The Surgeon: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel: With Bonus Content

over her shoulder at him, and their faces were suddenly so close he felt his breath catch.
    “You can’t read it?” she asked.
    “I can read tire tracks and blood splatters. This I can’t read.”
    “It’s Ken Kimball’s handwriting. I recognize his signature.”
    “I don’t even recognize it as English.”
    “To another doctor, it’s perfectly legible. You just have to know the code.”
    “They teach you that in medical school?”
    “Along with the secret handshake and the decoder ring instructions.”
    It felt strange to be trading quips over such grim business, even stranger to hear humor come from Dr. Cordell’s lips. It was his first glimpse of the woman beneath the shell. The woman she’d been before Andrew Capra had inflicted his damage.
    “The first paragraph is the physical exam,” she explained. “He uses medical shorthand.
HEENT
means head, ears, eyes, nose, and throat. She had a bruise on her left cheek. The lungs were clear, the heart without murmurs or gallops.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Normal.”
    “A doctor can’t just write: ‘The heart is normal’?”
    “Why do cops say ‘vehicle’ instead of just plain ‘car’?”
    He nodded. “Point taken.”
    “The abdomen was flat, soft, and without organomegaly. In other words—”
    “Normal.”
    “You’re catching on. Next he describes the . . . pelvic exam. Where things are not normal.” She paused. When she spoke again, her voice was softer, drained of all humor. She took a breath, as though to draw in the courage to continue. “There was blood in the introitus. Scratches and bruising on both thighs. A vaginal tear at the four o’clock position, indicating this was not a consensual act. At that point Dr. Kimball says he stopped the exam.”
    Moore focused on the final paragraph. This he could read. This contained no medical shorthand.
     
    Patient became agitated. Refused collection of rape kit. Refused to cooperate with any further intervention. After baseline HIV screen and VDRL drawn, she dressed and left before authorities could be called.
     
    “So the rape was never reported,” he said. “There was no vaginal swab. No DNA collected.”
    Catherine was silent. She stood with head bowed, her hands clutching the binder.
    “Dr. Cordell?” he said, and touched her shoulder. She gave a start, as though he had burned her, and he quickly took his hand away. She looked up, and he saw rage in her eyes. There was a fierceness radiating from her that made her, at that moment, every bit his equal.
    “Raped in May, butchered in July,” she said. “It’s a fine world for women, isn’t it?”
    “We’ve spoken to every member of her family. No one said anything about a rape.”
    “Then she didn’t tell them.”
    How many women keep their silence? he wondered. How many have secrets so painful they cannot share them with the people they love? Looking at Catherine, he thought about the fact that she, too, had sought comfort in the company of strangers.
    She took the encounter out of the binder for him to photocopy. As he took it, his gaze fell on the doctor’s name, and another thought occurred to him.
    “What can you tell me about Dr. Kimball?” he said. “The one who examined Elena Ortiz?”
    “He’s an excellent physician.”
    “He usually works the night shift?”
    “Yes.”
    “Do you know if he was on duty last Thursday night?”
    It took her a moment to register the significance of that question. When she did, he saw she was shaken by the implications. “You don’t really think—”
    “It’s a routine question. We look at all the victim’s prior contacts.”
    But the question was not routine, and she knew it.
    “Andrew Capra was a doctor,” she said softly. “You don’t think another doctor—”
    “The possibility has occurred to us.”
    She turned away. Took an unsteady breath. “In Savannah, when those other women were murdered, I just assumed I didn’t know the killer. I assumed that if I ever did meet him, I’d know it. I’d feel it. Andrew Capra taught me how wrong I was.”
    “The banality of evil.”
    “That’s exactly what I learned. That evil can be so ordinary. That a man I’d see every day, say hello to every day, could smile right back at me.” She added, softly: “And be thinking of all the different ways he’d like to kill me.”
     
    It was dusk when Moore walked back to his car, but the heat of day still radiated from the blacktop. It would be another uncomfortable