Ice Cold: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

in raincoats, like a funeral gathering on a stormy November morning. She did not really want to step out of the warm car and join the dispirited throngs of travelers. Instead of boarding that flight, I could ask him to take me back home, she thought. If we had just a few more hours to talk about this, maybe we could find a way to make it work between us.
    Knuckles rapped on the windshield, and she looked up to see an airport policeman glaring at them. “This is only for unloading,” he barked. “You have to move the vehicle.”
    Daniel slid down the window. “I’m just dropping her off.”
    “Well, don’t take all day.”
    “I’ll get your luggage,” Daniel said. He stepped out of the car.
    For a moment they stood shivering together on the curb, silent amid the cacophony of rumbling buses and traffic whistles. If he were my husband, she thought, we would kiss each other goodbye right here. But for too long, they had scrupulously avoided any public displays of affection, and although he was not wearing his clerical collar this morning, even a hug felt dangerous.
    “I don’t have to go to this conference,” she said. “We could spend the week together.”
    He sighed. “Maura, I can’t just disappear for a week.”
    “When can you?”
    “I need time to arrange a leave. We’ll get away, I promise.”
    “It always has to be someplace else, though, doesn’t it? Someplace where no one knows us. For once, I’d like to spend a week with you without having to go
away
.”
    He glanced at the policeman, who was moving back in their direction. “We’ll talk about it when you get back next week.”
    “Hey, mister!” the cop yelled. “Move your car
now.”
    “Of course we’ll talk.” She laughed. “We’re good at talking about it, aren’t we? It’s all we ever seem to do.” She grabbed her suitcase.
    He reached for her arm. “Maura, please. Let’s not walk away from each other like this. You know I love you. I just need time to work this through.”
    She saw the pain carved on his face. All the months of deception, the indecision and guilt, had left their scars, had darkened whatever joy he’d found with her. She could have comforted him with just a smile, a reassuring squeeze of his arm, but at that moment she could not see past her own pain. All she could think of was retaliation.
    “I think we’ve run out of time,” she said, and walked away, into the terminal. The instant the glass doors whooshed shut behind her, she regretted her words. But when she stopped to look back through the window, he was already climbing into his car.
    T HE MAN’S LEGS were splayed apart, exposing ruptured testicles and the seared skin of buttocks and perineum. The morgue photo had flashed onto the screen without any advance warning from the lecturer, yet no one sitting in the darkened hotel conference room gave so much as a murmur of dismay. This audience was inured to the sight of ruined and broken bodies. For those who have seen and touched charred flesh, who are familiar with its stench, a sterile slide show holds few horrors. In fact, the white-haired man seated beside Maura had dozed off several times, and in the semi-darkness she could see his head bob as he struggled between sleep and wakefulness, impervious to the succession of gruesome photos glowing on the screen.
    “What you see here are typical injuries sustained from a car bomb. The victim was a forty-five-year-old Russian businessman who climbed into his Mercedes one morning—a very nice Mercedes, I might add. When he turned the ignition key, he set off the boobytrap of explosives that had been placed underneath his seat. As you can see from the X-rays …” The speaker clicked the computer mouse, and the next PowerPoint slide appeared on screen. It was a radiograph of a pelvis that was sheared apart at the pubis. Shards of bone and metal had been blasted throughout the soft tissues. “The force of the explosion blew car fragments straight up into his perineum, rupturing the scrotum and shearing off the ischial tuberosities. I’m sorry to say that we’re becoming more and more familiar with explosive injuries like these, especially in this era of terrorist attacks. This was quite a small bomb, meant to kill only the driver. When you move into terrorism, you’re talking about far more massive explosions with multiple casualties.”
    Again he clicked the mouse, and a photo of excised organs appeared, glistening like butcher shop offerings