Body Double: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

thought. I won’t let it drive me again from my own house.
    Now, as she and Rizzoli headed toward Maine, where even darker rain clouds loomed, she was ready to fight back, ready to turn the tables.
Whoever you are, I’m going to track you down and find you. I can be a hunter, too.
    It was two in the afternoon when they arrived at the Maine medical examiner’s building in Augusta. Dr. Daljeet Singh met them in reception and walked them downstairs to the autopsy lab, where the two boxes of bones were waiting on a countertop.
    “This hasn’t been my highest priority,” he admitted as he shook out a plastic sheet. It settled with a soft whish on the steel table, like parachute silk. “They’ve probably been buried for decades; a few more days won’t make much difference.”
    “Did you get back the new search results from NCIC?” asked Maura.
    “This morning. I printed up the list of names. It’s on that desk there.”
    “Dental X-rays?”
    “I’ve downloaded the files they emailed me. Haven’t had a chance yet to review them. I thought I’d wait till you two got here.” He opened the first cardboard box and began removing bones, gently setting them on the plastic sheet. Out came a skull, its cranium caved in. A dirt-stained pelvis and long bones and chunky spine. A bundle of ribs, which clattered together like a bamboo wind chime. It was otherwise silent in Daljeet’s lab, as stark and bright as Maura’s autopsy suite in Boston. Good pathologists are by nature perfectionists, and he now revealed that aspect of his personality. He seemed to dance around the table, moving with almost feminine grace as he arranged the bones in their anatomic positions.
    “Which one is this?” asked Rizzoli.
    “This is the male,” he said. “Femoral length indicates he was somewhere in the range of five foot ten to six feet tall. Obvious crush fracture of the right temporal bone. Also, there’s an old Colles fracture, well healed.” He glanced at Rizzoli, who looked perplexed. “That’s a broken wrist.”
    “Why do you doctors do that, anyway?”
    “What?”
    “Call it some fancy name. Why don’t you just call it a broken wrist?”
    Daljeet smiled. “Some questions have no easy answers, Detective Rizzoli.”
    Rizzoli looked at the bones. “What else do we know about him?”
    “There are no apparent osteoporotic or arthritic changes of the spine. This was a young adult male, Caucasian. Some dental work here—silver amalgam fillings numbers eighteen and nineteen.”
    Rizzoli pointed to the cratered temporal bone. “Is that the cause of death?”
    “That would certainly qualify as a fatal blow.” He turned and looked at the second box. “Now, to the female. She was found about twenty yards away.”
    On the second autopsy table, he again spread out a plastic sheet. Together, he and Maura laid out the next collection of remains in their anatomical positions, like two fussy waiters arranging a place setting for dinner. Bones clattered against the table. The dirt-encrusted pelvis. Another skull, smaller, the supraorbital ridges more delicate than the man’s. Leg bones, arm bones, sternum. A bundle of ribs, and two paper sacks containing loose carpal and tarsal bones.
    “So here’s our Jane Doe,” said Daljeet, surveying the finished arrangement. “I can’t tell you the cause of death here, because there’s nothing to go on. She appears to be young, also Caucasian. Twenty to thirty-five years old. Height around five foot three, no old fractures. Dentition’s very good. A little chip here, on the canine, and a gold crown on number four.”
    Maura glanced at the X-ray viewing box, where two films were mounted. “Are those their dental films?”
    “Male’s on the left, female on the right.” Daljeet went to the sink to wash the dirt from his hands and yanked out a paper towel. “So there you have it, John and Jane Doe.”
    Rizzoli picked up the printout of names that NCIC had emailed to Daljeet that morning. “Jesus. There are dozens of entries here. So many people missing.”
    “And that’s only for the New England region. Caucasians between the ages of twenty and forty-five.”
    “All these reports are from the 1950s and ’60s.”
    “That’s the time frame Maura specified.” Daljeet crossed to his laptop computer. “Okay, let’s take a look at some of the X-rays they sent.” He opened the file that had been emailed to him from NCIC. A row of icons appeared, each labeled with a case