Rizzoli & Isles 8-Book Set

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 it.
    “This is one postmortem I really don’t want to do,” said Bristol.
    “Someone has to look at this body. Someone has to give us a definitive answer.”
    “The problem is, I’m not sure the answer is going to be any more to our liking.”
    “You haven’t even looked at her yet.”
    “But I can see the X-rays.” He pointed to the films of the skull, spine, and pelvis that Yoshima had clipped onto the light box. “I can tell you they’re completely consistent with a woman of Maura’s height and age. And those fractures are exactly what you’d find from injuries sustained by an unrestrained passenger.”
    “Maura always wore her seat belt,” said Jane. “She was compulsive about it. You know how she was.”
Was. I can’t stop using the past tense. I can’t quite believe this exam will change anything
.
    “True,” Bristol said. “Not wearing a seat belt isn’t like her at all.” He pulled on gloves and reluctantly peeled back the sheet.
    Even before she saw the body, Jane flinched away, her hand lifted over her nose against the smell of burned flesh. Gagging, she turned and saw Gabriel’s face. He at least seemed to be holding his own, but there was no mistaking the appalled look in his eyes. She forced herself to turn back to the table. To see the body they had believed was Maura’s.
    It was not the first time Jane had seen charred remains. Once she had watched postmortems on three arson victims, two young children and their mother. She remembered those three cadavers lying on the tables, their limbs bent, their arms thrust forward like boxers spoiling for a fight. The woman she saw now was frozen in the same pugilistic pose, her tendons contracted by intense heat.
    Jane took another step closer and stared down at what should have been a face. She tried to see something—anything—familiar, but all she saw was an unrecognizable mask of charred