The security alarm. Someone is in the house.
Ballard pounded on her door. “Maura? Maura?” he yelled.
“I’m okay!”
“Lock your door! Don’t come out.”
“Rick?”
“Just stay in the room!”
She scrambled out of bed and locked the door. Crouched there, hands covering her ears against the alarm’s shriek, unable to hear anything else. She thought of Ballard, moving down the staircase. Imagined a house full of shadows. Someone waiting below. Where are you, Rick? She could hear nothing except that piercing alarm. Here in the darkness she was both blind and deaf to whatever might be moving toward her door.
The shrieks suddenly ceased. In the silence that followed, she could finally hear her own panicked breaths, the pounding of her heart.
And voices.
“Jesus Christ!” Rick was yelling. “I could have shot you! What the hell were you thinking?”
Now a girl’s voice. Hurt, angry. “You chained the door! I couldn’t get in to shut off the alarm!”
“Don’t you yell at me.”
Maura opened her door and stepped out into the hallway. The voices were louder now, both raised in fury. Looking over the banister, she saw Rick standing below, shirtless in blue jeans, the gun he’d carried downstairs now tucked in his waistband. His daughter was glaring at him.
“It’s two in the morning, Katie. How did you get over here?”
“My friend drove me.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“I came to get my backpack, okay? I forgot I needed it tomorrow. I didn’t want to wake up Mom.”
“Tell me who this friend is. Who drove you?”
“Well, he’s gone now! The alarm probably freaked him out.”
“It’s a boy? Who?”
“I’m not going to get him in trouble, too!”
“Who is this boy?”
“Don’t, Dad. Just don’t.”
“You stay down here and talk to me. Katie, don’t go up there—”
Footsteps thumped up the steps and suddenly halted. Katie stood frozen on the stairway, staring at Maura.
“Get back down here!” Rick yelled.
“Yeah, Dad,” Katie murmured, her gaze still on Maura. “Now I know why you chained the door on me.”
“Katie!” Rick paused, suddenly cut off by the ringing telephone. He turned to answer it. “Hello? Yeah, this is Rick Ballard. Everything’s okay here. No, you don’t need to send a man out. My daughter came home and didn’t shut off the alarm system in time . . .”
The girl was still staring at Maura with open hostility. “So you’re his new girlfriend.”
“Please, you don’t need to get upset about this,” Maura said quietly. “I’m not his girlfriend. I just needed a place to sleep for the night.”
“Oh, right. So why not with my dad?”
“Katie, it’s the truth—”
“Nobody in this family ever tells the truth.”
Downstairs, the phone rang again. Again Rick answered it. “Carmen. Carmen, calm down! Katie’s right here. Yeah, she’s fine. Some boy drove her over to pick up her backpack . . .”
The girl shot a last poisonous glance at Maura, and went back down the stairs.
“It’s your mother calling,” Rick said.
“Are you going to tell her about your new girlfriend? How can you do this to her, Dad?”
“We need to have a talk about this. You need to accept the fact your mother and I aren’t together anymore. Things have changed.”
Maura went back into the bedroom and shut the door. While she got dressed, she could hear them continue to argue downstairs. Rick’s voice, steady and firm, the girl’s sharp with rage. It took Maura only moments to change clothes. When she came downstairs, she found Ballard and his daughter sitting in the living room. Katie was curled up on the couch like an angry porcupine.
“Rick, I’m going to leave now,” Maura said.
He rose to his feet. “You can’t.”
“No, it’s okay. You need time alone with your family.”
“It’s not safe for you to go home.”
“I won’t go home. I’ll check into a hotel. Really, I’ll be perfectly fine.”
“Maura, wait—”
“She wants to leave, okay?” Katie snapped. “So just let her go.”
“I’ll call you when I get to the hotel,” said Maura.
As she backed out of his garage, Rick came out and stood by the driveway, watching her. Their gazes met through her car window, and he stepped forward, as though to try once again to persuade her to stay, to return to the safety of his house.
