Body Double: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

contraction seized her. This was pain like none she had ever known. It dropped her to her knees. She splashed down into ankle-deep water as the pain crescendoed, clamping her so tightly in its jaws that for a moment her vision went black and she felt herself tilting sideways, toppling. She tasted mud. Writhed, coughing, onto her back, as helpless as an overturned tortoise. The contraction faded. The stars slowly brightened in the sky. She could feel water caressing her hair, lapping at her cheeks. Not cold at all, but warm as a bath. She heard the splash of his footsteps, the snapping of reeds. Watched the cattails part.
    And then he was there, standing above her, towering against the sky. Here to claim his prize.
    He knelt beside her, and the water’s reflection glinted in his eyes in pinpoints of light. What he held in his hand gleamed as well: a knife’s silvery streak. He seemed to know, as he crouched over her body, that she was spent. That her soul was only waiting for release from its exhausted shell.
    He grasped the waistband of her maternity slacks and pulled it down, revealing the white dome of her belly. And still she did not move, but lay catatonic. Already surrendered, already dead.
    He placed one hand on her abdomen; with the other, he grasped the knife, lowering the blade toward bared flesh, bending toward her to make the first cut.
    Water fountained up in a silvery splash as her hand suddenly shot up from the mud. As she aimed the tip of the screwdriver toward his face. Muscles taut with fury, she drove it upward, the pathetic little weapon suddenly launched with lethal aim at his eye.
    This is for me, asshole!
    And this is for my baby!
    She thrust deep, felt the weapon penetrate bone and brain, until the handle lodged in the socket and could sink no deeper.
    He dropped without uttering a sound.
    For a moment she could not move. He had fallen across her thighs, and she could feel the heat of his blood soaking through her clothes. The dead are heavy, so much heavier than the living. She pushed, grunting with the effort, repulsed by the touch of him. At last she rolled him away and he splashed onto his back among the reeds.
    She stumbled to her feet and staggered toward higher ground. Away from the water, away from the blood. She collapsed farther up on the bank, dropping onto a bed of grass. There she lay as the next contraction came and went. And the next, and the next. Through pain-dimmed eyes she watched the quarter moon wheel across the heavens. Saw the stars fade and a pink glow seep into the eastern sky.
    As the sun lifted over the horizon, Mattie Purvis welcomed her daughter into the world.

THIRTY
    T URKEY VULTURES TRACED LAZY CIRCLES in the sky, the black-winged heralds of fresh carrion. The dead do not long escape Mother Nature’s attention. The perfume of decomposition draws blowflies and beetles, crows and rodents, all converging on Death’s bounty. And how am I any different? Maura thought, as she headed down the grassy bank toward the water. She too was drawn to the dead, to poke and prod cold flesh like any scavenger. This was such a beautiful place for so grim a task. The sky was a cloudless blue, the lake like silvered glass. But at the water’s edge, a white sheet draped what the vultures, circling above, were so eager to feast on.
    Jane Rizzoli, standing with Barry Frost and two Massachusetts State Police officers, stepped forward to meet Maura. “Body was lying in a couple inches of water, over in those cattails. We pulled it up onto the bank. Just wanted you to know it’s been moved.”
    Maura stared down at the draped corpse, but did not touch it. She was not quite ready to confront what lay beneath the plastic sheet. “Is the woman all right?”
    “I saw Mrs. Purvis in the ER. She’s a little banged up, but she’ll be fine. And the baby’s doing great.” Rizzoli pointed toward the bank, where tufts of feathery grass grew. “She had it right over there. Managed it all by herself. When the park ranger drove by around seven, he found her sitting at the side of the road, nursing the baby.”
    Maura stared up the bank and thought of the woman laboring alone under the open sky, her cries of pain unheard, while twenty yards away, a corpse cooled and stiffened. “Where did he keep her?”
    “In a pit, about two miles from here.”
    Maura frowned at her. “She made it all this way on foot?”
    “Yeah. Imagine running in the dark, through the trees. And doing it while