The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

clean penetration is followed by the explosion of lead pellets contained within the Glaser’s copper jacket. This small wound gave no hint of the devastation inside the thorax.
    “So what’s this skin crud?” asked Crowe.
    Maura focused on the areas undamaged by rodent teeth. The purplish nodules were scattered across both torso and extremities, and some had crusted over.
    “I don’t know what this is,” she said. “It certainly seems to be systemic. It could be a drug reaction. It could be a manifestation of cancer.” She paused. “It could also be bacterial.”
    “You mean—infectious?” said Sleeper, taking a step back from the table.
    “That’s why I suggested the masks.”
    She ran a gloved finger across one of the crusted lesions, and a few white scales flaked off. “Some of these remind me a little of psoriasis. But the distribution is all wrong. Psoriasis usually affects primarily the elbows and knees.”
    “Hey, isn’t there treatment for that?” said Crowe. “I used to see it advertised on TV. The heartbreak of psoriasis.”
    “It’s an inflammatory disorder, so it responds to steroid creams. Ultraviolet light therapy helps, too. But look at her dentition. This woman didn’t have the money to pay for expensive creams or doctors’ bills. If it’s psoriasis, she probably went untreated for years.”
    What a cruel affliction such a skin condition would have been, thought Maura, especially in the summertime. Even on the hottest days, she would have wanted to wear pants and long-sleeved shirts to conceal the lesions.
    “Not only does our perp choose a victim who’s got no teeth,” said Crowe, “he whacks off a face with skin like this.”
    “Psoriasis does tend to spare the face.”
    “You think that’s significant? Maybe he only sliced off the parts where the skin was okay.”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t begin to understand why anyone would do something like this.”
    She turned her attention to the right wrist stump. White bone gleamed through raw flesh. Hungry rodents’ teeth had gnawed the open wound, destroying the cut marks left by the knife, but scanning electron microscopy of the cut surface of bone might reveal the blade’s characteristics. She lifted the forearm from the table, to examine the underside of the wound, and a fleck of yellow caught her eye.
    “Yoshima, can you hand me the tweezers?” she said.
    “What is it?” asked Crowe.
    “There’s some kind of fiber adhering to the wound edge.”
    Yoshima moved so silently, the tweezers seemed to magically appear in her hand. She swung the magnifying lens over the wrist stump. With the tweezers, she plucked the fragment from its crust of blood and dried flesh and laid it on a tray.
    Through the magnifying lens, she saw a thick coil of thread, dyed a startling shade of canary yellow.
    “From her clothes?” asked Crowe.
    “It looks awfully coarse for a clothing fiber.”
    “Carpet, maybe?”
    “Yellow carpet? I can’t imagine.” She slipped the strand into an evidence bag that Yoshima was already holding open, and asked: “Was there anything at the death scene that would match this?”
    “Nothing yellow,” said Crowe.
    “Yellow rope?” said Maura. “He may have bound her wrists.”
    “And then took the cut ropes away?” Sleeper shook his head. “Weird, how this guy’s so neat.”
    Maura looked down at the corpse, small as a child. “He hardly needed to bind her wrists. She would have been easy to control.”
    How simple it would have been, to take her life. Arms this thin could not have struggled long against an attacker’s grip; legs this short could not have outrun him.
    You have already been so violated, she thought. And now my scalpel will make its mark on your flesh as well.
    She worked with quiet efficiency, her knife slicing through skin and muscle. The cause of death was as obvious as the bits of shrapnel glowing on the X-ray box, and when at last the torso gaped open, and she saw the taut pericardial sac and the pockets of hemorrhage throughout the lungs, she was not surprised.
    The Glaser bullet had punctured the thorax and then exploded, sending its deadly shrapnel throughout the chest. Metal had ripped through arteries and veins, punctured heart and lungs. And blood had poured into the sac that surrounded the heart, compressing it so that it could not expand, could not pump. A pericardial tamponade.
    Death had been relatively swift.
    The intercom buzzed. “Dr.