Body Double: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

thinking when . . .” Maura stopped and sighed. “It’s been hard going back to work. That’s all.”
    “Do you really have to?”
    Perplexed by the question, she looked at him. “Do I have a choice?”
    “You make it sound like indentured servitude.”
    “It’s my job. It’s what I’m good at.”
    “Not, in itself, a reason to do it. So why do you?”
    “Why are you a priest?”
    Now it was his turn to look perplexed. He thought about it for a moment, standing very still beside her, the blueness of his eyes muted in the shadows cast by the willow trees. “I made that choice so long ago,” he said, “I don’t think about it much anymore. Or question it.”
    “You must have believed.”
    “I still believe.”
    “Isn’t that enough?”
    “Do you really think that faith is all that’s required?”
    “No, of course not.” She turned and began walking again, along a path dappled with sunlight and shade. Afraid to meet his gaze, afraid that he’d see too much in hers.
    “Sometimes it’s good to come face-to-face with your own mortality,” he said. “It makes us reconsider our lives.”
    “I’d rather not.”
    “Why?”
    “I’m not big on introspection. I grew so impatient with philosophy classes. All those questions without answers. But physics and chemistry, I could understand. They were comforting to me because they taught principles that are reproducible and orderly.” She paused to watch a young woman on Rollerblades skate past, pushing a baby in a stroller. “I don’t like the unexplainable.”
    “Yes, I know. You always want your mathematical equations solved. That’s why you’re having such a hard time with that woman’s murder.”
    “It’s a question without an answer. The sort of thing I hate.”
    She sank onto a wooden bench facing the river. Daylight was fading, and the water flowed black in the thickening shadows. He too sat down, and although they didn’t touch, she was so aware of him, sitting close beside her, that she could almost feel his heat against her bare arm.
    “Have you heard any more about the case from Detective Rizzoli?”
    “She hasn’t exactly been keeping me in the loop.”
    “Would you expect her to?”
    “As a cop, no. She wouldn’t.”
    “And as a friend?”
    “That’s just it, I thought we
were
friends. But she’s told me so little.”
    “You can’t blame her. The victim was found outside your house. She has to wonder—”
    “What, that I’m a suspect?”
    “Or that you were the intended target. It’s what we all thought that night. That it was you in that car.” He stared across the river. “You said you can’t stop thinking about the autopsy. Well, I can’t stop thinking about that night, standing in your street with all those police cars. I couldn’t believe any of it was happening. I
refused
to believe.”
    They both fell silent. Before them flowed a river of dark water, and behind them, a river of cars.
    She asked, suddenly: “Will you have dinner with me tonight?”
    He didn’t answer for a moment, and his hesitation made her flush with embarrassment. What a foolish question. She wanted to take it back, to replay the last sixty seconds. How much better to have just said good-bye and walked away. Instead, she’d blurted out that ill-considered invitation, one that they both knew he shouldn’t accept.
    “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I guess it’s not such a good—”
    ”Yes,” he said. “I’d like to very much.”
    She stood in her kitchen dicing tomatoes for the salad, her hand jittery as it gripped the knife. On the stove simmered a pot of coq au vin, wafting out steam fragrant with the scents of red wine and chicken. An easy, familiar meal that she could cook without consulting a recipe, without having to stop and think about it. She could not cope with any meal more complicated. Her mind was completely focused on the man who was now pouring two glasses of pinot noir.
    He placed one glass beside her on the counter. “What else can I do?”
    “Not a thing.”
    “Make the salad dressing? Wash lettuce?”
    “I didn’t invite you here to make you work. I just thought you’d prefer this to a restaurant, where it’s so public.”
    “You must be tired of always being in the public’s eye,” he said.
    “I was thinking more about you.”
    “Even priests eat out at restaurants, Maura.”
    “No, I meant . . .” She felt herself flush and renewed her efforts with the tomato.
    “I guess it would make