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

not turn away. We recognize its lustrous beauty; we feel its primitive pull.
    Everyone who drives past an accident and cannot help but look for the blood understands this. Beneath the revulsion, the urge to turn away, throbs a greater force. Attraction.
    We all want to look. But not all of us will admit it.
    It is lonely, walking among the anesthetized. In the afternoon, I wander the city and breathe in air so thick I can almost see it. It warms my lungs like heated syrup. I search the faces of people on the street, and I wonder which among them is my dearest blood brother, as once you were. Is there anyone else who has not lost touch with the ancient force that flows through us all? I wonder if we would recognize each other if we met, and I fear we would not, because we have hidden ourselves so deeply beneath the cloak that passes for normality.
    So I walk alone. And I think of you, the only one who ever understood.

     

seventeen
    A s a physician, Catherine had looked at death so many times that its visage was familiar to her. She had stared into a patient’s face and watched life drain from the eyes, turning them blank and glassy. She had seen skin fade to gray, the soul in retreat, seeping away like blood. The practice of medicine is as much about death as it is about life, and Catherine had long ago made Death’s acquaintance over the cooling remains of a patient. She was not afraid of corpses.
    Yet as Moore turned onto Albany Street and she saw the neat brick building of the Medical Examiner’s office, her hands broke out in a sweat.
    He parked in the lot behind the building, next to a white van with the words “Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Office of the Medical Examiner” printed on the side. She did not want to leave the car, and only when he came around to open her door did she finally step out.
    “Are you ready for this?” he asked.
    “I’m not looking forward to it,” she admitted. “But let’s get it over with.”
    Though she had viewed dozens of autopsies, she was not fully prepared for the smell of blood and ruptured intestines that hit her as they walked into the lab. For the first time in her medical career, she thought she would be sick at the sight of a body.
    An older gentleman, eyes protected by a plastic face shield, turned to look at them. She recognized the M.E., Dr. Ashford Tierney, whom she had met at a forensic pathology conference six months before. A trauma surgeon’s failures were often the very subjects who ended up on Dr. Tierney’s autopsy table, and she had last spoken to him only a month ago, regarding the disturbing circumstances surrounding a child’s death from a ruptured spleen.
    Dr. Tierney’s gentle smile contrasted jarringly with the blood-streaked rubber gloves he was wearing. “Dr. Cordell, it’s good to see you again.” He paused, as the irony of that statement struck him. “Though it could be under more pleasant circumstances.”
    “You’ve already started cutting,” Moore noted in dismay.
    “Lieutenant Marquette wants immediate answers,” said Tierney. “Every police shooting, the press is at his throat.”
    “But I called ahead to arrange this viewing.”
    “Dr. Cordell’s seen autopsies before. This is nothing new for her. Just let me finish this excision, and she can take a look at the face.”
    Tierney turned his attention to the abdomen. With the scalpel, he finished slicing free the small bowel, pulled out loops of intestine, and dropped them into a steel basin. Then he stepped away from the table and nodded to Moore. “Go ahead.”
    Moore touched Catherine’s arm. Reluctantly she approached the corpse. At first she focused on the gaping incision. An open abdomen was familiar territory, the organs impersonal landmarks, lumps of tissue that could belong to any stranger. Organs held no emotional significance, carried no personal stamp of identity. She could study them with the cool eye of a professional, and so she did, noting that the stomach and pancreas and liver were still in situ, waiting to be removed in a single bloc. The Y-incision, extending from the neck to the pubis, revealed both the chest and the abdominal cavity. The heart and lungs had already been excised, leaving the thorax an empty bowl. Visible in the chest wall were two bullet wounds, one entry just above the left nipple, the other a few ribs beneath it. Both bullets would have entered the thorax, piercing either heart or lung. In the left upper abdomen was yet a