“You’re not alone, Maura,” he said. “You have me.” He turned her face toward his, and in the darkness she saw the gleam of his eyes, steadily focused on her. “You’ll always have me.”
Tonight, she believed him.
—
IN THE MORNING, DANIEL WAS gone.
She got dressed alone, ate her breakfast alone, read the newspaper alone. Well, not entirely alone: The cat sat nearby, licking his paws after a breakfast of fancy canned tuna.
“No comment, I take it?” Maura said to him.
The Beast didn’t deign to look up at her.
As she rinsed her dishes and packed up her laptop, she thought of Daniel, who at this moment would be preparing for a new day of tending to the needy souls in his congregation. This was how their feverish nights together always concluded: with the mundane tasks of daily life, performed separately. In this way they were no different from married couples. They made love, they slept together, and in the morning off they both went to their jobs.
Today, she thought, this counts as happiness.
—
FROM A NIGHT OF LOVE to a day of death.
This morning it was the body of Earl Devine that waited to greet her when she walked into the autopsy room. Yoshima had already performed the X-rays, and the images were now displayed on the computer screen. As she tied on her gown, she studied the chest films and noted the position of the bullet that had lodged against the spine. Based on the exit wounds, which she’d examined at the death scene, two bullets had passed through the chest and out of the body. This was the sole bullet that remained, its trajectory halted by Devine’s vertebral bone.
Jane walked into the autopsy room and joined Maura at the computer screen. “Let me guess. Cause of death is gunshot wounds. Can I be an ME too?”
“There’s a bullet lodged in his sixth thoracic vertebra,” said Maura.
“And we recovered the other two bullets at the scene. Backs up what I said last night. Crowe fired three times.”
“An appropriate response to an imminent threat. I think he has nothing to worry about.”
“Still, he’s pretty rattled. We had to take him out for drinks last night, just to talk him down.”
Maura shot her an amused look. “What is this I’m hearing? A note of sympathy for your old nemesis?”
“Yeah, can you believe it? It’s like the world’s turned upside down.” Jane paused, studying Maura’s face. “What’d you do to yourself?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re all bright and shiny this morning. Like you’ve been to a health spa or something.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But of course Maura did know; bright and shiny was exactly how the world looked to her today. Happiness left its telltale glow, and Jane was too observant to miss it. If I tell her about last night, she’ll certainly disapprove, but I don’t give a damn. I choose not to care what Jane thinks, or what anyone thinks. Today I choose to be happy. With a defiant click of the mouse, she pulled up the next X-ray, and a lateral view of the chest appeared onscreen. Maura frowned at a coin-shaped lucency in the vertebral body, just above where the bullet had lodged. A lesion that should not be there.
“New makeup? Vitamin pills?” Jane asked.
“What?”
“Something’s different about you.”
Maura ignored her. She clicked back to the frontal view of the chest and zoomed in to study the fifth and sixth vertebrae. But the bullet-shredded lung had spilled air and blood into the chest cavity and forced the thoracic organs out of their usual positions. In this distorted landscape, she could not find what she was searching for.
“You see something interesting?” said Jane.
Maura clicked back to the lateral view and pointed to the lesion in the vertebral body. “I’m not sure what this is.”
“I’m no doctor, but that doesn’t look like a bullet to me.”
“No, it’s something else. Something in the bone. I need to confirm what I think it is.” Maura turned to the autopsy table where Earl Devine was stretched out, awaiting her scalpel. “Let’s open him up,” she said, and tied on her mask.
As Maura started the Y incision, Jane said, “I hope you’re not having doubts about how the shooting went down.”
“No.”
“So what are you looking for?”
“An explanation, Jane. The reason why this man chose suicide by cop.”
“Isn’t that a job for a psychiatrist?”
“In this case, the autopsy may give us the answer.”
Maura cut swiftly and efficiently, moving with an urgency she hadn’t felt before she’d viewed the X-rays. The cause of death and manner of death were both apparent, and she’d assumed this autopsy would merely confirm what she’d already been told about the shooting. But the lateral chest X-ray had added a possible twist to the tale, a tantalizing glimpse of Earl Devine’s motives and his state of mind. A cadaver could reveal more than merely physical secrets; sometimes it offered insights into the personality once inhabiting the flesh. Whether clues were old slash marks on the wrists or needle tracks or cosmetic-surgery scars, every corpse told tales on its owner.
As Maura snapped through the ribs, she felt she was about to open the book containing Earl Devine’s secrets, but when she lifted the breastplate and exposed the thoracic cavity, she found those secrets obscured by a chest full of blood. The three bullets fired by Detective Crowe had devastated their target, puncturing lung and slicing through the aorta. The explosion of blood and leaked air had collapsed the right lung, deforming the usual landmarks. She plunged gloved hands into that cold pudding of blood and blindly ran her fingers across the surface of the left lung.
It did not take long to find what she was searching for.
“How can you see anything in there?” asked Jane.
“I can’t. But I can already tell you this lung is not normal.”
“Maybe because a bullet went through it?”
