Last to Die

finally drove her to step out onto the roof walk and surrender her body to gravity and the hard earth?
    Randy clipped a new set of films onto the light box and waved to them. As Maura and Dr. Owen reentered the lab, he said: “I don’t see any other fractures on these views.”
    “They’d be old,” said Maura.
    “No scar formation, no deformities. You know, I can recognize those.”
    There was no missing the irritation in his voice. She was the interloper, the high-and-mighty expert from the big city who’d questioned his competence. She chose not to engage him and focused instead on the X-rays. What he had said was correct: At first glance, there were no obvious old fractures of the arms or legs. She moved closer to study first the right tibia, then the left. The darker skin on Anna’s shins had raised her suspicions, and what she saw on these films confirmed her diagnosis.
    “Do you see this, Dr. Owen?” Maura pointed to the outline of the tibia. “Notice the layering and the thickness.”
    The young pathologist frowned. “It is thicker, I agree.”
    “There are endosteal changes here as well. Do you see them? These are highly suggestive.” She looked at Randy. “Can we see the ankle films now?”
    “Suggestive of what?” he asked, still unconvinced by this expert from Boston.
    “Periostitis. Inflammatory changes of the membrane covering the bone.” Maura pulled down the tibia X-rays. “Ankle films, please.”
    Tight-lipped, he shoved the new X-rays under the clips, and what Maura saw in those films swept away any doubts she’d had. Dr. Owen, standing beside her, murmured a troubled:
Oh
.
    “These are classic bony changes,” said Maura. “I’ve seen them only twice before. Once in an immigrant from Algeria. The second was a corpse that turned up in a freighter, a man from South America.”
    “What are you looking at?” said Randy.
    “The changes in the right calcaneus,” said Dr. Owen. She pointed to the right heel bone.
    Maura said, “You can see them in the left calcaneus, too. Those deformities are from multiple old fractures that have since healed.”
    “
Both
her feet were broken?” said Randy.
    “Repeatedly.” She stared at the X-rays and shuddered at their significance. “Falaka,” she said softly.
    “I’ve read about it,” said Dr. Owen. “But I never thought I’d see a case in Maine.”
    Maura looked at Randy. “It’s also known as bastinado. The feet are beaten on the sole, which breaks bones, ruptures tendons and ligaments. It’s known in many places around the world. The Middle East, Asia. South America.”
    “You mean someone
did
this to her?”
    Maura nodded. “And those changes in the tibias that I pointed out are also from repeated beatings. Something heavy was slammed against the shins. It may not be enough to actually fracture bone, but it leaves permanent changes in the periosteum from repeated hemorrhages.” Maura went back to the table, where Anna’s broken body lay. She understood, now, the significance of that grid of scars on the breasts, the abdomen. What she did not understand was
why
any of this had been done to Anna. Or when.
    “It still doesn’t explain why she killed herself,” said Dr. Owen.
    “No,” Maura admitted. “But it makes you wonder, doesn’t it? If her death is somehow connected to her past. To what caused these scars.”
    “You’re now questioning whether this was a suicide?”
    “After seeing this, I question everything. And now we have another mystery.” She looked at Dr. Owen. “Why was Anna Welliver tortured?”

 
    A jail cell diminishes any man, and so it was with Icarus
.
    Viewed through the bars, he seemed smaller, inconsequential. Now stripped of his Italian suit and his Panerai wristwatch, he wore a lurid orange jumpsuit and rubber flip-flops. His solitary cell was furnished only with a sink, a toilet, and a concrete shelf bed with a thin mattress, on which he was now sitting
.
    “You know,” he said, “that every man has his price.”
    “And what would yours be?” I asked
.
    “I have already paid it. Everything I ever valued has been lost.” He looked up at me with bright blue eyes, so unlike the soft brown eyes of his dead son Carlo. “I was speaking of your price.”
    “Me? I can’t be bought.”
    “Then you are merely a simple-minded patriot? You do this for love of country?”
    “Yes.”
    He laughed. “I’ve heard that before. All it means is that the alternative offer was not high