The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

Lepers.”
    “
Ben-Hur
was just a movie.”
    “But the disease is real. What it does to your face, your hands.”
    “It can be highly mutilating. That’s what terrified the ancients. Why just the sight of a leper could send people screaming in horror.”
    “Jesus. To think we have it right here in Boston.” Rizzoli shuddered. “It’s freezing. Let’s get inside.”
    They stepped into the alley, their shoes crunching along the icy trough that had formed from the footsteps of so many law enforcement officers. Here they might be protected from the wind, but the well of gloom between the buildings felt somehow colder, the air ominously still. Police tape lay across the threshold of the restaurant’s alley doorway.
    Maura took out the key and inserted it in the padlock, but it would not pop open. She crouched down, jiggling the key in the frozen lock.
    “Why do their fingers fall off?” asked Rizzoli.
    “What?”
    “When you catch leprosy. Why do you lose your fingers? Does it attack the skin, like flesh-eating bacteria?”
    “No, it does its damage in a different way. The leprosy bacillus attacks the peripheral nerves, so your fingers and toes go numb. You can’t feel any pain. Pain is our warning system, part of our defense mechanism against injury. Without it, you could accidentally stick your fingers in boiling hot water, and not sense that your skin’s being burned. Or you don’t feel that blister building on your foot. You can injure yourself again and again, leading to secondary infections. Gangrene.” Maura paused, frustrated by the stubborn lock.
    “Here. Let me try.”
    Maura stepped aside and gratefully slipped her gloved hands in her pockets while Rizzoli jiggled the key.
    “In poorer countries,” said Maura, “it’s the rats that do the actual damage to hands and feet.”
    Rizzoli looked up with a frown. “Rats?”
    “In the night, while you’re sleeping. They crawl onto your bed and gnaw on fingers and toes.”
    “You’re serious?”
    “And you don’t feel a thing, because leprosy has made your skin numb. When you wake up the next morning, you discover the tips of your fingers are gone. That all you’ve got left are bloody stumps.”
    Rizzoli stared at her, then gave the key a sharp twist.
    The padlock popped open. The door swung ajar, to reveal shades of gray blending into blackness.
    “Welcome to Mama Cortina’s,” said Maura.
    Rizzoli paused on the threshold, her Maglite beam cutting across the room. “Something’s moving inside,” she murmured.
    “Rats.”
    “Let’s not talk any more about rats.”
    Maura switched on her own flashlight and followed Rizzoli into a darkness that smelled of rancid grease.
    “He brought her through here, into the dining room,” said Maura, her flashlight playing across the floor. “They found some drag marks through the dust, probably left by the heels of her shoes. He must have grasped her under the arms and hauled her backwards.”
    “You’d think he wouldn’t even want to touch her.”
    “I would assume he was wearing gloves, because he left no fingerprints.”
    “Still, he was rubbing up against her clothes. Exposing himself to infection.”
    “You’re thinking of it the way the ancients did. As though one touch from a leper will turn you into a monster. It’s not as transmissible as you think.”
    “But you
can
catch it. You
can
get infected.”
    “Yes.”
    “And the next thing you know, your nose and fingers are falling off.”
    “It’s treatable. There are antibiotics.”
    “I don’t care if it’s treatable,” said Rizzoli, now moving slowly across the kitchen. “This is leprosy we’re talking about. Something straight out of the Bible.”
    They pushed through the swinging door, into the dining room. Rizzoli’s Maglite swept a circle, and stacked chairs gleamed at the periphery. Though they couldn’t see the infestation, they could hear the faint rustling. The darkness was alive.
    “Which way?” said Rizzoli. Her voice now a murmur, as though they had entered hostile territory.
    “Keep going. There’s a hallway to the right, at that end of the room.”
    Their lights played across the floor. The last traces of the drag marks had been obliterated by the passage of all the law enforcement personnel who had since tramped through. On the night Maura had come to this death scene, she had been flanked by Detectives Crowe and Sleeper, had known that an army of CSTs were already poised to move in with their