Rizzoli & Isles 8-Book Set

glass. Jane bolted straight in alarm and sawCathy standing at the far edge of the ruins. Her gaze was fixed to the ground, her gloved hand clapped over her mouth. In jerky robotic steps she began to back away.
    Jane started toward her. “What is it? Cathy?”
    The other woman did not answer. She was still staring downward, still in a stumbling retreat. As Jane drew closer, she spied bits of color on the ground. A scrap of blue here, a fleck of pink there. Fragments of cloth, she realized, the edges shredded. As she moved beyond the last burned foundation, the snow became deep and more riddled with scavenger tracks. The prints were everywhere, as if coyotes had staged a hoedown.
    “Cathy?”
    At last the woman turned to her, and her face was drained of color. Unable to speak, all she could do was point to the ground, at one of the dead coyotes.
    Only then did Jane realize that Cathy was not pointing at the animal, but at a pair of bones poking up like slender white stalks from the snow. They might have been the remains of wild animal prey, ripped apart and gnawed on by predators, except for one small detail. Encircling those bones was something that did not belong to any animal.
    Jane crouched down and stared at the pink and purple beads strung on a loop of elastic. A child’s bracelet.
    Her heart was pounding as she rose back to her feet. She looked across the snowy expanse that stretched toward the trees, and saw craters in the snow where the coyotes had been digging for treasure, fresh meat on which they had begun to feast.
    “They’re still here,” Cathy said softly. “The families, the children. The people in Kingdom Come never left.” She stared down at the ground, as if seeing some new horror at her feet. “They’re right
here.
”

B Y NIGHTFALL, THE CORONER’S RECOVERY TEAM HAD EXTRACTED the fifteenth body from the frozen ground. It had lain entangled with the other corpses, buried together in one communal pit, limbs mingled in a grotesque group hug. The grave had been shallow, covered with only a thin layer of soil, so thin that even through a foot and a half of snow scavengers had detected the trove of meat. Like the fourteen bodies before it, this corpse emerged from the pit with limbs frozen and rigid, eyelashes encrusted with ice. It was only an infant, about six months old, dressed in a long-sleeved cotton sleeper decorated with tiny airplanes. An indoor outfit. Like the other bodies, this one bore no marks of violence. Except for postmortem damage by carnivores, the cadavers were strangely, disturbingly perfect.
    This baby was the most perfect of all, eyes closed as if in sleep, its skin as smooth and milky white as porcelain.
Just a doll
was what Jane had first thought when she’d glimpsed the tiny corpse in the pit.It’s what she’d wanted to believe. But soon the truth was apparent as the coroner’s team, biohazard garb covering their heavy winter clothes, gingerly freed the body from its grave.
    Jane had watched the steady succession of cadavers emerge, and the infant was what upset her most, because it made her think of her own daughter. She tried to block out the image, but it had already sprung into her head: Regina’s lifeless face, the skin feathered with frost.
    Abruptly she turned away from the pit and walked back to where the vehicles were parked. Cathy was still huddled inside her SUV. Jane climbed in beside her and swung the door shut. The vehicle stank of smoke, and Jane saw that the ashtray was full. Hands shaking, Cathy lit yet another cigarette and took a trembling puff. The two women sat for a moment without speaking. Through the windshield, they watched a member of the recovery team place the pitifully small bundle inside the morgue vehicle and swing the door shut. There was too little daylight left. Tomorrow the digging would resume, and they would certainly find more bodies. At the bottom of the pit, workers had already glimpsed an adult’s rigid limb.
    “No knife wounds. No bullet holes,” said Jane as she watched the morgue vehicle drive away. “They look like they just fell asleep. And died.”
    “Jonestown,” murmured Cathy. “You remember that, don’t you? The Reverend Jim Jones. He brought nearly a thousand followers from California to Guyana. Established his own colony. When US authorities came to investigate, he ordered his followers to commit suicide. More than nine hundred people died.”
    “You think this was a mass suicide, too?”
    “What