Last to Die: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

usual place at the table. Instead she stood back as Dr. Owen and Randy positioned instrument trays and adjusted lights. In truth, she did not want to move any closer, did not want to look into Anna’s face. Only yesterday she had seen awareness in those eyes, and now the absence of it was a stark reminder that bodies are merely shells, that whatever constituted a soul was fleetingand easily extinguished. Emma Owen was right, she thought. This isn’t an autopsy I should watch.
    She turned instead to the preliminary X-rays hanging on the light box. As Dr. Owen and her assistant undressed the corpse, Maura stayed focused on images that had no familiar face. Nothing in these films surprised her. Last night, just by palpation, she had detected depressed fractures of the left parietal bone, and now she saw the evidence in black and white, a subtle spider’s web of cracks. She turned next to the rib cage where, even through the vague shadows of clothing, she spotted massive fracturing of ribs two through eight on the left. The force of free fall had fractured the pelvis as well, compressing the sacral foramen and cracking apart the ramus of the pubic bone. Exactly what one would expect to see in a body dropped from a height. Even before they sliced open the chest, Maura could predict what they would find in the thoracic cavity because she had seen the results of free fall in other bodies. While a fall might crack ribs and crush a pelvis, what ultimately killed was the force of abrupt deceleration tugging on heart and lungs, ripping delicate tissues and tearing great vessels. When they sliced open Anna’s chest, they would most likely find it filled with blood.
    “How the hell did she get these?” Randy said.
    Dr. Owen called out: “Dr. Isles, you’ll want to look at this.”
    Maura crossed to the table. They had unbuttoned the top of Anna’s dress, but had not yet peeled it off the hips. The corpse was still wearing a bra, a practical white D-cup with no lace, no frills. They all stared at the exposed skin.
    “These are the weirdest scars I’ve ever come across,” said Dr. Owen.
    Maura stared, stunned by what she saw. “Let’s get the rest of her clothes off,” she said.
    With three of them working together, they quickly removed the bra, pulled the dress down. As they peeled the underwear waistband over the hips, Maura remembered the pelvic fractures that she hadjust seen on X-ray and grimaced at the thought of those bony fragments grinding together. Thought of the screams she’d once heard in the ER from a young man whose pelvis had been crushed in a barge accident. But Anna was beyond pain, and she surrendered her clothes without a whimper. Stripped naked, she now lay exposed, her body bruised and deformed by broken ribs and skull and pelvis.
    Yet it was the marks on her skin that they stared at. Marks that were invisible to the X-ray machine, and revealed only now. The scars were spread across the front of her torso, an ugly grid of knots on her breasts, her abdomen, even her shoulders. Maura thought about the modest Mother Hubbard gowns that Anna wore even on warm days, dresses chosen not because of her eccentric sense of style, but for concealment. She wondered how many years it had been since Anna had donned a bathing suit or sunbathed on a beach. These scars looked old, permanent souvenirs of some unspeakable ordeal.
    “Could these be some kind of skin grafts?” asked Randy.
    “These aren’t skin grafts,” said Dr. Owen.
    “Then what are they?”
    “I don’t know.” Dr. Owen looked at Maura. “Do you?”
    Maura didn’t answer. She turned her attention to the lower extremities. Reaching up for the light, she redirected it to the shins, where the skin was darker. Thicker. She looked at Randy. “We need detailed X-rays of the legs. The tibias in particular, and both ankles.”
    “I already did the skeletal survey,” said Randy. “The films are hanging there right now. You can see all the fractures.”
    “I’m not concerned about new fractures. I’m looking for old ones.”
    “How does this help us with cause of death?” said Dr. Owen.
    “It’s about understanding the victim. Her past, her state of mind. She can’t talk to us, but her body still can.”
    Maura and Dr. Owen retreated to the anteroom, where they watched through the viewing window as Randy, now garbed in a lead apron, positioned the body for a new set of X-rays.
How many scars were you hiding, Anna?
The marks on her