The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

what we’re dealing with. Out of his mind. Or some coked-up asshole looking for something to steal.”
    “We don’t know it’s a man.”
    Rizzoli waved toward the body of Sister Camille. “You think a woman did that?”
    “A woman can swing a hammer. Crush a skull.”
    “We found a footprint. There, halfway up the aisle. Looked to me like a man’s size twelve.”
    “One of the ambulance crew?”
    “No, you can see the Med-Q team’s footprints here, near the door. That one in the aisle’s different. That one’s
his
.”
    The wind blew, rattling the windows, and the door creaked as though invisible hands were tugging at it, desperate to get in. Rizzoli’s lips had chilled to blue, and her face had taken on a corpselike pallor, but she showed no intention of seeking a warmer room. That was Rizzoli, too stubborn to be the first to capitulate. To admit she had reached her limit.
    Maura looked down at the stone floor where Sister Ursula had been lying, and she could not disagree with Rizzoli’s instincts, that this attack was an act of insanity. This was madness she saw here, in these bloodstains. In the blows slammed into Sister Camille’s skull. Either madness, or evil.
    An icy draft seemed to blow straight up her spine. She straightened, shivering, and her gaze fixed on the crucifix. “I’m freezing,” she said. “Can we get warm somewhere? Get a cup of coffee?”
    “Are you finished here?”
    “I’ve seen what I need to. The autopsy will tell us the rest.”

T WO
     
    T HEY EMERGED from the chapel, stepping over the strand of police tape which by now had fallen from the doorway and lay encased in ice. The wind flapped their coats and whipped their faces as they headed beneath the walkway, their eyes narrowed against rebel gusts of snowflakes. As they stepped into a gloomy entranceway, Maura registered barely a whisper of warmth against her numb face. She smelled eggs and old paint and the mustiness of an ancient heating system, radiating dust.
    The clatter of chinaware drew them down a dim hallway, into a room awash in fluorescent light, a disconcertingly modern detail. It glared down, stark and unflattering, on the deeply lined faces of the nuns seated around a battered rectory table. Thirteen of them—an unlucky number. Their attention was focused on squares of bright floral cloth and silk ribbons and trays of dried lavender and rose petals. Craft time, thought Maura, watching as arthritic hands scooped up herbs and wound ribbon around sachets. One of the nuns sat slumped in a wheelchair. She was tilted to the side, her left hand curled into a claw on the armrest, her face sagging like a partly melted mask. The cruel aftermath of a stroke. Yet she was the first to notice the two intruders, and she gave a moan. The other sisters looked up, turning toward Maura and Rizzoli.
    Gazing into those wizened faces, Maura was startled by the frailty she saw there. These were not the stern images of authority she remembered from her girlhood, but the gazes of the bewildered, looking to her for answers to this tragedy. She was uneasy with her new status, the way a grown child is uneasy when he first realizes that he and his parents have reversed roles.
    Rizzoli asked, “Can someone tell me where Detective Frost is?”
    The question was answered by a harried-looking woman who had just come out of the adjoining kitchen, carrying a tray of clean coffee cups and saucers. She was dressed in a faded blue jumper stained with grease, and a tiny diamond glinted through the bubbles of dishwater on her left hand. Not a nun, thought Maura, but the rectory employee, tending to this ever more infirm community.
    “He’s still talking to the Abbess,” the woman said. She cocked her head toward the doorway, and a strand of brown hair came loose, curling over her frown-etched forehead. “Her office is down the hall.”
    Rizzoli nodded. “I know the way.”
    They left the harsh light of that room and continued down the hallway. Maura felt a draft here, a whisper of chill air, as though a ghost had just slipped past her. She did not believe in the afterlife, but when walking in the footsteps of those who had recently died, she sometimes wondered if their passing did not leave behind some imprint, some faint disturbance of energy that could be sensed by those who followed.
    Rizzoli knocked on the Abbess’s door, and a tremulous voice said: “Come in.”
    Stepping into the room, Maura smelled the aroma of coffee, as