Ice Cold (18 page)

Daniel Brophy did not eat at all. His sandwich sat untouched as he stared out at the night, his shoulders sagging under the weight of grief. And guilt, too, surely. The guilt of knowing what could have been, had he chosen love above duty, Maura above God. Now the woman he cared about was charred flesh, locked in the hold beneath their feet.

“When we get back to Boston,” said Gabriel, “we have decisions to make.”

Jane looked at her husband and wondered how he managed to stay focused on necessary tasks. In times like these, she was reminded that she’d married a marine.

“Decisions?” she said.

“Funeral arrangements. Notifications. There must be relatives who need to be called.”

“She has no family,” said Brophy. “There’s only her mo—” He stopped, not finishing the word
mother
. Nor did he say the name they were all thinking:
Amalthea Lank
. Two years ago, Maura had sought out her birth mother, whose identity had been a mystery to her. The search had eventually brought her to a women’s prison in Framingham. To a woman guilty of unspeakable crimes. Amalthea was not a mother anyone would want to claim, and Maura never spoke of her.

Daniel said again, more firmly: “She has no family.”

She had only us, thought Jane. Her friends. While Jane had a husband and daughter, parents and brothers, Maura had few intimate connections. She had a lover whom she saw only in secret, and friends who did not really know her. It was a truth that Jane now had to acknowledge:
I did not really know her
.

“What about her ex-husband?” Sansone asked. “I believe he still lives in California.”

“Victor?” Brophy gave a disgusted laugh. “Maura despised him. She wouldn’t want him anywhere near her funeral.”

“Do we know what she did want? What her final wishes were? She wasn’t religious, so I assume she’d want a secular service.”

Jane glanced at Brophy, who had suddenly stiffened. She did not think Sansone’s comment was meant as a barb at the priest, but the air between the two men suddenly felt charged.

Brophy said, tightly: “Even though she fell away from the Church, she still respected it.”

“She was a committed scientist, Father Brophy. The fact that she respected the Church doesn’t mean she believed in it. It would probably strike her as odd to have a religious service at her funeral. And as a nonbeliever, wouldn’t she be denied a Catholic funeral, anyway?”

Brophy looked away. “Yes,” he conceded. “That is official policy.”

“There’s also the question of whether she would have wanted burial or cremation. Do we know what Maura wanted? Did she ever broach the subject with you?”

“Why would she? She was
young!”
Brophy’s voice suddenly broke. “When you’re only forty-two, you don’t think about how you want your body disposed of! You don’t think of who should and shouldn’t be invited to the funeral. You’re too busy being
alive.”
He took a deep breath and looked away.

No one spoke for a long time. The only sound was the steady whine of the jet engines.

“So we have to make those decisions for her,” Sansone finally said.

“We?”
asked Brophy.

“I’m only trying to offer my help. And the necessary funds, whatever it may cost.”

“Not everything can be bought and paid for.”

“Is that what you think I’m trying to do?”

“It’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Why you’ve swooped in with your private jet and taken control? Because you can?”

Jane reached out to touch Brophy’s arm. “Daniel. Hey, relax.”

“I’m here because I cared about Maura, too,” said Sansone.

“As you made so abundantly obvious to both of us.”

“Father Brophy, it was always clear to me where Maura’s affections lay. Nothing I could do, nothing I could offer her, would have changed the fact that she loved you.”

“Yet you were always waiting in the shadows. Hoping for a chance.”

“A chance to offer my help if she ever needed it. Help that she never asked for while she was alive.” Sansone sighed. “If only she had. I might have …”

“Saved her?”

“I can’t rewrite history. But we both know things could have been different.” He looked straight at Brophy. “She could have been happier.”

Brophy’s face flushed a deep red. Sansone had just delivered the cruelest of truths, but it was a truth obvious to anyone who knew Maura, anyone who’d watched her over the past few months and seen how her already slender frame had become thinner, how sadness had dimmed her smile. She was not alone in her pain: Jane had seen the same sadness reflected in Daniel Brophy’s eyes, compounded by guilt. He loved Maura, yet he’d made her miserable, a fact that was all the harder for him to bear because it was Sansone pointing it out.

Brophy half rose from his seat, his hands clenched into fists, and she reached for his arm. “Stop it,” she said. “Both of you! Why are you two doing this? It’s not some contest to decide who loved her the most. We all cared about her. It doesn’t matter now who would have made her happier. She’s dead and there’s no way to change history.”

Brophy sank back in his seat, the rage draining from his body. “She deserved better,” he said. “Better than me.” Turning, he stared out the window, retreating into his own misery.

