Vanish: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel - Softcover

Buch 5 von 13: Rizzoli & Isles

Gerritsen, Tess

 
9780345476982: Vanish: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

Inhaltsangabe

A blessed event becomes a nightmare for pregnant homicide detective Jane Rizzoli when she finds herself on the wrong side of a hostage crisis in this timely and relentless thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of Body Double .

A nameless, beautiful woman appears to be just another corpse in the morgue. An apparent suicide, she lies on a gurney, awaiting the dissecting scalpel of medical examiner Maura Isles. But when Maura unzips the body bag and looks down at the body, she gets the fright of her life. The corpse opens its eyes.

Very much alive, the woman is rushed to the hospital, where with shockingly cool precision, she murders a security guard and seizes hostages . . . one of them a pregnant patient, Jane Rizzoli.

Who is this violent, desperate soul, and what does she want? As the tense hours tick by, Maura joins forces with Jane's husband, FBI agent Gabriel Dean, to track down the mysterious killer's identity. When federal agents suddenly appear on the scene, Maura and Gabriel realize that they are dealing with a case that goes far deeper than just an ordinary hostage crisis.

Only Jane, trapped with the armed madwoman, holds the key to the mystery. And only she can solve it-if she survives the night.

From the Hardcover edition.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen earned international acclaim for her first novel of suspense,Harvest. She introduced Detective Jane Rizzoli in The Surgeon (2001) and Dr. Maura Isles inThe Apprentice (2002) and has gone on to write numerous other titles in the celebrated Rizzoli & Isles series, most recentlyThe Mephisto Club, The Keepsake, Ice Cold, The Silent Girl, Last to Die, and Die Again. Her latest novel is the standalone thrillerPlaying with Fire. A physician, Tess Gerritsen lives in Maine.


From the Hardcover edition.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Dr. Maura Isles had not smelled fresh air all day. Since seven that morning she had been inhaling the scent of death, an aroma so familiar to her that she did not recoil as her knife sliced cold skin, as foul odors wafted up from exposed organs. The police officers who occasionally stood in the room to observe postmortems were not so stoic. Sometimes Maura caught a whiff of the Vicks ointment that they dabbed in their nostrils to mask the stench. Sometimes even Vicks was not enough, and she'd see them suddenly go wobbly and turn away, to gag over the sink. Cops were not accustomed, as she was, to the astringent bite of formalin, the sulfurous aroma of decaying membranes.

Today, there was an incongruous note of sweetness added to that bouquet of odors: the scent of coconut oil, emanating from the skin of Mrs. Gloria Leder, who now lay on the autopsy table. She was fifty years old, a divorcee with broad hips and heavy breasts and toenails painted a brilliant pink. Deep tan lines marked the edges of the bathing suit she had been wearing when she was found dead beside her apartment swimming pool. It had been a bikini-not the most flattering choice for a body sagging with middle age. When was the last time I had the chance to put on my bathing suit? Maura thought, and she felt an absurd flash of envy for Mrs. Gloria Leder, who'd spent the last moments of her life enjoying this summer day. It was almost August, and Maura had not yet visited the beach or sat by a swimming pool or even sunbathed in her own backyard.

"Rum and Coke," said the young cop standing at the foot of the table. "I think that's what she had in her glass. It was sitting next to her patio chair."

This was the first time Maura had seen Officer Buchanan in her morgue. He made her nervous, the way he kept fussing with his paper mask and shifting from foot to foot. The boy looked way too young to be a cop. They were all starting to look too young.

"Did you retain the contents of that glass?" she asked Officer Buchanan.

"Uh . . . no, ma'am. I took a good whiff. She was definitely drinking a rum and Coke."

"At nine A.M.?" Maura looked across the table at her assistant, Yoshima. As usual, he was silent, but she saw one dark eyebrow tilt up, as eloquent a comment as she would get from Yoshima.

"She didn't get down too much of it," said Officer Buchanan.

"The glass was still pretty full."

"Okay," said Maura. "Let's take a look at her back."

Together, she and Yoshima log-rolled the corpse onto its side.

"There's a tattoo here on the hip," noted Maura. "Little blue butterfly."

"Geez," said Buchanan. "A woman her age?"

Maura glanced up. "You think fifty's ancient, do you?"

"I mean-well, that's my mom's age."

Careful, boy. I'm only ten years younger.

She picked up the knife and began to cut. This was her fifth postmortem of the day, and she made swift work of it. With Dr. Costas on vacation, and a multivehicle accident the night before, the cold room had been crammed with body bags that morning. Even as she'd worked her way through the backlog, two more bodies had been delivered to the refrigerator. Those would have to wait until tomorrow. The morgue's clerical staff had already left for the evening, and Yoshima kept looking at the clock, obviously anxious to be on his way home.

She incised skin, gutted the thorax and abdomen. Removed dripping organs and placed them on the cutting board to be sectioned. Little by little, Gloria Leder revealed her secrets: a fatty liver, the telltale sign of a few too many rums and Cokes. A uterus knobby with fibroids.

And finally, when they opened the cranium, the reason for her death. Maura saw it as she lifted the brain in her gloved hands. "Subarachnoid hemorrhage," she said, and glanced up at Buchanan. He was looking far paler than when he had first walked into the room. "This woman probably had a berr

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