Tess Gerritsen - Body Double

It was only five A.M., yet she felt wide awake. It’s eleven A.M. in Paris, she thought. There the sun is shining and if I were there now, I would already have had my second cup of coffee. She knew that jet lag would catch up with her later today, that this burst of early morning energy would be gone by afternoon, but she could not force herself to sleep any longer.

She rose and got dressed.

The street in front of her house looked the same as it always had. The first streaks of dawn lit the sky. She watched the lights come on in Mr. Telushkin’s house next door. He was an early riser, usually heading off to work at least an hour before she did, but this morning, she’d been the first to awaken, and she saw her neighborhood with fresh eyes. Saw the automatic sprinklers come on across the street, water hissing circles on the lawn. She saw the paperboy cycle past, baseball cap turned backward, and heard the thump of The Boston Globe hitting her front porch. Everything seems the same, she thought, but it’s not. Death has paid a visit to my neighborhood, and everyone who lives here will remember it. They will look out their front windows at the curb where the Taurus was parked, and shudder at how close it came to touching any one of us.

Headlights swung around the corner, and a vehicle drove along the street, slowing down as it approached her house. A Brookline police cruiser.

No, nothing is the same, she thought as she watched the cruiser drive past.

Nothing ever is.

She arrived at work before her secretary did. By six, Maura was at her desk, tackling the large stack of transcribed dictations and lab reports that had accumulated in her in-box during the week she had been at the Paris conference. She was already a third of the way through when she heard footsteps, and she looked up to see Louise standing in the doorway.

“You’re here,” Louise murmured.

Maura greeted her with a smile. “Bonjour! I thought I’d get an early start on all this paperwork.”

Louise just stared at her for a moment, then she came into the room and sat down in the chair facing Maura’s desk, as though she was suddenly too tired to stand. Though fifty years old, Louise always seemed to have twice the stamina of Maura, who was ten years younger. But this morning, Louise looked drained, her face thin and sallow under fluorescent lights.

“Are you all right, Dr. Isles?” Louise asked quietly.

“I’m fine. A little jet-lagged.”

“I mean-after what happened last night. Detective Frost sounded so sure it was you, in that car…”

Maura nodded, her smile fading. “It was like being in the Twilight Zone, Louise. Coming home to find all those police cars in front of my house.”

“It was awful. We all thought…” Louise swallowed and looked down at her lap. “I was so relieved when Dr. Bristol called me last night. To let me know it was a mistake.”

There was a silence, heavy with reproach. It suddenly dawned on Maura that she should have been the one to call her own secretary. She should have realized that Louise was shaken, and would want to hear her voice. I’ve been living alone and unattached for so long, she thought, that it doesn’t even occur to me that there are people in this world who might care what happens to me.

Louise stood up to leave. “I’m so glad to see you back, Dr. Isles. I just wanted to tell you that.”

“Louise?”

“Yes?”

“I brought you a little something back from Paris. I know this sounds like a lame excuse, but it’s packed in my suitcase. And the airline lost it.”

“Oh.” Louise laughed. “Well, if it’s chocolate, my hips certainly don’t need it.”

“Nothing caloric, I promise.” She glanced at the clock on her desk. “Is Dr. Bristol in yet?”

“He just got here. I saw him in the parking lot.”

“Do you know when he’s doing the autopsy?”

“Which one? He has two today.”

“The gunshot from last night. The woman.”

Louise gave her a long look. “I think that one is second on his schedule.”

“Do they know anything more about her?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Dr. Bristol.”

ALTHOUGH SHE HAD NO AUTOPSIES on her own schedule that day, at two o’clock Maura headed downstairs and changed into a scrub suit. She was alone in the women’s locker room, and she took her time removing her street clothes, folding her blouse and slacks and placing them in a tidy pile inside the locker. The scrubs felt crisp against her bare skin, like freshly laundered sheets, and she found comfort in the familiar routine of tightening the trouser drawstrings and tucking her hair into a cap. She felt contained and protected by laundered cotton, and by the role she donned along with the uniform. She glanced in the mirror, at a reflection as cool as a stranger’s, all emotions shielded from sight. She left the locker room, walked down the hall, and pushed into the autopsy suite.

Rizzoli and Frost were already standing beside the table, both of them gowned and gloved, their backs obstructing Maura’s view of the victim. It was Dr. Bristol who first spotted Maura. He stood facing her, his generous girth filling the extra-large surgical gown, and he met her gaze as she entered the room. His eyebrows pinched into a frown above the surgical mask, and she saw the question in his eyes.

“I thought I’d drop in to watch this one,” she said.

Now Rizzoli turned to look at her. She, too, was frowning. “Are you sure you want to be here?”

“Wouldn’t you be curious?”

“But I’m not sure I’d want to watch. Considering.”

“I’m just going to observe. If that’s okay with you, Abe.”

Bristol shrugged. “Well hell, I guess I’d be curious, too,” he said. “Join the party.”

She moved around to Abe’s side of the table and at her first unobstructed view of the corpse, her throat went dry. She had seen her share of horrors in this lab, had gazed at flesh in every stage of decay, at bodies so damaged by fire or trauma that the remains could scarcely be categorized as human. The woman on the table was, in the scope of her experience, remarkably intact. The blood had been washed away, and the bullet’s entry wound, in the left scalp, was obscured by her dark hair. The face was undamaged, the torso marred only by dependent mottling of the skin. There were fresh puncture marks in the groin and neck, where the morgue assistant Yoshima had drawn blood for lab tests, but the torso was otherwise untouched; Abe’s scalpel had yet to make a single slice. Had the chest already been split open, the cavity exposed, the body would have struck her as a far less disturbing sight. Opened corpses are anonymous. Hearts and lungs and spleens are merely organs, so lacking in individuality that they can be transplanted, like spare auto parts, between bodies. But this woman was still whole, her features startlingly recognizable. Last night, Maura had seen the corpse fully clothed and in shadow, lit only by the beam of Rizzoli’s Maglite. Now the features were harshly lit by autopsy lamps, the clothes stripped off to reveal the naked torso, and those features were more than merely familiar.

Dear god, that’s my own face, my own body, on the table.

Only she knew just how close the resemblance was. No one else in that room would have seen the shape of Maura’s bare breasts, the curve of her thighs. They knew only what she allowed them to see, her face, her hair. They could not possibly know that the similarities between her and this corpse were as intimate as the flecks of reddish brown in the pubic hair.

Maura looked at the woman’s hands, the fingers long and slender like her own. A pianist’s hands. The fingers had already been inked. Skull and dental X-rays had been completed as well; the dental panograph was now displayed on the light box, two white rows of teeth glowing in a Cheshire cat’s grin. Is that how my X-rays would look? she wondered. Are we the same, right down to the enamel on our teeth?