“A bullet had nothing to do with this.” Maura reached again for the scalpel. It was tempting to take shortcuts and focus immediately on the lung, but that was how mistakes were made, vital details missed. Instead, she proceeded as she always did, first dissecting the tongue and neck, freeing the pharynx and esophagus from the cervical vertebrae. She saw no foreign bodies, nothing to distinguish Earl Devine’s throat structures from those of any other sixty-seven-year-old man. Slow down. Make no mistakes. She felt Jane watching her with growing puzzlement. Yoshima set forceps on the tray, and the clang was as sharp as gunfire. Maura stayed on task, her scalpel slicing through the soft tissue and vessels of the thoracic inlet. With both hands deep in chilled blood, she freed the parietal pleura to separate the lungs from the chest wall.
“Basin,” she requested.
Yoshima held out a stainless-steel basin, waiting for what she was about to drop into it.
She lifted the heart and lungs in a single organ bloc from the chest cavity, and the viscera plopped into the basin with a splash. The smell of cold blood and meat rose with the dripping offal. She carried the bowl to the sink and rinsed a slimy veil of blood from the organs, revealing what she had earlier felt on the surface of the left lung: a lesion that had been obscured on the X-ray by trauma.
Maura sliced out a wedge of lung. Staring at the gray-white specimen glistening in her gloved hand, she knew how this tissue would almost certainly look under the microscope. She imagined dense whorls of keratin and strange, misshapen cells. And she thought of Earl Devine’s house, where the smell of nicotine clung to the drapes, the furniture.
She looked at Jane. “I need a list of his medications. Find out who his doctor was.”
“Why?”
Maura held up the wedge of tissue. “Because this explains his suicide.”
“I HAD NO IDEA,” SAID HOLLY Devine, her hands calmly folded in her lap as she sat on her living-room sofa. “I knew Daddy was losing weight, but he told me he was just getting over pneumonia. He never
said he was dying.” She looked across the coffee table at Jane and Frost. “Maybe he didn’t know either.”
“Your father definitely knew,” said Jane. “When we searched his medicine cabinet, we found prescription pills ordered by an oncologist, Dr. Christine Cuddy. Four months ago, your father was diagnosed with lung cancer. It had already spread to his bones, and when Dr. Isles studied the X-rays, she spotted a metastatic lesion in your father’s spine. Your father must have been in a great deal of pain, because there was a recently prescribed bottle of Vicodin in his bathroom.”
“He told me he’d pulled a muscle. He said the pain was getting better.”
“It wasn’t getting better, Holly. His cancer was already in his liver, and that pain was only going to get worse. He was offered chemotherapy but he refused. He told Dr. Cuddy that he wanted to live as fully as he could, while he could, without feeling sick. Because his daughter needed him.”
It had been only two days since her father’s death, yet Holly appeared composed and dry-eyed as she processed this new information. Outside, a truck rumbled by her apartment building, and the three teacups rattled on the flimsy-looking coffee table. Everything in Holly’s apartment seemed cheaply made, the sort of furniture that usually came packed in a box with step-by-step instructions for assembly. This was a bare-bones apartment, for a career girl still perched on the bottom rungs of the ladder, but Holly was almost certainly on her way up. There was a slyness about her, a canny intelligence in her eyes that Jane was only now recognizing.
“I’m sure he didn’t want me to worry. That’s why he never told me about the cancer,” said Holly. She gave a sad shake of the head. “He’d do anything to make me happy.”
“He even killed for you,” said Jane.
“He did what he thought had to be done. Isn’t that what fathers do? They keep the monsters away.”
“That wasn’t his job, Holly. It was ours.”
“But you couldn’t protect me.”
“Because you didn’t let us. Instead, you practically invited the killers to strike. You ignored our advice and went to a bar. Allowed that woman to send you a drink. Were you trying to get yourself killed, or was it all part of the plan?”
“You weren’t having any luck finding him.”
“So you decided to do it yourself.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What was the plan, Holly?”
“There was no plan. I went for a drink after work, that’s all. I told you, I was supposed to meet a friend.”
“Who never showed up.”
“Do you think I lied about that?”
“I think we haven’t heard the whole story.”
“Which is?”
“That you went to the bar hoping to draw out Stanek and his partner. Instead of letting us find him, you chose to be a vigilante.”
“I chose to fight back.”
“By taking justice into your own hands?”
“Does it really matter how it happens, as long as it does happen?”
Jane stared at her for a moment, suddenly struck by the fact that, on some level, she actually agreed with this woman. She thought of the perps who’d walked free because some cop or attorney made a procedural error, perps that she knew were guilty. She thought of how often she wished there were a shortcut to bringing a killer to justice, a way to kick a monster straight into a prison cell. And she thought of Detective Johnny Tam, who had once resorted to just such a shortcut and delivered his own form of justice. Only Jane knew Tam’s secret, and she would forever protect it.
But Holly’s secrets couldn’t be protected, because Boston PD knew exactly what she and her father had plotted. Holly had to be confronted.
“You drew them out,” said Jane. “Made them reveal themselves.”
“There’s no law against it.”
“There’s a law against murder. You’re an accessory.”
Holly blinked. “Excuse me?”
