The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

eighty-five million dollars, right out of your hands. And the whole world sees Saint Victor fall off his pedestal.”
    “I think I’m finished here.” He rose to his feet. “I have a plane to catch.”
    “You had the opportunity. You had the motive.”
    “Motive?” He gave a disbelieving laugh. “For murdering a
nun
? You might as well accuse the archdiocese, since I’m sure they got paid off quite nicely.”
    “What did Octagon promise you? Even more money if you came to Boston and took care of the problem for them?”
    “First you accuse me of murder. Now you’re saying that Octagon hired me? Can you see any executive personally risking a murder charge, just to cover up an industrial accident?” Victor shook his head. “No American went to jail for Bhopal. And no American will go to jail for Bara, either. Now, am I free to leave or not?”
    Rizzoli shot a questioning glance at Crowe. He responded with a dispirited nod, an answer that told her he had already heard back from the Crime Scene Unit. While she was questioning Victor, CSU had been searching the rental car. Obviously they had turned up nothing.
    They did not have enough to hold him.
    She said, “For now, you’re free to go, Dr. Banks. But we need to know exactly where you are.”
    “I’m flying straight home to San Francisco. You have my address.” Victor reached for the door. Stopped, and turned back to face her. “Before I leave,” he said, “I want you to know one thing about me.”
    “What’s that, Dr. Banks?”
    “I’m a physician. Remember that, Detective. I save lives. I don’t take them.”
             
     
    Maura saw him as he left the interrogation room. He walked with his gaze straight ahead, not even glancing her way as he drew near the desk where she was sitting.
    She rose from the chair. “Victor?”
    He stopped, but didn’t turn toward her; it was as though he could not stand to look at her.
    “What happened?” she said.
    “What do you think happened? I told them what I know. I told them the truth.”
    “That’s all I was asking from you. That’s all I’ve ever asked.”
    “Now I’ve got a plane to catch.”
    Her cell phone rang. She looked down at it, wanting to fling it away.
    “Better answer that,” he said, an angry bite to his voice. “Some corpse might need you.”
    “The dead deserve our attention.”
    “You know, that’s the difference between you and me, Maura. You care about the dead. I care about the living.”
    She watched him walk away. Not once did he look back.
    Her phone had stopped ringing.
    She flipped it open and saw that the call had come from St. Francis Hospital. She’d been waiting to hear the results of Ursula’s second EEG, but she could not deal with that right now; she was still absorbing the impact of Victor’s last words.
    Rizzoli emerged from the interrogation room and came toward her, an apologetic look on her face. “I’m sorry we couldn’t let you listen in,” Rizzoli said. “You understand why, right?”
    “No, I don’t understand.” Maura dropped the phone into her purse and met Rizzoli’s gaze. “I gave him to you. I handed you the answer.”
    “And he confirmed it all. The Bhopal scenario. You were right about the dead birds.”
    “Yet you shut me out of the room. As if you didn’t trust me.”
    “I was trying to protect you.”
    “From what, the truth? That he used me?” Maura gave a bitter laugh and turned to leave. “That, I already knew.”
             
     
    Maura drove to St. Francis Hospital through a gathering flurry of snow, her hands calm and steady on the wheel. The Queen of the Dead, on her way to claim another subject. By the time she pulled into the parking garage, she was ready to play the part she’d always played so well, ready to don the only mask she allowed the public to see.
    She stepped out of the Lexus, black coat sweeping behind her, boots clipping across the pavement as she walked through the parking garage, toward the elevator. Sodium lights cast the cars in an eerie glow, and she felt as if she was moving through an orange mist. That if she just rubbed her eyes, the mist would clear. She saw no one else in the garage, and heard only her own footsteps, echoing off concrete.
    In the hospital lobby, she walked past the Christmas tree, sparkling with multicolored lights, past the volunteers’ desk, where an elderly woman sat with a red Santa’s elf cap jauntily perched on her gray hair. “Joy to the