Body Double (17 page)

Talk to me, not the belly.
She crossed to his desk and shook his hand. Noticed the telltale transplant plugs dotting his scalp, sprouting hair like little tufts of yellow grass in a last desperate stand of virility. That’s what you deserved for marrying a trophy wife.

“Sit down, sit down,” he said.

She settled into a slick leather chair. Glancing around the room, she noticed that the decor in here was radically different from the rest of the house. It was done up in Traditional Lawyer, with dark wood and leather. Mahogany shelves were filled with law journals and textbooks. Not a whisper of pink. Clearly this was his domain, a Bonnie-free zone.

“I don’t really know how I can help you, Detective,” he said. “The adoption you’re asking about was forty years ago.”

“Not exactly ancient history.”

He laughed. “I doubt you were even born then.”

Was that a little poke? His way of saying she was too young to be bothering him with these questions?

“You don’t recall the people involved?”

“I’m just saying that it was a long time ago. I would’ve been just out of law school then. Working out of a rented office with rented furniture and no secretary. Answered my own phone. I took every case that came in—divorces, adoptions, drunk driving. Whatever paid the rent.”

“And you still have all those files, of course. From your cases back then.”

“They’d be in storage.”

“Where?”

“File-Safe, out in Quincy. But before we go any further, I have to tell you. The parties involved in this particular case requested absolute privacy. The birth mother did not want her name revealed. Those records were sealed years ago.”

“This is a homicide case, Mr. Van Gates. One of the two adoptees is now dead.”

“Yes, I know. But I fail to see what that has to do with her adoption forty years ago. How is it relevant to your investigation?”

“Why did Anna Leoni call you?”

He looked startled. Nothing he said after that could cover up that initial reaction, that expression of
uh-oh.
“Excuse me?” he said.

“The day before she was murdered, Anna Leoni called your law office from her room at the Tremont Hotel. We just got her phone record. The conversation lasted thirty-seven minutes. Now, you two must have talked about
something
during those thirty-seven minutes. You couldn’t have kept the poor woman on hold all that time?”

He said nothing.

“Mr. Van Gates?”

“That—that conversation was confidential.”

“Ms. Leoni was your client? You billed her for that call?”

“No, but—”

“So you’re not bound by attorney-client privilege.”

“But I am bound by another client’s confidentiality.”

“The birth mother.”

“Well, she
was
my client. She gave up her babies on one condition—that her name never be revealed.”

“That was forty years ago. She may have changed her mind.”

“I have no idea. I don’t know where she is. I don’t even know if she’s still alive.”

“Is that why Anna called you? To ask about her mother?”

He leaned back. “Adoptees are often curious about their origins. For some of them it becomes an obsession. So they go on document hunts. Invest thousands of dollars and a lot of heartache searching for mothers who don’t want to be found. And if they
do
find them, it’s seldom the fairy-tale ending they expected. That’s what she was looking for, Detective. A fairy-tale ending. Sometimes they’re better off just forgetting it, and moving on with their lives.”

Rizzoli thought of her own childhood, her own family. She had always known who she was. She could look at her grandparents, her parents, and see her own bloodline engraved on their faces. She was one of them, right down to her DNA, and no matter how much her relatives might annoy her or embarrass her, she knew they were hers.

But Maura Isles had never seen herself in the eyes of a grandparent. When Maura walked down a street, did she study the faces of passing strangers, searching for a hint of her own features? A familiar curve to the mouth or slope of the nose? Rizzoli could perfectly understand the hunger to know your own origins. To know that you’re not just a loose twig, but one branch of a deeply rooted tree.

She looked Van Gates in the eye. “Who is Anna Leoni’s mother?”

He shook his head. “I’ll say it again. This is not relevant to your—”

“Let me decide that. Just give me the name.”

“Why? So you can disrupt the life of a woman who may not want to be reminded of her youthful mistake? What does this have to do with the murder?”

Rizzoli leaned closer, placing both her hands on his desk. Aggressively trespassing on his personal property. Sweet little Bambis might not do this, but girl cops from Revere weren’t afraid to.

