Body Double

THREE

ALTHOUGH SHE HAD NO AUTOPSIES on her own schedule that day, at two o’clock Maura headed downstairs and changed into a scrub suit. She was alone in the women’s locker room, and she took her time removing her street clothes, folding her blouse and slacks and placing them in a tidy pile inside the locker. The scrubs felt crisp against her bare skin, like freshly laundered sheets, and she found comfort in the familiar routine of tightening the trouser drawstrings and tucking her hair into a cap. She felt contained and protected by laundered cotton, and by the role she donned along with the uniform. She glanced in the mirror, at a reflection as cool as a stranger’s, all emotions shielded from sight. She left the locker room, walked down the hall, and pushed into the autopsy suite.

Rizzoli and Frost were already standing beside the table, both of them gowned and gloved, their backs obstructing Maura’s view of the victim. It was Dr. Bristol who first spotted Maura. He stood facing her, his generous girth filling the extra-large surgical gown, and he met her gaze as she entered the room. His eyebrows pinched into a frown above the surgical mask, and she saw the question in his eyes.

“I thought I’d drop in to watch this one,” she said.

Now Rizzoli turned to look at her. She, too, was frowning. “Are you sure you want to be here?”

“Wouldn’t you be curious?”

“But I’m not sure I’d want to watch. Considering.”

“I’m just going to observe. If that’s okay with you, Abe.”

Bristol shrugged. “Well hell, I guess I’d be curious, too,” he said. “Join the party.”

She moved around to Abe’s side of the table and at her first unobstructed view of the corpse, her throat went dry. She had seen her share of horrors in this lab, had gazed at flesh in every stage of decay, at bodies so damaged by fire or trauma that the remains could scarcely be categorized as human. The woman on the table was, in the scope of her experience, remarkably intact. The blood had been washed away, and the bullet’s entry wound, in the left scalp, was obscured by her dark hair. The face was undamaged, the torso marred only by dependent mottling of the skin. There were fresh puncture marks in the groin and neck, where the morgue assistant Yoshima had drawn blood for lab tests, but the torso was otherwise untouched; Abe’s scalpel had yet to make a single slice. Had the chest already been split open, the cavity exposed, the body would have struck her as a far less disturbing sight. Opened corpses are anonymous. Hearts and lungs and spleens are merely organs, so lacking in individuality that they can be transplanted, like spare auto parts, between bodies. But this woman was still whole, her features startlingly recognizable. Last night, Maura had seen the corpse fully clothed and in shadow, lit only by the beam of Rizzoli’s Maglite. Now the features were harshly lit by autopsy lamps, the clothes stripped off to reveal the naked torso, and those features were more than merely familiar.

Dear god, that’s my own face, my own body, on the table.

Only she knew just how close the resemblance was. No one else in that room would have seen the shape of Maura’s bare breasts, the curve of her thighs. They knew only what she allowed them to see, her face, her hair. They could not possibly know that the similarities between her and this corpse were as intimate as the flecks of reddish brown in the pubic hair.

Maura looked at the woman’s hands, the fingers long and slender like her own. A pianist’s hands. The fingers had already been inked. Skull and dental X-rays had been completed as well; the dental panograph was now displayed on the light box, two white rows of teeth glowing in a Cheshire cat’s grin. Is that how my X-rays would look? she wondered. Are we the same, right down to the enamel on our teeth?

She asked, in a voice that struck her as unnaturally calm, “Have you learned anything else about her?”

“We’re still checking on that name, Anna Jessop,” said Rizzoli. “All we have so far is that Massachusetts driver’s license, issued four months ago. It says she’s forty years old. Five foot seven, black hair, green eyes. A hundred twenty pounds.” Rizzoli eyed the corpse on the table. “I’d say she fits that description.”

So do I, thought Maura. I’m forty years old and five foot seven. Only the weight is different; I weigh a hundred twenty-five. But what woman doesn’t lie about her weight on her driver’s license?

She watched, wordless, as Abe completed his surface exam. He jotted occasional notations on the preprinted diagram of a female body. Bullet wound in the left temple. Dependent mottling of the lower torso and thighs. Appendectomy scar. Then he set down the clipboard and moved to the foot of the table to collect vaginal swabs. As he and Yoshima rotated the thighs to expose the perineum, it was the corpse’s abdomen that Maura focused on. She stared at the appendectomy scar, a thin white line tracing across ivory skin.

I have one, too.

Swabs collected, Abe moved to the instrument tray and picked up the scalpel.

