"There's not always an easy explanation."
"Because medical science doesn't completely understand death. Isn't that true?"
"But we do understand conception. We know it requires a sperm and an egg. That's simple biology, Reverend Mother. I don't believe in immaculate conception. What I do believe is that Camille had a sexual encounter. It may have been forced, or it may have been consensual. But her child was conceived in the usual way. And the father's identity could well have a bearing on her murder."
"What if no father is ever found?"
"We'll have the child's DNA. We only need the father's name."
"You have such confidence in your science, Dr. Isles. It's the answer to everything!"
Maura rose from her chair. "But at least those answers, I can believe in."
Father Brophy escorted Maura from the office, and walked with her, back up the dim corridor, their steps creaking on well-worn floorboards.
He said, "We might as well bring up the subject now, Dr. Isles."
"Which subject is that?"
He stopped and looked at her. "Whether the child is mine." He met her gaze without flinching; she was the one who wanted to turn away, to retreat from the intensity of his gaze.
"It's what you're wondering, isn't it?" he said.
"You can understand why."
"Yes. As you said just a moment ago, the unavoidable laws of biology require a sperm and an egg."
"You're the one man who has regular access to this abbey. You say Mass. You hear confession."
"Yes."
"You know their most intimate secrets."
"Only what they choose to tell me."
"You're a symbol of authority."
"Some view priests that way."
"To a young novice, you certainly would be."
"And that makes me automatically suspect?"
"You wouldn't be the first priest to break your vows."
He sighed, and for the first time his gaze dropped from hers. Not in avoidance, but a sad nod of acknowledgment. "It's not easy, these days. The looks people give us, the jokes behind our backs. When I say Mass, I look at the faces in my church, and I know what they're thinking. They wonder whether I touch little boys, or covet young girls. They're all wondering, just as you are. And you assume the worst."
"Is the child yours, Father Brophy?"
The blue eyes were once more focused on her. His gaze was absolutely steady. "No, it's not. I have never broken my vows."
"You understand, don't you, that we can't just take your word for it?"
"No, I could be lying, couldn't I?" Though he didn't raise his voice, she heard the note of anger. He drew closer, and she stood very still, resisting the urge to retreat. "I could be compounding one sin with another, and yet another. Where do you see that spiral, that chain of sins, leading to? Lying. Abuse of a nun. Murder?"
"The police have to look at all motives. Even yours."
"And you'll want my DNA, I suppose."
"It would eliminate you as the baby's father."
"Or it would point to me as a prime murder suspect."
"It could work either way, depending on the results."
"What do you think it will show?"
"I have no idea."
"But you must have a hunch. You're standing here, looking at me. Do you see a murderer?"
"I trust only the evidence."
"Numbers and facts. That's all you believe in."
"Yes."
"And if I told you that I'm perfectly willing to submit my DNA? That I'll give you a blood sample right here and now, if you're ready to take it?"
"It doesn't require a blood sample. Just a swab from the mouth."
"A swab, then. I just want to be clear that I'm volunteering for this."
"I'll tell Detective Rizzoli. She'll collect it."
"Will that change your mind? About whether I'm guilty?"
"As I said, I'll know when I see the results." She opened the door and walked out.
He followed her into the courtyard. He was not wearing a coat, yet he seemed impervious to the cold, his attention focused only on her.
"You said you were raised Catholic," he said.
"I went to a Catholic high school. Holy Innocents, in San Francisco."
"Yet you believe only in your blood tests. In your science."
"What should I rely on instead?"
"Instincts? Faith?"
"In you? Just because you're a priest?"
"Just because?" He shook his head and gave a sad laugh, his breath white in the chill air. "I guess that answers my question."
"I don't make guesses. I don't assume anything about other human beings, because too often, they surprise you."
They reached the front gate. He opened it for her, and she stepped out. The gate swung shut between them, suddenly separating his world from hers.
"You know that man who collapsed on the sidewalk?" he said. "The one we did CPR on?"
"Yes."
"He's alive. I went to visit him this morning. He's awake and talking."
"I'm glad to hear that."
"You didn't think he'd make it."
"The odds were against him."
"So you see? Sometimes the numbers, the statistics, are wrong."
She turned to leave.
"Dr. Isles!" he called. "You grew up in the church. Isn't there anything left of your faith?"
She looked back at him. "Faith requires no proof," she said. "But I do."
The autopsy of a child was a task every pathologist dreaded. As Maura pulled on gloves and readied her instruments, she avoided looking at the tiny bundle on the table, trying to distance herself, as long as possible, from the sad reality of what she was about to confront. Except for the clang of instruments, the room was silent. None of the participants standing around the table felt like saying a word.
Maura had always set a respectful tone in her lab. As a medical student, she'd observed the autopsies of patients who had died under her care, and although the pathologists performing those postmortems regarded the subjects as anonymous strangers, she had known those patients while they were alive, and could not look at them, laid out on the table, without hearing their voices or remembering how awareness had lit up their eyes. The autopsy lab was not the place to crack jokes or discuss last night's date, and she didn't tolerate such behavior. One stern look from her could subdue even the most disrespectful cop. She knew that they were not heartless, that humor was how they coped with the darkness of their jobs, but she expected them to check their humor at the door, or they could count on sharp words from her.
