Тесс Герритсен - I Know a Secret

To her bedroom.

There, she stopped thinking at all, because she no longer cared about the consequences. All that mattered was that she felt alive again, whole again, reunited with the missing part of her soul. Loving Daniel might be foolish and ultimately star-crossed, but not loving him had been impossible. All these months she had tried to live without him, had swallowed the bitter pill of self-control and been rewarded with lonely nights and far too many glasses of wine. She’d convinced herself that walking away from him was sensible, because she could never claim him as her own, not when her rival was God Himself. But being sensible had not warmed her bed or made her happy or quelled the longing that she would always feel for this man.

In the bedroom they did not turn on the lights; they didn’t need to. Their bodies were already familiar territory to each other, and she knew every inch of his skin. She could tell that he had lost weight, just as she had, as though their hunger for each other had been a true starvation. One night would not be enough to satisfy that hunger, and she did not know when they would have another, so she took what she could now, greedy for the pleasure that his Church had forbidden them. Here is what you’ve missed, Daniel, she thought. How petty your God must be, how cruel, to deny us this joy.

But later, as they lay together with the sweat cooling on their skin, she felt the old sadness creeping in. Here is our punishment, she thought. Not hell and brimstone but the inevitable pain of goodbye. Always a goodbye.

“Tell me why,” he whispered. He didn’t need to say more; she understood what he was asking. Months after she had unequivocally broken off their affair, why had she invited him back into her bed?

“She’s dead,” said Maura. “Amalthea Lank.”

“When did this happen?”

“Tonight. I was there, at the hospital. I watched her last heartbeats on the monitor. She had cancer, so I knew she was dying, and I’ve known it for months. But still, when it happened...”

“I should have been there with you,” he murmured, and she savored the warmth of his breath in her hair. “All you ever have to do is call me and I’ll be here. You know that.”

“It’s strange. A few years ago, I didn’t know Amalthea existed. But now that she’s gone, my last living relative, I realize how alone I am.”

“Only if you choose to be.”

As if loneliness were a choice, she thought. She hadn’t chosen the road to both joy and misery. She hadn’t chosen to love a man who would always be torn between her and his promise to God. That choice had been made for them, by the killer who’d brought them together four years ago, a killer who’d turned his sights on Maura. Daniel had risked his life to save Maura’s; what greater proof could he offer that he loved her?

“You’re not alone, Maura,” he said. “You have me.” He turned her face toward his, and in the darkness she saw the gleam of his eyes, steadily focused on her. “You’ll always have me.”

Tonight, she believed him.

In the morning, Daniel was gone.

She got dressed alone, ate her breakfast alone, read the newspaper alone. Well, not entirely alone: The cat sat nearby, licking his paws after a breakfast of fancy canned tuna.

“No comment, I take it?” Maura said to him.

The Beast didn’t deign to look up at her.

As she rinsed her dishes and packed up her laptop, she thought of Daniel, who at this moment would be preparing for a new day of tending to the needy souls in his congregation. This was how their feverish nights together always concluded: with the mundane tasks of daily life, performed separately. In this way they were no different from married couples. They made love, they slept together, and in the morning off they both went to their jobs.

Today, she thought, this counts as happiness.

From a night of love to a day of death.

This morning it was the body of Earl Devine that waited to greet her when she walked into the autopsy room. Yoshima had already performed the X-rays, and the images were now displayed on the computer screen. As she tied on her gown, she studied the chest films and noted the position of the bullet that had lodged against the spine. Based on the exit wounds, which she’d examined at the death scene, two bullets had passed through the chest and out of the body. This was the sole bullet that remained, its trajectory halted by Devine’s vertebral bone.

Jane walked into the autopsy room and joined Maura at the computer screen. “Let me guess. Cause of death is gunshot wounds. Can I be an ME too?”

“There’s a bullet lodged in his sixth thoracic vertebra,” said Maura.

“And we recovered the other two bullets at the scene. Backs up what I said last night. Crowe fired three times.”

“An appropriate response to an imminent threat. I think he has nothing to worry about.”

“Still, he’s pretty rattled. We had to take him out for drinks last night, just to talk him down.”

Maura shot her an amused look. “What is this I’m hearing? A note of sympathy for your old nemesis?”

“Yeah, can you believe it? It’s like the world’s turned upside down.” Jane paused, studying Maura’s face. “What’d you do to yourself?”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re all bright and shiny this morning. Like you’ve been to a health spa or something.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But of course Maura did know; bright and shiny was exactly how the world looked to her today. Happiness left its telltale glow, and Jane was too observant to miss it. If I tell her about last night, she’ll certainly disapprove, but I don’t give a damn. I choose not to care what Jane thinks, or what anyone thinks. Today I choose to be happy . With a defiant click of the mouse, she pulled up the next X-ray, and a lateral view of the chest appeared onscreen. Maura frowned at a coin-shaped lucency in the vertebral body, just above where the bullet had lodged. A lesion that should not be there.

“New makeup? Vitamin pills?” Jane asked.

“What?”

“ Something’s different about you.”

Maura ignored her. She clicked back to the frontal view of the chest and zoomed in to study the fifth and sixth vertebrae. But the bullet-shredded lung had spilled air and blood into the chest cavity and forced the thoracic organs out of their usual positions. In this distorted landscape, she could not find what she was searching for.

“You see something interesting?” said Jane.

Maura clicked back to the lateral view and pointed to the lesion in the vertebral body. “I’m not sure what this is.”

“I’m no doctor, but that doesn’t look like a bullet to me.”

“No, it’s something else. Something in the bone. I need to confirm what I think it is.” Maura turned to the autopsy table where Earl Devine was stretched out, awaiting her scalpel. “Let’s open him up,” she said, and tied on her mask.

As Maura started the Y incision, Jane said, “I hope you’re not having doubts about how the shooting went down.”

“No.”

“So what are you looking for?”

“An explanation, Jane. The reason why this man chose suicide by cop.”

“Isn’t that a job for a psychiatrist?”

“In this case, the autopsy may give us the answer.”

Maura cut swiftly and efficiently, moving with an urgency she hadn’t felt before she’d viewed the X-rays. The cause of death and manner of death were both apparent, and she’d assumed this autopsy would merely confirm what she’d already been told about the shooting. But the lateral chest X-ray had added a possible twist to the tale, a tantalizing glimpse of Earl Devine’s motives and his state of mind. A cadaver could reveal more than merely physical secrets; sometimes it offered insights into the personality once inhabiting the flesh. Whether clues were old slash marks on the wrists or needle tracks or cosmetic-surgery scars, every corpse told tales on its owner.