The first cut was almost unbearable to watch. Maura actually lifted her hand to her chest, as though she could feel the blade slice into her own flesh. This was a mistake, she thought as Abe made his Y incision. I don’t know if I can watch this. But she remained rooted to her spot, trapped by appalled fascination as she saw Abe reflect back the skin from the chest wall, swiftly peeling it away as though skinning game. He worked unaware of her horror, his attention focused only on the task of opening up the torso. An efficient pathologist can complete an uncomplicated autopsy in under an hour, and at this stage of the postmortem, Abe wasted no time on needlessly elegant dissection. Maura had always thought Abe a likable man, with his hearty appetite for food and drink and opera, but at this moment, with his bulging abdomen and his neck thick as a bull’s, he looked like a fat butcher, his knife tearing through flesh.

The skin of the chest was now flayed open, the breasts concealed beneath the peeled-back flaps, the ribs and muscles exposed. Yoshima leaned forward with pruning shears and cut through the ribs. Each snap made Maura wince. How easily a human bone is cracked, she thought. We think of our hearts as protected within a sturdy cage of ribs, yet all it takes is the squeeze of a handle, the scissoring of blades, and one by one, the ribs surrender to tempered steel. We are made of such fragile material.

Yoshima snipped through the last bone, and Abe sliced the last strands of gristle and muscle. Together they removed the breastplate, as though lifting off the lid of a box.

Inside the open thorax, the heart and lungs glistened. Young organs, was Maura’s first thought. But no, she realized; forty years old wasn’t so young, was it? It was not easy to acknowledge that, at age forty, she was at the halfway mark in her life. That she, like this woman on the table, could no longer be considered young.

The organs she saw in the open chest appeared normal, without obvious signs of pathology. With a few swift cuts, Abe excised the lungs and heart and placed them in a metal basin. Under bright lights he made a few slices to view the lung parenchyma.

“Not a smoker,” he said to the two detectives. “No edema. Nice healthy tissue.”

Except for the fact it was dead.

He dropped the lungs back into the basin, where they formed a pink mound, and he picked up the heart. It rested easily in his massive hand. Maura was suddenly aware of her own heart, thumping in her chest. Like this woman’s heart, it would fit in Abe’s palm. She felt a twinge of nausea at the thought of him holding it, turning it over to inspect the coronary vessels as he was doing now. Though mechanically just a pump, the heart sits at the very core of one’s body, and to see this one so exposed to view made her own chest feel hollow. She took a breath, and the scent of blood made her nausea worse. She turned away from the corpse and found herself meeting Rizzoli’s gaze. Rizzoli, who saw too much. They had known each other almost two years now, had worked enough cases together to have developed the highest regard for each other as professionals. But along with that regard came a measure of respectful wariness. Maura knew just how acute were Rizzoli’s instincts, and as they looked at each other across the table, she knew that the other woman must surely see how close Maura was to bolting from the room. At the unspoken question in Rizzoli’s eyes, Maura simply squared her jaw. The Queen of the Dead reasserted her invincibility.

She focused, once again, on the corpse.

Abe, oblivious to the undercurrent of tension in the room, had sliced open the heart’s chambers. “Valves all look normal,” he commented. “Coronaries are soft. Clean vessels. Geez, I hope my heart looks this good.”

Maura glanced at his enormous belly and doubted it, knowing his passion for foie gras and buttery sauces. Enjoy life while you can, was Abe’s philosophy. Indulge your appetites now, because we all end up, sooner or later, like our friends on the table. What good are clean coronaries if you’ve lived a life deprived of pleasures?

He set the heart in the basin and went to work on the contents of the abdomen, his scalpel slicing deep, through peritoneum. Out came the stomach and liver, spleen and pancreas. The odor of death, of chilled organs, was familiar to Maura, yet this time so disturbing. As if she was experiencing an autopsy for the very first time. No longer the jaded pathologist, she watched Abe cut with scissors and knife, and the brutality of the procedure appalled her. Dear god, this is what I do every day, but when my scalpel cuts, it’s through the unfamiliar flesh of strangers.

This woman does not feel like a stranger.

She slipped into a numb void, watching Abe work as though from a distance. Fatigued by her restless night, by jet lag, she felt herself recede from the scene unfolding on the table, retreating to some safer vantage point from which she could watch with dulled emotions. It was just a cadaver on the table. No connection, no one she knew. Abe quickly freed the small intestines and dropped the coils into the basin. With scissors and kitchen knife, he gutted the abdomen, leaving only a hollow shell. He carried the basin, now heavy with entrails, to the stainless steel countertop, where he lifted out the organs one by one for closer examination.

