Listen To Me (Rizzoli & Isles #13)(11)

Sofia Suarez had not been.

Maura picked up the scalpel and began to cut.

“We also heard you have a concert coming up,” said Frost. “Alice and I want to come. She’s really into classical music.”

At last Maura looked up at Jane and Frost, who were watching her across the autopsy table. Frost’s sunburn was now in its ugly peeling phase, and above his paper mask, his forehead was flaky with dead skin. “Trust me, the concert is not going to be a big deal. Which is why I never bothered to mention it. How did you hear about it anyway?”

“Dr. Antrim told us,” said Jane. “He worked with Sofia Suarez at Pilgrim Hospital.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“We interviewed her colleagues in the intensive care unit, and he told us you were going to be the star soloist at their concert.”

“It’s only Mozart.” Maura picked up the rib shears and snapped through bone. “Piano Concerto Twenty-one.”

“Well, that sounds fancy enough.”

“It’s not a difficult piece.”

“Alice loves Mozart,” Frost said. “She’ll definitely want to hear that.”

“It’s not like I’m Lang Lang.” Maura cut through the last rib, freeing up the sternal shield. “We’re amateurs. Just doctors, playing together for fun.”

“You still should have told us,” said Jane.

“I joined them only a few months ago. After their pianist fell and broke her shoulder.”

“And just like that, you can step in and play some complicated piece?”

“I told you, it’s not that big a deal.”

Jane snorted. “You keep saying that. And I keep not believing you.”

“Hey, maybe we should start a band or something,” Frost said to Jane. “A police band. You used to play the trumpet, didn’t you?”

“You do not want to hear me play the trumpet.”

Maura reached into Sofia Suarez’s chest and frowned. “The surface of the right lung does not feel normal. There’s fibrosis here.”

“Meaning?” asked Jane.

“The clue’s in her chest films.” Maura nodded at the computer monitor where the chest X-ray was displayed. “It was in her medical records too. That’s scarring from COVID-19. She was an ICU nurse, so it’s not surprising she got infected. She never needed intubation but she was hospitalized for four days on oxygen. Quite a few people are walking around right now with X-rays that look like that, and they may not even know it.”

Maura picked up a scalpel and once again reached into the chest cavity. For a moment the only sounds were the wet suck of organs as she pulled them from the cavity and the splash as they landed in the basin. The sounds of a butcher’s table.

She turned her attention to the abdominal cavity and out came loops of bowel, stomach and liver, pancreas and spleen. She slit open the stomach and emptied the scant contents into a basin. “Her last meal was at least four hours prior to death,” she noted. “That would have been during her work shift.”

“So she didn’t stop somewhere to eat on the way home,” said Jane. “Four hours. She must have been hungry.”

Maura sealed a sample of stomach contents for analysis. “Any matches from AFIS?”

“No hit on any of the fingerprints,” said Frost. “The ones we ID’d matched her neighbor Mrs. Leong and Jamal Bird, the computer whiz kid down the street. Assuming neither of them did it, it looks like our perp wore gloves.”

“And the footwear?”

“Standard garden boots, men’s size eight and a half. Like you can buy in any Walmart. We’re still waiting for her phone records, but that won’t help us if this was someone she didn’t know.”

“What about those recent break-ins in the neighborhood? Do any of those details match?” Maura looked up at Jane, who shook her head.

“That burglar wore Nikes, size ten, and his fingerprints didn’t turn up in Sofia’s house. It would make this case way too easy if it’s the same neighborhood burglar.”

Maura moved on to the pelvis and now her scalpel laid open the uterus, revealing yet another sad secret. “Endometrial scarring. Almost the entire wall.”

“She never had children,” said Jane.

“This may be the reason why.”

As Maura placed the resected uterus into the basin, she thought of the wedding photo hanging in the victim’s house, the bride and groom both beaming with joy. When they’d married, Sofia and Tony were already in their forties, no longer young; perhaps that had made their marriage all the sweeter, because they’d found each other so late in life. But too late for children.

She turned at last to the injuries that had brought Sofia Suarez to this table. So far Maura had examined the heart and lungs, stomach and liver, but those were faceless organs, as impersonal as pig offal at the butcher shop. Now she had to look at Sofia’s face, which had been cruelly transformed into a distorted version by Picasso. Maura had already examined the skull X-rays, had seen the fractures of the cranium and facial bones, and even before she peeled away the scalp and opened the skull, she knew the damage she would find inside.

“There’s a depressed fracture of the parietotemporal bone,” she said. “The shape of the cranial lesion is well-defined and circular, with a sharply regular edge of the wound on the outer table of the skull. On X-ray, it’s clear there’s bony penetration from a rupture of the outer table with comminuted fragmentation of the inner table. This is all consistent with blunt-force trauma from a hammer. The initial blow was most likely delivered from behind, with the attacker swinging at an angle to the victim.”