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“How come you never toldus you played in an orchestra?” said Jane. “It seems like something youmighthave mentioned.”
Maura heard the note of accusation in Jane’s voice and she took her time before answering the question. Instead she remained focused on the body that was stretched out on the autopsy table. Sofia Suarez’s clothes had already been removed—blue hospital scrubs, a size-46B bra, white cotton underwear—and under the bright morgue lights every flaw, every scar acquired during the woman’s fifty-two years of life, was exposed. Maura did not yet focus on the shattered skull or the ruined face; instead she focused on the burn scar on the back of the left hand and the arthritic bulge of the right thumb. Souvenirs, perhaps, of hours spent in the kitchen, chopping and frying and kneading. Aging was a cruel process. Cellulite now dimpled thighs that once would have been slim and smooth. An appendectomy scar rippled the lower abdomen. On her neck and chestwere freckles and skin tags and rough black seborrheic keratoses that the largest organ of the body so often acquires over the decades. Flaws that Maura was starting to find on her own skin, a depressing reminder that old age came for everyone, if you were lucky.
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,thatsounds 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, maybeweshould 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?”