Another pair of headlights swung into view. Carmen’s car pulled over to the curb, and she stepped out, blond hair in disarray, her nightgown peeking out from beneath a bathrobe. Another parent roused from bed by this errant teenager. Carmen shot a look in Maura’s direction, then said a few words to Ballard and walked into the house. Through the living room window, Maura saw mother and daughter embrace.
Ballard lingered in the driveway. Looked toward the house, then back at Maura, as though pulled in two directions.
She made the decision for him. She put the car into gear, stepped on the gas, and drove away. The last glimpse she had of him was in her rearview mirror, as he turned and walked into the house. Back to his family. Even divorce, she thought, cannot erase all the bonds forged by years of marriage. Long after the papers are signed, decrees notarized, the ties still remain. And the most powerful tie of all is written in a child’s flesh and blood.
She released a deep breath. Felt, suddenly, cleansed of temptation. Free.
As she’d promised Ballard, she did not go home. Instead she headed west, toward Route 95, which traced a wide arc along the outskirts of Boston. She stopped at the first roadside motel she came to. The room she checked into smelled of cigarettes and Ivory soap. The toilet had a “sanitized” paper band across the lid, and the wrapped cups in the bathroom were plastic. Traffic noise from the nearby highway filtered in through thin walls. She could not remember the last time she had stayed in a motel so cheap, so run-down. She called Rick, just a curt thirty-second phone call to let him know where she was. Then she shut off her cell phone and climbed in between fraying sheets.
That night she slept more soundly than she had in a week.
NINETEEN
NOBODY LIKES ME, everybody hates me, think I’ll go eat worms.
Worms, worms, worms.
Stop thinking about that!
Mattie closed her eyes and gritted her teeth, but she could not block out the melody of that insipid children’s song. It played again and again in her head, and always it came back to those worms.
Except I won’t be eating them; they’ll be eating me.
Oh, think about something else. Nice things, pretty things. Flowers, dresses. White dresses with chiffon and beads. Her wedding day. Yes, think about that.
She remembered sitting in the bride’s room at St. John’s Methodist Church, staring at herself in the mirror and thinking: Today is the best day of my life. I’m marrying the man I love. She remembered her mother coming into the room to help her with the veil. How her mother had bent close and said, with a relieved sigh: “I never thought I’d see this day.” The day a man would finally marry her daughter.
Now, these seven months later, Mattie thought about her mother’s words and how they had not been particularly kind. But on that day, nothing had dampened her joy. Not the nausea of morning sickness, or her killer high heels, or the fact that Dwayne drank so much champagne on their wedding night that he fell asleep in their hotel bed before she’d even come out of the bathroom. Nothing mattered, except that she was Mrs. Purvis, and her life, her real life, was finally about to begin.
And now it’s going to end here, in this box, unless Dwayne saves me.
He will, won’t he? He does want me back?
Oh, this was worse than thinking about worms eating her. Change of s
ubject, Mattie!
What if he doesn’t want me back? What if he was hoping all along that I’d just go away, so he can be with that woman? What if he’s the one who . . .
No, not Dwayne. If he wanted her dead, why keep her in a box? Why keep her alive?
She took a deep breath, and her eyes filled with tears. She wanted to live. She’d do anything to live, but she didn’t know how to get herself out of this box. She’d spent hours thinking about how to do it. She had pounded on the walls, kicked again and again against the top. She’d thought about taking apart the flashlight, maybe using its parts to build—what?
A bomb.
She could almost hear Dwayne laughing at her, ridiculing her. Oh right, Mattie, you’re a real MacGyver.
Well, what am I supposed to do?
Worms . . .
They squirmed back into her thoughts. Into her future, slithering under her skin, devouring her flesh. They were out there waiting in the soil right outside this box, she thought. Waiting for her to die. Then they would crawl in, to feast.
