The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

gate,” she said, handing it to Maura. “And the coffee’s for you. Drink it.”
    Maura took a sip. It was too sweet, but tonight she welcomed the sugar. Welcomed any source of energy into her tired and bruised body.
    “Is there anything else I can get you?” asked Rizzoli. “Anything else you need?”
    “Yes.” Maura looked up from her coffee. “I want you to tell me the truth.”
    “I always tell the truth, Doc. You know that.”
    “Then tell me that Victor had nothing to do with this.”
    “He didn’t.”
    “You’re absolutely certain?”
    “As sure as I can be. Your ex may be a major-league prick. He may have lied to you. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t kill anyone.”
    Maura sank back against the couch and sighed. Staring down at the steaming cup, she asked: “And Matthew Sutcliffe? Is he really a doctor?”
    “Yes, as a matter of fact. M.D. from the University of Vermont. Did his internal medicine residency in Boston. It’s interesting, Doc. If you’ve got that M.D. behind your name, you’re golden. You can walk into a hospital, tell the staff that your patient’s just been admitted, and no one questions you. Not when the patient’s relative calls and backs up your story.”
    “A physician who works as a paid killer?”
    “We don’t know that Octagon paid him. In fact, I don’t think the company had anything to do with these murders. Sutcliffe may have done it for his own reasons.”
    “What reasons?”
    “To protect himself. To bury the truth about what happened in India.” Seeing Maura’s bewildered look, Rizzoli said, “Octagon finally released that list of personnel working at their plant in India. There was a factory doctor.”
    “He was the one?”
    Rizzoli nodded. “Matthew Sutcliffe, M.D.”
    Maura stared at the TV, but her mind was not on the images playing across the screen. She thought of funeral pyres, of skulls savagely fractured. And she remembered her nightmare of fire consuming human flesh. Of bodies, still moving, still writhing in the flames.
    She said, “In Bhopal, six thousand people died.”
    Rizzoli nodded.
    “But the next morning, there were hundreds of thousands who were still alive.” Maura looked at Rizzoli. “Where were the survivors at Bara? Rat Lady couldn’t have been the only one.”
    “And if she wasn’t, what happened to the others?”
    They stared at each other, both of them now understanding what Sutcliffe had been desperate to conceal. Not the accident itself, but the aftermath. And his role in it. She thought of the horror that must have greeted him that night, after the poisonous cloud had swept across the village. Entire families, lying dead in their beds. Bodies sprawled outside, frozen in their final agonies. The factory doctor would have been the first sent out to assess the damage.
    Perhaps he did not realize that some of the victims were still alive until after the decision was made to burn the corpses. Perhaps it was a groan that alerted him, or the twitching of a limb, as they dragged bodies to the flaming pyre.
    With the smell of death and seared flesh rising in the air, he must have regarded the living with panic. But by then they could not turn back; they had already gone too far.
    This is what you didn’t want the world to know: what you did with the living.
    “Why did he attack you tonight?” asked Rizzoli.
    Maura shook her head. “I don’t know.”
    “You saw him at the hospital. You spoke to him. What happened there?”
    Maura thought about her conversation with Sutcliffe. They had stood gazing down at Ursula, and had talked about the autopsy. About lab tests and death summaries.
    And toxicology screens.
    She said, “I think we’ll know the answer when we do the postmortem.”
    “What do you expect to find?”
    “The reason why she went into cardiac arrest. You were there that night. You told me that just before she coded, she was panicking. That she looked terrified.”
    “Because he was there.”
    Maura nodded. “She knew what was about to happen, and she couldn’t speak, not with a tube in her throat. I’ve seen too many codes. I know what they’re like. Everyone crowding into the room, so much confusion. Half a dozen drugs going in at once.” She paused. “Ursula was allergic to penicillin.”
    “Would it show up on the drug screen?”
    “I don’t know. But he’d worry about that, wouldn’t he? And I was the only person insisting on the test.”
    “Detective Rizzoli?”
    They turned to see