Body Double (23 page)

It was the file for Theresa Wells, the older sister. The cover sheet listed the victim’s name and case number and the date of the postmortem. She didn’t recognize the name of the pathologist, Dr. James Hobart, but then she had joined the medical examiner’s office only two years ago, and this autopsy report was five years old. She turned to Dr. Hobart’s typed dictation.

The deceased is a well-nourished female, age indeterminate, measuring five foot five inches in height and weighing one hundred fifteen pounds. Definitive ID established through dental X-rays; fingerprints unobtainable. Noted are extensive burn injuries to the trunk and extremities, with severe charring of skin and exposed areas of musculature. Face and front of torso are somewhat spared. Clothing remnants are in place, consisting of size eight Gap blue jeans with closed zipper and snaps still fastened, as well as charred white sweater and bra, hooks still fastened as well. Examination of the airways revealed no soot deposition, and blood carboxyhemoglobin saturation was minimal
.

At the time her body was set afire, Theresa Wells was not breathing. The cause of death was apparent from Dr. Hobart’s X-ray interpretation.

Lateral and AP skull films reveal depressed and comminuted right parietal fracture with four-centimeter-wide wedge-shaped fragment.

A blow to the head had most likely killed her.

At the bottom of the typed report, below Dr. Hobart’s signature, Maura saw a familiar set of initials. Louise had transcribed the dictation. Pathologists might come and go, but in this office, Louise was forever.

Maura flipped through the next pages in the file. There was an autopsy worksheet listing all the X-rays that had been taken, which blood and fluid and trace evidence had been collected. Administrative pages recorded chain of custody, personal possessions, and the names of those present at the autopsy. Yoshima had been Hobart’s assistant. She did not recognize the name of the Fitchburg police officer who’d attended the procedure, a Detective Swigert.

She flipped to the end of the file, to a photograph. Here she stopped, recoiling at the image. The flames had charred Theresa Wells’s limbs, and had laid bare the muscles of her torso, but her face was strangely intact, and undeniably a woman’s. Only thirty-five years old, thought Maura. Already I have outlived Theresa Wells by five years. She would be my age today, had she lived. Had her tire not gone flat on that day in November.

She closed Theresa’s file and reached for the next one. Again she paused before opening the folder, reluctant to view the horrors it contained. She thought of the burn victim she herself had autopsied a year ago, and the odors that had permeated her hair and clothes even after she’d left the room. For the rest of that summer, she’d avoided lighting her backyard grill, unable to tolerate the smell of barbecued meat. Now, as she opened the file for Nikki Wells, she could almost smell that odor again, wafting back through her memory.

While Theresa’s face had been largely spared by the fire, the same could not be said for her younger sister. The flames that had only partially consumed Theresa had focused all their rage instead on the flesh of Nikki Wells.

Subject is severely charred, with portions of the chest and abdominal wall completely burned away, revealing exposed viscera. Soft tissues of the face and scalp are burned away as well. Areas of cranial vault are visible, as are crush injuries of the facial bones. No fragments of clothing remain, but small metallic densities are visible on X-ray at the level of the fifth rib which may represent fasteners from a brassiere, as well as a single metallic fragment overlying the pubis. X-ray of abdomen also reveals additional skeletal remains representing a fetus, skull diameter compatible with gestation of about thirty-six weeks . . .

Nikki Wells’s pregnancy would have been clearly evident to her killer. Yet her condition had brought her and her unborn child no pity, no concessions. Only a shared funeral pyre in the woods.

She turned the page. Paused, frowning, at the next sentence in the autopsy report:

Notably absent on X-ray are the fetus’s right tibia, fibula, and tarsal bones.

An asterisk had been added in pen, with the scrawled note: “See addendum.” She flipped to the attached page and read:

*Fetal anomaly was noted in subject’s outpatient obstetric record dated three months earlier. Ultrasound performed during second trimester revealed fetus was missing its right lower limb, most likely due to amniotic band syndrome.

A fetal malformation. Months before her death, Nikki Wells had been told that her baby would be born without its right leg, yet she had chosen to continue the pregnancy. To keep her baby.

