The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

think I’ll be eating chicken tonight.”
    “What kind of knife did he use?” asked Crowe.
    “It could be a boning knife, it could be a scalpel. The stump’s been too chewed up by rats, so we can’t tell by the wound margin. We’ll need to boil off the soft tissues and see how the cut marks look under the microscope.”
    “I don’t think I’ll be eating soup tonight either,” said Sleeper.
    Crowe glanced at his partner’s ample belly. “Maybe you ought to hang around the morgue more often. Might lose some of that tire.”
    “You mean, instead of wasting my life in the gym?” Sleeper shot back.
    Maura glanced at him, surprised by the retort. Even the usually tractable Sleeper could only take so much of his partner.
    Crowe merely laughed, oblivious to the irritation he stirred in others. “Hey, when you’re ready to bulk up—I mean,
above
the waist—you’re welcome to join me.”
    “There are other X rays to look at,” cut in Maura, pulling down the films with businesslike efficiency. Yoshima handed her the next films, and she slid them under the mounting clips. Images of the Rat Lady’s head and neck glowed from the light box. Last night, looking at the corpse’s face, she’d seen only raw meat, ravaged even more by hungry scavengers. But beneath the stripped flesh, the facial bones were eerily intact, except for the missing tip of the nasal bone, which had been sheared off when the killer had peeled off his trophy of flesh.
    “The front teeth are missing,” said Sleeper. “You don’t think he took those, too?”
    “No. These look like atrophic changes. And that’s what surprises me.”
    “Why?”
    “These changes are usually associated with advanced age and bad dentition. But that doesn’t fit a woman who otherwise appears fairly young.”
    “How can you tell, with her face gone?”
    “Her spine films show no evidence of the degenerative changes you usually see with age. She has no gray hairs, either on her head or her pubis. And no arcus senilis in her eyes.”
    “How old would you say she is?”
    “I would have put her age at no older than forty.” Maura looked at the X ray hanging on the light box. “But these films are more consistent with a woman of advanced age. I’ve never seen such severe bony resorption in anyone, much less a young woman. She wouldn’t have been able to wear dentures, even if she could afford them. Clearly, this woman didn’t get even basic dental care.”
    “So we’re not gonna have dental X rays for comparison.”
    “I doubt this woman has seen a dentist in decades.”
    Sleeper sighed. “No fingerprints. No face. No dental X rays. We’ll never I.D. her. Which may be the whole point.”
    “But it doesn’t explain why he cut off the feet,” she said, her gaze still fixed on the anonymous skull glowing on the light box. “I think he did this for other reasons. Power, maybe. Rage. When you strip off a woman’s face, you’ve taken more than just a souvenir. You’ve stolen the essence of who she is. You’ve taken her soul.”
    “Yeah, well, he scraped the bottom of the barrel for this one,” said Crowe. “Who’d want a woman with no teeth and sores all over her skin? If he’s gonna start collecting faces, you’d think he’d go after one that’d look nicer on the mantelpiece.”
    “Maybe he’s just starting,” Sleeper said softly. “Maybe this is his first kill.”
    Maura turned to the table. “Let’s get started.”
    As Sleeper and Crowe tied on their masks, she peeled back the sheet, and caught a strong whiff of decay. She’d drawn vitreous potassium levels last night, and the results told her this victim had been dead approximately thirty-six hours prior to its discovery. Rigor mortis was still present, and the limbs were not easily manipulated. Despite the meat-locker chill at the death scene, decomposition had commenced. Bacteria had begun their work, breaking down proteins, bloating air spaces. Cold temperatures had only slowed, but not stopped, the process of decay.
    Though she had already seen that ruined face, the sight of it startled her anew. So too did the many skin lesions, which, under the bright lights, stood out in dark, angry nodules punctuated by rat bites. Against that background of ravaged skin, the bullet wound seemed unimpressive—just a small entry hole at the left of the sternum. Glaser bullets were designed to minimize ricochet danger, while inflicting maximum damage once they have entered the body. A