The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

motives.”
    “These are elderly women. They can’t fight back.”
    “I know.”
    “So what do we tell them? All the sisters living in religious communities? That they’re not safe even behind walls?”
    “None of us is entirely safe.”
    “That’s not the answer I want to give them.”
    “But it’s the one they have to hear.” She opened her car door. “I was raised Catholic, Father. I used to think nuns were untouchable. But I’ve just seen what was done to Sister Camille. If that can happen to a nun, then no one is untouchable.” She slid into her car. “Good luck with the press. You have my sympathies.”
    He closed her car door and stood looking at her through the window. As striking as his face was, it was that clerical collar that drew her gaze. Such a narrow band of white, yet it set him apart from all others. It made him unattainable.
    He raised his hand in a wave. Then he looked toward the pack of reporters, who were even now closing in on him. She saw him straighten and take a deep breath. Then he strode forward to meet them.
             
     
    “In light of the gross anatomical findings, as well as the subject’s known history of hypertension, it is my opinion that this death was from natural causes. The most likely sequence of events was an acute myocardial infarction, occurring within the twenty-four hours prior to death, followed by a ventricular arrhythmia, which was the terminal event. Presumptive cause of death: fatal arrhythmia secondary to acute myocardial infarction. Dictated by Maura Isles, M.D., Office of the Medical Examiner, Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”
    Maura turned off the Dictaphone and stared down at the preprinted diagrams on which she had earlier recorded the landmarks of Mr. Samuel Knight’s body. The old appendectomy scar. The blotches of lividity on his buttocks and the underside of his thighs, where blood had pooled during the hours he had sat, lifeless, on his bed. There had been no witnesses to Mr. Knight’s final moments in his hotel room, but she could imagine what went through his mind. A sudden fluttering in his chest. Perhaps a few seconds’ panic, when he realizes that the fluttering is his heart. And then, a gradual fadeout to black. You were one of the easy ones, she thought. A swift dictation, and Mr. Knight could be set aside. Their brief acquaintance would end with the scrawl of her name on his autopsy report.
    More reports sat in her in-box, a stack of transcribed dictations needing her review and signature. In cold storage, yet another new acquaintance waited for her: Camille Maginnes, whose autopsy was scheduled for nine o’clock the next morning, when both Rizzoli and Frost could attend. Even as Maura flipped through reports, jotting corrections in the margins, her mind was still on Camille. The chill she’d felt in the chapel that morning had not left her, and she kept her sweater on as she worked at her desk, bundled against the memory of that visit.
    She rose from her chair to feel whether her wool slacks, which she’d left hanging over the radiator, were now dry. Close enough, she thought, and quickly untied her waist drawstring and slipped out of the scrub pants she’d worn all afternoon.
    Sinking back into her chair, she just sat for a moment, eyeing one of the floral prints on her wall. To counteract the grimness of her job, she had decorated her office with reminders of life, not death. A potted ficus thrived in the corner of the room, the happy recipient of constant fussing and attention by both Maura and Louise. On the wall were framed images of flowers: a bouquet of white peonies and blue irises. Another with a vase of centifolia roses, the blossoms so lush with petals that the stems drooped. When the stack of files grew too tall on her desk, when the weight of death seemed overwhelming, she would look up at those prints and think of her garden, and of the smell of rich soil and the bright green of spring grass. She would think of things growing, not dying. Not decaying.
    But on this December day, spring had never seemed so distant. Freezing rain was tapping against the window, and she dreaded the drive home. She wondered if the city had salted the roads yet, or if it would still be an ice rink out there, cars sliding like hockey pucks.
    “Dr. Isles?” said Louise over the intercom.
    “Yes?”
    “There’s a Dr. Banks on the phone for you. He’s on line one.”
    Maura went very still. “Is it . . . Dr. Victor