Vanish

TEN

“We can’t let this information get out,” said Gabriel. “It could kill her.”

Homicide detective Barry Frost reacted with a stunned gaze. They were standing in the parking lot of the Sunrise Yacht Club. Not a breeze stirred, and out on Hingham Bay, sailboats drifted, dead in the water. Under the glare of the afternoon sun, sweat pasted wispy strands of hair to Frost’s pale forehead. In a room full of people, Barry Frost was the one you’d most likely overlook, the man who’d quietly recede into a corner where he’d stand smiling and unnoticed. His bland temperament had helped him weather his occasionally stormy partnership with Jane, a partnership that, over the past two and a half years, had grown strong roots in trust. Now the two men who cared about her, Jane’s husband and Jane’s partner, faced each other with shared apprehension.

“No one told us she was in there,” murmured Frost. “We had no idea.”

“We can’t let the media find out.”

Frost huffed out a shocked breath. “That would be a disaster.”

“Tell me who Jane Doe is. Tell me everything you know.”

“Believe me, we’ll pull out all the stops on this. You have to trust us.”

“I can’t sit on the sidelines. I need to know everything.”

“You can’t be objective. She’s your wife.”

“Exactly. She’s my wife.” A note of panic had slipped into Gabriel’s voice. He paused to rein in his agitation and said quietly: “What would you do? If it was Alice trapped in there?”

Frost regarded him for a moment. At last he nodded. “Come inside. We’re talking to the commodore. He pulled her out of the water.”

They stepped from glaring sunshine into the cool gloom of the yacht club. Inside, it smelled like every seaside bar that Gabriel had ever walked into, the scent of ocean air mingled with citrus and booze. It was a rickety building, perched on a wooden pier overlooking Hingham Bay. Two portable air-conditioning units rattled in the windows, muffling the clink of glasses and the low hum of conversation. The floors creaked as they headed toward the lounge.

Gabriel recognized the two Boston PD detectives standing at the bar, talking with a bald man. Both Darren Crowe and Thomas Moore were Jane’s colleagues from the homicide unit; both of them greeted Gabriel with looks of surprise.

“Hey,” Crowe said. “I didn’t know the FBI was coming in on this.”

“FBI?” said the bald man. “Wow, this must be getting pretty serious.” He stuck out his hand to Gabriel. “Skip Boynton. I’m the commodore, Sunrise Yacht Club.”

“Agent Gabriel Dean,” said Gabriel, shaking the man’s hand. Trying, as best he could, to play it official. But he could feel Thomas Moore’s puzzled gaze. Moore could see that something was not right here.

“Yeah, I was just telling these detectives how we found her. Quite a shock, lemme tell you, seeing a body in the water.” He paused. “Say, you want a drink, Agent Dean? It’s on the club.”

“No, thank you.”

“Oh, right. On duty, huh?” Skip gave a sympathetic laugh. “You guys really play it by the book, don’t you? No one’ll take a drink. Well, hell, I will.” He slipped behind the bar and dropped ice cubes in a glass. Splashed vodka on top. Gabriel heard ice clinking in other glasses, and he gazed around the room at the dozen club members sitting in the lounge, almost all of them men. Did any of them actually sail boats? Gabriel wondered. Or did they just come here to drink?

Skip slipped out from behind the counter, his vodka in hand. “It’s not the kind of thing that happens every day,” he said. “I’m still kind of rattled about it.”

“You were telling us how you spotted the body,” said Moore.

“Oh. Yeah. About eight A.M. I came in early to change out my spinnaker. We have a regatta coming up in two weeks, and I’m gonna fly a new one. Got a logo on it. A green dragon, really striking. So anyway, I’m walking out to the dock, carrying my new spinnaker, and I see what looks like a mannequin floating out in the water, kinda snagged up on one of the rocks. I get in my rowboat to take a closer look and hell, if it ain’t a woman. Damn nice-looking one, too. So I yelled for some of the other guys, and three of us pulled her out. Then we called nine one one.” He took a gulp of his vodka and drew a breath. “Never occurred to us she was still alive. I mean, hell. That gal sure looked dead to us.”

“Must have looked dead to Fire and Rescue, too,” said Crowe.

Skip laughed. “And they’re supposed to be the professionals. If they can’t tell, who can?”

“Show us,” said Gabriel. “Where you found her.”

They all walked out the lounge door, onto the pier. The water magnified the sun’s glare, and Gabriel had to squint against the brilliant reflection to see the rocks that Skip now pointed out.

“See that shoal over there? We have it marked off with buoys, ’cause it’s a navigation hazard. At high tide, it’s only a few inches deep there, so you don’t even see it. Real easy to run aground.”

“What time was high tide yesterday?” asked Gabriel.

“I don’t know. Ten A.M., I think.”

“Was that shoal exposed?”

“Yeah. If I hadn’t spotted her then, a few hours later, she might have drifted out to sea.”