The final pages in the file, Maura knew, would be the hardest to confront. She had no stomach for the photograph, but she forced herself to turn to it anyway. Saw blackened limbs and torso. No pretty woman here, no rosy glow of pregnancy, just a skull’s visage, peering through a charred mask, the facial bones caved in by the killing blow.

Amalthea Lank did this. My mother. She crushed their skulls and dragged the bodies into a shed. As she poured gasoline over the corpses, as she struck the match, did she feel a thrill, watching the flames whoosh to life? Did she linger by the burning shed to inhale the stench of singed hair and flesh?

Unable to bear the image any longer, she closed the file. Turned her attention to the two large X-ray envelopes also lying on her desk. She carried them to the viewing box and inserted Theresa Wells’s head and neck films under the clips. The lights flickered on, illuminating the ghostly shadows of bone. X-rays were far easier to stomach than photographs. Stripped of recognizable flesh, corpses lose their power to horrify. One skeleton looks like any other. The skull she now saw on the light box might be any woman’s, loved one or stranger. She stared at the fractured cranial vault, at the triangle of bone that had been forced beneath the skull table. This had been no glancing blow; only a deliberate and savage swing of the arm could have driven that shard so deeply into the parietal lobe.

She took down Theresa’s films, reached into the second envelope for a new pair of X-rays, and clipped them onto the light box. Another skull—this one Nikki’s. Like her sister, Nikki had been struck in the head, but this blow had landed on the forehead, caving in the frontal bone, crushing both orbits so severely the eyes would have ruptured in their sockets. Nikki Wells must have seen the blow coming.

Maura removed the skull films and clipped up another pair of X-rays, showing Nikki’s spine and pelvis, startlingly intact beneath the fire-ravaged flesh. Overlying the pelvis were the fetal bones. Though the flames had melded mother and child to a single charred mass, on X-ray, Maura could see they were separate individuals. Two sets of bones, two victims.

She saw something else, as well: a bright speck that stood out, even in the tangle of interlocking shadows. It was just a needle-thin sliver over Nikki Wells’s pubic bone. A tiny shard of metal? Perhaps something from her overlying clothing—a zipper, a fastener—that had adhered to burned skin?

Maura reached into the envelope and found a lateral torso view. She clipped it up beside the frontal view. The metallic sliver was still there on the lateral shot, but she could now see that it was not overlying the pubis; it seemed to be wedged within the bone.

She pulled all the X-rays from Nikki’s envelope and clipped them up, two at a time. She spotted the densities that Dr. Hobart had seen on the chest X-ray, metallic loops that represented brassiere hook and eye fasteners. On the lateral films, those same loops of metal were clearly in the overlying soft tissue. She put up the pelvic films again and stared at that metallic sliver embedded in Nikki Wells’s pubic bone. Although Dr. Hobart had mentioned it in his report, he had said nothing further about it in his conclusions. Perhaps he’d thought it a trivial finding. And why wouldn’t he, in light of all the other horrors inflicted on this victim?

Yoshima had assisted Hobart at the autopsy; perhaps he would remember the case.

She left her office, headed down the stairwell, and pushed through the double doors, into the autopsy suite. The lab was deserted, the counters wiped clean for the night.

“Yoshima?” she called.

She pulled on shoe covers and walked through the lab, past the empty stainless steel tables, and pushed through yet another set of double doors, to the delivery bay. Swinging open the door to the cold locker, she glanced inside. Saw only the deceased, two white body pouches on side-by-side gurneys.

She closed the door and stood for a moment in the deserted bay, listening for voices, footsteps, anything to tell her that someone else was still in the building. But she heard only the rumble of the refrigerator and, faintly, the whine of an ambulance on the street outside.

Costas and Yoshima must have gone home for the night.

When she walked out of the building fifteen minutes later, she saw that the Saab and the Toyota were indeed gone; except for her black Lexus, the only other vehicles in the parking lot were the three morgue vans, stenciled with the words: O
FFICE OF THE
M
EDICAL
E
XAMINER
, C
OMMONWEALTH OF
M
ASSACHUSETTS.
Darkness had fallen, and her car sat isolated under a yellow pool of light cast by the streetlamp.