On the cutting board, he slit open the stomach and drained the contents into a smaller basin. The smell of undigested food made Rizzoli and Frost turn away, their faces grimacing in disgust.

“Looks like the remains of supper here,” said Abe. “I’d say she had a seafood salad. I see lettuce and tomatoes. Maybe shrimp…”

“How close to the time of death was her last meal?” asked Rizzoli. Voice oddly nasal, her hand over her face, blocking the smells.

“An hour, maybe more. I’m guessing she ate out, since seafood salad’s not the kind of meal I’d fix for myself at home.” Abe glanced at Rizzoli. “You find any restaurant receipts in her purse?”

“No. She could’ve paid cash. We’re still waiting for her credit card info.”

“Jesus,” said Frost, still averting his gaze. “This just about kills any appetite I ever had for shrimp.”

“Hey, you can’t let that bother you,” said Abe, now slicing into the pancreas. “When you get right down to it, we’re all made up of the same basic building blocks. Fat, carbohydrates, and protein. You eat a juicy steak, you’re eating muscle. You think I’d ever swear off steak, just because that’s the tissue I dissect every day? All muscle has the same biochemical ingredients, but sometimes it just smells better than at other times.” He reached for the kidneys. Made neat slices into each, and dropped small tissue samples into a jar of formalin. “So far, everything looks normal,” he said. He glanced at Maura. “You agree?”

She gave a mechanical nod but said nothing, suddenly distracted by the new set of X-rays that Yoshima was now hanging on the light box. They were skull films. On the lateral view, the outline of soft tissue could be seen, like a semitransparent ghost of a face in profile.

Maura crossed to the light box and stared at the star-shaped density, startlingly bright against the softer shadow of bone. It had lodged up against the skull table. The bullet’s deceptively small entrance wound in the scalp gave little indication of the damage this devastating projectile could do to the human brain.

“Jesus,” she murmured. “It’s a Black Talon bullet.”

Abe glanced up from the basin of organs. “Haven’t seen one of those in a while. We’ll have to be careful. Metal tips on that bullet are razor-sharp. They’ll cut right through your glove.” He looked at Yoshima, who had worked at the M.E.’s office longer than any of the current pathologists, and who served as their institutional memory. “When’s the last time we had a vic come in with a Black Talon?”

“I’d guess it was about two years ago,” said Yoshima.

“That recent?”

“I remember Dr. Tierney had the case.”

“Can you ask Stella to look it up? See if that case got closed. Bullet’s unusual enough to make you wonder about any linkage.”

Yoshima stripped off his gloves and went to the intercom to buzz Abe’s secretary. “Hello, Stella? Dr. Bristol would like a search for the last case involving a Black Talon bullet. It would have been Dr. Tierney’s…”

“I’ve heard of them,” said Frost, who’d moved to the light box for a closer look at the X-ray. “First time I’ve had a vic with one.”

“It’s a hollow point, manufactured by Winchester,” said Abe. “Designed to expand and cut through soft tissue. When it penetrates flesh, the copper jacket peels open to form a six-pointed star. Each tip’s as sharp as a claw.” He moved to the corpse’s head. “They were taken off the market in ’93, after some nut out in San Francisco used them to kill nine people in a mass shooting. Winchester got such bad publicity, they decided to stop production. But there are still a few out there in circulation. Every so often, one’ll turn up in a vic, but they’re getting pretty rare.”

Maura’s gaze was still on the X-ray, on that lethal white star. She thought of what Abe had just said: Each tip’s as sharp as a claw. And she remembered the scratch marks left on the victim’s car. Like the claw mark of a raptor’s talon.

She turned back to the table, just as Abe completed his scalp incision. In that brief instant, before he peeled the skin flap forward, Maura found herself unavoidably staring at the dead woman’s face. Death had mottled the lips to a dusky blue. The eyes were open, the exposed corneas dry and clouded by exposure to air. The eye’s bright gleam during life is merely the light’s reflection off moist corneas; when the lids no longer blink, when the cornea is no longer bathed in fluid, the eyes turn dry and dull. It’s not the departure of the soul that drains the appearance of life from one’s eyes; it’s simply the cessation of the blink reflex. Maura gazed down at the two clouded bands across the cornea, and for an instant she imagined the eyes as they must have looked while alive. It was a startling glimpse into the mirror. She had the sudden, vertiginous thought that in fact she was the one lying on the table. That she was watching her own corpse being autopsied. Didn’t ghosts linger in the same places they frequented while alive? This is my haunt, she thought. The autopsy lab. This is where I’m doomed to spend eternity.

