Body Double: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

On both doors, and on the steering wheel. Those prints were never identified.”
    “It doesn’t mean anything. Maybe a mechanic worked on her car and left behind his fingerprints.”
    “A possibility. Now look at the hair and fiber report.”
    Maura turned to the next page and saw that blond hairs had been found on the back seat. The hairs matched Theresa and Nikki Wells. “I see nothing surprising about this. We know the victims were in the car.”
    “But you’ll notice that none of their hairs appear in the front seat. Think about it. Two women stranded at the side of the road. Someone pulls over, offers to give them a lift. And what do the sisters do? They
both
climb into the backseat. It seems a little rude, doesn’t it? Leaving the driver all alone up in front. Unless . . .”
    Maura looked up at her. “Unless someone else was already sitting in that front seat.”
    O’Donnell sat back, a satisfied smile on her lips. “That’s the tantalizing question. A question that was never answered at trial. It’s the reason I keep going back, again and again, to see your mother. I want to learn what the police never bothered to find out: Who was sitting in the front seat with Amalthea?”
    “She hasn’t told you?”
    “Not his name.”
    Maura stared at her. “His?”
    “I’m only guessing the sex. But I do believe that someone was in the car with Amalthea at the moment she spotted those two women on the road. Someone helped her control those victims. Someone who was strong enough to help her stack those bodies in the shed and helped her set them on fire.” O’Donnell paused. “
He’s
the one I’m interested in, Dr. Isles. He’s the one I want to find.”
    “All your visits to Amalthea—they weren’t even about her.”
    “Insanity doesn’t interest me. Evil does.”
    Maura stared at her, thinking: Yes, it would. You enjoy getting close enough to brush against it, sniff it. Amalthea isn’t what attracts you. She’s only the go-between, the one who can introduce you to the real object of your desire.
    “A partner,” said Maura.
    “We don’t know who he is, or what he looks like. But your mother knows.”
    “Then why won’t she say his name?”
    “That’s the question—why is she hiding him? Is she afraid of him? Is she protecting him?”
    “You don’t know if this person even exists. All you have are some unidentified fingerprints. And a theory.”
    “More than a theory. The Beast is real.” O’Donnell leaned forward and said, quietly, almost intimately: “That’s the name she used when she was arrested in Virginia. When the police there interrogated her. She said, quote: ‘The Beast told me to do it,’ unquote.
He
told her to kill those women.”
    In the silence that followed, Maura heard the sound of her own heart, like the quickening beat of a drum. She swallowed. Said, “We’re talking about a schizophrenic. A woman who’s probably having auditory hallucinations.”
    “Or she’s talking about someone real.”
    “The
Beast
?” Maura managed a laugh. “A personal demon, maybe. A monster from her nightmares.”
    “Who leaves behind fingerprints.”
    “That didn’t seem to impress the jury.”
    “They ignored that evidence. I was at that trial. I watched the prosecution build its case against a woman so psychotic, even the prosecution had to know she wasn’t responsible for her actions. But she was the easy target, the easy conviction.”
    “Even though she was clearly insane.”
    “Oh, no one doubted she was psychotic and hearing voices. Those voices might’ve screamed at you to crush a woman’s skull, to burn her body, but the jury still assumes you know right from wrong. Amalthea was a prosecutor’s slam dunk, so that’s what they did. They got it wrong. They missed
him
.” O’Donnell leaned back in her chair. “And your mother is the only one who knows who he is.”
    It was almost six by the time Maura pulled up behind the medical examiner’s building. Two cars were still parked in the lot—Yoshima’s blue Honda and Dr. Costas’s black Saab. There must be a late autopsy, she thought, with a twinge of guilt; today would have been her day on call, but she had asked her colleagues to cover for her.
    She unlocked the back door, walked into the building, and headed straight to her office, meeting no one on the way. On her desk she found what she’d come in to retrieve: two folders, with an attached yellow Post-it note, on which Louise had written:
The