Vanish: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

envy for Mrs. Gloria Leder, who’d spent the last moments of her life enjoying this summer day. It was almost August, and Maura had not yet visited the beach or sat by a swimming pool or even sunbathed in her own backyard.
    “Rum and Coke,” said the young cop standing at the foot of the table. “I think that’s what she had in her glass. It was sitting next to her patio chair.”
    This was the first time Maura had seen Officer Buchanan in her morgue. He made her nervous, the way he kept fussing with his paper mask and shifting from foot to foot. The boy looked way too young to be a cop. They were all starting to look too young.
    “Did you retain the contents of that glass?” she asked Officer Buchanan.
    “Uh . . . no, ma’am. I took a good whiff. She was definitely drinking a rum and Coke.”
    “At nine A.M .?” Maura looked across the table at her assistant, Yoshima. As usual, he was silent, but she saw one dark eyebrow tilt up, as eloquent a comment as she would get from Yoshima.
    “She didn’t get down too much of it,” said Officer Buchanan. “The glass was still pretty full.”
    “Okay,” said Maura. “Let’s take a look at her back.”
    Together, she and Yoshima log-rolled the corpse onto its side.
    “There’s a tattoo here on the hip,” noted Maura. “Little blue butterfly.”
    “Geez,” said Buchanan. “A woman her age?”
    Maura glanced up. “You think fifty’s ancient, do you?”
    “I mean—well, that’s my
mom’s
age.”
    Careful, boy. I’m only ten years younger.
    She picked up the knife and began to cut. This was her fifth postmortem of the day, and she made swift work of it. With Dr. Costas on vacation, and a multivehicle accident the night before, the cold room had been crammed with body bags that morning. Even as she’d worked her way through the backlog, two more bodies had been delivered to the refrigerator. Those would have to wait until tomorrow. The morgue’s clerical staff had already left for the evening, and Yoshima kept looking at the clock, obviously anxious to be on his way home.
    She incised skin, gutted the thorax and abdomen. Removed dripping organs and placed them on the cutting board to be sectioned. Little by little, Gloria Leder revealed her secrets: a fatty liver, the telltale sign of a few too many rums and Cokes. A uterus knobby with fibroids.
    And finally, when they opened the cranium, the reason for her death. Maura saw it as she lifted the brain in her gloved hands. “Subarachnoid hemorrhage,” she said, and glanced up at Buchanan. He was looking far paler than when he had first walked into the room. “This woman probably had a berry aneurysm—a weak spot in one of the arteries at the base of the brain. Hypertension would have exacerbated it.”
    Buchanan swallowed, his gaze focused on the flap of loose skin that had been Gloria Leder’s scalp, now peeled forward over the face. That’s the part that usually horrified them, the point at which so many of them winced or turned away—when the face collapses like a tired rubber mask.
    “So . . . you’re saying it’s a natural death?” he asked softly.
    “Correct. There’s nothing more you need to see here.”
    The young man was already stripping off his gown as he retreated from the table. “I think I need some fresh air . . .”
    So do I, thought Maura. It’s a summer night, my garden needs watering, and I have not been outside all day.
    But an hour later she was still in the building, sitting at her desk reviewing lab slips and dictated reports. Though she had changed out of her scrub suit, the smell of the morgue still seemed to cling to her, a scent that no amount of soap and water could eradicate, because the memory itself was what lingered. She picked up the Dictaphone and began to record her report on Gloria Leder.
    “Fifty-year-old white woman found slumped in a patio chair near her apartment swimming pool. She is a well-developed, well-nourished woman with no visible trauma. External exam reveals an old surgical scar on her abdomen, probably from an appendectomy. There is a small tattoo of a butterfly on her . . .” She paused, picturing the tattoo. Was it on the left or the right hip? God, I’m so tired, she thought. I can’t remember. What a trivial detail. It made no difference to her conclusions, but she hated being inaccurate.
    She rose from her chair and walked the deserted hallway to the stairwell, where her footfalls echoed on concrete steps. Pushing into the