Body Double

“Yes. But dentists were using amalgam fillings a hundred years ago,” said Daljeet.

“So it could still be an old burial.”

“But where are the coffin fragments? If this was a formal burial, there should be a coffin. And there’s this little detail.” Daljeet pointed to the crush fracture. He looked up at the two detectives bending over his shoulder. “Whatever the age of these remains, I think you have a crime scene here.”

The other men had crowded in around them, and suddenly the air felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of it. The buzz of mosquitoes seemed to grow to a pulsing roar. It’s so warm, she thought. She rose to her feet and walked on unsteady legs toward the edge of the woods, where the canopy of oak and maple cast a welcome shade. Sinking onto a rock, she dropped her head in her hands, thinking: This is what I get for not eating breakfast.

“Maura?” called Ballard. “Are you okay?”

“It’s just this heat. I need to cool down for a moment.”

“Would you like some water? I have some in my truck, if you don’t mind drinking from the same bottle.”

“Thank you. I could use some.”

She watched as he headed toward his vehicle, the back of his shirt stained with wings of sweat. He didn’t bother to pick his way delicately across the uneven field, but just forged ahead, boots tramping across broken soil. Purposeful. That’s the way Ballard walked, like a man who knew what needed to be done, and simply got on with it.

The bottle he brought back to her was warm from sitting in the truck. She took a greedy gulp, water trickling down her chin. Lowering the bottle, she found Ballard watching her. For a moment she didn’t notice the hum of insects, the murmur of men’s voices as they worked yards away. Here, in the green shadows beneath the trees, she could focus only on him. On the way his hand brushed hers as he took the bottle back. On the soft light dappling his hair, and the web of laugh lines around his eyes. She heard Daljeet call her name, but she didn’t answer, didn’t turn away; neither did Ballard, who seemed just as trapped in the moment. She thought: One of us has got to break the spell. One of us has got to snap back out of it. But I can’t seem to manage it.

“Maura?” Daljeet was suddenly standing right beside her; she hadn’t even heard his approach. “We have an interesting problem,” he said.

“What problem?”

“Come take another look at that ilium.”

Slowly she rose to her feet, feeling steadier now, her head clear. The drink of water, the few moments in the shade, had given her a second wind. She and Ballard followed Daljeet back to the hip bone, and she saw that Daljeet had already cleared away some of the soil, exposing more of the pelvis.

“I got it down to the sacrum on this side,” he said. “You can just see the pelvic outlet and the ischial tuberosity, here.”

She dropped to a crouch beside him. Said nothing for a moment, just stared at the bone.

“What’s the problem?” said Ballard.

“We need to expose the rest of this,” she said. She looked up at Daljeet. “Do you have another trowel?”

He passed one to her; it was like the slap of a scalpel handle in her palm. Suddenly she was at work, and all grim business. Kneeling side by side, trowels in hand, she and Daljeet cleared away more stony soil. Tree roots had woven through bony fossae, anchoring the bones to their grave, and they had to cut away the wiry tangle to free the pelvis. The deeper they dug, the faster her heart began to beat. Treasure hunters might dig for gold; she dug for secrets. For the answers that only a grave can reveal. With each trowelful of dirt they removed, more of the pelvis came into view. They worked feverishly now, tools probing deeper.

When at last they stared down at the exposed pelvis, they were both too stu

Maura rose to her feet and walked back to look at the skull, still lying on the plastic sheet. Kneeling beside it, she pulled off her gloves and ran her bare fingers above the orbit, feeling the robust curve of the supraorbital ridge. Then she flipped over the skull, to examine the occipital protuberance.

This did not make sense.

She rocked back on her knees. Her blouse was sweat-soaked in the cloying air. Except for the buzz of insects, the clearing had gone silent. Trees loomed on all sides, guarding this secret enclosure. Gazing at that impenetrable wall of green, she felt eyes staring back, as though the forest itself was watching her. Waiting for her next move.

“What’s going on, Dr. Isles?”

She looked up at Detective Corso. “We have a problem,” she said. “This skull-”

“What about it?”

“You see the heavy ridges here, above the eye sockets? And look back here, at the base of the skull. If you run your finger across it, you can feel a bump. It’s called the occipital protuberance.”

“So?”

“It’s where the ligamentum nuchae attaches, anchoring the muscles from the back of the neck to the cranium. The fact that bump is so prominent tells me this individual had robust musculature. This is almost certainly a man’s skull.”

“What’s the problem?”

“That pelvis over there is from a woman.”

Corso stared at her. Turned to look at Dr. Singh.

“I completely agree with Dr. Isles,” said Daljeet.

“But that would mean…”

“We have the remains of two different individuals here,” said Maura. “One male, one female.” She stood up and met Corso’s gaze. “The question is, how many others are buried out here?”

For a moment, Corso seemed too startled to respond. Then he turned and slowly sca

“Chief Gresham,” he said, “we’re going to need volunteers. A lot of them. Cops, firemen. I’ll call in our team from Augusta, but it won’t be enough. Not for what we need to do.”

“How many people are you talking about?”

“Whatever it takes to walk this site.” Corso was staring at the surrounding trees. “We’re going to comb every square inch of this place. The clearing, the woods. If there’s more than two people buried here, I’m going to find them.”

TWELVE

JANE RIZZOLI HAD GROWN UP in the suburb of Revere, just over the Tobin Bridge from downtown Boston. It was a working-class neighborhood of boxy homes on postage-stamp lots, a place where, every fourth of July, hot dogs sizzled on backyard grills and American flags were proudly displayed on front porches. The Rizzoli family had known its share of ups and downs, including a few terrible months when Jane was ten years old, and her father had lost his job. She’d been old enough to sense her mother’s fear and absorb her father’s angry desperation. She and her two brothers knew what it was like to live on that knife edge between comfort and ruin, and even though she enjoyed a steady paycheck, she could never quite silence the whispers of insecurity from her childhood. She would always think of herself as the girl from Revere who’d grown up dreaming of one day having a big house in a grander neighborhood, a house with enough bathrooms so she wouldn’t have to pound on the door every morning, demanding her turn in the shower. It would have to have a brick chimney and a double front door and a brass knocker. The house she was now staring at from her car had all those features and more: the brass knocker, the double front door, and not one chimney, but two. Everything she’d dreamed about.

But it was the ugliest house she’d ever seen.

The other homes on this East Dedham street were what you’d expect to find in a comfortable middle-class neighborhood: two-car garages and neatly kept front yards. Late-model cars parked in driveways. Nothing fancy, nothing that demanded look at me. But this house-well, it didn’t just demand your attention. It shrieked for it.

It was as if Tara, the plantation house from Gone with the Wind, had been whooshed up in a tornado and plopped down on a city lot. It had no yard to speak of, just a rim of land along the sides so narrow you could barely push a lawnmower between the wall and the neighbor’s fence. White columns stood sentinel on a porch where Scarlett O’Hara could have held court in full view of the traffic on Sprague Street. The house made her think of Joh