Such words were never needed when a child lay on the table.
She looked across at the two detectives. Barry Frost, as usual, had a sickly pallor to his face, and he stood slightly back from the table, as though poised to make an escape. Today, it was not foul smells that would make this postmortem difficult; it was the age of the victim. Rizzoli stood beside him, her expression resolute, her petite frame almost lost in a surgical gown that was several sizes too large. She stood right up against the table, a position that announced: I'm ready. I can deal with anything. The same attitude Maura had seen among women surgical residents. Men might call them bitches, but she recognized them for what they were: embattled women who'd worked so hard to prove themselves in a man's profession that they actually take on a masculine swagger. Rizzoli had the swagger down pat, but her face did not quite match the fearless posture. It was white and tense, the skin beneath her eyes smudged with fatigue.
Yoshima had angled the light onto the bundle, and stood waiting by the instrument tray.
The blanket was soaked, and icy pond water trickled off as she gently peeled it away, revealing another layer of wrapping. The tiny foot that she'd seen earlier now lay exposed, poking out from beneath wet linen. Clinging to the infant's form like a shroud was a white pillowcase, closed with safety pins. Flecks of pink adhered to the fabric.
Maura reached for the tweezers, p
icked off the bits of pink, and dropped them onto a small tray.
"What is that stuff?" asked Frost.
"It looks like confetti," said Rizzoli.
Maura slipped the tweezers deep into a wet fold and came up with a twig. "It's not confetti," she said. "These are dried flowers."
The significance of this finding brought another silence to the room. A symbol of love, she thought. Of mourning. She remembered how moved she had been, years ago, when she'd learned that Neanderthals buried their dead with flowers. It was evidence of their grief, and therefore, their humanity. This child, she thought, was mourned. Wrapped in linen, sprinkled with dried flower petals, and swaddled in a wool blanket. Not a disposal, but a burial. A farewell.
She focused on the foot, poking out doll-like from its shroud. The skin of the sole was wrinkled from immersion in fresh water, but there was no obvious decomposition, no marbling of veins. The pond had been near freezing temperatures, and the body could have remained in a state of near-preservation for weeks. Time of death, she thought, would be difficult, if not impossible, to determine.
She set aside the tweezers and removed the four safety pins closing the bottom of the pillowcase. They made soft musical ticks as she dropped them onto a tray. Lifting the fabric, she gently peeled it upwards, and both legs appeared, knees bent, thighs apart like a small frog.
The size was consistent with a full-term fetus.
She exposed the genitals, and then a swollen length of umbilical cord, tied off with red satin ribbon. She suddenly remembered the nuns sitting at the dining table, their gnarled hands reaching for dried flowers and ribbons to make into sachets. A sachet-baby, she thought. Sprinkled with flowers and tied with ribbon.
"It's a boy," Rizzoli said, and her voice suddenly cracked.
Maura looked up and saw that Rizzoli had paled even more, that she was now leaning against the table, as though to steady herself.
"Do you need to step out?"
Rizzoli swallowed. "It's just . . ."
"What?"
"Nothing. I'm fine."
"These are hard to take, I know. Kids are always hard. If you want to sit down—"
"I told you, I'm fine."
The worst was yet to come.
Maura eased the pillowcase up over the chest, gently extending first one arm and then the other so they would not be snagged by the wet fabric. The hands were perfectly formed, tiny fingers designed to reach for a mother's face, to grasp a mother's lock of hair. Next to the face, it is the hands that are most recognizably human, and it was almost painful to look at them.
Maura reached inside the pillowcase to support the back of the head as she pulled off the last of the fabric.
Instantly, she knew something was wrong.
Her hand was cradling a skull that did not feel normal, did not feel human. She paused, her throat suddenly dry. With a sense of dread, she peeled off the fabric, and the infant's head emerged.
Rizzoli gasped and jerked away from the table.
"Jesus," said Frost. "What the hell happened to it?"
Too stunned to speak, Maura could only gaze down in horror at the skull, gaping open, the brain exposed. At the face, folded in like a squashed rubber mask.
A metal tray suddenly toppled and crashed.
Maura looked up just in time to see Jane Rizzoli, her face drained white, slowly crumple to the floor.
TEN
"I DON'T WANT TO GO to the ER!"
Maura wiped away the last of the blood and frowned at the inch-long laceration on Rizzoli's forehead. "I'm not a plastic surgeon. I can stitch this up, but I can't guarantee there won't be a scar."
"Just do it, okay? I don't want to sit for hours in some hospital waiting room. They'd probably just sic a medical student on me, anyway."
Maura wiped the skin with Betadine, then reached for a vial of Xylocaine and a syringe. "I'm going to numb your skin first. It'll sting a little bit, but after that, you shouldn't feel a thing."
