the knobby ridge of spine. Dark, almost purplish nodules were scattered across the nude torso. She focused her light on the left hip and buttock, and saw more lesions. The angry eruption ran all the way down the thigh and calf to the …
Her flashlight beam froze on the ankle. “My God,” she said.
The left foot was missing. The ankle ended in a stump, the raw edge black with putrefaction.
She shifted her beam to the other ankle, and saw another stump. The right foot was missing as well.
“Now check out the hands,” said Crowe, who’d moved close beside her. He added his beam to hers, pooling their light on the arms, which had been tucked into the shadow of the torso.
Instead of hands, she saw two stumps, the edges ragged with the teeth marks of scavengers.
She rocked back, stunned.
“I take it rats didn’t eat those clean off,” said Crowe.
She swallowed. “No. No, these were amputations.”
“You think he did it while she was still alive?”
She stared down at the stained tiles, and saw only small black pools of dried blood near the stumps, no machine-gun splatter. “There was no arterial pressure when these cuts were made. The parts were removed postmortem.” She looked at Crowe. “Did you find them?”
“No. He took them. Who the hell knows why?”
“There’s a logical reason he might have done it,” said Sleeper. “We don’t have fingerprints now. We can’t I.D. her.”
Maura said, “If he was trying to obliterate her identity …” She stared at the face, at the gleam of bone, and felt a fresh thrill of horror at its significance. “I need to roll her over,” she said.
She took a disposable sheet from her kit and spread it out beside the body. Together, Sleeper and Crowe logrolled the corpse onto the sheet.
Sleeper gave a gasp and flinched away. The right side of the face, which had been pressed against the floor, now came into view. So, too, did the single bullet hole, punched into the left breast.
But it was not the bullet wound that had repelled Sleeper. It was the victim’s face, its lidless eye staring up at them. Lying against the bathroom tiles, the right side of the face should have been inaccessible to rodent teeth, yet the skin was gone. Exposed muscle had dried in leathery strands, and a pearly nubbin of cheekbone poked through.
“The rats didn’t do that, either,” said Sleeper.
“No,” said Maura. “This damage wasn’t done by scavengers.”
“Christ, did he just tear it off? It’s like he peeled away a …”
A mask. Only this mask had not been made of rubber or plastic, but of human skin.
“He cut off the face. The hands. He’s left us with no way to identify her,” said Sleeper.
“But why take the feet?” said Crowe. “That doesn’t make any sense. No one gets identified by their toe prints. Besides, she doesn’t look like the kind of vic who’d be missed. What is she, black? Latina?”
“What does her race have to do with whether she’s missed or not?” asked Maura.
“I’m just saying, this isn’t some housewife from the suburbs. Or why would she end up in this neighborhood?”
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.
EIGHT
Jane Rizzoli 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 Rizzoli & Isles Series 11-Book Bundle Page 73