She started to reach out to him again, but Gabriel stopped her. “Give him some space,” he whispered.

So she did. She left Brophy to his silence and his regrets, and she joined her husband on the other side of the aisle. Sansone rose and moved as well, to the rear of the plane, retreating into his own thoughts. For the remainder of the flight they sat separate and silent, as the plane with Maura’s body soared eastward, toward Boston.

O
H MAURA, IF ONLY YOU WERE HERE TO SEE THIS
.

Jane stood outside the entrance to Emmanuel Episcopal Church and watched as a steady stream of mourners arrived to pay their last respects to Dr. Maura Isles. Maura would be surprised by all this fuss. Impressed and maybe a little embarrassed, too: She never did enjoy being the center of attention. Jane recognized many of these people because they came from the same world that she and Maura both inhabited, a world that revolved around death. She spotted Drs. Bristol and Costas from the ME’s office, and quietly greeted Maura’s secretary, Louise, and Maura’s morgue assistant, Yoshima. There were cops, too—Jane’s partner, Barry Frost, as well as most of the homicide unit, all of whom were well acquainted with the woman they privately referred to as the Queen of the Dead. A queen who herself had now entered that realm.

But the one man whom Maura loved above all was not here, and Jane understood why. A deeply grieving Daniel Brophy was now in seclusion, and would not be attending the services. He had said his private goodbyes to Maura; to bare his pain in public was more than anyone should ask of him.

“We’d better take our seats,” Gabriel said gently. “They’re about to begin.”

She followed her husband up the aisle to the front pew. The closed coffin loomed right in front of her, framed by massive vases of lilies. Anthony Sansone had spared no expense, and the coffin’s mahogany surface was polished to such a bright gloss that she could see her own reflection.

The officiating priest entered—not Brophy, but the Reverend Gail Harriman of the Episcopal Church. Maura would have appreciated the fact that a woman was performing her memorial service. She would have liked this church as well, known for its open policy of welcoming all into its fold. She hadn’t believed in God, but she had believed in fellowship, and she would have approved.

As the Reverend Harriman began to speak, Gabriel took Jane’s hand. She felt her throat close up and fought back humiliating tears. Through the forty minutes of homilies and hymns and words of remembrance, she struggled to stay in control, her teeth clenched, her back pressed rigidly against the pew. When at last the service ended, she was still dry-eyed, but all her muscles ached as though she had just staggered off the battlefield.

The six pallbearers rose, Gabriel and Sansone among them, and they shepherded the casket in its slow progression up the aisle, toward the hearse that waited outside. As the other mourners filed from the building, Jane did not move. She remained in her seat, imagining Maura’s final journey. The solemn drive to the crematorium. The slide into the flames. The final rendering of bone into ashes.

I can’t believe I will never see you again
.

She felt her cell phone go off. During the memorial service, she had turned off the ringer, and the sudden vibration against her belt was a startling reminder that duty still demanded her attention.

The call was from a Wyoming area code. “Detective Rizzoli,” she answered quietly.

It was Queenan’s voice on the line. “Does the name Elaine Salinger mean anything to you?” he asked.

“Should it?”

“So you’ve never heard that name before.”

She sighed. “I just sat through Maura’s memorial service. I’m afraid I’m not really focusing on the point of this call.”

“A woman named Elaine Salinger has just been reported missing. She was due back at her job in San Diego yesterday, but it seems she never returned from vacation. And she never caught her flight home from Jackson Hole.”

San Diego. Douglas Comley was from San Diego, too
.

“It turns out they knew one another,” Queenan continued. “Elaine Salinger and Arlo Zielinski and Douglas Comley. They were friends, and they were all booked to fly back on the same day.”

Jane heard her own heartbeat whooshing in her ears. An image suddenly came back to her, of a torn airline boarding pass that she’d picked up in the ravine. The scrap of paper with the fragment of the passenger’s name:
inger
.

Salinger.

“What did this woman look like?” she asked. “How old, how tall?”

“That’s what I just spent the last hour finding out. Elaine Salinger is thirty-nine years old. Five foot six, a hundred twenty pounds. And a brunette.”

Jane shot to her feet. The church had not yet emptied out, and she had to push past stragglers as she ran up the aisle, toward the exit. She made it to the door just in time to see the hearse pull away.

“Stop it!” she yelled.

Gabriel turned to her. “Jane?”

“What’s the name of the mortuary? Does anyone know?”

Sansone looked up at her in puzzlement. “I made the arrangements. What’s the problem, Detective?”