Abe peeled the scalp forward and the face collapsed like a rubber mask.

Maura shuddered. Looking away, she noticed that Rizzoli was once again watching her. Is she looking at me? Or at my ghost?

The whir of the Stryker saw seemed to drill straight into her marrow. Abe cut through the dome of exposed skull, preserving the segment where the bullet had punched through. Gently, he pried off and removed the cap of bone. The Black Talon tumbled out of the open cranium and clattered into the basin Yoshima was holding beneath it. It gleamed there, its metal points splayed open like the petals of a lethal blossom.

The brain was mottled with dark blood.

“Extensive hemorrhage, both hemispheres. Just what you’d expect from the X-rays,” Abe said. “The bullet entered here, left temporal bone. But it didn’t exit. You can see it there, in the films.” He pointed to the light box, where the bullet stood out as a bright starburst, resting against the inner curve of the left occipital bone.

Frost said, “Funny how it ended up on the same side of the skull it entered.”

“There was probably ricochet. The bullet punched into the cranium and bounced back and forth, slicing through brain. Expending all its energy on the soft tissue. Like spinning the blades of a blender.”

“Dr. Bristol?” It was his secretary, Stella, on the intercom.

“Yeah?”

“I found that case with the Black Talon. Victim’s name was Vassily Titov. Dr. Tierney did the autopsy.”

“Who was the detective on that case?”

“Um… here it is. Detectives Vann and Dunleavy.”

“I’ll check with them,” said Rizzoli. “See what they remember about it.”

“Thanks, Stella,” called Bristol. He looked at Yoshima, who had the camera ready. “Okay, snap away.”

Yoshima began to take photos of the exposed brain, capturing a permanent record of its appearance before Abe removed it from its bony house. Here is where a lifetime’s worth of memories were laid down, Maura thought, as she gazed at the glistening folds of gray matter. The ABC’s of childhood. Four times four is sixteen. The first kiss, the first lover, the first heartbreak. All are deposited, as packets of messenger RNA, into this complex collection of neurons. Memory was merely biochemistry, yet it defined each human being as an individual.

With a few nicks of the scalpel, Abe freed the brain and carried it in both hands, as though bearing treasure, to the countertop. He would not dissect it today; instead he would let it soak in a basin of fixative, to be sectioned later. But he needed no microscopic examination to see the evidence of trauma; it was there, in the bloody discoloration on the surface.

“So we’ve got the entrance wound here, in the left temple,” said Rizzoli.

“Yes, and the skin hole and cranial hole line up perfectly,” said Abe.

“That’s consistent with a straight shot into the side of the head.”

Abe nodded. “The perp probably pointed right through the driver’s window. And the window was open, so there was no glass to distort the trajectory.”

“So she’s just sitting there,” said Rizzoli. “Warm night. Window down. Eight o’clock, it’s getting dark. And he walks up to her car. Just points the gun and fires.” Rizzoli shook her head. “Why?”

“Didn’t take the purse,” said Abe.

“So not a robbery,” said Frost.

“Which leaves us with a crime of passion. Or a hit.” Rizzoli glanced at Maura. There it was again-that possibility of a targeted killing.

Did he hit the right target?

Abe suspended the brain in a bucket of formalin. “No surprises so far,” he said, as he turned to perform the neck dissection.

“You’ll be running tox screens?” asked Rizzoli.

Abe shrugged. “We can send one off, but I’m not sure it’s necessary. The cause of death is right up there.” He nodded toward the light box, where the bullet stood out against the cranial shadow. “You have any reason to want a tox screen? Did CST find any drugs or paraphernalia in the car?”

“Nothing. The car was pretty tidy. I mean, except for the blood.”

“And all of it is from the victim?”

“It’s all B positive, anyway.”

Abe glanced at Yoshima. “You typed our gal yet?”

Yoshima nodded. “It matches. She’s B positive.”

No one was looking at Maura. No one saw her chin snap up, or heard her sharp intake of breath. Abruptly she turned so they could not see her face, and she untied her mask, pulling it off with a brisk tug.

As she crossed to the trash can, Abe called out: “You bored with us already, Maura?”

“This jet lag is getting to me,” she said, shrugging off the gown. “I think I’m going to go home early. I’ll see you tomorrow, Abe.”

