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.”
“Right-handed?” asked Frost.
“Likely. Someone who swung it over his right shoulder. That same impact also caused a fissured fracture that ran obliquely across the temporal bone. This was all powerful enough to certainly stun her, but we know it didn’t immediately kill her. The trail of blood across the living room tells us she was able to crawl away for some distance…”
“Seventeen feet,” said Frost. “It must have seemed like miles.”
As Maura reflected back the scalp, peeling the hair and skin from bone, she imagined Sofia’s terrifying last moments. The crushing pain, the seeping blood. The floor slippery beneath her hands as she dragged herself away from the front door. Away from the killer.
But she cannot crawl fast enough. He follows her, past the aquarium with the mermaid in her lavish pink castle. Past the bookcase with the romance novels. By now her vision would be fading, her limbs growing numb. She knows she can’t escape, cannot fend off the attack. Finally she can go no further and here is where it ends. She curls up on her side into a fetal position, embracing herself as the last blow falls.
It lands on her right temple, where the bone is thinnest. It crushes her cheekbone, collapsing the bony orbit of her eye. All this had been revealed in the X-rays and in this exposed surface of skull. Even before Maura turned on the bone saw and opened the cranium, she knew that the transmitted force of the blows had displaced bone fragments, sheared blood vessels, and lacerated gray matter. She knew the catastrophic results when blood displaced brain and axons were stretched and crushed.
What she did not know was what the victim was thinking in her final moments. Sofia was surely terrified, but did she feel surprised? Betrayed? Did she recognize the face staring down at her? This was the limit of the pathologist’s knife. Maura could dissect a body, examine its tissues all the way down to the cellular level, but what the dead knew and saw and felt as the lights blinked out would remain a mystery.
* * *
—
A sense of dissatisfaction hung over Maura as she drove home that evening. She walked in her front door and could not help thinking about Sofia, who a few days ago had walked in her own front door to find death waiting for her. In truth, it was waiting for everyone; the only question was the time and place of the rendezvous.
Maura went straight to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of cabernet. Carried it into the living room and sat down at the piano. The score of Mozart’s Concerto no. 21 was already open and staring at her, a reminder of yet another commitment she’d taken on, one that carried the risk of abject humiliation if she failed.
She took a sip of wine, set the glass down on an end table, and began to play.
The andante solo was quiet and uncomplicated and did not require the skill that the more frantic sections did, and it was a soothing place to start. A way to focus on tempo and melody instead of Sofia Suarez’s death. She felt her tension ease and the dark clouds lifted from her mood. Music was her safe space, where death did not intrude, a universe away from the scalpel and the bone saw. She had not told Jane about the orchestra because she’d wanted to preserve this distance between the two universes, did not want the purity of music to be polluted by her other life.
She reached the end of the andante and launched straight into the allegro, her now-warmed-up fingers racing across the keys. She kept on playing, even when she heard the front door open. Even when Father Daniel Brophy walked into the living room. He did not say a word, but listened in silence as he peeled off his priest’s collar, shedding the uniform of his calling, a calling that forbade any intimate bond between them.