Body Double

“What was her name?” asked Maura.

“Karen. Karen Sadler. I have the case number for you.”

“Give it to me,” said Daljeet, turning back to the computer. “Let’s see if her X-rays are here.” Maura stood close behind him, staring over his shoulder as he clicked on the correct icon, and an image appeared on the screen. It was an X-ray taken when Karen Sadler was alive and sitting in her dentist’s chair. Anxious, perhaps, about the prospect of a cavity and the inevitable drilling that would result. She could not have imagined, as she’d clamped down on the cardboard wing to hold the unexposed film in place, that this same image her dentist captured that day would be glowing, years later, on a pathologist’s computer screen.

Maura saw a row of molars, and the bright metallic glow of a crown. She crossed to the X-ray light box, where Daljeet had clipped up the panograph he’d taken of the unidentified woman’s teeth. She said, softly, “It’s her. These bones are Karen Sadler’s.”

“So we have a double match,” said Daljeet. “Both husband and wife.”

Behind them, Rizzoli flipped through the printouts, looking for Karen Sadler’s missing persons report. “Okay, here she is. Caucasian female, age twenty-five. Blond hair, blue eyes…” She suddenly stopped. “There’s something wrong here. You’d better check those X-rays again.”

“Why?” said Maura.

“Just check them again.”

Maura studied the panograph, then turned to look at the computer screen. “They are a match, Jane. What’s the problem?”

“You’re missing another set of bones.”

“Whose bones?”

“A fetus.” Rizzoli looked at her, a stu

There was a long silence.

“We found no other remains,” Daljeet said.

“You could have missed them,” said Rizzoli.

“We sifted the soil. Thoroughly excavated that grave site.”

“Scavengers might have dragged them away.”

“Yes, that’s always possible. But this is Karen Sadler.”

Maura went to the table and stared down at the woman’s pelvis, thinking about another woman’s bones, glowing on an X-ray light box. Nikki Wells was pregnant, too.

She swung the magnifying lens over the table and switched on the light. Focused the lens over the pubic ramus. Reddish dirt had crusted over the symphysis, where the two rami met, joined by leathery cartilage. “Daljeet, could I have a wet Q-tip or gauze? Something to wipe this dirt away.”

He filled a basin of water and tore open a packet of Q-tips. He set them on the tray beside her. “What are you looking for?”

She didn’t answer him. Her attention was focused on dabbing away that coating of dirt, on revealing what lay beneath. As the crust melted, her pulse quickened. The last fleck of dirt suddenly fell away. She stared at what was now revealed beneath the magnifier. Straightening, she looked at Daljeet.

“What is it?” he said.

“Take a look. It’s right at the edge, where the bones articulate.”

He bent to look through the lens. “You mean that little nick? Is that what you’re talking about?”

“Yes.”

“It’s pretty subtle.”

“But it’s there.” She took a deep breath. “I brought an X-ray. It’s in my car. I think you should look at it.”

Rain battered her umbrella as she walked out to the parking lot. As she pressed the UNLOCK button on her key ring, she couldn’t avoid glancing at the scratches on her passenger door. A claw mark meant to scare her. All it did is make me angry. Ready to fight back. She took the envelope out of the backseat and sheltered it under her coat as she carried it into the building.

Daljeet looked bewildered as he watched her clip Nikki Wells’s films onto the light box. “What is this case you’re showing me?”

“A five-year-old homicide in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. The victim’s skull was crushed and her body later burned.”

Daljeet frowned at the X-ray. “Pregnant female. The fetus looks close to term.”

“But this is what caught my eye.” She pointed to the bright sliver embedded in Nikki Wells’s pubic symphysis. “I think it’s the broken edge of a knife blade.”

“But Nikki Wells was killed with a tire iron,” said Rizzoli. “Her skull was smashed in.”

“That’s right,” said Maura.

“Then why use a knife as well?”

Maura pointed to the X-ray. To the fetal bones curled over Nikki Wells’s pelvis. “That’s why. That’s what the killer really wanted.”

For a moment Daljeet didn’t speak. But she knew, without his saying a word, that he understood what she was thinking. He turned back to the remains of Karen Sadler. He picked up the pelvis. “A midline incision, straight down the abdomen,” he said. “The blade would hit bone, right where this nick is…”

Maura thought of Amalthea’s knife, slicing down a young woman’s abdomen with a stroke so decisive the blade stops only when it collides with bone. She thought of her own profession, where knives played such a large part, and of the days she spent in the autopsy lab, slicing skin and organs. We are both cutters, my mother and I. But I cut dead flesh, and she cut the living.

“That’s why you didn’t find fetal bones in Karen Sadler’s grave,” said Maura.

“But your other case-” He gestured toward the X-ray of Nikki Wells. “That fetus wasn’t taken. It was burned with the mother. Why make an incision to extract it, and then kill it anyway?”

“Because Nikki Wells’s baby had a congenital defect. An amniotic band.”

“What’s that?” asked Rizzoli.

“It’s a membranous strand that sometimes stretches across the amniotic sac,” said Maura. “If it wraps around a fetus’s limb, it can constrict blood flow, even amputate the limb. The defect was diagnosed during Nikki’s second trimester.” She pointed to the X-ray. “You can see the fetus is missing its right leg beneath the knee.”

“That’s not a fatal defect?”

“No, it would have survived. But the killer would have seen the defect immediately. She would have seen it wasn’t a perfect baby. I think that’s why she didn’t take it.” Maura turned and looked at Rizzoli. Could not avoid confronting the fact of Rizzoli’s pregnancy. The swollen belly, the estrogenic flush of her cheeks. “She wanted a perfect baby.”

“But Karen Sadler’s wouldn’t have been perfect either,” Rizzoli pointed out. “She was only eight months pregnant. The lungs wouldn’t be mature, right? It would need an incubator to survive.”

Maura looked down at Karen Sadler’s bones. She thought of the site from which they had been recovered. Thought, too, of the husband’s bones, buried twenty yards away. But not in the same grave-a separate spot. Why dig two different holes? Why not bury husband and wife together?

Her mouth suddenly went dry. The answer left her stu

They were not buried at the same time.

TWENTY-ONE

THE COTTAGE HUDDLED beneath rain-heavy tree branches, as though cringing from their touch. When Maura had first seen it the week before, she had thought the house merely depressing, a dark little box slowly being strangled by encroaching woods. Now, as she gazed at it from her car, the windows seemed to stare back like malevolent eyes.

“This is the house where Amalthea grew up,” said Maura. “It wouldn’t have been hard for A

“So A

And like me, she was hungry to know more about our mother, thought Maura. To understand the woman who gave us life, and then abandoned us.

Rain pounded on the car roof and slid in silvery sheets down the windshield.

Rizzoli zipped up her slicker and pulled the hood over her head. “Well, let’s go in and take a look, then.”