“Call them,
now
. Tell them the body can’t be cremated.”

“Why not?”

“It needs to go to the medical examiner’s office.”

D
R
. A
BE
B
RISTOL
stared down at the draped cadaver but he made no attempt to uncover it. For a man who spent his workdays cutting open dead bodies, he looked shaken by the prospect of peeling back the sheet. Most of the people in the room were veterans of multiple death scenes, yet they all quailed from what lay beneath the drape. Only Yoshima had so far laid eyes on the body, when he had taken the X-rays after its arrival. Now he hung back from the table, as though so traumatized, he wanted nothing more to do with it.

“This is one postmortem I really don’t want to do,” said Bristol.

“Someone has to look at this body. Someone has to give us a definitive answer.”

“The problem is, I’m not sure the answer is going to be any more to our liking.”

“You haven’t even looked at her yet.”

“But I can see the X-rays.” He pointed to the films of the skull, spine, and pelvis that Yoshima had clipped onto the light box. “I can tell you they’re completely consistent with a woman of Maura’s height and age. And those fractures are exactly what you’d find from injuries sustained by an unrestrained passenger.”

“Maura always wore her seat belt,” said Jane. “She was compulsive about it. You know how she was.”
Was. I can’t stop using the past tense. I can’t quite believe this exam will change anything
.

“True,” Bristol said. “Not wearing a seat belt isn’t like her at all.” He pulled on gloves and reluctantly peeled back the sheet.

Even before she saw the body, Jane flinched away, her hand lifted over her nose against the smell of burned flesh. Gagging, she turned and saw Gabriel’s face. He at least seemed to be holding his own, but there was no mistaking the appalled look in his eyes. She forced herself to turn back to the table. To see the body they had believed was Maura’s.

It was not the first time Jane had seen charred remains. Once she had watched postmortems on three arson victims, two young children and their mother. She remembered those three cadavers lying on the tables, their limbs bent, their arms thrust forward like boxers spoiling for a fight. The woman she saw now was frozen in the same pugilistic pose, her tendons contracted by intense heat.

Jane took another step closer and stared down at what should have been a face. She tried to see something—anything—familiar, but all she saw was an unrecognizable mask of charred flesh.

Someone gave a startled gasp behind her, and she turned to see Maura’s secretary, Louise, standing in the doorway. Louise seldom ventured into the autopsy room, and Jane was surprised to see her here, and so late in the day. The woman was wearing her winter coat, and her windblown gray hair sparkled with melting snowflakes.

“You probably don’t want to come any closer, Louise,” said Bristol.

But it was too late. Louise had already glimpsed the corpse and she stood frozen, too horrified to take another step into the room. “Dr.—Dr. Bristol—”

“What is it?”

“You asked about her dentist. The one Dr. Isles went to. I suddenly remembered that she’d asked me to make an appointment for her, so I went back over the calendar. It was about six months ago.”

“You found her dentist’s name?”

“Even better.” Louise held out a brown envelope. “I have her X-rays. When I explained to him why we needed them, he told me I should drive right over and pick them up.”

Bristol crossed the room in a few swift steps and snatched the envelope from Louise’s hand. Yoshima was already pulling down the skull X-rays from the light box, the unwieldy films twanging as he hastily yanked them from the clips to make room.

Bristol pulled the dental films from the envelope. These were not morgue panograms, but small bitewing X-rays that looked dwarfed by Bristol’s meaty hands. As he clipped them onto the box, Jane spotted the patient’s name on the label.

ISLES, MAURA
.

“These films were all taken within the last three years,” Bristol noted. “And we’ve got plenty here for ID purposes. Gold crowns on the lower left and right molars. An old root canal here …”

“I did panograms on this body,” said Yoshima. He shuffled through the X-rays he’d taken of the burned cadaver. “Here.” He slid the films onto the box, right beside Maura’s bitewing X-rays.

Everyone crowded closer. For a moment no one said a word as gazes flicked back and forth between the sets of films.

Then Bristol said: “I think it’s pretty clear.” He turned to Jane. “The body on that table isn’t Maura’s.”

The breath whooshed out of Jane’s lungs. Yoshima sagged against a countertop, as though suddenly too weak to support himself.

“If this body is Elaine Salinger’s,” said Gabriel, “then we’re still left with the same question we had before. Where’s Maura?”

Jane took out her cell phone and dialed.

After three rings, a voice answered: “Detective Queenan.”

“Maura Isles is still missing,” she said. “We’re coming back to Wyoming.”