The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

the gentle wind.
    This is the place, he thought. This is where it happened.
    His breathing suddenly seemed too loud. Heart pounding, he slipped off his knapsack, unzipped it, and pulled out his camera. Document everything, he thought. Octagon will try to make you out as a liar. They will do everything they can to discredit you, so you have to be ready to defend yourself. You have to prove that you are telling the truth.
    He moved into the clearing, toward a heap of blackened branches. Nudging the twigs with his shoe, he stirred up the stench of charred wood. He backed away, a chill crawling up his spine.
    It was the remains of a funeral pyre.
    With sweating hands, he took off his lens cap and began to shoot photos. Eye pressed to the viewfinder, he snapped image after image. The burned remains of a hut. A child’s sandal, lying in the grass. A bright fragment of cloth, torn from a sari. Everywhere he looked, he saw Death.
    He swung to the right, a tapestry of green sweeping past his viewfinder, and was about to click off another photo when his finger froze on the button.
    A figure skittered past the edge of the frame.
    He lowered the camera from his eye and straightened, staring at the trees. He saw nothing now, only the sway of branches.
    There—was that a flash of movement, at the very periphery of his vision? He’d caught only a glimpse of something dark, bobbing among the trees. A monkey?
    He had to keep shooting. The daylight was going fast.
    He walked past a stone well and crossed toward the tin-roofed building, his pants swishing through grass, glancing left and right as he moved. The trees seemed to have eyes, and they were watching him. As he drew near the building, he saw that the walls were scorched by fire. In front of the doorway was a mound of ashes and blackened branches. Another funeral pyre.
    He stepped around it, and looked into the doorway.
    At first, he could make out very little in that gloomy interior. Daylight was rapidly fading, and inside, it was even darker, a palette of blacks and grays. He paused for a moment as his eyes adjusted. With growing bewilderment, he registered the glint of fresh water in an earthenware jar. The scent of spices. How could this be?
    Behind him, a twig snapped.
    He spun around.
    A lone figure was standing in the clearing. All around them, the trees had gone still, and even the birds were silent. The figure came toward him, moving with a strange and jerky gait, until it stood only a few feet away.
    The camera tumbled from Redfield’s hands. He backed away, staring in horror.
    It was a woman. And she had no face.

O NE
     
    T HEY CALLED HER the Queen of the Dead.
    Though no one ever said it to her face, Dr. Maura Isles sometimes heard the nickname murmured in her wake as she traveled the grim triangle of her job between courtroom and death scene and morgue. Sometimes she would detect a note of dark sarcasm:
Ha ha, there she goes, our Goth goddess, out to collect fresh subjects.
Sometimes the whispers held a tremolo of disquiet, like the murmurs of the pious as an unholy stranger passes among them. It was the disquiet of those who could not understand why she chose to walk in Death’s footsteps. Does she enjoy it, they wonder? Does the touch of cold flesh, the stench of decay, hold such allure for her that she has turned her back on the living? They think this cannot be normal, and they cast uneasy glances her way, noting details that only reinforce their beliefs that she is an odd duck. The ivory skin, the black hair with its blunt Cleopatra cut. The red slash of lipstick. Who else wears lipstick to a death scene? Most of all, it’s her calmness that disturbs them, her coolly regal gaze as she surveys the horrors that they themselves can barely stomach. Unlike them, she does not avert her gaze. Instead she bends close and stares, touches. She sniffs.
    And later, under bright lights in her autopsy lab, she cuts.
    She was cutting now, her scalpel slicing through chilled skin, through subcutaneous fat that gleamed a greasy yellow. A man who liked his hamburgers and fries, she thought as she used pruning shears to cut through the ribs and lifted the triangular shield of breastbone the way one opens a cupboard door, to reveal its treasured contents.
    The heart lay cradled in its spongey bed of lungs. For fifty-nine years, it had pumped blood through the body of Mr. Samuel Knight. It had grown with him, aged with him, transforming, as he had, from the lean muscle of