She turned on her side and trembled.
There has to be a way out.
TWENTY
YOSHIMA STOOD OVER the corpse, his gloved hand wielding a syringe with a sixteen-gauge needle. The body was a young female, so gaunt that her belly drooped like a sagging tent across the hip bones. Yoshima spread the skin taut over her groin and angled the needle into the femoral vein. He drew back on the plunger and blood, so dark it was almost black, began to fill the syringe.
He did not look up as Maura came into the room, but stayed focused on his task. She watched in silence as he withdrew the needle and transferred the blood into various glass tubes, working with the calm efficiency of someone who had handled countless tubes of blood from countless corpses. If I’m the queen of the dead, she thought, then Yoshima is surely the king. He has undressed them, weighed them, probed their groins and necks for veins, deposited their organs in jars of formalin. And when the autopsy is done, when I am finished cutting, he is the one who picks up the needle and thread and sews their incised flesh back together again.
Yoshima cut the needle and deposited the used syringe in the contaminated trash. Then he paused, gazing down at the woman whose blood he had just collected. “She came in this morning,” he said. “Boyfriend found her dead on the couch when he woke up.”
Maura saw the needle tracks on the corpse’s arms. “What a waste.”
“It always is.”
“Who’s doing this one?”
“Dr. Costas. Dr. Bristol’s in court today.” He wheeled a tray to the table and began laying out instruments. In the awkward silence, the clang of metal seemed painfully loud. Their exchange had been businesslike as usual, but today Yoshima was not looking at her. He seemed to be avoiding her gaze, shying away from even a glance in her direction. Shying, too, from any mention of what had happened in the parking lot last night. But the issue was there, hanging between them, impossible to ignore.
“I understand Detective Rizzoli called you at home last night,” she said.
He paused, his profile to her, his hands motionless on the tray.
“Yoshima,” she said, “I’m sorry if she implied in any way—”
“Do you know how long I’ve worked in the medical examiner’s office, Dr. Isles?” he cut in.
“I know you’ve been here longer than any of us.”
“Eighteen years. Dr. Tierney hired me right after I got out of the army. I served in their mortuary unit. It was hard, you know, working on so many young people. Most of them were accidents or suicides, but that goes with the territory. Young men, they take chances. They get into fights, they drive too fast. Or their wives leave them, so they reach for their weapon and shoot themselves. I thought, at least I can do something for them, I can treat them with the respect due a soldier. And some of them were just kids, barely old enough to grow beards. That was the upsetting part, how young they were, but I managed to deal with it. The way I deal with it here, because it’s my job. I can’t remember the last time I called in sick.” He paused. “But today, I thought about not coming in.”
“Why?”
He turned and looked at her. “Do you know what it’s like, after eighteen years working here, to suddenly feel like I’m a suspect?”
“I’m sorry that’s how she made you feel. I know she can be brusque—”
“No, actually, she wasn’t. She was very polite, very friendly. It was the nature of her questions that made me realize what was going on. What’s it like working with Dr. Isles? Do you two get along?” Yoshima laughed. “Now, why do you suppose she asked me that?”
“She was doing her job, that’s all. It wasn’t an accusation.”
“It felt like one.” He went to the countertop and began lining up jars of formalin for tissue samples. “We’ve worked together almost two years, Dr. Isles.”
“Yes.”
“There’s never been a time, at least that I’m aware of, that you’ve been unhappy with my performance.”
“Never. There’s no one I’d rather work with than you.”
He turned and faced her. Under the harsh fluorescent lights, she saw how much gray peppered his black hair. She had once thought him to be in his thirties. With that placidly seamless face and slender build, he’d seemed somehow ageless. Now, seeing the troubled lines around his eyes, she recognized him for what he was: a man quietly slipping into middle age. As I am.
“There wasn’t a moment,” she said, “not an instant, when I thought you might have—”
”But now you do have to think about it, don’t you? Since Detective Rizzoli’s brought it up, you have to consider the possibility that I vandalized your car. That I’m the one stalking you.”