“We can subpoena your files. Or I can ask you politely.”

They stared at each other for a moment. Then he released a sigh of capitulation. “Okay, I don’t need to go through this again. I’ll just tell you, okay? The mother’s name was Amalthea Lank. She was twenty-four years old. And she needed money—badly.”

Rizzoli frowned. “Are you telling me she got paid for giving up her babies?”

“Well . . .”

“How much?”

“It was substantial. Enough for her to get a fresh start in life.”

“How much?”

He blinked. “It was twenty thousand dollars, each.”

“For each
baby
?”

“Two happy families walked away with a child. She walked away with cash. Believe me, adoptive parents pay a lot more today. Do you know how hard it is to adopt a healthy Caucasian newborn these days? There just aren’t enough to go around. It’s supply and demand, that’s all.”

Rizzoli sank back, appalled that a woman would sell her babies for cold hard cash.

“Now that’s all I can tell you,” said Van Gates. “If you want to find out more, well, maybe you cops should try talking to each other. You’d save a lot of time.”

That last statement puzzled her. Then she remembered what he’d said only a moment earlier:
I don’t need to go through this again.

“Who else has asked you about this woman?” she said.

“You people all go about it the same way. You come in, threaten to make my life miserable if I don’t cooperate—”

“It was another cop?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“I don’t remember. It was months ago. I must’ve blocked out his name.”

“Why did he want to know?”

“Because she put him up to it. They came in together.”

“Anna Leoni came in with him?”

“He was doing it for her. A favor.” Van Gates snorted. “We should all have cops doing us favors.”

“This was several months ago? They came in to see you together?”

“I just said that.”

“And you told her the mother’s name?”

“Yeah.”

“So why did Anna call you last week? If she already knew her mother’s name?”

“Because she saw some photo in
The Boston Globe.
A lady who looks just like her.”

“Dr. Maura Isles.”

He nodded. “Ms. Leoni asked me directly, so I told her.”

“Told her what?”

“That she had a sister.”

THIRTEEN

T
HE BONES CHANGED EVERYTHING.

Maura had planned to drive home to Boston that evening. Instead she returned briefly to the cottage to change into jeans and a T-shirt, then drove back in her own car to the clearing. I’ll stay a little longer, she thought, and leave by four o’clock. But as the afternoon wore on, as the crime scene unit arrived from Augusta and search teams began walking the grid that Corso had mapped out in the clearing, Maura lost track of the time. She took only one break, to wolf down a chicken sandwich that volunteers had delivered to the site. Everything tasted like the mosquito repellent she’d slathered all over her face, but she was so hungry she would have happily gnawed on a dry crust of bread. Her appetite sated, she once again pulled on gloves, picked up a trowel, and knelt down in the dirt beside Dr. Singh.

Four o’clock came and went.

The cardboard boxes began to fill with bones. Ribs and lumbar vertebrae. Femurs and tibias. The bulldozer had not, in fact, scattered the bones far. The female’s remains were all located within a six-foot radius; the male’s, bound together in a web of blackberry roots, were even more contained. There appeared to be only two individuals, but it took all afternoon to unearth them. Gripped by the excitement of the dig, Maura could not bring herself to leave, not when every shovelful of dirt she sifted might reveal some new prize. A button or a bullet or a tooth. As a Stanford University undergraduate, she had spent a summer working on an archaeological site in Baja. Though the temperatures there had soared well into the nineties, and her only shade was a broad-brimmed hat, she had worked straight into the hottest part of the day, driven by the same fever that afflicts treasure hunters who believe that the next artifact is only inches away. That fever was what she experienced now, kneeling among the ferns, swatting at blackflies. It was what kept her digging through the afternoon and into the evening as storm clouds moved in. As thunder rumbled in the distance.

That, and the quiet thrill she felt whenever Rick Ballard came near.

Even as she sifted through dirt, teased away roots, she was aware of him. His voice, his proximity. He was the one who brought her a fresh water bottle, who handed her the sandwich. Who stopped to place a hand on her shoulder and ask how she was doing. Her male colleagues at the M.E.’s office seldom touched her. Perhaps it was her aloofness, or some silent signal she gave off that told them she did not welcome personal contact. But Ballard did not hesitate to reach for her arm, to rest his hand on her back.

