Vanish

Turning to the light box where X-rays were hanging, he asked: “Those are Olena’s?”

“Yes.”

He moved in for a closer look. Saw a bright comma against the skull, a scattering of fragments throughout the cranial cavity.

“That’s all internal ricochet,” she said.

“And this C-shaped opacity here?”

“It’s a fragment caught between the scalp and the skull. Just a piece of lead that sheared off as the bullet punctured bone.”

“Do we know which member of the entry team fired this head shot?”

“Not even Hayder has a list of their names. By the time our Crime Scene Unit processed the scene, the entry team was probably on its way back to Washington, and beyond our reach. They swept up everything when they left. Weapons, cartridge evidence. They even took the knapsack that Joseph Roke brought into the building. They left us only the bodies.”

“It’s how the world works now, Maura. The Pentagon’s authorized to send a commando unit into any American city.”

“I’ll tell you something.” She set down her scalpel and looked at him. “This scares the hell out of me.”

The intercom buzzed. Maura glanced up as her secretary said, over the speaker: “Dr. Isles, Agent Barsanti’s on the line again. He wants to talk to you.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Not a thing.”

“Good. Just say I’ll call him back.” She paused. “When and if I have the time.”

“He’s getting really rude, you know.”

“Then you don’t have to be polite to him.” Maura looked at Yoshima. “Let’s finish up before we get interrupted again.”

She reached deep into the open belly and began resecting the abdominal organs. Out came stomach and liver and pancreas and endless loops of small intestine. Slitting open the stomach, Maura found it empty of food; only greenish secretions dripped out into the basin. “Liver, spleen, and pancreas within normal limits,” she noted. Gabriel watched the foul-smelling offal pile up in the basin, and it disturbed him to think that in his own belly were the same glistening organs. Looking down at Olena’s face, he thought: Once you cut beneath the skin, even the most beautiful woman looks like any other. A mass of organs encased in a hollow package of muscle and bone.

“All right,” Maura said, her voice muffled as she probed even deeper in the cavity. “I can see where the other bullets tracked through. They’re up against the spine here, and we’ve got some retroperitoneal bleeding.” The abdomen was now gutted of most of its organs, and she was peering into an almost hollow shell. “Could you put up the abdominal and thoracic films? Let me just check the position of those other two bullets.”

Yoshima crossed to the light box, took down the skull films, and clipped up a new set of X-rays. The ghostly shadows of heart and lungs glowed inside their bony cage of ribs. Dark pockets of gas were lined up like bumper cars inside intestinal tu

Gabriel stared at the films for a moment, and his gaze suddenly narrowed as he remembered what Joe had told him. “There’s no view of the arms,” he said.

“Unless there’s obvious trauma, we don’t normally X-ray the limbs,” said Yoshima.

“Maybe you should.”

Maura glanced up. “Why?”

Gabriel went back to the table and examined the left arm. “Look at this scar. What do you think of it?”

Maura circled around to the corpse’s left side and examined the arm. “I see it, just above the elbow. It’s well healed. I don’t feel any masses.” She looked at Gabriel. “What about it?”

“It’s something that Joe told me. I know it sounds crazy.”

“What?”

“He claimed she had a microchip implanted in her arm. Right here, under the skin, to track her whereabouts.”

For a moment Maura just stared at him. Suddenly she laughed. “That’s not a very original delusion.”

“I know, I know what it sounds like.”

“It’s a classic. The government-implanted microchip.”

Gabriel turned to look once again at the X-rays. “Why do you think Barsanti is so eager to transfer these bodies? What does he think you’re going to find?”

Maura fell silent for a moment, her gaze on Olena’s arm.

Yoshima said, “I can X-ray that arm right now. It will only take a few minutes.”

Maura sighed and stripped off her soiled gloves. “It’s almost certainly a waste of time, but we might as well settle the question right now.”

In the anteroom, shielded behind lead, Maura and Gabriel watched through the window as Yoshima positioned the arm on a film cassette and angled the collimator. Maura is right, thought Gabriel, this is probably a waste of time, but he needed to locate the dividing line between fear and paranoia, between truth and delusion. He saw Maura glance up at the clock on the wall, and knew she was anxious to continue cutting. The most important part of the autopsy-the head and neck dissection-had yet to be completed.

Yoshima retrieved the film cassette and disappeared into the processing room.

“Okay, he’s done. Let’s get back to work,” Maura said. She pulled on fresh gloves and moved back to the table. Standing at the corpse’s head, hands tu

Yoshima re-emerged from the processing room. “Dr. Isles?”

“X-ray’s ready?”

“Yes. And there’s something here.”

Maura glanced up. “What?”

“You can see it under the skin.” He mounted the X-ray on the light box. “This thing,” he said, pointing.

Maura crossed to the X-ray and stared in silence at the thin white strip tracing through soft tissue. Nothing natural could be that straight, that uniform.

“It’s man-made,” said Gabriel. “Do you think-”

“That’s not a microchip,” said Maura.

“There is something there.”

“It’s not metallic. It’s not dense enough.”

“What are we looking at?”

“Let’s find out.” Maura returned to the corpse and picked up her scalpel. Rotating the left arm, she exposed the scar. The cut she made was startlingly swift and deep, a single stroke that sliced through skin and subcutaneous fat, all the way down to muscle. This patient would never complain about an ugly incision or a severed nerve; the indignities she suffered in this room, on that table, meant nothing to senseless flesh.

Maura reached for a pair of forceps and plunged the tips into the wound. As she rooted around in freshly incised tissue, Gabriel was repelled by the brutal exploration, but he could not turn away. He heard her give a murmur of satisfaction, and suddenly her forceps re-emerged, the tips clamped around what looked like a glistening matchstick.

“I know what this is,” she said, setting the object on a specimen tray. “This is Silastic tubing. It’s simply migrated deeper than it should have after it was inserted. It’s been encapsulated by scar tissue. That’s why I couldn’t feel it through the skin. We needed an X-ray to know it was even there.”

“What’s this thing for?”

“Norplant. This tube contained a progestin that’s slowly released over time, preventing ovulation.”

“A contraceptive.”

“Yes. You don’t see many of these implanted anymore. The product has been discontinued in the US. Usually they’re implanted six at a time, in a fanlike pattern. Whoever removed the other five missed this one.”

The intercom buzzed. “Dr. Isles?” It was Louise again. “You have a call.”

“Can you take a message?”

“I think you need to answer this one. It’s Joan Anstead, in the governor’s office.”