Body Double: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

and went to the intercom to buzz Abe’s secretary. “Hello, Stella? Dr. Bristol would like a search for the last case involving a Black Talon bullet. It would have been Dr. Tierney’s . . .”
    “I’ve heard of them,” said Frost, who’d moved to the light box for a closer look at the X-ray. “First time I’ve had a vic with one.”
    “It’s a hollow point, manufactured by Winchester,” said Abe. “Designed to expand and cut through soft tissue. When it penetrates flesh, the copper jacket peels open to form a six-pointed star. Each tip’s as sharp as a claw.” He moved to the corpse’s head. “They were taken off the market in ’93, after some nut out in San Francisco used them to kill nine people in a mass shooting. Winchester got such bad publicity, they decided to stop production. But there are still a few out there in circulation. Every so often, one’ll turn up in a vic, but they’re getting pretty rare.”
    Maura’s gaze was still on the X-ray, on that lethal white star. She thought of what Abe had just said:
Each tip’s as sharp as a claw.
And she remembered the scratch marks left on the victim’s car.
Like the claw mark of a raptor’s talon.
    She turned back to the table, just as Abe completed his scalp incision. In that brief instant, before he peeled the skin flap forward, Maura found herself unavoidably staring at the dead woman’s face. Death had mottled the lips to a dusky blue. The eyes were open, the exposed corneas dry and clouded by exposure to air. The eye’s bright gleam during life is merely the light’s reflection off moist corneas; when the lids no longer blink, when the cornea is no longer bathed in fluid, the eyes turn dry and dull. It’s not the departure of the soul that drains the appearance of life from one’s eyes; it’s simply the cessation of the blink reflex. Maura gazed down at the two clouded bands across the cornea, and for an instant she imagined the eyes as they must have looked while alive. It was a startling glimpse into the mirror. She had the sudden, vertiginous thought that in fact
she
was the one lying on the table. That she was watching her own corpse being autopsied. Didn’t ghosts linger in the same places they frequented while alive? This is my haunt, she thought. The autopsy lab. This is where I’m doomed to spend eternity.
    Abe peeled the scalp forward and the face collapsed like a rubber mask.
    Maura shuddered. Looking away, she noticed that Rizzoli was once again watching her.
Is she looking at me? Or at my ghost?
    The whir of the Stryker saw seemed to drill straight into her marrow. Abe cut through the dome of exposed skull, preserving the segment where the bullet had punched through. Gently, he pried off and removed the cap of bone. The Black Talon tumbled out of the open cranium and clattered into the basin Yoshima was holding beneath it. It gleamed there, its metal points splayed open like the petals of a lethal blossom.
    The brain was mottled with dark blood.
    “Extensive hemorrhage, both hemispheres. Just what you’d expect from the X-rays,” Abe said. “The bullet entered here, left temporal bone. But it didn’t exit. You can see it there, in the films.” He pointed to the light box, where the bullet stood out as a bright starburst, resting against the inner curve of the left occipital bone.
    Frost said, “Funny how it ended up on the same side of the skull it entered.”
    “There was probably ricochet. The bullet punched into the cranium and bounced back and forth, slicing through brain. Expending all its energy on the soft tissue. Like spinning the blades of a blender.”
    “Dr. Bristol?” It was his secretary, Stella, on the intercom.
    “Yeah?”
    “I found that case with the Black Talon. Victim’s name was Vassily Titov. Dr. Tierney did the autopsy.”
    “Who was the detective on that case?”
    “Um . . . here it is. Detectives Vann and Dunleavy.”
    “I’ll check with them,” said Rizzoli. “See what they remember about it.”
    “Thanks, Stella,” called Bristol. He looked at Yoshima, who had the camera ready. “Okay, snap away.”
    Yoshima began to take photos of the exposed brain, capturing a permanent record of its appearance before Abe removed it from its bony house. Here is where a lifetime’s worth of memories were laid down, Maura thought, as she gazed at the glistening folds of gray matter. The ABC’s of childhood. Four times four is sixteen. The first kiss, the first lover, the first