Body Double: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel Read Free

expectation.
    “I’ll . . . see you at school,” she said. She backed away, glancing left and right at woods that looked the same in every direction. Which way had they come from? Which way should she go?
    “But you just got here, Alice,” he said. He was holding something in his hand. Only as he raised it over his head did she see what it was.
    A rock.
    The blow sent her to her knees. She crouched in the dirt, her vision almost black, her limbs numb. She felt no pain, just dumb disbelief that he had hit her. She started to crawl, but could not see where she was going. Then he grabbed her ankles and yanked her backward. Her face scraped against the ground as he dragged her by her feet. She tried to kick free, tried to scream, but her mouth filled with dirt and twigs as he pulled her toward the pit. Just as her feet dropped over the edge, she grabbed a sapling and held on, her legs dangling into the hole.
    “Let go, Alice,” he said.
    “Pull me up! Pull me up!”
    “I said, let
go.
” He lifted a rock and brought it down on her hand.
    She shrieked and lost her grip. Slid feetfirst into the hole, landing on a bed of dead leaves.
    “Alice. Alice.”
    Stunned by the fall, she looked up at the circle of sky above, and saw the silhouette of his head, leaning forward, peering down at her.
    “Why are you doing this?” she sobbed.
“Why?”
    “It’s nothing personal. I just want to see how long it takes. Seven months for a kitty. How long do you think it’ll take you?”
    “You can’t do this to me!”
    “Bye-bye, Alice.”
    “Elijah!
Elijah!
”
    The wooden boards slid across the opening, eclipsing the circle of light. Her last glimpse of sky vanished. This isn’t real, she thought. This is a joke. He’s just trying to scare me. He’ll leave me down here for a few minutes, and then he’ll come back and let me out. Of course he’ll come back.
    Then she heard something thud onto the well cover.
Rocks. He’s piling rocks on top.
    She stood up and tried to climb out of the hole. Found a dry wisp of vine that immediately disintegrated in her hands. She clawed at the dirt, but could not find a handhold, could not pull herself even a few inches without sliding back. Her screams pierced the darkness.
    “Elijah!” she shrieked.
    Her only answer was stones thudding onto wood.

ONE
    Pesez le matin que vous n’irez peut-être pas jusqu’au soir,
    Et au soir que vous n’irez peut-être pas jusqu’au matin.
    Be aware every morning that you may not last the day,
    And every evening that you may not last the night.
    —E NGRAVED PLAQUE IN THE CATACOMBS OF P ARIS
    A ROW OF SKULLS glared from atop a wall of intricately stacked femurs and tibias. Though it was June, and she knew the sun was shining on the streets of Paris sixty feet above her, Dr. Maura Isles felt chilled as she walked down the dim passageway, its walls lined almost to the ceiling with human remains. She was familiar, even intimate, with death, and had confronted its face countless times on her autopsy table, but she was stunned by the scale of this display, by the sheer number of bones stored in this network of tunnels beneath the City of Light. The one-kilometer tour took her through only a small section of the catacombs. Off-limits to tourists were numerous side tunnels and bone-filled chambers, their dark mouths gaping seductively behind locked gates. Here were the remains of six million Parisians who had once felt the sun on their faces, who had hungered and thirsted and loved, who had felt the beating of their own hearts in their chests, the rush of air in and out of their lungs. They could never have imagined that one day their bones would be unearthed from their cemetery resting places, and moved to this grim ossuary beneath the city.
    That one day they would be on display, to be gawked at by hordes of tourists.
    A century and a half ago, to make room for the steady influx of dead into Paris’s overcrowded cemeteries, the bones had been