The men stood in silence for a moment, squinting off over Hingham Bay. A motor cruiser rumbled by, churning up a wake that made the boats rock on their moorings and set halyards clanging on masts.

“Had you ever seen the woman before?” Moore asked.

“Nope.”

“You’re sure?”

“A gal who looks like that? I’d sure as hell remember.”

“And no one in the club recognized her?”

Skip laughed. “No one who’ll admit to it.”

Gabriel looked at him. “Why wouldn’t they?”

“Well, you know.”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

“These guys in the club…” Skip gave a nervous laugh. “I mean, you see all these boats moored out here? Who do you think sails them? It’s not the wives. It’s the men who lust after boats, not the women. And it’s the men who hang around here. A boat’s your home away from home.” Skip paused. “In every respect.”

“You think she was someone’s girlfriend?” said Crowe.

“Hell, I don’t know. It’s just that the possibility occurred to me. You know, bring a chickie here late at night. Fool around on your boat, get a little drunk, a little high. It’s easy to fall overboard.”

“Or get pushed.”

“Now wait a minute.” Skip looked alarmed. “Don’t you go jumping to that conclusion. These are good guys in the club. Good guys.”

Who might be banging chickies on their boats, thought Gabriel.

“I’m sorry I even mentioned the possibility,” said Skip. “It’s not like people don’t get drunk and fall off boats all the time. Could’ve been any boat, not just one of ours.” He pointed out to Hingham Bay, where a cabin cruiser was gliding across the blindingly bright water. “See all the traffic out there? She could’ve tripped off some motorboat that night. Drifted in on the tide.”

“Nevertheless,” said Moore, “We’ll need a list of all your members.”

“Is that really necessary?”

“Yes, Mr. Boynton,” said Moore with quiet but unmistakable authority. “It is.”

Skip gulped down the rest of his vodka. The heat had flushed his scalp bright red, and he swiped away sweat. “This is going to go over real well with the members. Here we do our civic duty and pull a woman out of the water. Now we’re all suspects?”

Gabriel turned his gaze up the shoreline to the boat ramp, where a truck was now backing up to launch a motorboat into the water. Three other vehicles towing boats were lined up in the parking area, waiting their turns. “What’s your nighttime security like, Mr. Boynton?” he asked.

“Security?” Skip shrugged. “We lock the club doors at midnight.”

“And the pier? The boats? There’s no security guard?”

“We haven’t had any break-ins. The boats are all locked. Plus, it’s quiet out here. If you get any closer to the city, you’ll find people hanging around the waterfront all night. This is a special little club. A place to get away from it all.”

A place where you could drive down to the boat ramp at night, thought Gabriel. You could back right down to the water, and no one would see you open your trunk. No one would see you pull out a body and toss it into Hingham Bay. If the tide was right, that body would drift out past the islands just offshore, straight into Massachusetts Bay.

But not if the tide was coming in.

His cell phone rang. He moved away from the others and walked down the pier a few paces before he answered the call.

It was Maura. “I think you might want to get back here,” she said. “We’re about to do the autopsy.”

“Which autopsy?”

“On the hospital security guard.”

“The cause of death is clear, isn’t it?”

“Another question has come up.”

“What?”

“We don’t know who this man is.”

“Can’t someone at the hospital ID him? He was their employee.”

“That’s the problem,” said Maura. “He wasn’t.”

They had not yet undressed the corpse.

Gabriel was no stranger to the horrors of the autopsy room, and the sight of this victim, in the scope of his experience, was not particularly shocking. He saw only a single entry wound that tunneled into the left cheek; otherwise the features were intact. The man was in his thirties, with neatly clipped dark hair and a muscular jaw. His brown eyes, exposed to air by partially open lids, were already clouded. A name tag with PERRIN was clipped to the breast pocket of the uniform. Staring at the table, what disturbed Gabriel most was not the gore or the sightless eyes; it was the knowledge that the same weapon that had ended this man’s life was now threatening Jane’s.

“We waited for you,” said Dr. Abe Bristol. “Maura thought you’d want to watch this from the beginning.”

Gabriel looked at Maura, who was gowned and masked, but standing at the foot of the table, and not at her usual place at the corpse’s right side. Every other time he’d entered this lab, she had been the one in command, the one holding the knife. He was not accustomed to seeing her cede control in the room where she usually reigned. “You’re not doing this postmortem?” he asked.

“I can’t. I’m a witness to this man’s death,” said Maura. “Abe has to do this one.”

“And you still have no idea who he is?”

She shook her head. “There’s no hospital employee with the name Perrin. And the chief of security came to view the body. He didn’t recognize this man.”

“Fingerprints?”

“We’ve sent his prints to AFIS. Nothing’s back on him so far. Or on the shooter’s fingerprints, either.”

“So we’ve got a John Doe and a Jane Doe?” Gabriel stared at the corpse. “Who the hell are these people?”

