The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

one’s allowed inside the gates except for the parish priest, when he comes in to say Mass and hear confession. And there’s also a lady who works in the rectory. They let her bring her little girl when she can’t get child care. But that’s it. No one else comes in without the Abbess’s approval. And the sisters stay inside. They leave only for doctors’ appointments and family emergencies.”
    “Who have you spoken to so far?”
    “The Abbess, Mother Mary Clement. And the two nuns who found the victims.”
    “What did they tell you?”
    Rizzoli shook her head. “Saw nothing, heard nothing. I don’t think the others will be able to tell us much, either.”
    “Why not?”
    “Have you seen how old they are?”
    “It doesn’t mean they don’t have their wits about them.”
    “One of them’s gorked out by a stroke and two of them have Alzheimer’s. Most of them sleep in rooms facing away from the courtyard, so they wouldn’t have seen a thing.”
    At first Maura simply crouched over Camille’s body, not touching it. Granting the victim a last moment of dignity. Nothing can hurt you now, she thought. She began to palpate the scalp, and felt the crunch of shifting bone fragments beneath the skin. “Multiple blows. All of them landed on the crown or the back of the skull. . . .”
    “And the facial bruising? Is that just lividity?”
    “Yes. And it’s fixed.”
    “So the blows came from behind. And above.”
    “The attacker was probably taller.”
    “Or she was down on her knees. And he was standing over her.”
    Maura paused, hands touching cool flesh, arrested by the heartbreaking image of this young nun, kneeling before her attacker, blows raining down on her bowed head.
    “What kind of bastard goes around beating up nuns?” said Rizzoli. “What the fuck is wrong with this world?”
    Maura winced at Rizzoli’s choice of words. Though she couldn’t remember the last time she’d set foot in a church, and had ceased believing years ago, to hear such profanity in a sanctified place disturbed her. Such was the power of childhood indoctrination. Even she, for whom saints and miracles were now merely fantasies, would never utter a curse in full view of the cross.
    But Rizzoli was too angry to care what words came tumbling out of her mouth, even in this sacred place. Her hair was more disheveled than usual, a wild, black mane glistening with melted sleet. The bones of her face jutted out in sharp angles beneath pale skin. In the gloom of the chapel, her eyes were bright coals, lit with rage. Righteous anger had always been Jane Rizzoli’s fuel, the essence of what drove her to hunt monsters. Today, though, she seemed feverish with it, and her face was thinner, as though the fire was now consuming her from within.
    Maura did not want to feed those flames. She kept her voice dispassionate, her questions businesslike. A scientist dealing in facts, not emotions.
    She reached for Sister Camille’s arm and tested the elbow joint. “It’s flaccid. No rigor mortis.”
    “Less than five, six hours then?”
    “It’s also cold in here.”
    Rizzoli gave a snort, exhaling a puff of vapor in the frigid air. “No kidding.”
    “Just above freezing, I’d guess. Rigor mortis would be delayed.”
    “How long?”
    “Almost indefinitely.”
    “What about her face? The fixed bruising?”
    “Livor mortis could have happened within half an hour. It doesn’t help us all that much with time of death.”
    Maura opened her kit and set out the chemical thermometer to measure ambient temperature. She eyed the victim’s many layers of clothing and decided not to take a rectal temperature until after the body had been transported to the morgue. The room was poorly lit—not a place in which she could adequately rule out sexual assault prior to the insertion of the thermometer. Wrestling off clothes might also dislodge trace evidence. Instead she took out syringes to withdraw vitreous fluid for postmortem potassium levels. It would give her one estimate for time of death.
    “Tell me about the other victim,” Maura said as she pierced the left eye and slowly withdrew vitreous fluid into the syringe.
    Rizzoli gave a groan of disgust at the procedure and turned away. “The vic found by the door was Sister Ursula Rowland, sixty-eight years old. Must be a tough old bird. They said she was moving her arms when they loaded her into the ambulance. Frost and I got here just as they were driving away.”
    “How