Ice Cold: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

deeply grieving Daniel Brophy was now inseclusion, and would not be attending the services. He had said his private goodbyes to Maura; to bare his pain in public was more than anyone should ask of him.
    “We’d better take our seats,” Gabriel said gently. “They’re about to begin.”
    She followed her husband up the aisle to the front pew. The closed coffin loomed right in front of her, framed by massive vases of lilies. Anthony Sansone had spared no expense, and the coffin’s mahogany surface was polished to such a bright gloss that she could see her own reflection.
    The officiating priest entered—not Brophy, but the Reverend Gail Harriman of the Episcopal Church. Maura would have appreciated the fact that a woman was performing her memorial service. She would have liked this church as well, known for its open policy of welcoming all into its fold. She hadn’t believed in God, but she had believed in fellowship, and she would have approved.
    As the Reverend Harriman began to speak, Gabriel took Jane’s hand. She felt her throat close up and fought back humiliating tears. Through the forty minutes of homilies and hymns and words of remembrance, she struggled to stay in control, her teeth clenched, her back pressed rigidly against the pew. When at last the service ended, she was still dry-eyed, but all her muscles ached as though she had just staggered off the battlefield.
    The six pallbearers rose, Gabriel and Sansone among them, and they shepherded the casket in its slow progression up the aisle, toward the hearse that waited outside. As the other mourners filed from the building, Jane did not move. She remained in her seat, imagining Maura’s final journey. The solemn drive to the crematorium. The slide into the flames. The final rendering of bone into ashes.
    I can’t believe I will never see you again
.
    She felt her cell phone go off. During the memorial service, she had turned off the ringer, and the sudden vibration against her belt was a startling reminder that duty still demanded her attention.
    The call was from a Wyoming area code. “Detective Rizzoli,” she answered quietly.
    It was Queenan’s voice on the line. “Does the name Elaine Salinger mean anything to you?” he asked.
    “Should it?”
    “So you’ve never heard that name before.”
    She sighed. “I just sat through Maura’s memorial service. I’m afraid I’m not really focusing on the point of this call.”
    “A woman named Elaine Salinger has just been reported missing. She was due back at her job in San Diego yesterday, but it seems she never returned from vacation. And she never caught her flight home from Jackson Hole.”
    San Diego. Douglas Comley was from San Diego, too
.
    “It turns out they knew one another,” Queenan continued. “Elaine Salinger and Arlo Zielinski and Douglas Comley. They were friends, and they were all booked to fly back on the same day.”
    Jane heard her own heartbeat whooshing in her ears. An image suddenly came back to her, of a torn airline boarding pass that she’d picked up in the ravine. The scrap of paper with the fragment of the passenger’s name:
inger
.
    Salinger.
    “What did this woman look like?” she asked. “How old, how tall?”
    “That’s what I just spent the last hour finding out. Elaine Salinger is thirty-nine years old. Five foot six, a hundred twenty pounds. And a brunette.”
    Jane shot to her feet. The church had not yet emptied out, and she had to push past stragglers as she ran up the aisle, toward the exit. She made it to the door just in time to see the hearse pull away.
    “Stop it!” she yelled.
    Gabriel turned to her. “Jane?”
    “What’s the name of the mortuary? Does anyone know?”
    Sansone looked up at her in puzzlement. “I made the arrangements. What’s the problem, Detective?”
    “Call them,
now
. Tell them the body can’t be cremated.”
    “Why not?”
    “It needs to go to the medical examiner’s office.”
    D R . A BE B RISTOL stared down at the draped cadaver but he made no attempt to uncover it. For a man who spent his workdays cutting open dead bodies, he looked shaken by the prospect of peeling back the sheet. Most of the people in the room were veterans of multiple death scenes, yet they all quailed from what lay beneath the drape. Only Yoshima had so far laid eyes on the body, when he had taken the X-rays after its arrival. Now he hung back from the table, as though so traumatized, he wanted nothing more to do with