She fled the lab without a backward glance.

The drive home went by in a blur. Only as she reached the outskirts of Brookline did her brain suddenly unlock. Only then did she break out of the obsessive loop of thoughts that kept playing in her head. Don’t think about the autopsy. Put it out of your mind. Think about dinner, about anything but what you saw today.

She stopped at the grocery store. Her refrigerator was empty, and unless she wanted to eat tuna and frozen peas tonight, she needed to shop. It was a relief to focus on something else. She threw items into her cart with manic urgency. Far safer to think about food, about what she would cook for the rest of the week. Stop thinking about blood spatters and women’s organs in steel basins. I need grapefruits and apples. And don’t those eggplants look good? She picked up a bundle of fresh basil and greedily inhaled its scent, grateful that its pungency swept away, if only for the moment, all the remembered smells of the autopsy lab. A week of bland French meals had left her starved for spices; tonight, she thought, I’ll cook a Thai green curry so hot it will burn my mouth.

At home she changed into shorts and a T-shirt and threw herself into preparing dinner. Sipped chilled white Bordeaux as she sliced chicken and onions and garlic. The steamy fragrance of jasmine rice filled the kitchen. No time to think of B positive blood and black-haired women; the oil’s smoking in the pot. Time to sauté the chicken, add the curry paste. Pour in the can of coconut milk. She covered the pot to let it simmer. Looked up at the kitchen window and suddenly caught a reflection of herself in the glass.

I look like her. Exactly like her.

A chill swept through her, as though the face in the window was not a reflection, but a phantom staring back. The lid on the pot rattled from the rising steam. Ghosts trying to get out. Desperate to get her attention.

She turned off the burner, crossed to the telephone, and dialed a pager number she knew by heart.

A moment later, Jane Rizzoli called. In the background, Maura could hear a phone ringing. So Rizzoli was not at home yet, but probably sitting at her desk in Schroeder Plaza.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” said Maura. “But I need to ask you something.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I just want to know one more thing about her.”

“Anna Jessop?”

“Yes. You said she had a Massachusetts driver’s license.”

“That’s right.”

“What’s the birth date on her license?”

“What?”

“Today, in the autopsy lab, you said she was forty years old. What day was she born?”

“Why?”

“Please. I just need to know.”

“Okay. Hold on.”

Maura heard the shuffling of pages, then Rizzoli came back on the line. “According to that license, her birthday’s November twenty-fifth.”

For a moment, Maura did not say anything.

“You still there?” asked Rizzoli.

“Yes.”

“What’s the problem, Doc? What’s going on?”

Maura swallowed. “I need you to do something for me, Jane. It’s going to sound crazy.”

“Try me.”

“I want the crime lab to run my DNA against hers.”

Over the line, Maura heard the other telephone finally stop ringing. Rizzoli said, “Tell me that again. Because I don’t think I heard you right.”

“I want to know if my DNA matches Anna Jessop’s.”

“Look, I agree there’s a strong resemblance-”

“There’s more.”

“What else are you talking about?”

“We both have the same blood type. B positive.”

Rizzoli said, reasonably: “How many other people have B positive? It’s like, what? Ten percent of the population?”

“And her birthday. You said her birthday’s November twenty-fifth. Jane, so is mine.”

That news brought dead silence. Rizzoli said softly: “Okay, you just made the hairs on the back of my arms stand up.”

“You see why I want it, now? Everything about her-from the way she looks, to her blood type, to her date of birth…” Maura paused. “She’s me. I want to know where she comes from. I want to know who that woman is.”

A long pause. Then Rizzoli said, “Answering that question is turning out to be a lot harder than we thought.”

“Why?”

“We got back a credit report on her this afternoon. Found out that her MasterCard account is only six months old.”

“So?”

“Her driver’s license is four months old. The plates on her car were issued only three months ago.”

“What about her residence? She had an address in Brighton, right? You must have spoken to her neighbors.”

“We finally got hold of the landlady late last night. She says she rented it out to Anna Jessop three months ago. She let us into the apartment.”

“And?”

“It’s empty, Doc. Not a stick of furniture, not a frying pan, not a toothbrush. Someone had paid for cable TV and a phone line, but no one was there.”

“What about the neighbors?”

“Never saw her. They called her ‘the ghost.’”

“There must be some prior address. Another bank account-”

“We’ve looked. We can’t find anything on this woman that dates back earlier.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” said Rizzoli, “that until six months ago, Anna Jessop didn’t exist.”