Body Double

“I understand Detective Rizzoli called you at home last night,” she said.

He paused, his profile to her, his hands motionless on the tray.

“Yoshima,” she said, “I’m sorry if she implied in any way-”

“Do you know how long I’ve worked in the medical examiner’s office, Dr. Isles?” he cut in.

“I know you’ve been here longer than any of us.”

“Eighteen years. Dr. Tierney hired me right after I got out of the army. I served in their mortuary unit. It was hard, you know, working on so many young people. Most of them were accidents or suicides, but that goes with the territory. Young men, they take chances. They get into fights, they drive too fast. Or their wives leave them, so they reach for their weapon and shoot themselves. I thought, at least I can do something for them, I can treat them with the respect due a soldier. And some of them were just kids, barely old enough to grow beards. That was the upsetting part, how young they were, but I managed to deal with it. The way I deal with it here, because it’s my job. I can’t remember the last time I called in sick.” He paused. “But today, I thought about not coming in.”

“Why?”

He turned and looked at her. “Do you know what it’s like, after eighteen years working here, to suddenly feel like I’m a suspect?”

“I’m sorry that’s how she made you feel. I know she can be brusque-”

“No, actually, she wasn’t. She was very polite, very friendly. It was the nature of her questions that made me realize what was going on. What’s it like working with Dr. Isles? Do you two get along?” Yoshima laughed. “Now, why do you suppose she asked me that?”

“She was doing her job, that’s all. It wasn’t an accusation.”

“It felt like one.” He went to the countertop and began lining up jars of formalin for tissue samples. “We’ve worked together almost two years, Dr. Isles.”

“Yes.”

“There’s never been a time, at least that I’m aware of, that you’ve been unhappy with my performance.”

“Never. There’s no one I’d rather work with than you.”

He turned and faced her. Under the harsh fluorescent lights, she saw how much gray peppered his black hair. She had once thought him to be in his thirties. With that placidly seamless face and slender build, he’d seemed somehow ageless. Now, seeing the troubled lines around his eyes, she recognized him for what he was: a man quietly slipping into middle age. As I am.

“There wasn’t a moment,” she said, “not an instant, when I thought you might have-”

”But now you do have to think about it, don’t you? Since Detective Rizzoli’s brought it up, you have to consider the possibility that I vandalized your car. That I’m the one stalking you.”

“No, Yoshima. I don’t. I refuse to.”

His gaze held hers. “Then you’re not being honest with yourself, or with me. Because the thought’s got to be there. And as long as the smallest ounce of mistrust is there, you’re going to be uneasy with me. I can feel it, you can feel it.” He stripped off his gloves, turned, and began writing the deceased’s name on labels. She could see the tension in his shoulders, in the rigid muscles of his neck.

“We’ll get past this,” she said.

“Maybe.”

“Not maybe. We will. We have to work together.”

“Well, I guess that’s up to you.”

She watched him for a moment, wondering how to recapture the cordial relationship they had once enjoyed. Perhaps it wasn’t so cordial after all, she thought. I just assumed it was, while all this time, he’s hidden his emotions from me, just as I hide mine. What a pair we are, the poker-faced duo. Every week tragedy passes across our autopsy table, but I have never seen him cry, nor has he seen me cry. We just go about the business of death like two workers on the factory floor.

He finished labeling the specimen jars and turned back to see she was still standing behind him. “Did you need anything, Dr. Isles?” he asked, and his voice, like his expression, revealed no hint of what had just passed between them. This was the Yoshima she had always known, quietly efficient, poised to offer his assistance.

She responded in kind. She removed X-rays from the envelope she’d carried into the room and mounted Nikki Wells’s films on the light box. “I’m hoping you remember this case,” she said, and flipped on the switch. “It’s from five years ago. A case out in Fitchburg.”

“What’s the name?”

“Nikki Wells.”

He frowned at the X-ray. Focused, immediately, on the collection of fetal bones overlying the maternal pelvis. “This was that pregnant woman? Killed with her sister?”

“You do remember it, then.”

“Both the bodies were burned?”

“That’s right.”

“I remember, it was Dr. Hobart’s case.”

“I’ve never met Dr. Hobart.”

“No, you wouldn’t have. He left about two years before you joined us.”

“Where is he working now? I’d like to talk to him.”

“Well, that would be hard. He’s dead.”

She frowned at him. “What?”

Sadly, Yoshima shook his head. “It was so hard on Dr. Tierney. He felt responsible, even though he had no choice.”

“What happened?”

“There were some… problems with Dr. Hobart. First he lost track of a few slides. Then he misplaced some organs, and the family found out. They sued our office. It was a big mess, a lot of bad publicity, but Dr. Tierney stood by him. Then some drugs went missing from a bag of personal effects, and he had no choice. He asked Dr. Hobart to resign.”

“What happened then?”

“Dr. Hobart went home and swallowed a handful of Oxycontin. They didn’t find him for three days.” Yoshima paused. “That was the autopsy no one here wanted to do.”

“Were there questions about his competence?”

“He may have made some mistakes.”

“Serious ones?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I’m wondering if he missed this.” She pointed to the X-ray. To the bright sliver embedded in the pubic bone. “His report on Nikki Wells doesn’t explain this metallic density here.”

“There are other metallic shadows on that film,” noted Yoshima. “I can see a bra hook here. And this looks like a snap.”

“Yes, but look at the lateral view. This sliver of metal is in the bone. Not overlying it. Did Dr. Hobart say anything about it to you?”

“Not that I recall. It’s not in his report?”

“No.”

“Then he must not have thought it was significant.”

Which meant it had probably not been brought up during Amalthea’s trial, she thought. Yoshima returned to his tasks, positioning basins and buckets, assembling paperwork on his clipboard. Though a young woman lay dead only a few feet away, Maura’s attention was not on the fresh corpse, but on the X-ray of Nikki Wells and her fetus, their bones melded together by fire into a single charred mass.

Why did you burn them? What was the point? Had Amalthea felt pleasure, watching the flames consume them? Or was she hoping those flames would consume something else, some trace of herself that she did not want to be found?

Her focus moved from the arc of fetal skull to the bright shard embedded in Nikki’s pubis. A shard as thin as…

A knife’s edge. A broken-off fragment from a blade.

But Nikki had been killed with a blow to the head. Why use a knife on a victim whose face you have just crushed with a crowbar? She stared at that metallic sliver, and its significance suddenly struck her-a significance that sent a chill streaking up her spine.

She crossed to the phone and hit the intercom button. “Louise?”

“Yes, Dr. Isles?”

“Can you co

“Hold on.” Then, a moment later: “I’ve got Dr. Singh on the line.”

“Daljeet?” said Maura.

“No, I haven’t forgotten about that di

“I may owe you a di