The images of Theresa and Nikki Wells still haunted her. As she walked toward the Lexus, she was alert to every shadow around her, to every stray noise, every hint of movement. A few paces from her car she came to a halt and stared at the passenger door. The hairs on the back of her neck suddenly stood up. The bundle of files she was carrying slid from her numb hands, papers scattering across the pavement.

Three parallel scratches marred her car’s gleaming finish. A claw mark.

Get away. Get inside.

She spun around and ran back to the building. Stood at the locked door, fumbling through her keys. Where was it, where was the right one? Finally she found it, thrust it into the lock, and pushed through, slamming the door behind her. She threw her weight against it as well, as though to reinforce the barricade.

Inside the empty building, it was so quiet she could hear her own panicked breaths.

She ran down the hall to her office and locked herself inside. Only then, surrounded by all that was familiar, did she feel her pulse stop galloping, her hands stop shaking. She went to her desk, picked up the phone, and called Jane Rizzoli.

EIGHTEEN

“Y
OU DID EXACTLY
the right thing. Backed the hell away and moved to a safe place,” said Rizzoli.

Maura sat at her desk and stared at the creased papers that Rizzoli had retrieved for her from the parking lot. A now-untidy stack from Nikki Wells’s file, smudged with dirt, trampled in panic. Even now, sitting safe in Rizzoli’s company, Maura still felt the aftershocks.

“Did you find any fingerprints on my door?” Maura asked.

“A few. What you’d expect to find on any car door.”

Rizzoli rolled a chair close to Maura’s desk and sat down. Rested her hands on the shelf of her belly. Mama Rizzoli, pregnant and armed, thought Maura. Was there any less likely savior to come to my rescue?

“How long was your car in that parking lot? You said you arrived around six.”

“But the scratches could have been made before I got here. I don’t use the passenger door every day. Only if I’m loading groceries or something. I saw it tonight because of the way the car was parked. And it was right under the lamp.”

“When was the last time you looked at that door?”

Maura pressed her hands to her temples. “I know it was fine yesterday morning. When I left Maine. I put my overnight bag in the front seat. I would have noticed the scratches then.”

“Okay. So you drove home yesterday. Then what?”

“The car stayed in my garage all night. And then, this morning, I went to see you at Schroeder Plaza.”

“Where did you park?”

“In that garage near police headquarters. The one off Columbus Ave.”

“So it was in that parking garage all afternoon. While we were visiting the prison.”

“Yes.”

“That garage is fully monitored, you know.”

“Is it? I didn’t notice . . .”

“And then where did you go? After we got back from Framingham?”

Maura hesitated.

“Doc?”

“I went to see Joyce O’Donnell.” She met Rizzoli’s gaze. “Don’t look at me like that. I had to see her.”

“Were you going to tell me?”

“Of course. Look, I just needed to know more about my mother.”

Rizzoli leaned back, mouth set in a straight line. She’s not happy with me, thought Maura. She told me to stay away from O’Donnell and I ignored her advice.

“How long were you at her house?” Rizzoli asked.

“About an hour. Jane, she told me something I didn’t know. Amalthea grew up in Fox Harbor. That’s why Anna went to Maine.”

“And after you left O’Donnell’s house? What happened then?”

Maura sighed. “I came straight here.”

“You didn’t notice anyone following you?”

“Why would I bother to look? I have too many things on my mind.”

They regarded each other for a moment, neither one speaking, the tension about her visit to O’Donnell still hanging between them.

“Did you know your security camera’s broken?” Rizzoli said. “The one here in your parking lot.”

Maura gave a laugh. A shrug. “Do you know how much our budget’s been cut this year? That camera’s been broken for months. You can almost see the wires hanging out.”

“My point is, that camera would have scared off most vandals.”

“Unfortunately, it didn’t.”

“Who else knows that camera’s broken? Everyone who works in this office, right?”

Maura felt a stab of dismay. “I don’t like what you’re implying. A lot of people have noticed it’s broken. Cops. Mortuary drivers. Anyone who’s ever delivered a body here. You just have to look up and see it.”

“You said there were two cars parked here when you arrived. Dr. Costas’s and Yoshima’s.”