The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

see a hole in your armor, and they’ll aim straight for it. They always do. She grabbed a paper towel, blotted her face dry, and was about to drop the paper into the trash can when she paused, remembering Sister Camille’s bed. The blood on the sheets.
    The trash can was about half full. Among the mound of crumpled paper towels was a small bundle of toilet paper. Quelling her distaste, she unwrapped the bundle. Although she already knew what it contained, she was still jolted by the sight of another woman’s menstrual blood. She dealt with blood all the time, and had just seen a lake of it beneath Camille’s corpse. Yet she was far more shaken by the mere glimpse of this sanitary pad. It was soaked, heavy. This was why you left your bed, she thought. The warmth seeping between your thighs, and the dampness of the sheets. You got up and came into the bathroom to change pads, depositing this soiled one in the trash can.
    And then . . . what did you do then?
    She left the bathroom and returned to Camille’s chamber. Dr. Isles had left, and Rizzoli was alone in the room, frowning at the bloodstained sheets, the one bright blot in this colorless room. She crossed to the window and looked down, at the courtyard.
    Multiple footprints now tracked across the frosting of sleet and snow. Beyond the gate, yet another TV news van had pulled up outside the wall, and was setting up its satellite feed. The dead nun story, beamed straight into your living room. Sure to be a lead at five, she thought; we’re all curious about nuns. Swear off sex, retreat behind walls, and everyone wonders what it is you’re hiding underneath that habit. It’s the chastity that intrigues us; we wonder about any human being who girds herself against the most powerful of all urges, who turns her back on what nature intended us to fulfill. It’s their purity that makes them titillating.
    Rizzoli’s gaze swung back across the courtyard, to the chapel. Where I should be right now, she thought, shivering with the CSU crew. Not lingering up here in this room that smelled of Clorox. But only from this room could she picture the view that Camille must have seen, returning from her nocturnal trip to the bathroom on a dark winter’s morning. She would have seen light, shining through the chapel’s stained-glass windows.
    A light that should not have been there.
             
     
    Maura stood by as the two attendants laid out a clean sheet and gently transferred Sister Camille. She had watched transport teams remove other bodies from other sites. Sometimes they performed the task with perfunctory efficiency, other times with evident distaste. But every so often, she saw them move a victim with special tenderness. Young children received this attention, their small heads cradled with care, their still forms caressed through the body pouch. Sister Camille was treated with just such tenderness, just such sorrow.
    She held open the chapel door as they wheeled out the stretcher, and followed it as it made its slow progress toward the gate. Beyond the walls, the news media swarmed, cameras ready to capture the classic image of tragedy: the body on the stretcher, the plastic shroud containing a clearly human shape. Though the public could not see the victim, they would hear that she was a young woman, and they would look at that bag and mentally dissect its contents. Their ruthless imaginations would violate Camille’s privacy in ways Maura’s scalpel never could.
    As the stretcher rolled out the abbey gate, a ring of reporters and cameramen surged forward, ignoring the patrolman yelling at them to stand back.
    It was the priest who finally managed to hold the pack at bay. An imposing figure in black, he strode out of the gate and swept into the crowd, his angry voice carrying over the sounds of chaos.
    “This poor sister deserves your respect! Why don’t you show her some? Let her pass!”
    Even reporters can sometimes be shamed, and a few of them stepped back to allow the transport team through. But the TV cameras kept rolling as the stretcher was loaded into the vehicle. Now those hungry cameras turned to their next prey: Maura, who had just slipped out of the gate and was headed toward her car, hugging her coat tight, as though it would shield her from notice.
    “Dr. Isles! Do you have a statement?”
    “What was the cause of death?”
    “—any evidence this was a sexual assault?”
    With reporters bearing down on her, she fumbled in her