Even in death, the leper was shunned.
"To see a patient in such an advanced stage is almost unheard of in the U.S.," said Dr. Cawley. "Modern medical care would arrest the disease long before it caused this much disfigurement. Three-drug therapy can cure even the worst cases of lepromatous leprosy."
"I'm assuming this woman has been treated," said Maura. "Since I saw no active bacilli in her skin biopsies."
"Yes, but treatment obviously came late for her. Look at these deformities. The loss of teeth and the collapse of facial bones. She was infected for quite some time—probably decades—before she received any care."
"Even the poorest patient in this country would have found treatment."
"You'd certainly hope so. Because Hansen's disease is a public health issue."
"Then the chances are this woman was an immigrant."
Cawley nodded. "You can still find it among some rural populations around the world. The majority of cases worldwide are in only five countries."
"Which ones?"
"Brazil and Bangladesh. Indonesia and Myanmar. And, of course, India."
Dr. Cawley returned the skull to the shelf, then gathered up the photos on her desk and shuffled them together. But Maura was scarcely aware of the other woman's movements. She stared at the X ray of Rat Lady, and thought of another victim, another death scene. Of spilled blood, in the shadow of a crucifix.
India, she thought. Sister Ursula worked in India.
* * *
Graystones Abbey seemed colder and more desolate than ever when Maura stepped through the gate that afternoon. Ancient Sister Isabel led the way across the courtyard, her L. L. Bean snow boots peeking out incongruously from beneath the hem of her black habit. When winter turns brutal, even nuns rely on the comfort of Gore-Tex.
Sister Isabel directed Maura into the Abbess's empty office, then she vanished down the dark hallway, the clomp-clomp of her boots trailing a fading echo.
Maura touched the cast-iron radiator beside her; it was cold. She did not take off her coat.
So much time passed that she began to wonder if she had been forgotten, if the antique Sister Isabel had simply shuffled on down the hall, her memory of Maura's arrival fading with each step. Listening to the creaks of the building, to the gusts rattling the window, Maura imagined spending a lifetime under this roof. The years of silence and prayer, the unchanging rituals. There would be comfort in it, she thought. The ease of knowing, at each dawn, how the day will go. No surprises, no turmoil. You rise from bed and reach for the same clothing, kneel for the same prayers, walk the same dim corridors to breakfast. Outside the walls, women's hems might rise and fall, cars might take on new shapes and colors, and a changing galaxy of movie stars would appear and then vanish from the silver screen. But within the walls, the rituals continue unchanging, even as your body grows infirm, your hands unsteady, the world more silent as your hearing fades.
Solace, thought Maura. Contentment. Yes, these were reasons to withdraw from the world, reasons she understood.
She did not hear Mary Clement's approach, and she was startled to notice the Abbess was standing in the doorway, watching her.
"Reverend Mother."
"I understand you have more questions?"
"About Sister Ursula."
Mary Clement glided into the room and settled in behind her desk. On this bitterly cold day, even she was not immune to winter's chill; beneath her veil, she wore a gray wool sweater embroidered with white cats. She folded her hands on the desk and fixed Maura with a hard look. Not the friendly face that had greeted her on that first morning.
"You've done all you can to disrupt our lives. To destroy the memory of Sister Camille. And now you want to repeat the process with Sister Ursula?"
"She would want us to find her attacker."
"And what terrible secrets do you imagine she has? Which sins are you now fishing for, Dr. Isles?"
"Not sins, necessarily."
"Just a few days ago, you were focused only on Camille."
"And that may have distracted us from probing more deeply into Sister Ursula's life."
"You'll find no scandals there."
"I'm not looking for scandals. I'm looking for the attacker's motive."
"To kill a sixty-eight-year-old nun?" Mary Clement shook her head. "There's no rational motive that I could imagine."
"You told us that Sister Ursula served a mission abroad. In India."
The abrupt change in subject seemed to startle Mary Clement. She rocked back in her chair. "Why is that relevant?"
