I Know a Secret

Eight

“How long did they work to resuscitate him?” said Maura as she cut through the ribs of Cassandra Coyle. Jane winced at the snap of the bone shears as Maura kept cutting, crack crack crack, like a carpenter in her workshop. The rib cage that had protected Cassandra’s heart and lungs was now just a bony palisade blocking their view of the secrets within, and Maura worked quickly and efficiently to clear away the barrier of ribs and breastplate.

“It took them about fifteen, twenty minutes,” said Jane. “But they got his heart beating again. I called the hospital this morning and he’s still alive. For now.”

Maura snapped another rib, and Jane saw Frost grimace at the sound of cracking bone. While the sights and smells of the morgue were familiar territory for Maura, this room would always be no-man’s-land to Frost, whose delicate stomach was legendary in the homicide unit. Cassandra Coyle was one of the fresher corpses they’d encountered, only a day old when she’d been discovered, but odors bloom quickly in a dead body at room temperature. Frost was getting enough of a whiff to make his face blanch, and he raised his arm to block the smell.

“Statistics show that you have about a forty percent chance of surviving a cardiac arrest in the hospital. A twenty percent chance of eventually leaving the hospital alive,” said Maura, matter-of-factly quoting statistics as she cut through the last few ribs. “Is he awake yet?”

“No. He’s still comatose.”

“Then I’m afraid his prognosis is poor. Even if Mr. Coyle does survive, he probably suffered anoxic brain damage.”

“Meaning he could be a vegetable.”

“Unfortunately, that’s a possible outcome.”

The ribs were now split, and Maura pried up the breastplate. Frost backed away as the stench of body fluids rose from the exposed cavity, but Maura simply leaned closer to peer at the thoracic organs.

“These lungs look edematous. Heavy with fluid.” Maura reached for a scalpel.

“And what does that tell us?” asked Frost, voice muffled.

“It’s a nonspecific finding. It could mean a number of things.” Maura glanced up and said to her assistant, “Yoshima, could you make sure the drug and tox screen is expedited?”

“Already done,” Yoshima said, always the calm voice of efficiency. “I ordered both an AxSYM and Toxi-Lab A, plus GC-MS for quantitation. That should cover pretty much every known drug.”

Rooting deep inside the thorax, Maura lifted out the dripping lungs. “These are definitely heavy. I see no obvious lesions, only a few petechiae. Again, a nonspecific finding.” She placed the severed heart on a tray and, with gloved fingers, traced the coronary arteries. “Interesting.”

“Aw, you say that to every corpse,” said Jane.

“Because every corpse tells a story, but this one isn’t revealing any secrets. The neck dissection and X-rays were normal. Her hyoid bone is intact. And look how clean her coronaries are, with no evidence of thrombosis or infarction. This was a perfectly healthy heart in what seems to be a perfectly healthy young woman.”

A woman who looked lean and fit and certainly capable of putting up a good fight, thought Jane. Yet Cassandra Coyle had no torn fingernails, no bruises on her hands, nothing to indicate she’d offered any resistance whatsoever against her attacker.

Maura moved on to the abdomen. Methodically, she excised liver and spleen, pancreas and intestines, but it was the stomach she was most interested in. She lifted it out as gingerly as if she were delivering a newborn and set it on the dissection tray. This was the part of the postmortem that Jane always quailed from. Whatever the victim had last eaten would now be two days old, a putrid stew of stomach acid and partly digested food. Both she and Frost retreated a few paces as Maura picked up the scalpel. Above his paper mask, Frost’s eyes narrowed in anticipation of the stench.

But when Maura sliced open the stomach, all that dribbled out was purplish liquid.

“Do you smell that?” Maura asked.

“I’d rather not,” said Jane.

“I think it’s wine. Judging by how dark it is, I’m guessing something heavy like a cabernet or a zinfandel.”

“What, you’re not gonna tell us the vintage? What about the label?” Jane snorted. “You’re slipping, Maura.”

Maura probed the stomach cavity. “I don’t see any food in here, which means she hadn’t eaten anything for at least a few hours before she died.” Maura looked up. “Did you find open wine bottles in her apartment?”

“No,” said Frost. “And there were no dirty wineglasses on the counter or in the sink.”

“Maybe she had a drink somewhere else,” said Jane. “You think she met her killer at a bar?”

“It would have been just before getting home. Liquids pass pretty quickly into the jejunum, yet she still has wine in her stomach.”

Frost said, “She left her film studio around six P.M. It’s only a ten-minute walk to her residence. I’ll check the bars in the area.”

Maura emptied the scant stomach contents into a specimen jar, then moved to the corpse’s head. There she stood frowning at Cassandra Coyle’s empty eye sockets. She had already examined the enucleated globes, which were now soaking in a jar of preservative, like two grotesque olives bobbing in gin.

“So she stops somewhere to have a glass of wine,” said Jane, trying to piece together the sequence of events. “Then she brings her killer home. Or he follows her there. But what happens next? How did he kill her?”

Maura didn’t answer. Instead, she once again picked up the scalpel. Starting behind one ear, she cut into the scalp and sliced all the way across the top of the head to behind the opposite ear.

How easily the most recognizable feature of a human being can be obliterated, thought Jane, as she watched Maura peel the scalp forward in one limp flap. Cassandra Coyle’s pretty face collapsed in a fleshy mask, dyed black hair flopping forward to conceal it like a fringed curtain. The whine of the oscillating saw cut off any conversation, and Jane turned away at the smell of bone dust. The skull, at least, was impersonal. It could be anyone’s cranium being sawed open, anyone’s brain about to be exposed.

Maura pried off the cranial cap and revealed the glistening surface of gray matter. Here was what had made Cassandra a unique human being. Stored in this three-pound organ had been every memory, every experience, everything Cassandra had ever known or felt or loved. Gently, Maura lifted the lobes and sliced through nerves and arteries before easing the brain out of its cranial bed. “No obvious hemorrhages,” she noted. “No contusions. No edema.”

“So it looks normal?” asked Frost.

“Yes, it does. On the surface, at least.” Maura gingerly lowered the organ into a bucket of formalin. “This is a young woman with a healthy-looking heart and lungs and brain. She hasn’t been strangled. She hasn’t been sexually assaulted. There are no bruises, no needle marks, no apparent trauma at all, except for the eyes. And those were removed postmortem.”

“Then what happened to her? What killed her?” said Jane.

For a moment Maura didn’t answer. Her gaze remained on the brain, submerged in the bucket of formalin. A brain that had offered up no answers. She glanced at Jane and said, “I don’t know.”

The cell phone buzzed in Jane’s pocket. She stripped off her gloves, reached under the protective gown to fish it out, and saw a number she didn’t recognize.

“Detective Rizzoli,” she answered.

“Hey, sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner,” a man said. “But I just got home from Boca Raton and, man, I’m sorry I did. This weather sucks.”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Benny Lima. You know, the Lima Travel Agency? You left a message on my phone last night, asking about my security camera. The one that’s pointed toward Utica Street.”

“Is your camera operational?”

“Sure is. Last year we caught a kid throwing rocks through the window.”

The word camera had caught Frost’s attention, and he was watching the conversation with sudden interest.

“We need whatever footage you have from Monday night,” Jane said. “Do you still have it?”

“It’s right here, waiting for you.”