The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel Read Free Page B

was down on her knees. And he was standing over her.”
    Maura paused, hands touching cool flesh, arrested by the heartbreaking image of this young nun, kneeling before her attacker, blows raining down on her bowed head.
    “What kind of bastard goes around beating up nuns?” said Rizzoli. “What the fuck is wrong with this world?”
    Maura winced at Rizzoli’s choice of words. Though she couldn’t remember the last time she’d set foot in a church, and had ceased believing years ago, to hear such profanity in a sanctified place disturbed her. Such was the power of childhood indoctrination. Even she, for whom saints and miracles were now merely fantasies, would never utter a curse in full view of the cross.
    But Rizzoli was too angry to care what words came tumbling out of her mouth, even in this sacred place. Her hair was more disheveled than usual, a wild, black mane glistening with melted sleet. The bones of her face jutted out in sharp angles beneath pale skin. In the gloom of the chapel, her eyes were bright coals, lit with rage. Righteous anger had always been Jane Rizzoli’s fuel, the essence of what drove her to hunt monsters. Today, though, she seemed feverish with it, and her face was thinner, as though the fire was now consuming her from within.
    Maura did not want to feed those flames. She kept her voice dispassionate, her questions businesslike. A scientist dealing in facts, not emotions.
    She reached for Sister Camille’s arm and tested the elbow joint. “It’s flaccid. No rigor mortis.”
    “Less than five, six hours then?”
    “It’s also cold in here.”
    Rizzoli gave a snort, exhaling a puff of vapor in the frigid air. “No kidding.”
    “Just above freezing, I’d guess. Rigor mortis would be delayed.”
    “How long?”
    “Almost indefinitely.”
    “What about her face? The fixed bruising?”
    “Livor mortis could have happened within half an hour. It doesn’t help us all that much with time of death.”
    Maura opened her kit and set out the chemical thermometer to measure ambient temperature. She eyed the victim’s many layers of clothing and decided not to take a rectal temperature until after the body had been transported to the morgue. The room was poorly lit—not a place in which she could adequately rule out sexual assault prior to the insertion of the thermometer. Wrestling off clothes might also dislodge trace evidence. Instead she took out syringes to withdraw vitreous fluid for postmortem potassium levels. It would give her one estimate for time of death.
    “Tell me about the other victim,” Maura said as she pierced the left eye and slowly withdrew vitreous fluid into the syringe.
    Rizzoli gave a groan of disgust at the procedure and turned away. “The vic found by the door was Sister Ursula Rowland, sixty-eight years old. Must be a tough old bird. They said she was moving her arms when they loaded her into the ambulance. Frost and I got here just as they were driving away.”
    “How badly injured was she?”
    “I didn’t see her. Latest report we got from St. Francis Hospital is that she’s in surgery. Multiple skull fractures and bleeding into the brain.”
    “Like this victim.”
    “Yeah. Like Camille.” The anger was back in Rizzoli’s voice.
    Maura rose to her feet and stood shivering. Her trousers had wicked freezing water from the soaked hem of her coat, and her calves felt encased in ice. She had been told on the phone that the death scene was indoors, so she had not brought her scarf or wool gloves from the car. This unheated room was scarcely warmer than the sleet-swept courtyard outside. She shoved her hands into her coat pockets, and wondered how Rizzoli, who was also without warm gloves and scarf, could linger so long in this frigid chapel. Rizzoli seemed to carry her own heat source within her, the fever of her outrage, and although her lips were turning blue, she did not seem in a hurry to seek a warmer room anytime soon.
    “Why is it so cold in