“No, Yoshima. I don’t. I refuse to.”
His gaze held hers. “Then you’re not being honest with yourself, or with me. Because the thought’s got to be there. And as long as the smallest ounce of mistrust is there, you’re going to be uneasy with me. I can feel it, you can feel it.” He stripped off his gloves, turned, and began writing the deceased’s name on labels. She could see the tension in his shoulders, in the rigid muscles of his neck.
“We’ll get past this,” she said.
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe. We will. We have to work together.”
“Well, I guess that’s up to you.”
She watched him for a moment, wondering how to recapture the cordial relationship they had once enjoyed. Perhaps it wasn’t so cordial after all, she thought. I just assumed it was, while all this time, he’s hidden his emotions from me, just as I hide mine. What a pair we are, the poker-faced duo. Every week tragedy passes across our autopsy table, but I have never seen him cry, nor has he seen me cry. We just go about the business of death like two workers on the factory floor.
He finished labeling the specimen jars and turned back to see she was still standing behind him. “Did you need anything, Dr. Isles?” he asked, and his voice, like his expression, revealed no hint of what had just passed between them. This was the Yoshima she had always known, quietly efficient, poised to offer his assistance.
She responded in kind. She removed X-rays from the envelope she’d carried into the room and mounted Nikki Wells’s films on the light box. “I’m hoping you remember this case,” she said, and flipped on the switch. “It’s from five years ago. A case out in Fitchburg.”
“What’s the name?”
“Nikki Wells.”
He frowned at the X-ray. Focused, immediately, on the collection of fetal bones overlying the maternal pelvis. “This was that pregnant woman? Killed with her sister?”
“You do remember it, then.”
“Both the bodies were burned?”
“That’s right.”
“I remember, it was Dr. Hobart’s case.”
“I’ve never met Dr. Hobart.”
“No, you wouldn’t have. He left about two years before you joined us.”
“Where is he wo
rking now? I’d like to talk to him.”
“Well, that would be hard. He’s dead.”
She frowned at him. “What?”
Sadly, Yoshima shook his head. “It was so hard on Dr. Tierney. He felt responsible, even though he had no choice.”
“What happened?”
“There were some . . . problems with Dr. Hobart. First he lost track of a few slides. Then he misplaced some organs, and the family found out. They sued our office. It was a big mess, a lot of bad publicity, but Dr. Tierney stood by him. Then some drugs went missing from a bag of personal effects, and he had no choice. He asked Dr. Hobart to resign.”
“What happened then?”
“Dr. Hobart went home and swallowed a handful of Oxycontin. They didn’t find him for three days.” Yoshima paused. “That was the autopsy no one here wanted to do.”
“Were there questions about his competence?”
“He may have made some mistakes.”
“Serious ones?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I’m wondering if he missed this.” She pointed to the X-ray. To the bright sliver embedded in the pubic bone. “His report on Nikki Wells doesn’t explain this metallic density here.”
“There are other metallic shadows on that film,” noted Yoshima. “I can see a bra hook here. And this looks like a snap.”
“Yes, but look at the lateral view. This sliver of metal is in the bone. Not overlying it. Did Dr. Hobart say anything about it to you?”
“Not that I recall. It’s not in his report?”
“No.”
“Then he must not have thought it was significant.”
Which meant it had probably not been brought up during Amalthea’s trial, she thought. Yoshima returned to his tasks, positioning basins and buckets, assembling paperwork on his clipboard. Though a young woman lay dead only a few feet away, Maura’s attention was not on the fresh corpse, but on the X-ray of Nikki Wells and her fetus, their bones melded together by fire into a single charred mass.
Why did you burn them? What was the point? Had Amalthea felt pleasure, watching the flames consume them? Or was she hoping those flames would consume something else, some trace of herself that she did not want to be found?