Body Double: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

on that day, nothing had dampened her joy. Not the nausea of morning sickness, or her killer high heels, or the fact that Dwayne drank so much champagne on their wedding night that he fell asleep in their hotel bed before she’d even come out of the bathroom. Nothing mattered, except that she was Mrs. Purvis, and her life, her real life, was finally about to begin.
    And now it’s going to end here, in this box, unless Dwayne saves me.
    He will, won’t he? He does want me back?
    Oh, this was worse than thinking about worms eating her. Change of subject, Mattie!
    What if he doesn’t want me back? What if he was hoping all along that I’d just go away, so he can be with that woman? What if he’s the one who . . .
    No, not Dwayne. If he wanted her dead, why keep her in a box? Why keep her alive?
    She took a deep breath, and her eyes filled with tears. She wanted to live. She’d do anything to live, but she didn’t know how to get herself out of this box. She’d spent hours thinking about how to do it. She had pounded on the walls, kicked again and again against the top. She’d thought about taking apart the flashlight, maybe using its parts to build—what?
    A bomb.
    She could almost hear Dwayne laughing at her, ridiculing her. Oh right, Mattie, you’re a real MacGyver.
    Well, what am I supposed to do?
    Worms . . .
    They squirmed back into her thoughts. Into her future, slithering under her skin, devouring her flesh. They were out there waiting in the soil right outside this box, she thought. Waiting for her to die. Then they would crawl in, to feast.
    She turned on her side and trembled.
    There has to be a way out.

TWENTY
    Y OSHIMA STOOD OVER the corpse, his gloved hand wielding a syringe with a sixteen-gauge needle. The body was a young female, so gaunt that her belly drooped like a sagging tent across the hip bones. Yoshima spread the skin taut over her groin and angled the needle into the femoral vein. He drew back on the plunger and blood, so dark it was almost black, began to fill the syringe.
    He did not look up as Maura came into the room, but stayed focused on his task. She watched in silence as he withdrew the needle and transferred the blood into various glass tubes, working with the calm efficiency of someone who had handled countless tubes of blood from countless corpses. If I’m the queen of the dead, she thought, then Yoshima is surely the king. He has undressed them, weighed them, probed their groins and necks for veins, deposited their organs in jars of formalin. And when the autopsy is done, when I am finished cutting, he is the one who picks up the needle and thread and sews their incised flesh back together again.
    Yoshima cut the needle and deposited the used syringe in the contaminated trash. Then he paused, gazing down at the woman whose blood he had just collected. “She came in this morning,” he said. “Boyfriend found her dead on the couch when he woke up.”
    Maura saw the needle tracks on the corpse’s arms. “What a waste.”
    “It always is.”
    “Who’s doing this one?”
    “Dr. Costas. Dr. Bristol’s in court today.” He wheeled a tray to the table and began laying out instruments. In the awkward silence, the clang of metal seemed painfully loud. Their exchange had been businesslike as usual, but today Yoshima was not looking at her. He seemed to be avoiding her gaze, shying away from even a glance in her direction. Shying, too, from any mention of what had happened in the parking lot last night. But the issue was there, hanging between them, impossible to ignore.
    “I understand Detective Rizzoli called you at home last night,” she said.
    He paused, his profile to her, his hands motionless on the tray.
    “Yoshima,” she said, “I’m sorry if she implied in any way—”
    “Do you know how long I’ve worked in the medical examiner’s office, Dr. Isles?” he cut in.
    “I know you’ve been here longer than any of us.”
    “Eighteen years. Dr. Tierney hired me right after I got out of the army. I served in their mortuary unit. It was hard, you know, working on so many young people. Most of them were accidents or suicides, but that goes with the territory. Young men, they take chances. They get into fights, they drive too fast. Or their wives leave them, so they reach for their weapon and shoot themselves. I thought, at least I can do something for them, I can treat them with the respect due a soldier. And some of them were just kids, barely old enough to