Body Double: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

up and tried to climb out of the hole. Found a dry wisp of vine that immediately disintegrated in her hands. She clawed at the dirt, but could not find a handhold, could not pull herself even a few inches without sliding back. Her screams pierced the darkness.
    “Elijah!” she shrieked.
    Her only answer was stones thudding onto wood.

ONE
    Pesez le matin que vous n’irez peut-être pas jusqu’au soir,
    Et au soir que vous n’irez peut-être pas jusqu’au matin.
    Be aware every morning that you may not last the day,
    And every evening that you may not last the night.
    —E NGRAVED PLAQUE IN THE CATACOMBS OF P ARIS
    A ROW OF SKULLS glared from atop a wall of intricately stacked femurs and tibias. Though it was June, and she knew the sun was shining on the streets of Paris sixty feet above her, Dr. Maura Isles felt chilled as she walked down the dim passageway, its walls lined almost to the ceiling with human remains. She was familiar, even intimate, with death, and had confronted its face countless times on her autopsy table, but she was stunned by the scale of this display, by the sheer number of bones stored in this network of tunnels beneath the City of Light. The one-kilometer tour took her through only a small section of the catacombs. Off-limits to tourists were numerous side tunnels and bone-filled chambers, their dark mouths gaping seductively behind locked gates. Here were the remains of six million Parisians who had once felt the sun on their faces, who had hungered and thirsted and loved, who had felt the beating of their own hearts in their chests, the rush of air in and out of their lungs. They could never have imagined that one day their bones would be unearthed from their cemetery resting places, and moved to this grim ossuary beneath the city.
    That one day they would be on display, to be gawked at by hordes of tourists.
    A century and a half ago, to make room for the steady influx of dead into Paris’s overcrowded cemeteries, the bones had been disinterred and moved into the vast honeycomb of ancient limestone quarries that lay deep beneath the city. The workmen who’d transferred the bones had not carelessly tossed them into piles, but had performed their macabre task with flair, meticulously stacking them to form whimsical designs. Like fussy stonemasons, they had built high walls decorated with alternating layers of skulls and long bones, turning decay into an artistic statement. And they had hung plaques engraved with grim quotations, reminders to all who walked these passageways that Death spares no one.
    One of the plaques caught Maura’s eye, and she paused among the flow of tourists to read it. As she struggled to translate the words using her shaky high school French, she heard the incongruous sound of children’s laughter echoing in the dim corridors, and the twang of a man’s Texas accent as he muttered to his wife. “Can you believe this place, Sherry? Gives me the goddamn creeps . . .”
    The Texas couple moved on, their voices fading into silence. For a moment Maura was alone in the chamber, breathing in the dust of the centuries. Under the dim glow of the tunnel light, mold had flourished on a cluster of skulls, coating them in a greenish cast. A single bullet hole gaped in the forehead of one skull, like a third eye.
    I know how you died.
    The chill of the tunnel had seeped into her own bones. But she did not move, determined to translate that plaque, to quell her horror by engaging in a useless intellectual puzzle. Come on, Maura. Three years of high school French, and you can’t figure this out? It was a personal challenge now, all thoughts of mortality temporarily held at bay. Then the words took on meaning, and she felt her blood go cold . . .
     
    Happy is he who is forever faced with the hour of his death
    And prepares himself for the end every day.
     
    Suddenly she noticed the silence. No voices, no echoing footsteps. She turned and left that gloomy chamber. How had she fallen so far behind the other tourists? She was alone in this tunnel, alone with the dead. She thought about unexpected power outages, about wandering the wrong way in pitch darkness. She’d heard of Parisian workmen a century ago who had lost their way in the catacombs and died of starvation. Her pace quickened as she sought to catch up with the others, to rejoin the company of the living. She felt Death pressing in too closely in these tunnels. The skulls seemed to stare back at her with