His touches left her flushed.

When the CSU team began packing up their tools for the day, she was startled to realize it was already seven, and daylight was fading. Her muscles ached, her clothes were filthy. She stood on legs trembling with weariness, and watched Daljeet tape shut the two boxes of remains. They each picked up a box and carried them across the field, to his vehicle.

“After today, I think you owe me dinner, Daljeet,” she said.

“Restaurant Julien, I promise. Next time I’m down in Boston.”

“Believe me, I plan to collect.”

He loaded the boxes into his car and shut the door. Then they shook hands, filthy palm to filthy palm. She waved as he drove away. Most of the search team had already left; only a few cars remained.

Ballard’s Explorer was among them.

She paused in the deepening dusk and looked at the clearing. He was standing near the woods, talking to Detective Corso, his back to her. She lingered, hoping that he would notice she was about to leave.

And then what? What did she want to happen between them?

Get out of here before you make an idiot of yourself.

Abruptly she turned and walked to her car. Started the engine and pulled away so quickly the tires spun.

Back in the cottage, she peeled off her soiled clothes. Took a long shower, lathering up twice to wash away every trace of the oily mosquito repellant. When she stepped out of the bathroom, she realized she had no more clean clothes to change into. She had planned on staying only one night in Fox Harbor.

She opened the closet door and gazed at Anna’s clothes. They were all her size. What else was she going to wear? She pulled out a summer dress. It was white cotton, a little girlish for her taste, but on this warm and humid evening, it was just what she felt like wearing. Slipping the dress over her head, she felt the kiss of sheer fabric against her skin, and wondered when the last time was that Anna had smoothed this dress over her own hips, when had she last looped the sash around her waist. The creases were still there, marking the fabric where Anna had tied the knot. Everything I see and touch of hers still bears her imprint, she thought.

The ringing telephone made her turn and face the nightstand. Somehow she knew, even before she picked it up, that it was Ballard.

“I didn’t see you leave,” he said.

“I came back to the house to take a shower. I was such a mess.”

He laughed. “I’m feeling pretty grungy myself.”

“When are you driving back to Boston?”

“It’s already so late in the day. I think I might as well just stay another night. What about you?”

“I don’t really feel like driving back tonight, either.”

A moment passed.

“Did you find a hotel room here?” she asked.

“I brought my tent and sleeping bag with me. I’m staying at a campground up the road.”

It took her five seconds to make a decision. Five seconds to consider the possibilities. And the consequences.

“There’s a spare room here,” she said. “You’re welcome to use it.”

“I hate to barge in on you.”

“The bed’s just sitting here, Rick.”

A pause. “That’d be great. But on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“You let me bring you dinner. There’s a take-out place down on Main Street. Nothing fancy, maybe just some boiled lobsters.”

“I don’t know about you, Rick. But in my book, lobsters definitely qualify as fancy.”

“Do you want wine or beer?”

“Tonight feels like a beer night.”

“I’ll be there in about an hour. Save your appetite.”

She hung up, and suddenly realized she was starving. Only moments ago, she’d been too tired to drive into town, and had considered skipping dinner and simply going to bed early. Now she was hungry, not just for food but for company as well.

She wandered the house, restless and driven by too many contradictory desires. Only a few nights ago, she had shared dinner with Daniel Brophy. But the church had long ago laid claim to Daniel, and she would never be in the running. Hopeless causes might be seductive, but they seldom brought you happiness.

She heard the rumble of thunder and went to the screen door. Outside, dusk had deepened to night. Though she saw no lightning flashes, the air itself seemed charged. Electric with possibilities. Raindrops began to patter on the roof. At first it was only a few hesitant taps, then the sky opened up like a hundred drummers pounding overhead. Thrilled by the storm’s power, she stood on the porch and watched the rain pour down, and felt the welcome blast of cool air ripple her dress, lift her hair.