The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

Isles?”
    Maura turned toward the speaker. “Yes, Louise?”
    “Detective Rizzoli is on line one. Can you answer?”
    Maura stripped off her gloves and crossed to the phone. “Rizzoli?” she said.
    “Hey, Doc. It looks like we need you here.”
    “What is it?”
    “We’re at the pond. It took us a while to scoop off all the ice.”
    “You’ve finished dragging it?”
    “Yeah. We found something.”

N INE
     
    W IND SLICED ACROSS THE OPEN FIELD , whipping Maura’s coat and wool scarf as she walked out the rear cloister gate and started toward the somber gathering of cops who waited for her at the pond’s edge. A layer of ice had formed over the fallen snow, and it cracked beneath her boots like a sugar crust. She felt everyone’s gaze marking her progress across the field, the nuns watching from the gate behind her, and the police awaiting her approach. She was the lone figure moving across that white world, and in the stillness of that afternoon, every sound seemed magnified, from the crunch of her boots, to the rush of her own breath.
    Rizzoli emerged from the knot of personnel and came forward to greet her. “Thanks for getting here so quick.”
    “So Noni was right about the duck pond.”
    “Yeah. Since Camille spent a lot of time out here, it’s not too surprising she thought of using the pond. The ice was still pretty thin. Probably froze over only in the last day or two.” Rizzoli looked at the water. “We snagged it on the third pass.”
    It was a small pond, a flat black oval that in the summertime would reflect clouds and blue sky and the passage of birds. At one end, cattails protruded, like ice-encrusted stalagmites. All around the perimeter, the snow was thoroughly trampled, its whiteness churned with mud.
    At the water’s edge, a small form lay covered by a disposable sheet. Maura crouched down beside it, and a grim-faced Detective Frost peeled back the sheet to reveal the swaddling, caked in wet mud.
    “It felt like it was weighed down with rocks,” said Frost. “That’s why it’s been sitting on the bottom. We haven’t unwrapped it yet. Thought we’d wait for you.”
    Maura pulled off her wool gloves and pulled on latex ones. They offered no protection against the cold, and her fingers quickly chilled as she peeled back the outer layer of muslin. Two fist-sized stones dropped out. The next layer was equally soaked, but not muddy. It was a woolen blanket of powder blue. A color one would swaddle an infant in, she thought. A blanket to keep him safe and warm.
    By now her fingers were numb and clumsy. She peeled back a corner of the blanket, just enough to catch a glimpse of a foot. Tiny, almost doll-like, the skin a dusky and marbled blue.
    That was all she needed to see.
    She covered it again, with the sheet. Rising to her feet, she looked at Rizzoli. “Let’s move it directly to the morgue. We’ll finish unwrapping it there.”
    Rizzoli merely nodded, and gazed down in silence at the tiny bundle. The wet wrappings were already starting to crust over in the icy wind.
    It was Frost who spoke. “How could she do it? Just toss her baby in the water like that?”
    Maura stripped off the latex gloves and thrust numb fingers into the woolen ones. She thought of the light blue blanket wrapped around the infant. Warm wool, like her gloves. Camille could have wrapped the baby in anything—newspapers, old sheets, rags—but she had chosen to wrap it in a blanket, as though to protect it, to insulate it from the frigid water of the pond.
    “I mean, drowning her own kid,” said Frost. “She’d have to be out of her mind.”
    “The infant may already have been dead.”
    “Okay, so she killed it first. She’d still have to be crazy.”
    “We can’t assume anything. Not until the autopsy.” Maura glanced toward the abbey. Three nuns stood like dark-robed wraiths beneath the archway, watching them. She said to Rizzoli: “Have you told Mary Clement yet?”
    Rizzoli didn’t answer. Her gaze was still fixed on what the pond had yielded up to them. It took only one pair of hands to slip the bundle into the oversize body bag, to seal it with an efficient tug of the zipper. She winced at the sound.
    Maura asked, “Do the sisters know?”
    At last Rizzoli looked at her. “They’ve been told what we found.”
    “They must have an idea who the father is.”
    “They deny it’s even possible she was pregnant.”
    “But the evidence is right here.”
    Rizzoli gave a snort.