Vanish: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

vodka. The heat had flushed his scalp bright red, and he swiped away sweat. “This is going to go over
real
well with the members. Here we do our civic duty and pull a woman out of the water. Now we’re all suspects?”
    Gabriel turned his gaze up the shoreline to the boat ramp, where a truck was now backing up to launch a motorboat into the water. Three other vehicles towing boats were lined up in the parking area, waiting their turns. “What’s your nighttime security like, Mr. Boynton?” he asked.
    “Security?” Skip shrugged. “We lock the club doors at midnight.”
    “And the pier? The boats? There’s no security guard?”
    “We haven’t had any break-ins. The boats are all locked. Plus, it’s quiet out here. If you get any closer to the city, you’ll find people hanging around the waterfront all night. This is a special little club. A place to get away from it all.”
    A place where you could drive down to the boat ramp at night, thought Gabriel. You could back right down to the water, and no one would see you open your trunk. No one would see you pull out a body and toss it into Hingham Bay. If the tide was right, that body would drift out past the islands just offshore, straight into Massachusetts Bay.
    But not if the tide was coming in.
    His cell phone rang. He moved away from the others and walked down the pier a few paces before he answered the call.
    It was Maura. “I think you might want to get back here,” she said. “We’re about to do the autopsy.”
    “Which autopsy?”
    “On the hospital security guard.”
    “The cause of death is clear, isn’t it?”
    “Another question has come up.”
    “What?”
    “We don’t know who this man is.”
    “Can’t someone at the hospital ID him? He was their employee.”
    “That’s the problem,” said Maura. “He wasn’t.”
     
    They had not yet undressed the corpse.
    Gabriel was no stranger to the horrors of the autopsy room, and the sight of this victim, in the scope of his experience, was not particularly shocking. He saw only a single entry wound that tunneled into the left cheek; otherwise the features were intact. The man was in his thirties, with neatly clipped dark hair and a muscular jaw. His brown eyes, exposed to air by partially open lids, were already clouded. A name tag with PERRIN was clipped to the breast pocket of the uniform. Staring at the table, what disturbed Gabriel most was not the gore or the sightless eyes; it was the knowledge that the same weapon that had ended this man’s life was now threatening Jane’s.
    “We waited for you,” said Dr. Abe Bristol. “Maura thought you’d want to watch this from the beginning.”
    Gabriel looked at Maura, who was gowned and masked, but standing at the foot of the table, and not at her usual place at the corpse’s right side. Every other time he’d entered this lab, she had been the one in command, the one holding the knife. He was not accustomed to seeing her cede control in the room where she usually reigned. “You’re not doing this postmortem?” he asked.
    “I can’t. I’m a witness to this man’s death,” said Maura. “Abe has to do this one.”
    “And you still have no idea who he is?”
    She shook her head. “There’s no hospital employee with the name Perrin. And the chief of security came to view the body. He didn’t recognize this man.”
    “Fingerprints?”
    “We’ve sent his prints to AFIS. Nothing’s back on him so far. Or on the shooter’s fingerprints, either.”
    “So we’ve got a John Doe and a Jane Doe?” Gabriel stared at the corpse. “Who the hell are these people?”
    “Let’s get him undressed,” Abe said to Yoshima.
    The two men removed the corpse’s shoes and socks, unbuckled the belt, and peeled off the trousers, laying the items of clothing on a clean sheet. With gloved hands Abe searched the pants pockets but found them empty. No comb, no wallet, no keys. “Not even any loose change,” he noted.
    “You’d think there’d be at least a spare dime or two,” said Yoshima.
    “These pockets are clean.” Abe looked up. “Brand-new uniform?”
    They turned their attention to the shirt. The fabric was now stiff with dried blood, and they had to peel it away from the chest, revealing muscular pectorals and a thick mat of dark hair. And scars. Thick as twisted rope, one scar slanted up beneath the right nipple; the other slashed diagonally from abdomen to left hip bone.
    “Those aren’t surgical scars,” said