Tess Gerritsen - Body Double

A bomb.

She could almost hear Dwayne laughing at her, ridiculing her. Oh right, Mattie, you’re a real MacGyver.

Well, what am I supposed to do?

Worms…

They squirmed back into her thoughts. Into her future, slithering under her skin, devouring her flesh. They were out there waiting in the soil right outside this box, she thought. Waiting for her to die. Then they would crawl in, to feast.

She turned on her side and trembled.

There has to be a way out.

YOSHIMA STOOD OVER the corpse, his gloved hand wielding a syringe with a sixteen-gauge needle. The body was a young female, so gaunt that her belly drooped like a sagging tent across the hip bones. Yoshima spread the skin taut over her groin and angled the needle into the femoral vein. He drew back on the plunger and blood, so dark it was almost black, began to fill the syringe.

He did not look up as Maura came into the room, but stayed focused on his task. She watched in silence as he withdrew the needle and transferred the blood into various glass tubes, working with the calm efficiency of someone who had handled countless tubes of blood from countless corpses. If I’m the queen of the dead, she thought, then Yoshima is surely the king. He has undressed them, weighed them, probed their groins and necks for veins, deposited their organs in jars of formalin. And when the autopsy is done, when I am finished cutting, he is the one who picks up the needle and thread and sews their incised flesh back together again.

Yoshima cut the needle and deposited the used syringe in the contaminated trash. Then he paused, gazing down at the woman whose blood he had just collected. “She came in this morning,” he said. “Boyfriend found her dead on the couch when he woke up.”

Maura saw the needle tracks on the corpse’s arms. “What a waste.”

“It always is.”

“Who’s doing this one?”

“Dr. Costas. Dr. Bristol’s in court today.” He wheeled a tray to the table and began laying out instruments. In the awkward silence, the clang of metal seemed painfully loud. Their exchange had been businesslike as usual, but today Yoshima was not looking at her. He seemed to be avoiding her gaze, shying away from even a glance in her direction. Shying, too, from any mention of what had happened in the parking lot last night. But the issue was there, hanging between them, impossible to ignore.

“I understand Detective Rizzoli called you at home last night,” she said.

He paused, his profile to her, his hands motionless on the tray.

“Yoshima,” she said, “I’m sorry if she implied in any way-”

“Do you know how long I’ve worked in the medical examiner’s office, Dr. Isles?” he cut in.

“I know you’ve been here longer than any of us.”

“Eighteen years. Dr. Tierney hired me right after I got out of the army. I served in their mortuary unit. It was hard, you know, working on so many young people. Most of them were accidents or suicides, but that goes with the territory. Young men, they take chances. They get into fights, they drive too fast. Or their wives leave them, so they reach for their weapon and shoot themselves. I thought, at least I can do something for them, I can treat them with the respect due a soldier. And some of them were just kids, barely old enough to grow beards. That was the upsetting part, how young they were, but I managed to deal with it. The way I deal with it here, because it’s my job. I can’t remember the last time I called in sick.” He paused. “But today, I thought about not coming in.”

“Why?”

He turned and looked at her. “Do you know what it’s like, after eighteen years working here, to suddenly feel like I’m a suspect?”

“I’m sorry that’s how she made you feel. I know she can be brusque-”

“No, actually, she wasn’t. She was very polite, very friendly. It was the nature of her questions that made me realize what was going on. What’s it like working with Dr. Isles? Do you two get along? ” Yoshima laughed. “Now, why do you suppose she asked me that?”

“She was doing her job, that’s all. It wasn’t an accusation.”

“It felt like one.” He went to the countertop and began lining up jars of formalin for tissue samples. “We’ve worked together almost two years, Dr. Isles.”

“Yes.”

“There’s never been a time, at least that I’m aware of, that you’ve been unhappy with my performance.”

“Never. There’s no one I’d rather work with than you.”

He turned and faced her. Under the harsh fluorescent lights, she saw how much gray peppered his black hair. She had once thought him to be in his thirties. With that placidly seamless face and slender build, he’d seemed somehow ageless. Now, seeing the troubled lines around his eyes, she recognized him for what he was: a man quietly slipping into middle age. As I am.

“There wasn’t a moment,” she said, “not an instant, when I thought you might have-”

”But now you do have to think about it, don’t you? Since Detective Rizzoli’s brought it up, you have to consider the possibility that I vandalized your car. That I’m the one stalking you.”

“No, Yoshima. I don’t. I refuse to.”

His gaze held hers. “Then you’re not being honest with yourself, or with me. Because the thought’s got to be there. And as long as the smallest ounce of mistrust is there, you’re going to be uneasy with me. I can feel it, you can feel it.” He stripped off his gloves, turned, and began writing the deceased’s name on labels. She could see the tension in his shoulders, in the rigid muscles of his neck.

“We’ll get past this,” she said.

“Maybe.”

“Not maybe. We will. We have to work together.”

“Well, I guess that’s up to you.”

She watched him for a moment, wondering how to recapture the cordial relationship they had once enjoyed. Perhaps it wasn’t so cordial after all, she thought. I just assumed it was, while all this time, he’s hidden his emotions from me, just as I hide mine. What a pair we are, the poker-faced duo. Every week tragedy passes across our autopsy table, but I have never seen him cry, nor has he seen me cry. We just go about the business of death like two workers on the factory floor.

He finished labeling the specimen jars and turned back to see she was still standing behind him. “Did you need anything, Dr. Isles?” he asked, and his voice, like his expression, revealed no hint of what had just passed between them. This was the Yoshima she had always known, quietly efficient, poised to offer his assistance.

She responded in kind. She removed X-rays from the envelope she’d carried into the room and mounted Nikki Wells’s films on the light box. “I’m hoping you remember this case,” she said, and flipped on the switch. “It’s from five years ago. A case out in Fitchburg.”

“What’s the name?”

“Nikki Wells.”

He frowned at the X-ray. Focused, immediately, on the collection of fetal bones overlying the maternal pelvis. “This was that pregnant woman? Killed with her sister?”

“You do remember it, then.”

“Both the bodies were burned?”

“That’s right.”

“I remember, it was Dr. Hobart’s case.”

“I’ve never met Dr. Hobart.”

“No, you wouldn’t have. He left about two years before you joined us.”

“Where is he working now? I’d like to talk to him.”

“Well, that would be hard. He’s dead.”

She frowned at him. “What?”

Sadly, Yoshima shook his head. “It was so hard on Dr. Tierney. He felt responsible, even though he had no choice.”

“What happened?”