Ice Cold: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

of silent houses.
    “You want to give me a hint?” he asked.
    “I didn’t want to talk about it in front of Grace. But I found something.”
    “What?”
    “It’s in this house.” She stopped before the porch and stared up at black windows that reflected no starlight, no moonlight, as if thedarkness within could swallow up even the faintest glimmer of light. She walked up the steps and pushed open the door. The lamp cast a feeble pool of light around them as they crossed the living room. Beyond that pool, in the shadowy circumference, lurked the dark silhouettes of furniture and the reflected glint off the picture frame. The dark-haired man stared back from the portrait, his eyes almost alive in the shadows.
    “That’s what I noticed first,” she said, pointing to the birdcage in the corner.
    Doug moved closer and peered into the cage at the canary lying on the bottom. “Another dead pet.”
    “Like the dog.”
    “Who leaves a pet canary behind to starve?”
    “This bird didn’t starve,” said Maura.
    “What?”
    “Look, there’s plenty of seed.” She brought the lamp up to the cage to show him that the feeder was filled with birdseed, and ice had frozen in the water dispenser. “The windows were left open in this house, too,” she said.
    “It froze to death.”
    “There’s more.” She moved up the hallway and pointed at the streak across the pine floorboards, as though someone had swiped a paintbrush. In the dim candlelight, the stain looked more black than brown.
    Doug stared at the drag mark, and he didn’t try to explain it. He didn’t say anything at all. In silence he followed the smear as it grew broader, until it led him to the staircase. There he stopped, staring down at the dried pool of blood at his feet.
    Maura raised the lamp and the light revealed dark spatters on the steps. “The splash marks start about halfway up,” she said. “Someone fell down those stairs, hitting the steps on the way down. And landed here.” She lowered the lamp, illuminating the dried pool at the bottom of the stairs. Something gleamed in that blood, a silvery thread that she had missed earlier that afternoon. She croucheddown and saw that it was a long blond hair, partially trapped in dried blood.
A woman
. A woman who had lain here while her heart continued to pump, at least for a few minutes. Long enough for a lake of blood to pour from her body.
    “An accident?” said Doug.
    “Or a homicide.”
    In the dim light, she saw his mouth twitch in a half smile. “That’s a medical examiner talking. What I see here isn’t necessarily a crime scene. Just blood.”
    “A lot of it.”
    “But no body. Nothing to tell us one way or another how it happened.”
    “The missing body is what bothers me.”
    “I’d be a lot more bothered if it was still here.”
    “Where is it? Who took it?”
    “The family? Maybe they brought her to the hospital. That would explain why the canary was forgotten.”
    “They would
carry
an injured woman, Doug. They wouldn’t drag her across the floor like a carcass. But if they were trying to get rid of a body …”
    His gaze followed the drag marks until they vanished into the shadows of the hallway. “They never came back to clean up the blood.”
    “Maybe they were planning to,” she said. “Maybe they couldn’t get back into the valley.”
    He looked at her. “The snowstorm kept them away.”
    She nodded. The flame in the lamp shuddered, as though buffeted by a ghostly breath. “Arlo was right. Something terrible happened in this village, Doug. Something that left bloodstains and dead pets and empty houses.” She looked at the floor. “And evidence. Evidence that tells a story. We keep hoping that someone will come back here and find us.” She looked at him. “But what if they’re not here to save us?”
    Doug gave himself a shake, as though trying to snap out of thedark spell she’d spun around him. “We’re talking about a whole community that’s missing, Maura,” he said. “Twelve houses, twelve families. If something happened to this many people, there’d be no way to hide it.”
    “In this valley, you could. You could hide a lot of things.” She looked at the shadows surrounding them, thought of what might be hidden beyond the glow of the lantern, and drew her jacket tighter. “We can’t stay in this place.”
    “You’re the one who thought we should wait to be rescued. You said it this morning.”
    “Since this morning, things