The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

abdomen, to counter the emptiness she felt there.
    “She might have seen something, from that room,” said Dean.
    “The light in the chapel. It was on when the bodies were found.” Rizzoli looked up at Camille’s window, and remembered the bloodstained sheet.
    She awakens with her sanitary pad soaked. She climbs from bed, to use the bathroom and change her pad. And when she comes back to her room, she notices the light, glowing through the stained-glass windows. A light that should not be on.
    Rizzoli turned toward the chapel, drawn by the ghostly image she now saw, of young Camille, stepping out of the main building. Shivering as she moved beneath the covered walkway, perhaps regretting that she had not pulled on a coat for this short walk between buildings.
    Rizzoli followed that ghost, into the chapel.
    There she stood in the gloom. The lights were off, and the pews were nothing more than horizontal slats of shadow. Dean was silent beside her, like a ghost himself, as she watched the final scene play out.
    Camille, stepping through the door, just a slip of a girl, her face pale as milk.
    She looks down in horror. Sister Ursula lies at her feet, and the stones are splattered with blood.
    Perhaps Camille did not immediately understand what had happened, and thought at first glance that Ursula had merely slipped and hit her head. Or perhaps she already knew, from that first glimpse of blood, that evil had breached their walls. That it now stood behind her, near the door. Watching her.
    That it was moving toward her.
    The first blow sends her staggering. Stunned as she is, she still struggles to escape. Moves in the only direction open to her: Up the aisle. Toward the altar, where she stumbles. Where she drops to her knees, awaiting the final blow.
    And when it’s done, and young Camille lies dead, the killer turns back, toward the first victim. Toward Ursula.
    But he doesn’t finish the job. He leaves her alive. Why?
    She looked down at the stones, where Ursula had fallen. She imagined the attacker, reaching down to confirm the kill.
    She went very still, suddenly remembering what Dr. Isles had told her.
    “The killer didn’t feel a pulse,” she said.
    “What?”
    “Sister Ursula is missing a carotid pulse on the right side of her neck.” She looked at Dean. “He thought she was dead.”
             
     
    They walked up the aisle, past rows of pews, following in Camille’s last footsteps. They came to the spot near the altar where she had fallen. They stood in silence, their gazes on the floor. Though they could not see it in the gloom, traces of blood surely lingered in the cracks between stones.
    Shivering, Rizzoli looked up and saw that Dean was watching her.
    “That’s all there is to see here,” she said. “Unless you want to talk to the sisters.”
    “I want to talk to you.”
    “I’m right here.”
    “No, you’re not. Detective Rizzoli is here. I want to talk to Jane.”
    She laughed. A blasphemous sound in that chapel. “You make it sound like I’m a split personality or something.”
    “That’s not too far from the truth. You work so hard at playing the cop, you bury the woman. It’s the woman I came to see.”
    “You waited long enough.”
    “Why are you angry at me?”
    “I’m not.”
    “You have a strange way of welcoming me to Boston.”
    “Maybe because you didn’t bother to tell me you were coming.”
    He sighed, huffing out a ghost. “Can we just sit together for a moment and talk?”
    She went to the front pew and sank onto the wooden bench. As he sat down beside her, she gazed straight ahead, afraid to look at him. Afraid of the emotions he stirred in her. Just inhaling his scent was painful, because of the longing it reawakened. This was the man who had shared her bed, whose touch and taste and laugh still haunted her dreams. The result of their union was growing even now, inside her, and she pressed her hand to her belly to quell the secret ache she suddenly felt there.
    “How have you been, Jane?”
    “I’ve been good. Busy.”
    “And the bandage on your head? What happened?”
    “Oh, this.” She touched her forehead and shrugged. “Little accident in the morgue. I slipped and fell.”
    “You look tired.”
    “You don’t bother much with compliments, do you?”
    “It’s just an observation.”
    “Yeah, well, I’m tired. Of course I am. It’s been one of those weeks. And Christmas is coming up and I haven’t even bought my family any