Body Double

It was almost six by the time Maura pulled up behind the medical examiner’s building. Two cars were still parked in the lot-Yoshima’s blue Honda and Dr. Costas’s black Saab. There must be a late autopsy, she thought, with a twinge of guilt; today would have been her day on call, but she had asked her colleagues to cover for her.

She unlocked the back door, walked into the building, and headed straight to her office, meeting no one on the way. On her desk she found what she’d come in to retrieve: two folders, with an attached yellow Post-it note, on which Louise had written: The files you requested. She sat down at her desk, took a deep breath, and opened the first folder.

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?