"Tell me more. About her time in India."
"I'm not sure what you want to know, exactly."
"She was trained as a nurse?"
"Yes. She worked in a small village outside the city of Hyderabad. She was there for about five years."
"And she returned to Graystones a year ago?"
"In January."
"Did she talk much, about her work there?"
"No."
"She served five years there, and she never spoke of her experiences?"
"We value silence here. Not idle chatter."
"I'd hardly consider it idle chatter to talk about her mission abroad."
"Have you ever lived abroad, Dr. Isles? I don't mean in a nice tourist hotel, where maids change the sheets every day. I'm talking about villages where sewage runs in the street, and children are dying of cholera. Her experience there wasn't a particularly pleasant topic to talk about."
"You told us there'd been violence in India. That the village where she worked was attacked."
The Abbess's gaze dropped to her hands, the skin chapped and red, folded on the desk.
"Reverend Mother?" said Maura.
"I don't know the whole story. She never spoke of it to me. What little I do know, I heard from Father Doolin."
"Who is that?"
"He serves in the archdiocese in Hyderabad. He called from India, right after it happened, to tell me that Sister Ursula was returning to Graystones. That she wished to rejoin cloistered life. We welcomed her back, of course. This is her home. Naturally, this was where she came to find solace, after . . ."
"After what, Reverend Mother?"
"The massacre. In Bara village."
The window suddenly rattled, buffeted by a gust. Beyond the glass, the day was leached of all color. A gray wall, topped by gray sky.
"That was where she worked?" asked Maura.
Mary Clement nodded. "A village so poor it had no telephones, no electricity. Nearly a hundred people lived there, but few outsiders dared to visit. That was the life our sister chose, to serve the most wretched people on earth."
Maura thought of Rat Lady's autopsy. Of her skull, deformed by disease. She said, softly: "It was a leper's village."
Mary Clement nodded. "In India, they're considered the most unclean of all. Despised and feared. Cast out by their families. They live in special villages, where they can retreat from society, where they don't have to hide their faces. Where others are as deformed as they are." She looked at Maura. "Even that didn't protect them from attack. Bara village no longer exists."
"You said there was a massacre."
"That's what Father Doolin called it. Mass slaughter."
"By whom?"
"The police never identified the attackers. It could have been a caste massacre. Or it could have been Hindu fundamentalists, angry about a Catholic nun living in their midst. Or they could have been Tamils, or any one of half a dozen separatist factions at war there. They killed everyone, Dr. Isles. Women, children. Two of the nurses in the clinic."
"But Ursula survived."
"Because she wasn't in Bara that night. She'd left the day before to fetch medical supplies from Hyderabad. When she returned the next morning, she found the village in ashes. Workers from the nearby factory were already there, searching for survivors, but they found none. Even the animals—the chickens, the goats—were slaughtered, and the corpses burned. Sister Ursula collapsed
when she saw the bodies, and a doctor from the factory had to keep her in his clinic until Father Doolin arrived. She was the only one from Bara who survived, Dr. Isles. She was the lucky one."
The lucky one, thought Maura. Spared from slaughter, only to come home to Graystones Abbey and find that Death had not forgotten her. That even here, she could not escape his hand.
Mary Clement's gaze met Maura's. "You'll find nothing shameful in her past. Only a lifetime of service in God's name. Leave our sister's memory alone, Dr. Isles. Leave her at peace."
Maura and Rizzoli stood on the sidewalk outside what had once been Mama Cortina's restaurant, and the wind sliced like an icy blade through their coats. It was the first time Maura had viewed this scene in daylight, and she saw a street of abandoned buildings, and windows that stared down like empty eye sockets.
"Nice neighborhood you've brought me to," said Rizzoli. She looked up at the faded sign for Mama Cortina's. "Your Jane Doe was found in there?"
"In the men's bathroom. She'd been dead about thirty-six hours when I examined her."
"And you've got no leads on her ID?"
