Body Double

Downstairs, the phone rang again. Again Rick answered it. “Carmen. Carmen, calm down! Katie’s right here. Yeah, she’s fine. Some boy drove her over to pick up her backpack…”

The girl shot a last poisonous glance at Maura, and went back down the stairs.

“It’s your mother calling,” Rick said.

“Are you going to tell her about your new girlfriend? How can you do this to her, Dad?”

“We need to have a talk about this. You need to accept the fact your mother and I aren’t together anymore. Things have changed.”

Maura went back into the bedroom and shut the door. While she got dressed, she could hear them continue to argue downstairs. Rick’s voice, steady and firm, the girl’s sharp with rage. It took Maura only moments to change clothes. When she came downstairs, she found Ballard and his daughter sitting in the living room. Katie was curled up on the couch like an angry porcupine.

“Rick, I’m going to leave now,” Maura said.

He rose to his feet. “You can’t.”

“No, it’s okay. You need time alone with your family.”

“It’s not safe for you to go home.”

“I won’t go home. I’ll check into a hotel. Really, I’ll be perfectly fine.”

“Maura, wait-”

“She wants to leave, okay?” Katie snapped. “So just let her go.”

“I’ll call you when I get to the hotel,” said Maura.

As she backed out of his garage, Rick came out and stood by the driveway, watching her. Their gazes met through her car window, and he stepped forward, as though to try once again to persuade her to stay, to return to the safety of his house.

Another pair of headlights swung into view. Carmen’s car pulled over to the curb, and she stepped out, blond hair in disarray, her nightgown peeking out from beneath a bathrobe. Another parent roused from bed by this errant teenager. Carmen shot a look in Maura’s direction, then said a few words to Ballard and walked into the house. Through the living room window, Maura saw mother and daughter embrace.

Ballard lingered in the driveway. Looked toward the house, then back at Maura, as though pulled in two directions.

She made the decision for him. She put the car into gear, stepped on the gas, and drove away. The last glimpse she had of him was in her rearview mirror, as he turned and walked into the house. Back to his family. Even divorce, she thought, ca

She released a deep breath. Felt, suddenly, cleansed of temptation. Free.

As she’d promised Ballard, she did not go home. Instead she headed west, toward Route 95, which traced a wide arc along the outskirts of Boston. She stopped at the first roadside motel she came to. The room she checked into smelled of cigarettes and Ivory soap. The toilet had a “sanitized” paper band across the lid, and the wrapped cups in the bathroom were plastic. Traffic noise from the nearby highway filtered in through thin walls. She could not remember the last time she had stayed in a motel so cheap, so run-down. She called Rick, just a curt thirty-second phone call to let him know where she was. Then she shut off her cell phone and climbed in between fraying sheets.

That night she slept more soundly than she had in a week.

NINETEEN

NOBODY LIKES ME, everybody hates me, think I’ll go eat worms.

Worms, worms, worms.

Stop thinking about that!

Mattie closed her eyes and gritted her teeth, but she could not block out the melody of that insipid children’s song. It played again and again in her head, and always it came back to those worms.

Except I won’t be eating them; they’ll be eating me.

Oh, think about something else. Nice things, pretty things. Flowers, dresses. White dresses with chiffon and beads. Her wedding day. Yes, think about that.

She remembered sitting in the bride’s room at St. John’s Methodist Church, staring at herself in the mirror and thinking: Today is the best day of my life. I’m marrying the man I love. She remembered her mother coming into the room to help her with the veil. How her mother had bent close and said, with a relieved sigh: “I never thought I’d see this day.” The day a man would finally marry her daughter.

Now, these seven months later, Mattie thought about her mother’s words and how they had not been particularly kind. But on that day, nothing had dampened her joy. Not the nausea of morning sickness, or her killer high heels, or the fact that Dwayne drank so much champagne on their wedding night that he fell asleep in their hotel bed before she’d even come out of the bathroom. Nothing mattered, except that she was Mrs. Purvis, and her life, her real life, was finally about to begin.

And now it’s going to end here, in this box, unless Dwayne saves me.

He will, won’t he? He does want me back?

Oh, this was worse than thinking about worms eating her. Change of subject, Mattie!

What if he doesn’t want me back? What if he was hoping all along that I’d just go away, so he can be with that woman? What if he’s the one who…

No, not Dwayne. If he wanted her dead, why keep her in a box? Why keep her alive?

She took a deep breath, and her eyes filled with tears. She wanted to live. She’d do anything to live, but she didn’t know how to get herself out of this box. She’d spent hours thinking about how to do it. She had pounded on the walls, kicked again and again against the top. She’d thought about taking apart the flashlight, maybe using its parts to build-what?

A bomb.

She could almost hear Dwayne laughing at her, ridiculing her. Oh right, Mattie, you’re a real MacGyver.

Well, what am I supposed to do?

Worms…

They squirmed back into her thoughts. Into her future, slithering under her skin, devouring her flesh. They were out there waiting in the soil right outside this box, she thought. Waiting for her to die. Then they would crawl in, to feast.

She turned on her side and trembled.

There has to be a way out.

TWENTY

YOSHIMA STOOD OVER the corpse, his gloved hand wielding a syringe with a sixteen-gauge needle. The body was a young female, so gaunt that her belly drooped like a sagging tent across the hip bones. Yoshima spread the skin taut over her groin and angled the needle into the femoral vein. He drew back on the plunger and blood, so dark it was almost black, began to fill the syringe.

He did not look up as Maura came into the room, but stayed focused on his task. She watched in silence as he withdrew the needle and transferred the blood into various glass tubes, working with the calm efficiency of someone who had handled countless tubes of blood from countless corpses. If I’m the queen of the dead, she thought, then Yoshima is surely the king. He has undressed them, weighed them, probed their groins and necks for veins, deposited their organs in jars of formalin. And when the autopsy is done, when I am finished cutting, he is the one who picks up the needle and thread and sews their incised flesh back together again.

Yoshima cut the needle and deposited the used syringe in the contaminated trash. Then he paused, gazing down at the woman whose blood he had just collected. “She came in this morning,” he said. “Boyfriend found her dead on the couch when he woke up.”

Maura saw the needle tracks on the corpse’s arms. “What a waste.”

“It always is.”

“Who’s doing this one?”

“Dr. Costas. Dr. Bristol’s in court today.” He wheeled a tray to the table and began laying out instruments. In the awkward silence, the clang of metal seemed painfully loud. Their exchange had been businesslike as usual, but today Yoshima was not looking at her. He seemed to be avoiding her gaze, shying away from even a glance in her direction. Shying, too, from any mention of what had happened in the parking lot last night. But the issue was there, hanging between them, impossible to ignore.