"You two don't keep in touch?"
"She wasn't important to me, Maura. You know that."
"Funny. But she became very important to me."
He turned to face her. "Do you think you'll ever get over being angry about her?"
"It's been three years. I suppose I should."
"That doesn't answer the question."
She looked down. "You had an affair. I needed to be angry. It was the only way."
"The only way?"
"That I could leave you. That I could get over you."
He walked toward her. Placed his hands on her shoulders, his touch warm and intimate. "I don't want you to get over me," he said. "Even if it means you hate me. At least you'd feel something. That's what bothered me the most, that you could just walk away. That you seemed so cold about it all."
It's the only way I know how to cope, she thought, as his arms slipped around her. As his breath warmed her hair. She had learned long ago how to box up all those messy emotions. They were so poorly matched, the two of them. Exuberant Victor, married to the Queen of the Dead. Why did they ever think it would work?
Because I wanted his heat, his passion. I wanted what I myself can never be.
The ringing telephone made Victor's hands go still on her shoulders. He stepped away, and left her longing for his warmth. She rose and went to the kitchen phone. One glance at the caller I.D., and she knew that this call would send her back into the night, into the snow. As she spoke to the detective and jotted down directions, she saw Victor give a resigned shake of his head. Tonight, she was the one called to duty, and he was the one left behind.
She hung up. "I'm sorry, I have to leave."
"The Grim Reaper calls?"
"A death scene in Roxbury. They're waiting for me."
He followed her down the hallway, toward the front door. "Would you like me to come with you?"
"Why?"
"To keep you company."
"Believe me, there's plenty of company at a death scene."
He glanced out the living room window, at the thickly falling snow. "It's not a good night to be driving."
"For either of us." She bent down to pull on boots. She was glad he couldn't see her face as she said, "There's no need for you to drive back to the hotel. Why don't you just stay here?"
"Spend the night, you mean?"
"It might be more convenient for you. You can make up the bed in the guest room. I'll probably be gone for a few hours."
His silence made her flush. Still not looking at him, she buttoned her coat. Suddenly anxious to escape, she opened the front door.
And heard him say, "I'll wait up for you."
Blue lights flashed through the gauze of falling snow. She pulled up right behind one of the cruisers and a patrolman approached, his face half hidden behind his raised collar, like a turtle retracted into its shell. She rolled down her window and squinted against the glare of his flashlight. Snow blew in, skittering across her dashboard.
"Dr. Isles, M.E.'s office," she said.
"Okay, you can park right where you are, ma'am."
"Where's the body?"
"Inside." He waved his flashlight toward a building across the street. "Front door's padlocked—gotta go in the alley entrance. Electricity's off, so watch your step. You'll need your flashlight. All kinds of boxes and shit piled up in that alley."
She stepped out of the car, into a curtain of lacy white. Tonight she was fully prepared for the weather, and grateful that her feet were warm and dry inside Thinsulate boots. At least six inches of new snow layered the road, but the flakes were soft and feathery and offered not even a whisper of resistance as her boots cut a trough through the drifts.
At the alley entrance, she turned on the flashlight, and saw a strand of sagging police tape, the yellow almost obscured by a coating of white. She stepped over it and dislodged a shower of flakes. The alley was obstructed by several amorphous piles obscured by snow. Her boot connected with something solid, and she heard the clatter of bottles. The alley had been used as a trash dump, and she wondered what distasteful items were hidden beneath this white blanket.
She knocked on the door and called out: "Hello? Medical Examiner."
The door swung open, and a flashlight glared in her eyes. She could not see the man holding it, but she recognized Detective Darren Crowe's voice.
"Hey, Doc. Welcome to roach city."
"Would you mind shining that light somewhere else?"
The flashlight beam dropped from her face and she saw his silhouette, broad-shouldered and vaguely threatening. He was one of the younger detectives in the Homicide Unit, and every time she worked a case with him, she felt she was walking onto the set of a TV show, and Crowe was the series star, a movie-star cop with blow-dried hair and the attitude to match, cocky and self-assured. The only thing that men like Crowe respected in a woman was icy professionalism, and that's what she showed him. While the male M.E.s might banter with Crowe, she could not; the barriers had to be maintained, the lines drawn, or he would find a way to chip at her authority.
She pulled on gloves and shoe-covers and stepped into the building. Shining her flashlight around the room, she saw metallic surfaces reflect back at her. A huge refrigerator and metal countertops. A commercial stove top and ovens.
"This used to be Mama Cortina's Italian restaurant," said Crowe. "Until Mama went out of business and filed for bankruptcy. Building got condemned two years ago, and the entrances were both padlocked. Alley door looks like it was broken open some time ago. All this kitchen equipment's up for auction, but I don't know who'd want it. It's filthy." He shone his flashlight at the gas burners, where years of accumulated grease had thickened to a black crust. Roaches scurried away from the light. "The place is crawling with 'em. All this yummy grease to feed on."
"Who found the body?"
"One of our boys from the narcotics division. They had a drug bust going down, about a block from here. The suspect bolted, and they thought he came down this alley. They noticed the door had been pried open. Came inside looking for their perp, and got quite a surprise." He pointed his flashlight at the floor. "Some scrape marks across the dust here. Like the perp dragged the victim across this room." He waved the light toward the other end of the kitchen. "Body's that way. We gotta go through the dining room."
"You've already videotaped in here?"
"Yeah. Had to lug in two battery packs to get enough light. Already ran 'em both down. So it's gonna be a little dim in there."
She followed him toward the kitchen doorway, holding her arms close to her body, a reminder not to touch any surface—as if she would want to. She heard rustling all around her in the shadows, and thought of thousands of insect legs skittering across the walls and clinging to the ceiling above her head. She might be stoic about the gory and grotesque, but scavenging insects truly repelled her.
Stepping into the dining area, she smelled the tired bouquet of scents that always clings to alleys behind old restaurants: the smell of garbage and stale beer. But here, there was also something else, an ominously familiar odor that made her pulse quicken. It was the object of her visit here, and it stirred in her both curiosity and dread.
"Looks like bums have been crashing in here," said Crowe, aiming his flashlight at the floor, where she saw an old blanket and bundles of newspapers. "And there are some candles over there. Lucky they didn't burn the place down, with all this trash." His flashlight moved across a mound of food wrappers and empty tin cans. Two yellow eyes stared at them from the top of the pile—a rat, unafraid, even cocky, daring them to advance on it.
Rats and roaches. With all these scavengers, what would be left of the body? she wondered.
"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.
Mau
ra 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.