Maura shook her head. "Considering her advanced stage of Hansen's disease, there's a good chance she was a recent immigrant. Possibly undocumented."
Rizzoli hugged her coat tighter. "Ben-Hur," she murmured. "That's what it makes me think of. The Valley of the Lepers."
"Ben-Hur was just a movie."
"But the disease is real. What it does to your face, your hands."
"It can be highly mutilating. That's what terrified the ancients. Why just the sight of a leper could send people screaming in horror."
"Jesus. To think we have it right here in Boston." Rizzoli shuddered. "It's freezing. Let's get inside."
They stepped into the alley, their shoes crunching along the icy trough that had formed from the footsteps of so many law enforcement officers. Here they might be protected from the wind, but the well of gloom between the buildings felt somehow colder, the air ominously still. Police tape lay across the threshold of the restaurant's alley doorway.
Maura took out the key and inserted it in the padlock, but it would not pop open. She crouched down, jiggling the key in the frozen lock.
"Why do their fingers fall off?" asked Rizzoli.
"What?"
"When you catch leprosy. Why do you lose your fingers? Does it attack the skin, like flesh-eating bacteria?"
"No, it does its damage in a different way. The leprosy bacillus attacks the peripheral nerves, so your fingers and toes go numb. You can't feel any pain. Pain is our warning system, part of our defense mechanism against injury. Without it, you could accidentally stick your fingers in boiling hot water, and not sense that your skin's being burned. Or you don't feel that blister building on your foot. You can injure yourself again and again, leading to secondary infections. Gangrene." Maura paused, frustrated by the stubborn lock.
"Here. Let me try."
Maura stepped aside and gratefully slipped her gloved hands in her pockets while Rizzoli jiggled the key.
"In poorer countries," said Maura, "it's the rats that do the actual damage to hands and feet."
Rizzoli looked up with a frown. "Rats?"
"In the night, while you're sleeping. They crawl onto your bed and gnaw on fingers and toes."
"You're serious?"
"And you don't feel a thing, because leprosy has made your skin numb. When you wake up the next morning, you discover the tips of your fingers are gone. That all you've got left are bloody stumps."
Rizzoli stared at her, then gave the key a sharp twist.
The padlock popped open. The door swung ajar, to reveal shades of gray blending into blackness.
"Welcome to Mama Cortina's," said Maura.
Rizzoli paused on the threshold, her Maglite beam cutting across the room. "Something's moving inside," she murmured.
"Rats."
"Let's not talk any more about rats."
Maura switched on her own flashlight and followed Rizzoli into a darkness that smelled of rancid grease.
"He brought her through here, into the dining room," said Maura, her flashlight playing across the floor. "They found some drag marks through the dust, probably left by the heels of her shoes. He must have grasped her under the arms and hauled her backwards."
"You'd think he wouldn't even want to touch her."
"I would assume he was wearing gloves, because he left no fingerprints."
"Still, he was rubbing up against her clothes. Exposing himself to infection."
"You're thinking of it the way the ancients did. As though one touch from a leper will turn you into a monster. It's not as transmissible as you think."
"But you can catch it. You can get infected."
"Yes."
"And the next thing you know, your nose and fingers are falling off."
"It's treatable. There are antibiotics."
"I don't care if it's treatable," said Rizzoli, now moving slowly across the kitchen. "This is leprosy we're talking about. Something straight out of the Bible."
They pushed through the swinging door, into the dining room. Rizzoli's Maglite swept a circle, and stacked chairs gleamed at the periphery. Though they couldn't see the infestation, they could hear the faint rustling. The darkness was alive.
"Which way?" said Rizzoli. Her voice now a murmur, as though they had entered hostile territory.
"Keep going. There's a hallway to the right, at that end of the room."
Their lights played across the floor. The last traces of the drag marks had been obliterated by the passage of all the law enforcement personnel who had since tramped through. On the night Maura had come to this death scene, she had been flanked by Detectives Crowe and Sleeper, had known that an army of CSTs were already poised to move in with their scopes and cameras and fingerprint powders. That night, she had not been afraid.
