Rizzoli & Isles 8-Book Set

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 on a green surgical drape.
    “Sometimes you may not find much evidence of external damage, even when the internal damage is fatal. This is the result of a suicide bombing in a Jerusalem café. The fourteen-year-old female sustained massive concussive injuries to the lungs, as well as perforated abdominal viscera. Yet her face was untouched. Almost angelic.”
    The photo that next appeared drew the first audible reaction from the audience, murmurs of sadness and disbelief. The girl appeared serenely at rest, her flawless face unlined and unworried, dark eyes peering from beneath thick lashes. In the end, it was not gore that shocked that room of pathologists, but beauty. At fourteen, at the moment of her death, she would have been thinking about a school assignment, perhaps. Or a pretty dress. Or a boy she’d glimpsed on the street. She would not have imagined that her lungs and liver and spleen would soon be laid out on an autopsy table, or that a room of two hundred pathologists would one day be gawking at her image.
    As the lights came up, the audience was still subdued. While the others filed out, Maura remained in her seat, staring down at thenotes that she’d jotted on her pad about nail bombs and parcel bombs, car bombs and buried bombs. When it came to causing misery, man’s ingenuity knew no limits. We are so good at killing each other, she thought. Yet we fail so miserably at love.
    “Excuse me. You wouldn’t happen to be Maura Isles?”
    She looked up at the man who’d risen from his seat two rows ahead. He was about her age, tall and athletic, with a deep tan and sun-streaked blond hair that made her automatically think: California boy. His face seemed vaguely familiar, but she could not recall where she’d met him, which was surprising. His was a face that any woman would certainly remember.
    “I knew it! It
is
you, isn’t it?” He