Body Double: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

LTHOUGH SHE HAD NO AUTOPSIES on her own schedule that day, at two o’clock Maura headed downstairs and changed into a scrub suit. She was alone in the women’s locker room, and she took her time removing her street clothes, folding her blouse and slacks and placing them in a tidy pile inside the locker. The scrubs felt crisp against her bare skin, like freshly laundered sheets, and she found comfort in the familiar routine of tightening the trouser drawstrings and tucking her hair into a cap. She felt contained and protected by laundered cotton, and by the role she donned along with the uniform. She glanced in the mirror, at a reflection as cool as a stranger’s, all emotions shielded from sight. She left the locker room, walked down the hall, and pushed into the autopsy suite.
    Rizzoli and Frost were already standing beside the table, both of them gowned and gloved, their backs obstructing Maura’s view of the victim. It was Dr. Bristol who first spotted Maura. He stood facing her, his generous girth filling the extra-large surgical gown, and he met her gaze as she entered the room. His eyebrows pinched into a frown above the surgical mask, and she saw the question in his eyes.
    “I thought I’d drop in to watch this one,” she said.
    Now Rizzoli turned to look at her. She, too, was frowning. “Are you sure you want to be here?”
    “Wouldn’t you be curious?”
    “But I’m not sure I’d want to watch. Considering.”
    “I’m just going to observe. If that’s okay with you, Abe.”
    Bristol shrugged. “Well hell, I guess I’d be curious, too,” he said. “Join the party.”
    She moved around to Abe’s side of the table and at her first unobstructed view of the corpse, her throat went dry. She had seen her share of horrors in this lab, had gazed at flesh in every stage of decay, at bodies so damaged by fire or trauma that the remains could scarcely be categorized as human. The woman on the table was, in the scope of her experience, remarkably intact. The blood had been washed away, and the bullet’s entry wound, in the left scalp, was obscured by her dark hair. The face was undamaged, the torso marred only by dependent mottling of the skin. There were fresh puncture marks in the groin and neck, where the morgue assistant Yoshima had drawn blood for lab tests, but the torso was otherwise untouched; Abe’s scalpel had yet to make a single slice. Had the chest already been split open, the cavity exposed, the body would have struck her as a far less disturbing sight. Opened corpses are anonymous. Hearts and lungs and spleens are merely organs, so lacking in individuality that they can be transplanted, like spare auto parts, between bodies. But this woman was still whole, her features startlingly recognizable. Last night, Maura had seen the corpse fully clothed and in shadow, lit only by the beam of Rizzoli’s Maglite. Now the features were harshly lit by autopsy lamps, the clothes stripped off to reveal the naked torso, and those features were more than merely familiar.
    Dear god, that’s my own face, my own body, on the table.
    Only she knew just how close the resemblance was. No one else in that room would have seen the shape of Maura’s bare breasts, the curve of her thighs. They knew only what she allowed them to see, her face, her hair. They could not possibly know that the similarities between her and this corpse were as intimate as the flecks of reddish brown in the pubic hair.
    Maura looked at the woman’s hands, the fingers long and slender like her own. A pianist’s hands. The fingers had already been inked. Skull and dental X-rays had been completed as well; the dental panograph was now displayed on the light box, two white rows of teeth glowing in a Cheshire cat’s grin. Is that how my X-rays would look? she wondered. Are we the same, right down to the enamel on our teeth?
    She asked, in a voice that struck her as unnaturally calm, “Have you learned anything else about her?”
    “We’re still checking on that name, Anna Jessop,” said Rizzoli. “All we have so far is that Massachusetts driver’s license, issued four months ago. It says she’s forty years old. Five foot seven, black hair, green eyes. A hundred twenty pounds.” Rizzoli eyed the corpse on the table. “I’d say she fits that description.”
    So do I, thought Maura. I’m forty years old and five foot seven. Only the weight is different; I weigh a hundred twenty-five. But what woman doesn’t lie about her