Body Double: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

was a big mess, a lot of bad publicity, but Dr. Tierney stood by him. Then some drugs went missing from a bag of personal effects, and he had no choice. He asked Dr. Hobart to resign.”
    “What happened then?”
    “Dr. Hobart went home and swallowed a handful of Oxycontin. They didn’t find him for three days.” Yoshima paused. “That was the autopsy no one here wanted to do.”
    “Were there questions about his competence?”
    “He may have made some mistakes.”
    “Serious ones?”
    “I’m not sure what you mean.”
    “I’m wondering if he missed this.” She pointed to the X-ray. To the bright sliver embedded in the pubic bone. “His report on Nikki Wells doesn’t explain this metallic density here.”
    “There are other metallic shadows on that film,” noted Yoshima. “I can see a bra hook here. And this looks like a snap.”
    “Yes, but look at the lateral view. This sliver of metal is
in
the bone. Not overlying it. Did Dr. Hobart say anything about it to you?”
    “Not that I recall. It’s not in his report?”
    “No.”
    “Then he must not have thought it was significant.”
    Which meant it had probably not been brought up during Amalthea’s trial, she thought. Yoshima returned to his tasks, positioning basins and buckets, assembling paperwork on his clipboard. Though a young woman lay dead only a few feet away, Maura’s attention was not on the fresh corpse, but on the X-ray of Nikki Wells and her fetus, their bones melded together by fire into a single charred mass.
    Why did you burn them? What was the point?
Had Amalthea felt pleasure, watching the flames consume them? Or was she hoping those flames would consume something else, some trace of herself that she did not want to be found?
    Her focus moved from the arc of fetal skull to the bright shard embedded in Nikki’s pubis. A shard as thin as . . .
    A knife’s edge. A broken-off fragment from a blade.
    But Nikki had been killed with a blow to the head. Why use a knife on a victim whose face you have just crushed with a crowbar? She stared at that metallic sliver, and its significance suddenly struck her—a significance that sent a chill streaking up her spine.
    She crossed to the phone and hit the intercom button. “Louise?”
    “Yes, Dr. Isles?”
    “Can you connect me with Dr. Daljeet Singh? The medical examiner’s office in Augusta, Maine.”
    “Hold on.” Then, a moment later: “I’ve got Dr. Singh on the line.”
    “Daljeet?” said Maura.
    “No, I haven’t forgotten about that dinner I owe you!” he answered.
    “I may owe
you
a dinner, if you can answer this question for me.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Those skeletal remains we dug up in Fox Harbor. Have you identified them yet?”
    “No. It may take a while. There are no missing persons reports on file in either Waldo or Hancock County that would match these remains. Either these bones are very old, or these people were not from the area.”
    “Have you requested an NCIC search yet?” she asked. The National Crime Information Center, administered through the FBI, maintained a searchable database of missing persons cases from across the country.
    “Yes, but since I can’t narrow it down to any particular decade, I got back pages of names. Everything on record for the New England area.”
    “Maybe I can help you narrow down your search parameters.”
    “How?”
    “Specify just the missing persons cases from 1955 to 1965.”
    “Can I ask how you came up with that particular decade?”
    Because that’s when my mother was living in Fox Harbor, she thought.
My mother, who has killed others.
    But all she said was: “An educated guess.”
    “You’re being very mysterious.”
    “I’ll explain it all when I see you.”
    For once, Rizzoli was letting Maura drive, but only because they were in Maura’s Lexus, heading north toward the Maine Turnpike. During the night, a storm front had blown in from the west, and Maura had awakened to the sound of rain drumming her roof. She’d made coffee, read the newspaper, all the usual things she did on a typical morning. How quickly old routines reasserted themselves, even in the face of fear. Last night she had not stayed in a motel, but had returned home. Had locked all her doors and left the porch light burning, a meager defense against the threats of the night, yet she had slept through the storm’s bluster, and had awakened feeling back in control of her own life.
    I’ve had enough of being afraid, she