The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

nude torso. She focused her light on the left hip and buttock, and saw more lesions. The angry eruption ran all the way down the thigh and calf to the . . .
    Her flashlight beam froze on the ankle. “My God,” she said.
    The left foot was missing. The ankle ended in a stump, the raw edge black with putrefaction.
    She shifted her beam to the other ankle, and saw another stump. The right foot was missing as well.
    “Now check out the hands,” said Crowe, who’d moved close beside her. He added his beam to hers, pooling their light on the arms, which had been tucked into the shadow of the torso.
    Instead of hands, she saw two stumps, the edges ragged with the teeth marks of scavengers.
    She rocked back, stunned.
    “I take it rats didn’t eat those clean off,” said Crowe.
    She swallowed. “No. No, these were amputations.”
    “You think he did it while she was still alive?”
    She stared down at the stained tiles, and saw only small black pools of dried blood near the stumps, no machine-gun splatter. “There was no arterial pressure when these cuts were made. The parts were removed postmortem.” She looked at Crowe. “Did you find them?”
    “No. He took them. Who the hell knows why?”
    “There’s a logical reason he might have done it,” said Sleeper. “We don’t have fingerprints now. We can’t I.D. her.”
    Maura said, “If he was trying to obliterate her identity . . .” She stared at the face, at the gleam of bone, and felt a fresh thrill of horror at its significance. “I need to roll her over,” she said.
    She took a disposable sheet from her kit and spread it out beside the body. Together, Sleeper and Crowe logrolled the corpse onto the sheet.
    Sleeper gave a gasp and flinched away. The right side of the face, which had been pressed against the floor, now came into view. So, too, did the single bullet hole, punched into the left breast.
    But it was not the bullet wound that had repelled Sleeper. It was the victim’s face, its lidless eye staring up at them. Lying against the bathroom tiles, the right side of the face should have been inaccessible to rodent teeth, yet the skin was gone. Exposed muscle had dried in leathery strands, and a pearly nubbin of cheekbone poked through.
    “The rats didn’t do that, either,” said Sleeper.
    “No,” said Maura. “This damage wasn’t done by scavengers.”
    “Christ, did he just tear it off? It’s like he peeled away a . . .”
    A mask.
Only this mask had not been made of rubber or plastic, but of human skin.
    “He cut off the face. The hands. He’s left us with no way to identify her,” said Sleeper.
    “But why take the feet?” said Crowe. “That doesn’t make any sense. No one gets identified by their toe prints. Besides, she doesn’t look like the kind of vic who’d be missed. What is she, black? Latina?”
    “What does her race have to do with whether she’s missed or not?” asked Maura.
    “I’m just saying, this isn’t some housewife from the suburbs. Or why would she end up in this neighborhood?”
    Maura stood up, her dislike for Crowe suddenly so strong she found it hard to be near him. She waved her flashlight around the room, her beam streaking across sinks and urinals.
    “There’s blood there, on the wall.”
    “I’d say he whacked her right in here,” said Crowe. “Dragged her in, shoves her up against the wall, and pulls the trigger. Then he does the amputations, right where she falls.”
    Maura stared down at blood on the tiles. Only a few smears, because by then the victim is already dead. Her heart has stopped beating, stopped pumping. She feels nothing as the killer crouches beside her, and his blade sinks deep into her wrist, prying apart joints. As he slices through her flesh, peeling away her face as though he is skinning a bear. And when he is done collecting his prizes, he leaves her here, like a discarded carcass, an offering to the scavengers that infest this abandoned building.
    Within a few days, with no clothing to hinder sharp teeth, the rats would have been down to muscle.
    Within a month, down to bone.
    She looked up at Crowe. “Where are her clothes?”
    “All we found was a single shoe. Tennis shoe, size four. I think he dropped it on the way out. It was lying in the kitchen.”
    “Was there blood on it?”
    “Yeah. Got splattered across the top.”
    She looked down at the stump where the right foot should have been. “So he undressed her here, in this room.”
    “Postmortem sexual