Body Double: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

Come up the road with me a ways. There’s something I need you to look at.”
    “What sort of thing?”
    “That was dispatch on the radio. They got a call from the construction crew right up the road. Their bulldozer turned up some—well, some bones.”
    She frowned. “Human?”
    “That’s what they’re wondering.”
    Maura rode with Gresham in the cruiser, with Ballard following right behind them in his Explorer. The trip was barely worth climbing into the car for, just a short curve up the road, and there the bulldozer was, sitting in a freshly cleared lot. Four men in hard hats stood in the shade next to their pickup trucks. One of them came forward to meet them as Maura, Gresham, and Ballard climbed out of the vehicles.
    “Hey, Chief.”
    “Hey, Mitch. Where is it?”
    “Out near the bulldozer. I spotted that bone, and I just shut my engine right down. There used to be an old farmhouse here, on this lot. Last thing I want to do is dig up some family graveyard.”
    “We’ll just have Dr. Isles here take a look before I make any calls. I’d hate to have the M.E. drive all the way over from Augusta for a bunch of bear bones.”
    Mitch led the way across the clearing. The newly churned-up soil was an obstacle course of ankle-snagging roots and overturned rocks. Maura’s pumps were not designed for hiking, and no matter how carefully she picked her way across the terrain, she could not avoid soiling the black suede.
    Gresham slapped his cheek. “Goddamn blackflies. They sure found us.”
    The clearing was surrounded by thick stands of trees; the air was close here and windless. By now, insects had caught their scent and were swarming, greedy for blood. Maura was grateful she’d chosen to wear long pants that morning; her unprotected face and arms were already turning into blackfly feeding stations.
    By the time they reached the bulldozer, the cuffs of her trousers were soiled. The sun shone down, sparkling on bits of broken glass. The canes of an old rosebush lay uprooted and dying in the heat.
    “There,” said Mitch, pointing.
    Even before she bent down to look more closely at it, Maura already knew what it was, lodged there in the soil. She didn’t touch it, but just crouched there, her shoes sunk deep in freshly overturned earth. Newly exposed to the elements, the paleness of bone peeked through the crust of dried dirt. She heard cawing among the trees and glanced up to see crows flitting like dark specters among the branches.
They know what it is, too.
    “What do you think?” asked Gresham.
    “It’s an ilium.”
    “What’s that?”
    “This bone.” She touched her own, where the pelvis flared against her slacks. She was reminded, suddenly, of the grim fact that beneath skin, beneath muscle, she too was merely skeleton. A structural frame of honeycombed calcium and phosphorus that would endure long after her flesh had rotted. “It’s human,” she said.
    They were silent for a moment. The only sound on that bright June day came from the crows, a gathering flock of them, perched in the trees above, like black fruit among the branches. They stared down with eerie intelligence at the humans, and their caws built to a deafening chorus. Then, as though on cue, their screeches abruptly stopped.
    “What do you know about this place?” Maura asked the bulldozer operator. “What used to be here?”
    Mitch said, “There were some old stone walls here. Foundation of a house. We moved all the stones over there, figured someone could use the rocks for something else.” He pointed to a pile of boulders near the edge of the lot. “Old walls, that’s really nothing unusual. You go walking in the woods, you find a lot of old foundations like this one. Used to be sheep farms all up and down the coast. Gone, now.”
    “So this could be an old grave,” said Ballard.
    “But that bone’s right up where one of the old walls was standing,” said Mitch. “I don’t think you’d want to bury dear old Ma so close to the house. Bad luck, I’d think.”
    “Some people believed it was good luck,” said Maura.
    “What?”
    “In ancient times, an infant buried alive under the cornerstone was supposed to protect the house.”
    Mitch stared at her. A look of
Who the heck are you, lady?
    “I’m just saying that burial practices change over the centuries,” said Maura. “This could very well be an old grave.”
    From overhead came a noisy flapping. The crows simultaneously rose from the tree,