The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

assault?” said Sleeper.
    Crowe snorted. “Who’d want to screw a woman with this creeping crud all over her skin? What is that rash, anyway? It’s not infectious, is it? Like smallpox or something?”
    “No, these lesions look chronic, not acute. See how some of them are crusted over?”
    “Well, I can’t see anyone wanting to touch her, much less screw her.”
    “It’s always a possibility,” said Sleeper.
    “Or he may have undressed her just to expose the corpse,” said Maura. “To speed up its destruction by scavengers.”
    “Why bother to take the clothes with him?”
    “It could be one more way to strip her identity.”
    “I think he just wanted them,” said Crowe.
    Maura looked at him. “Why?”
    “For the same reason he took the hands and the feet and the face. He wanted souvenirs.” Crowe looked at Maura, and in the slanting shadows, he seemed taller. Threatening. “I think our boy’s a collector.”
             
     
    Her porch light was on; she could see its yellowish glow through the lace of falling snow. Hers was the only house on the block lit up at this hour. So many other nights, she had returned to a house where the lamps were turned on not by human hands but by electric timers. Tonight, she thought, someone is actually waiting for me.
    Then she saw that Victor’s car was no longer parked in front of her house. He’s left, she thought. I’m coming home, as usual, to an empty house. The glowing porch light, which had seemed so welcoming, now struck her as coldly anonymous.
    Her chest felt hollow with disappointment as she turned into her driveway. What disturbed her most was not that he had left; it was her reaction to it. Just one evening with him, she thought, and I’m back where I was three years ago, my resolve shaken, my independence cracking.
    She pressed the garage remote. The door rumbled open and she gave a startled laugh as a blue Toyota was revealed, parked in the left stall.
    Victor had simply moved his car into the garage.
    She pulled in beside the rented Toyota, and as the garage door shut behind her, she sat for a moment, acutely aware of her own quickening pulse, of anticipation roaring through her bloodstream like a drug. From despair to jubilation in ten seconds flat. She had to remind herself that nothing had changed between them. That nothing
could
change between them.
    She stepped out of the car, took a deep breath, and walked into the house.
    “Victor?”
    There was no answer.
    She glanced in the living room, then went up the hall to the kitchen. The coffee cups had been washed and put away, all evidence of his visit erased. She peeked in the bedrooms and her study—still no Victor.
    Only when she returned to the living room did she spot his feet, clad in sensible white socks, protruding from one end of the couch. She stood and watched him as he slept, his arm trailing limp toward the floor, his face at peace. This was not the Victor she recalled, the man whose volcanic passions had first attracted her, and then driven her away. What she remembered of their marriage were the arguments, the deep wounds that only a lover can inflict. The divorce had distorted her memories of him, turning him darker, angrier. She had nursed those memories, had fed off them for so long that seeing him now, unguarded, was a moment of startling recognition.
    I used to watch you sleep. I used to love you.
    She went to the closet for a blanket, and spread it over him. Reached out to touch his hair, then stopped, her hand hovering above his head.
    His eyes were open and watching her.
    “You’re awake,” she said.
    “I never meant to fall asleep. What time is it?”
    “Two thirty.”
    He groaned. “I was going to leave—”
    “You might as well stay. It’s snowing like crazy.”
    “I moved the car into the garage. I hope you don’t mind. The city plow was coming by—”
    “They would have towed you, if you hadn’t moved it. It’s okay.” She smiled, and said softly, “Go back to sleep.”
    They looked at each other for a moment. Caught between longing and doubt, she said nothing, knowing only too well the consequences of a wrong choice. Surely they were both thinking the same thing: that her bedroom was right up the hall. It took only a short walk, an embrace, and there she’d be, back again. In a place she’d worked so hard to escape.
    She rose, an act that took as much fortitude as if she was struggling out of quicksand. “I’ll see you in the