Rizzoli lay perfectly still on the couch, her eyes focused on the ceiling. Though she didn't flinch as the needle pierced her skin, she closed her hand into a fist and kept it tightly balled as the local anesthetic was injected. Not a word of complaint, not a whimper escaped her lips. Already she'd been humiliated by the fall in the lab. Humiliated even further when she'd been too dizzy to walk, and Frost had carried her like a bride into Maura's office. Now she lay with her jaw squared, grimly determined not to show any weakness.
As Maura pierced the edges of the laceration with the curved suture needle, Rizzoli asked, in a perfectly calm voice: "Are you going to tell me what happened to that baby?"
"Nothing happened to it."
"It's not exactly normal. Jesus, it's missing half its head."
"It was born that way," Maura said, snipping off suture and tying a knot. Sewing skin was like stitching a living fabric, and she was simply a tailor, bringing the edges together, knotting the thread. "The baby is anencephalic."
"What does that mean?"
"Its brain never developed."
"There's more wrong with it than just a missing brain. It looked like the whole top of his head was chopped off." Rizzoli swallowed. "And the face . . ."
"It's all part of the same birth defect. The brain develops from a sheath of cells called the neural tube. If the top of the tube fails to close the way it's supposed to, the baby will be born missing a major part of the brain, the skull, even the scalp. That's what anencephalic means. Without a head."
"You ever seen one like that before?"
"Only in a medical museum. But it's not that rare. It happens in about one in a thousand births."
"Why?"
"No one knows."
"Then it could—it could happen to any baby?"
"That's right." Maura tied off the last stitch and snipped the excess suture. "This child was born gravely malformed. If it wasn't already dead at birth, then it almost certainly died soon after."
"So Camille didn't drown it."
"I'll check the kidneys for diatoms. That would tell us if the child died by drowning. But I don't think this is a case of infanticide. I think the baby died a natural death."
"Thank god," Rizzoli said softly. "If that thing had lived . . ."
"It wouldn't have." Maura finished taping a bandage to the wound and stripped off her gloves. "All done, Detective. The stitches need to come out in five days. You can drop by here and I'll snip them for you. But I still think you need to see a doctor."
"You are a doctor."
"I work on dead people. Remember?"
"You just sewed me up fine."
"I'm not talking about putting in a few stitches. I'm concerned about what else is going on."
"What do you mean?"
Maura leaned forward, her gaze tight on Rizzoli's. "You fainted, remember?"
"I didn't eat lunch. And that thing—the baby—it shocked me."
"It shocked us all. But you're the one who keeled over."
"I've just never seen anything like it."
"Jane, you've seen all sorts of terrible things in that autopsy room. We've seen them together, smelled them together. You've always had a strong stomach. The boy cops, I have to keep an eye on them, because they'll drop like rocks. But you've always managed to hang in there. Until now."
"Maybe I'm not as tough as you thought."
"No, I think there's something wrong. Isn't there?"
"Like what?"
"You got light-headed a few days ago."
Rizzoli shrugged. "I've gotta start eating breakfast."
"Why haven't you? Is it nausea? And I've noticed you're in the bathroom practically every ten minutes. You went in there twice, just while I was setting up the lab."
"What the hell is this, anyway? An interrogation?"
"You need to see a doctor. You need a complete physical and a blood count to rule out anemia, at the very least."
"I just need to get some fresh air." Rizzoli sat up, then quickly dropped her head in he
r hands. "God, this is some friggin' headache."
"You whacked your head pretty hard on the floor."
"It's been whacked before."
"But I'm more concerned about why you fainted. Why you've been so tired."
Rizzoli lifted her head and looked at her. In that instant, Maura had her answer. She had already suspected it, and now she saw it confirmed in the other woman's eyes.
"My life is so fucked up," Rizzoli whispered.
The tears startled Maura. She had never seen Rizzoli cry, had thought this woman was too strong, too stubborn, to ever break down, yet tears were now trickling down her cheeks, and Maura was so taken aback she could only watch in silence.
The knock on the door startled them both.
Frost stuck his head into the office. "How're we doing in here . . ." His voice trailed off when he saw his partner's damp face. "Hey. Hey, are you okay?"
Rizzoli gave an angry swipe at her tears. "I'm fine."
"What's going on?"
"I said I'm fine!"
"Detective Frost," said Maura, "We need time alone. Could you give us some privacy, please?"
Frost flushed. "Sorry," he murmured, and withdrew, softly closing the door.
"I shouldn't have yelled at him," said Rizzoli. "But sometimes, he's so goddamn dense."
"He's just concerned about you."
"Yeah, I know. I know. At least he's one of the good guys." Her voice broke. Fighting not to cry, she balled her hands into fists, but the tears came anyway, and then the sobs. Choked, embarrassed sobs that she could not hold back. It disturbed Maura to witness the disintegration of a woman whose strength had always impressed her. If Jane Rizzoli could fall apart, then anyone could.
Rizzoli suddenly slapped her fists on her knees and took a few deep breaths. When at last she raised her head, the tears were still there, but pride had set her face in a rigid mask.
"It's the goddamn hormones. They're screwing around with my head."
"How long have you known?"
"I don't know. A while, I guess. I finally did a home pregnancy test this morning. But I've sort of known for weeks. I could feel the difference. And I didn't get my period."
"How late are you?"