Body Double: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

that coating of dirt, on revealing what lay beneath. As the crust melted, her pulse quickened. The last fleck of dirt suddenly fell away. She stared at what was now revealed beneath the magnifier. Straightening, she looked at Daljeet.
    “What is it?” he said.
    “Take a look. It’s right at the edge, where the bones articulate.”
    He bent to look through the lens. “You mean that little nick? Is that what you’re talking about?”
    “Yes.”
    “It’s pretty subtle.”
    “But it’s there.” She took a deep breath. “I brought an X-ray. It’s in my car. I think you should look at it.”
    Rain battered her umbrella as she walked out to the parking lot. As she pressed the UNLOCK button on her key ring, she couldn’t avoid glancing at the scratches on her passenger door. A claw mark meant to scare her.
All it did is make me angry. Ready to fight back.
She took the envelope out of the backseat and sheltered it under her coat as she carried it into the building.
    Daljeet looked bewildered as he watched her clip Nikki Wells’s films onto the light box. “What is this case you’re showing me?”
    “A five-year-old homicide in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. The victim’s skull was crushed and her body later burned.”
    Daljeet frowned at the X-ray. “Pregnant female. The fetus looks close to term.”
    “But this is what caught my eye.” She pointed to the bright sliver embedded in Nikki Wells’s pubic symphysis. “I think it’s the broken edge of a knife blade.”
    “But Nikki Wells was killed with a tire iron,” said Rizzoli. “Her skull was smashed in.”
    “That’s right,” said Maura.
    “Then why use a knife as well?”
    Maura pointed to the X-ray. To the fetal bones curled over Nikki Wells’s pelvis. “That’s why. That’s what the killer really wanted.”
    For a moment Daljeet didn’t speak. But she knew, without his saying a word, that he understood what she was thinking. He turned back to the remains of Karen Sadler. He picked up the pelvis. “A midline incision, straight down the abdomen,” he said. “The blade would hit bone, right where this nick is . . .”
    Maura thought of Amalthea’s knife, slicing down a young woman’s abdomen with a stroke so decisive the blade stops only when it collides with bone. She thought of her own profession, where knives played such a large part, and of the days she spent in the autopsy lab, slicing skin and organs.
We are both cutters, my mother and I. But I cut dead flesh, and she cut the living.
    “That’s why you didn’t find fetal bones in Karen Sadler’s grave,” said Maura.
    “But your other case—” He gestured toward the X-ray of Nikki Wells. “That fetus wasn’t taken. It was burned with the mother. Why make an incision to extract it, and then kill it anyway?”
    “Because Nikki Wells’s baby had a congenital defect. An amniotic band.”
    “What’s that?” asked Rizzoli.
    “It’s a membranous strand that sometimes stretches across the amniotic sac,” said Maura. “If it wraps around a fetus’s limb, it can constrict blood flow, even amputate the limb. The defect was diagnosed during Nikki’s second trimester.” She pointed to the X-ray. “You can see the fetus is missing its right leg beneath the knee.”
    “That’s not a fatal defect?”
    “No, it would have survived. But the killer would have seen the defect immediately. She would have seen it wasn’t a perfect baby. I think that’s why she didn’t take it.” Maura turned and looked at Rizzoli. Could not avoid confronting the fact of Rizzoli’s pregnancy. The swollen belly, the estrogenic flush of her cheeks. “She wanted a perfect baby.”
    “But Karen Sadler’s wouldn’t have been perfect either,” Rizzoli pointed out. “She was only eight months pregnant. The lungs wouldn’t be mature, right? It would need an incubator to survive.”
    Maura looked down at Karen Sadler’s bones. She thought of the site from which they had been recovered. Thought, too, of the husband’s bones, buried twenty yards away. But not in the same grave—a separate spot. Why dig two different holes? Why not bury husband and wife together?
    Her mouth suddenly went dry. The answer left her stunned.
    They were not buried at the same time.

TWENTY-ONE
    T HE COTTAGE HUDDLED beneath rain-heavy tree branches, as though cringing from their touch. When Maura had first seen it the week before, she had thought the house merely depressing, a dark little box slowly being strangled