“Let’s get him undressed,” Abe said to Yoshima.

The two men removed the corpse’s shoes and socks, unbuckled the belt, and peeled off the trousers, laying the items of clothing on a clean sheet. With gloved hands Abe searched the pants pockets but found them empty. No comb, no wallet, no keys. “Not even any loose change,” he noted.

“You’d think there’d be at least a spare dime or two,” said Yoshima.

“These pockets are clean.” Abe looked up. “Brand-new uniform?”

They turned their attention to the shirt. The fabric was now stiff with dried blood, and they had to peel it away from the chest, revealing muscular pectorals and a thick mat of dark hair. And scars. Thick as twisted rope, one scar slanted up beneath the right nipple; the other slashed diagonally from abdomen to left hip bone.

“Those aren’t surgical scars,” said 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 pruners. With each squeeze, he snapped through a rib. A man could spend years developing his physique, as this victim surely had, straining against pulleys and barbells. But all bodies, muscular or not, yield to a knife and a pruner.

Abe cut through the last rib and lifted off the triangle containing the sternum. Deprived of its bony shield, the heart and lungs now lay exposed to his blade, and he reached in to resect them, his arm sinking deep into the chest cavity.

“Dr. Bristol?” said Yoshima, hanging up the phone. “I just spoke to Ballistics. They said that CSU only turned in one cartridge.”

Abe straightened, his gloves streaked with blood. “They didn’t find the second one?”

“That’s all they received in the lab. Just one.”

“That’s what I heard, Abe,” said Maura. “One gunshot.”

Gabriel crossed to the light box. He stared at the films with a growing sense of dismay. One shot, two bullets, he thought. This may change everything. He turned and looked at Abe. “I need to look at those bullets.”

“Anything in particular you’re expecting to find?”

“I think I know why there are two of them.”

Abe nodded. “Let me finish here first.” Swiftly his blade sliced through vessels and ligaments. He lifted out the heart and lungs, to be weighed and inspected later, then moved on to the abdomen. All looked normal. These were the healthy organs of a man whose body would have served him well for decades to come.

He moved, at last, to the head.

Gabriel watched, unflinching, as Abe sliced through the scalp and peeled it forward, collapsing the face, exposing cranium.

Yoshima turned on the saw.

Even then, Gabriel remained focused, through the whine of the saw, the grinding of bone, moving even closer to catch his first glimpse of the cavity. Yoshima pried off the skullcap and blood trickled out. Abe reached in with the scalpel to free the brain. As he pulled it from the cranial cavity, Gabriel was right beside him, holding a basin to catch the first bullet that tumbled out.

He took one glance at it under the magnifying lens, then said: “I need to see the other one.”

“What are you thinking, Agent Dean?”

“Just find the other bullet.” His brusque demand took everyone by surprise, and he saw Abe and Maura exchange startled glances. He was out of patience; he needed to know.

Abe set the resected brain on the cutting board. Studying the X-rays, he pinpointed the second bullet’s location, and with the first slice, he found it, buried within a pocket of hemorrhaged tissue.

“What are you looking for?” Abe asked, as Gabriel rotated the two bullets beneath the magnifying lens.

“Same caliber. Both about eighty grams…”

“They should be the same. They were fired from the same weapon.”

“But these are not identical.”

“What?”

“Look at how the second bullet sits on its base. It’s subtle, but you can see it.”

Abe leaned forward, frowning through the lens. “It’s a little off-kilter.”

“Exactly. It’s at an angle.”

“The impact could have deformed it.”

“No, it was manufactured this way. At a nine-degree cant, to send it in a slightly different trajectory from the first. Two missiles, designed for controlled dispersion.”

“There was only one cartridge.”

“And only one entrance wound.”

Maura was frowning at the skull X-rays hanging on the light box. At the two bullets, glowing brightly against the fainter glow of cranium. “A duplex round,” she said.

“That’s why you only heard one shot fired,” said Gabriel. “Because there was only one shot.”

Maura was silent for a moment, her gaze on the skull films. Dramatic as they were, the X-rays did not reveal the track of devastation those two bullets had left in soft tissue. Ruptured vessels, mangled gray matter. A lifetime’s worth of memories atomized.

“Duplex rounds are designed to inflict maximum damage,” she said.

“That’s their selling point.”

“Why would a security guard arm himself with bullets like these?”

“I think we’ve already established this man was not a hospital employee. He walked in with a fake uniform, a fake name tag, armed with bullets designed not just to maim, but to kill. There’s only one good explanation I can come up with.”

Maura said, softly: “The woman was meant to die.”

For a moment no one spoke.

It was the voice of Maura’s secretary that suddenly broke the silence. “Dr. Isles?” she said, over the intercom.

“Yes, Louise?”

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I thought you and Agent Dean should know…”

“What is it?”

“Something’s happening across the street.”