Now she found herself breathing hard. Found herself staying close behind Rizzoli, acutely conscious of the fact that she had no one to watch her own back. She felt her neck hairs rise, her attention focused with exquisite sensitivity on any sounds, any hint of movement behind her.
Rizzoli halted, flashlight veering to the right. "This is the hallway?"
"The bathroom's at that end."
Rizzoli moved forward, light bouncing from one wall to the other. At the last doorway she paused, as though already knowing that what came next would be disturbing. She cast her light into the room and stood staring at smears of blood on the tile floor. Her light briefly slid across the walls, past the bathroom stall and porcelain urinals and rust-stained sinks. Then it returned, as though pulled by magnetic force, to the floor where the corpse had lain.
A place of death has a power all its own. Long after the body is removed and the blood scrubbed away, such a place still retains the memory of what has happened there. It holds echoes of screams, the lingering scent of fear. And like a black hole, it sucks into its vortex the rapt attention of the living, who cannot turn away, cannot resist a glimpse into hell.
Rizzoli crouched down to look at the blood-smeared tiles.
"It was a clean shot, into her heart," said Maura, squatting down beside her. "Pericardial tamponade, leading to rapid cardiac arrest. That's why there's so little blood on the floor. She had no heartbeat, no circulation. When he performed the amputations, he was cutting into a corpse."
They fell silent, their gazes on the brown stains. Here in this bathroom, there were no windows. A light shining in this room wouldn't be visible from the street. Whoever wielded the knife could take his time, lingering undisturbed over the object of his butchery. There were no screams to muffle, no threat of discovery. He could cut at his leisure, through skin and joint, harvesting his prizes in flesh.
And when he was done, he left the body in this place where vermin reigned, where rats and roaches would feast, obliterating whatever flesh remained.
Maura rose to her feet, breathing hard. Though the building was frigid, her h
ands were sweating inside her gloves, and she felt her heart pounding.
"Can we go now?" she said.
"Wait. Let me look around some more."
"There's nothing more to see here."
"We just got here, Doc."
Maura glanced toward the dark hallway and shivered. She felt an odd shift in the air, a chill breath that raised the hairs on her neck. The door, she thought suddenly. We left the door to the alley unlocked.
Rizzoli was still crouched over the bloodstains, her Maglite slowly skimming the floor, her attention focused only on the blood. She's not rattled, thought Maura. Why should I be? Calm down, calm down.
She edged toward the doorway. Wielded her light like a saber, slashing it swiftly into the dark hallway.
Saw nothing.
The hairs on the back of her neck were standing straight up.
"Rizzoli," she whispered. "Can we get out of here now?"
Only then did Rizzoli hear the tension in Maura's voice. She asked, just as quietly: "What is it?"
"I want to leave."
"Why?"
Maura stared into the dark hallway. "Something doesn't feel right."
"Did you hear anything?"
"Let's just get out of here, okay?"
Rizzoli rose to her feet. Said, softly: "Okay." She stepped past Maura into the hallway. Paused, as though sniffing the air for any hint of a threat. Fearless Rizzoli, always in the lead, thought Maura, as she followed the detective back up the hallway and through the dining room. They stepped into the kitchen, flashlights beaming. Perfect targets, she realized. And here we come, creaking across the floor, our beams like two bull's-eyes.
Maura felt a whoosh of cold air and stared at the silhouette of a man, standing in the open doorway. She froze, a stunned observer, as voices suddenly exploded in the shadows.
Rizzoli, already in a combat crouch, screamed: "Freeze!"
"Drop your weapon!"
"I said freeze, asshole!" Rizzoli commanded.
"Boston PD! I'm Boston PD!"
"Who the hell . . ."
Rizzoli's flashlight suddenly lit on the intruder's face. He raised his arm against the glare, his eyes narrowed. There was a long silence.
Rizzoli gave a snort of disgust. "Oh shit."