The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

focused on the foot, poking out doll-like from its shroud. The skin of the sole was wrinkled from immersion in fresh water, but there was no obvious decomposition, no marbling of veins. The pond had been near freezing temperatures, and the body could have remained in a state of near-preservation for weeks. Time of death, she thought, would be difficult, if not impossible, to determine.
    She set aside the tweezers and removed the four safety pins closing the bottom of the pillowcase. They made soft musical ticks as she dropped them onto a tray. Lifting the fabric, she gently peeled it upwards, and both legs appeared, knees bent, thighs apart like a small frog.
    The size was consistent with a full-term fetus.
    She exposed the genitals, and then a swollen length of umbilical cord, tied off with red satin ribbon. She suddenly remembered the nuns sitting at the dining table, their gnarled hands reaching for dried flowers and ribbons to make into sachets. A sachet-baby, she thought. Sprinkled with flowers and tied with ribbon.
    “It’s a boy,” Rizzoli said, and her voice suddenly cracked.
    Maura looked up and saw that Rizzoli had paled even more, that she was now leaning against the table, as though to steady herself.
    “Do you need to step out?”
    Rizzoli swallowed. “It’s just . . .”
    “What?”
    “Nothing. I’m fine.”
    “These are hard to take, I know. Kids are always hard. If you want to sit down—”
    “I told you, I’m fine.”
    The worst was yet to come.
    Maura eased the pillowcase up over the chest, gently extending first one arm and then the other so they would not be snagged by the wet fabric. The hands were perfectly formed, tiny fingers designed to reach for a mother’s face, to grasp a mother’s lock of hair. Next to the face, it is the hands that are most recognizably human, and it was almost painful to look at them.
    Maura reached inside the pillowcase to support the back of the head as she pulled off the last of the fabric.
    Instantly, she knew something was wrong.
    Her hand was cradling a skull that did not feel normal, did not feel human. She paused, her throat suddenly dry. With a sense of dread, she peeled off the fabric, and the infant’s head emerged.
    Rizzoli gasped and jerked away from the table.
    “Jesus,” said Frost. “What the hell happened to it?”
    Too stunned to speak, Maura could only gaze down in horror at the skull, gaping open, the brain exposed. At the face, folded in like a squashed rubber mask.
    A metal tray suddenly toppled and crashed.
    Maura looked up just in time to see Jane Rizzoli, her face drained white, slowly crumple to the floor.

T EN
     
    “I DON ’ T WANT TO GO to the ER”
    Maura wiped away the last of the blood and frowned at the inch-long laceration on Rizzoli’s forehead. “I’m not a plastic surgeon. I can stitch this up, but I can’t guarantee there won’t be a scar.”
    “Just do it, okay? I don’t want to sit for hours in some hospital waiting room. They’d probably just sic a medical student on me, anyway.”
    Maura wiped the skin with Betadine, then reached for a vial of Xylocaine and a syringe. “I’m going to numb your skin first. It’ll sting a little bit, but after that, you shouldn’t feel a thing.”
    Rizzoli lay perfectly still on the couch, her eyes focused on the ceiling. Though she didn’t flinch as the needle pierced her skin, she closed her hand into a fist and kept it tightly balled as the local anesthetic was injected. Not a word of complaint, not a whimper escaped her lips. Already she’d been humiliated by the fall in the lab. Humiliated even further when she’d been too dizzy to walk, and Frost had carried her like a bride into Maura’s office. Now she lay with her jaw squared, grimly determined not to show any weakness.
    As Maura pierced the edges of the laceration with the curved suture needle, Rizzoli asked, in a perfectly calm voice: “Are you going to tell me what happened to that baby?”
    “Nothing happened to it.”
    “It’s not exactly normal. Jesus, it’s missing half its head.”
    “It was born that way,” Maura said, snipping off suture and tying a knot. Sewing skin was like stitching a living fabric, and she was simply a tailor, bringing the edges together, knotting the thread. “The baby is anencephalic.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “Its brain never developed.”
    “There’s more wrong with it than just a missing brain. It looked like the whole top of his head was chopped