Ice Cold: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

believed in it. It would probably strike her as odd to have a religious service at her funeral. And as a nonbeliever, wouldn’t she be denied a Catholic funeral, anyway?”
    Brophy looked away. “Yes,” he conceded. “That is official policy.”
    “There’s also the question of whether she would have wanted burial or cremation. Do we know what Maura wanted? Did she ever broach the subject with you?”
    “Why would she? She was
young!”
Brophy’s voice suddenly broke. “When you’re only forty-two, you don’t think about how you want your body disposed of! You don’t think of who should and shouldn’t be invited to the funeral. You’re too busy being
alive.”
He took a deep breath and looked away.
    No one spoke for a long time. The only sound was the steady whine of the jet engines.
    “So we have to make those decisions for her,” Sansone finally said.
    “We?”
asked Brophy.
    “I’m only trying to offer my help. And the necessary funds, whatever it may cost.”
    “Not everything can be bought and paid for.”
    “Is that what you think I’m trying to do?”
    “It’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Why you’ve swooped in with your private jet and taken control? Because you can?”
    Jane reached out to touch Brophy’s arm. “Daniel. Hey, relax.”
    “I’m here because I cared about Maura, too,” said Sansone.
    “As you made so abundantly obvious to both of us.”
    “Father Brophy, it was always clear to me where Maura’s affections lay. Nothing I could do, nothing I could offer her, would have changed the fact that she loved you.”
    “Yet you were always waiting in the shadows. Hoping for a chance.”
    “A chance to offer my help if she ever needed it. Help that she never asked for while she was alive.” Sansone sighed. “If only she had. I might have …”
    “Saved her?”
    “I can’t rewrite history. But we both know things could have been different.” He looked straight at Brophy. “She could have been happier.”
    Brophy’s face flushed a deep red. Sansone had just delivered the cruelest of truths, but it was a truth obvious to anyone who knew Maura, anyone who’d watched her over the past few months and seen how her already slender frame had become thinner, how sadness had dimmed her smile. She was not alone in her pain: Jane had seen the same sadness reflected in Daniel Brophy’s eyes, compounded by guilt. He loved Maura, yet he’d made her miserable, a fact that was all the harder for him to bear because it was Sansone pointing it out.
    Brophy half rose from his seat, his hands clenched into fists, and she reached for his arm. “Stop it,” she said. “Both of you! Why are you two doing this? It’s not some contest to decide who loved her the most. We all cared about her. It doesn’t matter now who would have made her happier. She’s dead and there’s no way to change history.”
    Brophy sank back in his seat, the rage draining from his body. “She deserved better,” he said. “Better than me.” Turning, he stared out the window, retreating into his own misery.
    She started to reach out to him again, but Gabriel stopped her. “Give him some space,” he whispered.
    So she did. She left Brophy to his silence and his regrets, and she joined her husband on the other side of the aisle. Sansone rose and moved as well, to the rear of the plane, retreating into his own thoughts. For the remainder of the flight they sat separate and silent, as the plane with Maura’s body soared eastward, toward Boston.

O
H MAURA, IF ONLY YOU WERE HERE TO SEE THIS .
    Jane stood outside the entrance to Emmanuel Episcopal Church and watched as a steady stream of mourners arrived to pay their last respects to Dr. Maura Isles. Maura would be surprised by all this fuss. Impressed and maybe a little embarrassed, too: She never did enjoy being the center of attention. Jane recognized many of these people because they came from the same world that she and Maura both inhabited, a world that revolved around death. She spotted Drs. Bristol and Costas from the ME’s office, and quietly greeted Maura’s secretary, Louise, and Maura’s morgue assistant, Yoshima. There were cops, too—Jane’s partner, Barry Frost, as well as most of the homicide unit, all of whom were well acquainted with the woman they privately referred to as the Queen of the Dead. A queen who herself had now entered that realm.
    But the one man whom Maura loved above all was not here, and Jane understood why. A