“You made it after all,” she said.
“Have I missed anything important?”
“No surprises so far.” She gazed down at Olena. “Same room, same corpse. Strange to think this is the second time I’ve seen this woman dead.”
This time, thought Gabriel, she’ll stay dead.
“So how is Jane doing?”
“She’s fine. A little overwhelmed by visitors right now, I think.”
“And the baby?” She dropped pink lungs into a basin. Lungs that would never again fill with air or oxygenate blood.
“Beautiful. Eight pounds two ounces, ten fingers and ten toes. She looks just like Jane.”
For the first time, a smile tugged at Maura’s eyes. “What’s her name?”
“For the moment, she’s still ‘Baby Girl Rizzoli-Dean.’ ”
“I hope that changes soon.”
“I don’t know. I’m starting to like the sound of it.” It felt disrespectful, talking about such happy details while a dead woman lay between them. He thought of his new daughter taking her first breath, catching her first blurry look at the world, even as Olena’s body was starting to cool.
“I’ll drop by the hospital to see her this afternoon,” said Maura. “Or is she already overdosed on visitors?”
“Believe me, you would be one of the truly welcome ones.”
“Detective Korsak been by yet?”
He sighed. “Balloons and all. Good old Uncle Vince.”
“Don’t knock him. Maybe he’ll volunteer to babysit.”
“That’s just what a baby needs. Someone to teach her the fine art of loud burping.”
Maura laughed. “Korsak’s a good man. Really, he is.”
“Except for the fact he’s in love with my wife.”
Maura set down her knife and looked at him. “Then he’d want her to be happy. And he can see that you both are.” Reaching once again for her scalpel, she added: “You and Jane give the rest of us hope.”
The rest of us. Meaning all the lonely people in the world, he thought. Not so long ago, he was one of them.
He watched as Maura dissected the coronary arteries. How calmly she held a dead woman’s heart in her hands. Her scalpel sliced open cardiac chambers, laying them bare to inspection. She probed and measured and weighed. Yet Maura Isles seemed to keep her own heart safely locked away.
His gaze dropped to the face of the woman they knew only as Olena. Hours ago, I was talking to her, he thought, and these eyes looked back at me, saw me. Now they were dull, the corneas clouded and glazed over. The blood had been washed away, and the bullet wound was a raw pink hole punched into the left temple.
“This looks like an execution,” he said.
“There are other wounds in the left flank.” She pointed to the light box. “You can see two bullets on X-ray, up against the spine.”
“But this wound here.” He stared down at her face. “This was a kill shot.”
“The assault team clearly wasn’t taking any chances. Joseph Roke was shot in the head as well.”
“You’ve done his postmortem?”
“Dr. Bristol finished it an hour ago.”
“Why execute them? They were already down. We were all down.”
Maura looked up from the mass of lungs dripping on the cutting board. “They could have wired themselves to detonate.”
“There were no explosives. These people weren’t terrorists.”
“The rescue team wouldn’t know that. Plus, there may have been a concern about the fentanyl gas they used. You know that a fentanyl derivative was also used to end the Moscow theater siege?”
“Yes.”
“In Moscow, it caused a number of fatalities. And here they were, using something similar on a pregnant hostage. They couldn’t expose a fetus to its effects for too long. The takedown had to be fast and clean. That was how they justified it.”
“So they’re claiming these kill shots were necessary.”
“That’s what Lieutenant Stillman was told. Boston PD had no part in the planning or execution of the takedown.”
Turning to the light box where X-rays were hanging, he asked: “Those are Olena’s?”
“Yes.”
He moved in for a closer look. Saw a bright comma against the skull, a scattering of fragments throughout the cranial cavity.
“That’s all internal ricochet,” she said.
“And this C-shaped opacity here?”
“It’s a fragment caught between the scalp and the skull. Just a piece of lead that sheared off as the bullet punctured bone.”
“Do we know which member of the entry team fired this head shot?”
“Not even Hayder has a list of their names. By the time our Crime Scene Unit processed the scene, the entry team was probably on its way back to Washington, and beyond our reach. They swept up everything when they left. Weapons, cartridge evidence. They even took the knapsack that Joseph Roke brought into the building. They left us only the bodies.”
“It’s how the world works now, Maura. The Pentagon’s authorized to send a commando unit into any American city.”
“I’ll tell you something.” She set down her scalpel and looked at him. “This scares the hell out of me.”
The intercom buzzed. Maura glanced up as her secretary said, over the speaker: “Dr. Isles, Agent Barsanti’s on the line again. He wants to talk to you.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Not a thing.”
“Good. Just say I’ll call him back.” She paused. “When and if I have the time.”
“He’s getting really rude, you know.”
“Then you don’t have to be polite to him.” Maura looked at Yoshima. “Let’s finish up before we get interrupted again.”
She reached deep into the open belly and began resecting the abdominal organs. Out came stomach and liver and pancreas and endless loops of small intestine. Slitting open the stomach, Maura found it empty of food; only greenish secretions dripped out into the basin. “Liver, spleen, and pancreas within normal limits,” she noted. Gabriel watched the foul-smelling offal pile up in the basin, and it disturbed him to think that in his own belly were the same glistening organs. Looking down at Olena’s face, he thought: Once you cut beneath the skin, even the most beautiful woman looks like any other. A mass of organs encased in a hollow package of muscle and bone.
“All right,” Maura said, her voice muffled as she probed even deeper in the cavity. “I can see where the other bullets tracked through. They’re up against the spine here, and we’ve got some retroperitoneal bleeding.” The abdomen was now gutted of most of its organs, and she was peering into an almost hollow shell. “Could you put up the abdominal and thoracic films? Let me just check the position of those other two bullets.”
Yoshima crossed to the light box, took down the skull films, and clipped up a new set of X-rays. The ghostly shadows of heart and lungs glowed inside their bony cage of ribs. Dark pockets of gas were lined up like bumper cars inside intestinal tunnels. Against the softer haze of organs, the bullets stood out like bright chips against the column of lumbar spine.
Gabriel stared at the films for a moment, and his gaze suddenly narrowed as he remembered what Joe had told him. “There’s no view of the arms,” he said.
“Unless there’s obvious trauma, we don’t normally X-ray the limbs,” said Yoshima.
“Maybe you should.”
Maura glanced up. “Why?”
Gabriel went back to the table and examined the left arm. “Look at this scar. What do you think of it?”
Maura circled around to the corpse’s left side and examined the arm. “I see it, just above the elbow. It’s well healed. I don’t feel any masses.” She looked at Gabriel. “What about it?”
“It’s something that Joe told me. I know it sounds crazy.”
“What?”
“He claimed she had a microchip implanted in her arm. Right here, under the skin, to track her whereabouts.”
For a moment Maura just stared at him. Suddenly she laughed. “That’s not a very original delusion.”
“I know, I know what it sounds like.”
“It’s a classic. The government-implanted microchip.”