The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

hypnotist’s fingers. She sat up straight, the trance broken, the job once again demanding her complete focus.
    She threw the test stick into the trash can. Then she got dressed, and went to work.
             
     
    The Rat Lady.
    This is what an entire lifetime gets distilled down to, thought Maura as she gazed down at the body lying on the table, its horrors concealed beneath a sheet. Nameless, faceless, your existence summed up in three words which only emphasize the indignity with which your life ended. As fodder for rodents.
    It was Darren Crowe who’d dubbed the corpse last night, while they had stood surrounded by vermin skittering just beyond the range of their flashlights. He had casually tossed off the nickname to the morgue retrieval crew, and by the next morning, when Maura walked into her office, her staff was calling the victim Rat Lady as well. She knew it was just a convenient moniker for a woman who’d otherwise be known merely as Jane Doe, but Maura could not help wincing when she heard even Detective Sleeper use it. This is how we get beyond the horror, she thought. How we keep these victims at arm’s length. We refer to them by a nickname, or a diagnosis, or a case file number. They don’t seem like people then, so their fates cannot break our hearts.
    She looked up as Crowe and Sleeper walked into the lab. Sleeper was exhausted from last night’s exertion, and the harsh light of the autopsy room cruelly emphasized his baggy eyes and his sagging jowls. Beside him, Crowe was like a young lion, tan and fit and confident. Crowe was not someone you ever wanted to humiliate; beneath the veneer of an arrogant man, cruelty usually lurked. He was looking down at the corpse with his lips curled in disgust. This would not be a pleasant autopsy, and even Crowe seemed to regard the prospect of this postmortem with a hint of trepidation.
    “The X rays are hanging,” said Maura. “Let’s go over them before we begin.”
    She crossed to the far wall and flipped on a switch. The light box flickered on, illuminating ghostly images of ribs and spine and pelvis. Scattered within the thorax, like a galaxy of stars spread across the lungs and heart, were bright metallic flecks.
    “That looks like shotshell,” said Sleeper.
    “That’s what I thought, at first,” said Maura. “But if you look here, next to this rib, you see this opaque shadow? It’s almost lost against the rib’s outline.”
    “Metal jacket?” said Crowe.
    “That’s what it looks like to me.”
    “So this isn’t a shotshell cartridge.”
    “No. This looks like Glaser ammo. Judging by the number of projectiles I see here, it’s most likely a blue-tip. Copper jacket, packed with number twelve shot.”
    Designed to produce far more devastating damage than a conventional bullet, Glaser-type ammo hit its target as a single unit, and then fragmented after impact. She did not need to cut open the torso to know that the damage caused by that single bullet was devastating.
    She took down the chest films and clipped up two new ones. These were somehow more disturbing images, because of what was missing from them. They were gazing at the right and left forearms. The radius and ulna, the two long bones of the forearm, normally extended from the elbow to the wrist, where they joined with the dense pebblelike carpal bones. But these arm bones ended abruptly.
    “The left hand was disarticulated here, right at the joint between the styloid process of the radius and the scaphoid bone,” she said. “The killer removed all the carpal bones, along with the hand. You can even see some of the nick marks, on the other views, where he scraped along the edge of the styloid process. He separated the hand just where the arm bones meet the wrist bones.” She pointed to the other X ray. “Now look at the right hand. Here, he wasn’t quite as neat. He didn’t slice straight across the wrist joint, and when he removed the hand, he left the hamate bone behind. You can see how the knife made a cut here. It looks like he couldn’t quite find the joint, and he ended up sawing around blindly, till he found it.”
    “So these hands weren’t just chopped off, say, with an axe,” said Sleeper.
    “No. It was done with a knife. He cut off the hands the way you’d disjoint a chicken. You flex the limb to expose the joint space, and cut through the ligaments. That way, you don’t have to saw through bone itself.”
    Sleeper grimaced. “I don’t