“The last thing your father did on this earth was to protect his little girl. He was dying of lung cancer, so he had nothing to lose by killing Martin Stanek. And you knew he was going to do it.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Of course you did.”
“How could I?”
“Because you’re the one who told him where to find Stanek. Moments after we arrested Bonnie Sandridge, you called your father’s cell phone. A two-minute phone call, which is how he learned Bonnie’s name and address. He went to her house armed and prepared to kill the man who threatened his daughter.”
Holly took this accusation with surprising calmness. Jane had laid out the evidence that Holly was an accessory to Martin’s murder, yet none of this seemed to fluster her.
Frost said, “Do you care to respond, Ms. Devine?”
“Yes.” Holly sat up straighter. “I did call my father. Of course I called him. I’d just had an encounter with a woman who’d planned to abduct me, and I wanted to tell him I was safe. Any daughter would make that call. I may have mentioned Bonnie’s name on the phone, but I didn’t tell him to kill her. I just told Daddy not to worry, because you had her in custody. I didn’t know that he’d go to her house. I didn’t know he’d bring his gun.” Holly took a deep breath and dropped her head. When she looked up again, her face was streaked with tears. “He gave his life for me. How can you talk about him as if he’s a cold-blooded killer?”
Jane looked at those glistening eyes and trembling lips and she thought: Goddamn it, this gal’s good. While Jane wasn’t buying the act, others might be convinced. They had no recording of the phone conversation between Holly and her father, no proof that Holly actually knew what Earl planned to do. In court, this eerily poised young woman would easily sail through the toughest cross-examination.
“I need to be alone right now,” said Holly. “This has been so hard, losing Daddy. Please, can you just go?”
“Of course,” said Frost, and he stood up to leave. Was he actually buying this performance? Frost had always been a pushover for damsels in distress, especially if those damsels were young and attractive, but surely he could see what was going on here.
Jane held her silence as she and Frost left the apartment and walked out of the building. But as soon as they climbed into her car, she blurted, “What a load of crap. And what a hell of an actress.”
“You think that was acting? She really did seem upset to me,” said Frost.
“You mean those cute little tears she produced on command?”
“Okay.” Frost sighed. “What’s bugging you?”
“There’s something not right about her.”
“Care to be more specific?”
Jane considered what it was about Holly that bothered her. “Two nights ago, when we told her that Earl was dead, do you remember how she reacted to the news?”
“She cried. Like you’d expect a daughter to do.”
“Oh, she cried, all right. Loud, honking sobs. But it felt staged to me, as if she was doing what we expected her to do. And I swear, just now she cried right on cue.”
“What is your problem with her anyway?”
“I don’t know.” Jane started the car. “But I feel like I’ve missed something important. Something about her.”
Back in the homicide unit, Jane scanned all the file folders piled up on her desk, wondering if they contained some detail she’d overlooked, some explanation for why she felt so unsatisfied. Here were the case files she’d already combed through, covering the Boston murders of Cassandra Coyle and Timothy McDougal, the Newport death of Sarah Basterash, and the disappearance of Billy Sullivan in Brookline. Four victims in three different jurisdictions. Their deaths were so dissimilar that the decades-old connection between them could easily have been missed. Cassandra Coyle, her eyeballs scooped out and displayed in her hand like Saint Lucy. Tim McDougal, his chest pierced by arrows, like Saint Sebastian. Sarah Basterash, burned to cinders like Saint Joan. Billy Sullivan, almost certainly buried and moldering in hi
s grave, like Saint Vitalis.
Then there was the child who was still alive, the one who’d been first to accuse the Staneks of abuse twenty years ago: Holly Devine, birthdate November 12. On that day, the church honored Saint Livinus, Apostle of Flanders, who died a martyr after being tortured by pagans. His tongue had been ripped out to stop him from spreading the word of God, but even after his death, according to legend, the amputated tongue of Livinus continued to preach. Did Holly ever lie awake at night, haunted by the bloody fate that was preordained by her birthdate? Did she shudder at the thought of her mouth being forced open, her tongue sliced away with a knife? Jane remembered her own fear when she’d been targeted by the killer called the Surgeon. She remembered startling awake in panic, drenched in sweat, imagining the killer’s scalpel sinking into her flesh.
If Holly had ever felt such terror, she hid it well. Too well.
Jane sighed and rubbed her temples, wondering if she should reread the case files for these four victims.
No, not four victims. She sat up straight. Five.
She shuffled through the stack of folders and found the file for Lizzie DiPalma, the nine-year-old girl who’d vanished twenty years ago. Lizzie’s disappearance was still classified as unsolved, but there’d been little doubt in the minds of investigators that Martin Stanek had abducted and killed her. Two decades later, the girl was still missing.
Frost returned from lunch, saw the files spread out across Jane’s desk, and shook his head. “You’re still going through those?”
“It’s not settling right with me. It feels too neatly tied up, complete with a pretty bow. Our prime suspect conveniently ending up dead.”
“Doesn’t seem like a problem to me.”
“And we never found out what happened to this little girl.” She tapped on the folder. “Lizzie DiPalma.”