The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

badly injured was she?”
    “I didn’t see her. Latest report we got from St. Francis Hospital is that she’s in surgery. Multiple skull fractures and bleeding into the brain.”
    “Like this victim.”
    “Yeah. Like Camille.” The anger was back in Rizzoli’s voice.
    Maura rose to her feet and stood shivering. Her trousers had wicked freezing water from the soaked hem of her coat, and her calves felt encased in ice. She had been told on the phone that the death scene was indoors, so she had not brought her scarf or wool gloves from the car. This unheated room was scarcely warmer than the sleet-swept courtyard outside. She shoved her hands into her coat pockets, and wondered how Rizzoli, who was also without warm gloves and scarf, could linger so long in this frigid chapel. Rizzoli seemed to carry her own heat source within her, the fever of her outrage, and although her lips were turning blue, she did not seem in a hurry to seek a warmer room anytime soon.
    “Why is it so cold in here?” asked Maura. “I can’t imagine they’d want to hold Mass in this room.”
    “They don’t. This part of the building’s never used in winter—it’s too expensive to heat. There are so few of them still living here, anyway. For Mass, they use a small chapel off the rectory.”
    Maura thought of the three nuns she’d seen through the window, all of them elderly. These sisters were dying flames, flickering out one by one.
    “If this chapel’s not used,” she said, “what were the victims doing in here?”
    Rizzoli gave a sigh, exhaling a dragon’s breath of vapor. “No one knows. The Abbess says the last time she saw Ursula and Camille was at prayers last night, around nine. When they didn’t appear at morning prayers, the sisters went looking for them. They never expected to find them in here.”
    “All these blows to the head. It looks like sheer rage.”
    “But look at her face,” said Rizzoli, pointing to Camille. “He didn’t hit her face. He spared her face. That makes it seem a lot less personal. As if he’s not swinging at her specifically, but at what she
is
. What she stands for.”
    “Authority?” said Maura. “Power?”
    “Funny. I would have said something along the lines of faith, hope, and charity.”
    “Well, I went to a Catholic high school.”
    “You?” Rizzoli gave a snort. “Never would’ve guessed.”
    Maura took a deep breath of chilly air and looked up at the cross, remembering her years at Holy Innocents Academy. And the special torments meted out by Sister Magdalene, who had taught history. The torment had not been physical but emotional, dispensed by a woman who was quick to identify which girls had, in her opinion, an unseemly excess of confidence. At the age of fourteen, Maura’s best friends had not been people, but books. She’d easily mastered all her classwork, and had been proud of it, too. That was what had brought Sister Magdalene’s wrath down upon her shoulders. For Maura’s own good, that unholy pride in her own intellect needed to be beaten into humility. Sister Magdalene went about the task with vicious gusto. She had held Maura up to ridicule in class, had written cutting comments in the margins of her immaculate papers, and sighed loudly whenever Maura raised her hand to ask a question. In the end, Maura had been reduced to conquered silence.
    “They used to intimidate me,” said Maura. “The nuns.”
    “I didn’t think anything scared you, Doc.”
    “Lots of things scare me.”
    Rizzoli laughed. “Just not dead bodies, huh?”
    “There are far scarier things in this world than dead bodies.”
    They left the body of Camille lying on her bed of cold stone and moved back around the room’s perimeter, toward the bloodstained floor where Ursula had been found, still alive. The photographer had completed his work and departed; only Maura and Rizzoli remained in the chapel, two lone women, their voices echoing off stark walls. Maura had always thought of chapels as universal sanctuaries, where even the spirit of the unbeliever might be comforted. But she found no comfort in this bleak place, where Death had walked, contemptuous of holy symbols.
    “They found Sister Ursula right here,” said Rizzoli. “She was lying with her head pointed toward the altar, her feet toward the door.”
    As though prostrating herself before the crucifix.
    “This guy’s a fucking animal,” said Rizzoli, the angry words clipped off like shards of ice. “That’s