Vanish: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

Maura, frowning from her position at the foot of the table.
    “I’d say this guy’s been in a pretty nasty fight,” said Abe. “These look like old knife wounds.”
    “You want to cut off these sleeves?” said Yoshima.
    “No, we can work them off. Let’s just roll him.”
    They tipped the corpse onto its left side to pull the sleeve free. Yoshima, facing the corpse’s back, suddenly said: “Whoa. You should see this.”
    The tattoo covered the entire left shoulder blade. Maura leaned over to take a look and seemed to recoil from the image, as though it were alive, its venomous stinger poised to strike. The carapace was a brilliant blue. Twin pincers stretched toward the man’s neck. Encircled by the coiled tail was the number 13.
    “A scorpion,” said Maura softly.
    “That’s a pretty impressive meat tag,” Yoshima said.
    Maura frowned at him. “What?”
    “It’s what we called them in the army. I saw some real works of art when I was working in the morgue unit. Cobras, tarantulas. One guy had his girlfriend’s name tattooed on . . .” Yoshima paused. “You wouldn’t get a needle anywhere near
mine.
”
    They pulled off the other sleeve and returned the now-nude corpse to its back. Though still a young man, his flesh had already amassed a record of trauma. The scars, the tattoo. And now the final insult: the bullet wound in the left cheek.
    Abe moved the magnifier over the wound. “I see a sear zone here.” He glanced at Maura. “They were in close contact?”
    “He was leaning over her bed, trying to restrain her when she fired.”
    “Can we see those skull X-rays?”
    Yoshima pulled films out of an envelope and clipped them onto the light box. There were two views, an anteroposteral and a lateral. Abe maneuvered his heavy girth around the table to get a closer view of the spectral shadows cast by cranium and facial bones. For a moment he said nothing. Then he looked at Maura. “How many shots did you say she fired?” he asked.
    “One.”
    “You want to take a look at this?”
    Maura crossed to the light box. “I don’t understand,” she murmured. “I was there when it happened.”
    “There are definitely two bullets here.”
    “I
know
that gun fired only once.”
    Abe crossed back to the table and stared down at the corpse’s head. At the bullet hole, with its oval halo of blackened sear zone. “There’s only one entrance wound. If the gun fired twice in rapid succession, that would explain a single wound.”
    “That’s not what I heard, Abe.”
    “In all the confusion, you might have missed the fact there were two shots.”
    Her gaze was still on the X-rays. Gabriel had never seen Maura look so unsure of herself. At that moment, she was clearly struggling to reconcile what she remembered with the undeniable evidence now glowing on the light box.
    “Describe what happened in that room, Maura,” Gabriel said.
    “There were three of us, trying to restrain her,” she said. “I didn’t see her grab the guard’s gun. I was focused on the wrist restraint, trying to get it tied. I had just reached for the strap when the gun went off.”
    “And the other witness?”
    “He was a doctor.”
    “What does he remember? One gunshot or two?”
    She turned, her gaze meeting Gabriel’s. “The police never spoke to him.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because no one knows who he was.” For the first time, he heard the note of apprehension in her voice. “I’m the only one who seems to remember him.”
    Yoshima turned toward the phone. “I’ll call Ballistics,” he said. “They’ll know how many cartridges were left at the scene.”
    “Let’s get started,” said Abe, and he picked up a knife from the instrument tray. There was so little they knew about this victim. Not his real name or his history or how he came to arrive at the time and place of his death. But when this postmortem was over, they would know him more intimately than anyone had before.
    With the first cut, Abe made his acquaintance.
    His blade sliced through skin and muscle, scraping across ribs as he made the Y incision, his cuts angling from the shoulders to join at the xiphoid notch, followed by a single slice down the abdomen, with only a blip of a detour around the umbilicus. Unlike Maura’s deft and elegant dissections, Abe worked with brutal efficiency, his huge hands moving like a butcher’s, the fingers too fat to be graceful. He peeled back flesh from bone, then reached for the heavy-duty garden