Tess Gerritsen - Ice Cold

“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.”

DR. ABE BRISTOL 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.”