Tess Gerritsen: Ice Cold

She saw the pain carved on his face. All the months of deception, the indecision and guilt, had left their scars, had darkened whatever joy he’d found with her. She could have comforted him with just a smile, a reassuring squeeze of his arm, but at that moment she could not see past her own pain. All she could think of was retaliation.

“I think we’ve run out of time,” she said, and walked away, into the terminal. The instant the glass doors whooshed shut behind her, she regretted her words. But when she stopped to look back through the window, he was already climbing into his car.

THE MAN’S LEGS were splayed apart, exposing ruptured testicles and the seared skin of buttocks and perineum. The morgue photo had flashed onto the screen without any advance warning from the lecturer, yet no one sitting in the darkened hotel conference room gave so much as a murmur of dismay. This audience was inured to the sight of ruined and broken bodies. For those who have seen and touched charred flesh, who are familiar with its stench, a sterile slide show holds few horrors. In fact, the white-haired man seated beside Maura had dozed off several times, and in the semi-darkness she could see his head bob as he struggled between sleep and wakefulness, impervious to the succession of gruesome photos glowing on the screen.

“What you see here are typical injuries sustained from a car bomb. The victim was a forty-five-year-old Russian businessman who climbed into his Mercedes one morning-a very nice Mercedes, I might add. When he turned the ignition key, he set off the booby trap of explosives that had been placed underneath his seat. As you can see from the X-rays…” The speaker clicked the computer mouse, and the next PowerPoint slide appeared on screen. It was a radiograph of a pelvis that was sheared apart at the pubis. Shards of bone and metal had been blasted throughout the soft tissues. “The force of the explosion blew car fragments straight up into his perineum, rupturing the scrotum and shearing off the ischial tuberosities. I’m sorry to say that we’re becoming more and more familiar with explosive injuries like these, especially in this era of terrorist attacks. This was quite a small bomb, meant to kill only the driver. When you move into terrorism, you’re talking about far more massive explosions with multiple casualties.”

Again he clicked the mouse, and a photo of excised organs appeared, glistening like butcher shop offerings on a green surgical drape.

“Sometimes you may not find much evidence of external damage, even when the internal damage is fatal. This is the result of a suicide bombing in a Jerusalem café. The fourteen-year-old female sustained massive concussive injuries to the lungs, as well as perforated abdominal viscera. Yet her face was untouched. Almost angelic.”

The photo that next appeared drew the first audible reaction from the audience, murmurs of sadness and disbelief. The girl appeared serenely at rest, her flawless face unlined and unworried, dark eyes peering from beneath thick lashes. In the end, it was not gore that shocked that room of pathologists, but beauty. At fourteen, at the moment of her death, she would have been thinking about a school assignment, perhaps. Or a pretty dress. Or a boy she’d glimpsed on the street. She would not have imagined that her lungs and liver and spleen would soon be laid out on an autopsy table, or that a room of two hundred pathologists would one day be gawking at her image.

As the lights came up, the audience was still subdued. While the others filed out, Maura remained in her seat, staring down at the notes that she’d jotted on her pad about nail bombs and parcel bombs, car bombs and buried bombs. When it came to causing misery, man’s ingenuity knew no limits. We are so good at killing each other, she thought. Yet we fail so miserably at love.

“Excuse me. You wouldn’t happen to be Maura Isles?”

She looked up at the man who’d risen from his seat two rows ahead. He was about her age, tall and athletic, with a deep tan and sun-streaked blond hair that made her automatically think: California boy. His face seemed vaguely familiar, but she could not recall where she’d met him, which was surprising. His was a face that any woman would certainly remember.

“I knew it! It is you, isn’t it?” He laughed. “I thought I spotted you as you came into the room.”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry. This is really embarrassing, but I’m having trouble placing you.”

“That’s because it was a long time ago. And I no longer have my ponytail. Doug Comley, Stanford pre-med. It’s been, what? Twenty years? I’m not surprised you’ve forgotten me. Hell, I would’ve forgotten me.”

Suddenly a memory popped into her head, of a young man with long blond hair and protective goggles perched on his sunburned nose. He’d been far lankier then, a whippet in blue jeans. “Were we in a lab together?” she said.

“Quantitative analysis. Junior year.”

“You remember that, even after twenty years? I’m amazed.”

“I don’t remember a damn thing about quant analysis. But I do remember you. You had the lab bench right across from me, and you got the highest score in class. Didn’t you end up at UC San Francisco med school?”

“Yes, but I’m living in Boston now. What about you?”

“UC San Diego. I just couldn’t bring myself to leave California. Addicted to sun and surf.”

“Which sounds pretty good to me right now. Only November, and I’m already tired of the cold.”

“I’m kind of digging this snow. It’s been a lot of fun.”

“Only because you don’t have to live in it four months out of the year.”

By now the conference room had emptied out, and hotel employees were packing up the chairs and wheeling out the sound equipment. Maura stuffed her notes into her tote bag and stood up. As she and Doug moved down parallel rows toward the exit, she asked him: “Will I see you at the cocktail party tonight?”

“Yeah, I think I’ll be there. But dinner’s on our own, right?”

“That’s what the schedule says.”

They walked out of the room together, into a hotel lobby crowded with other doctors wearing the same white name tags, carrying the same conference tote bags. Together they waited at the elevators, both of them struggling to keep the conversation flowing.

“So, are you here with your husband?” he asked.

“I’m not married.”

“Didn’t I see your wedding announcement in the alumni magazine?”

She looked at him in surprise. “You actually keep track of things like that?”

“I’m curious about where my classmates end up.”

“In my case, divorced. Four years ago.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “I’m not.”

They rode the elevator to the third floor, where they both stepped off.

“See you at the cocktail party,” she said with a goodbye wave, and pulled out her hotel keycard.

“Are you meeting anyone for dinner? Because I just happen to be free. If you want to join me, I’ll hunt down a good restaurant. Just give me a call.”

She turned to answer him, but he was already moving down the hallway, the tote bag slung over his shoulder. As she watched him walk away, another memory of Douglas Comley suddenly flashed into her head. An image of him in blue jeans, hobbling on crutches across the campus quadrangle.

“Didn’t you break your leg that year?” she called out. “I think it was right before finals.”

Laughing, he turned to her. “That’s what you remember about me?”

“It’s all starting to come back to me now. You had a skiing accident or something.”

“Or something.”

“It wasn’t a skiing accident?”

“Oh man.” He shook his head. “This is way too embarrassing to talk about.”