Tess Gerritsen - The Mephisto Club

Jane glanced at Frost. Better you than me, his eyes said. She moved to the head of the table. There she paused to snap on gloves, then reached down to cradle the head. Found herself gazing into the victim’s eyes, the corneas dull as wax. A day and a half in a refrigerator had chilled the flesh, and as she cupped the face, she thought of the butcher counter in her local supermarket, with its icy chickens wrapped in plastic. We are all, in the end, merely meat.

Maura bent over the wound, studying it through the magnifier. “There seems to be a single sweep across the anterior. Very sharp blade. The only notching I see is quite a ways back, under the ears. Minimal bread-knife repetition.”

“A bread knife’s not exactly sharp,” said Frost, his voice sounding very far away. Jane looked up and saw that he had retreated from the table and was standing halfway to the sink, his hand covering his mask.

“By bread-knifing, I’m not referring to the blade,” said Maura. “It’s a cutting pattern. Repeated slices going deeper, in the same plane. What we see here is one very deep initial slice, cutting right through the thyroid cartilage, down to the spinal column. Then a quick disarticulation, between the second and third cervical vertebrae. It could have taken less than a minute to complete this decapitation.”

Yoshima moved in with the digital camera, taking photos of the approximated wound. Frontal view, lateral. Horror from every angle.

“Okay, Jane,” said Maura. “Let’s take a look at the incision plane.” Maura grasped the head and turned it upside down. “Hold it there for me.”

Jane caught a glimpse of severed flesh and the open windpipe, and she abruptly averted her gaze, blindly holding the head in place.

Again, Maura moved in with the magnifier to examine the cut surface. “I see striations on the thyroid cartilage. I think the blade was serrated. Get some shots of this.”

Once again, the shutter clicked as Yoshima leaned in for more photos. My hands will be in these shots, thought Jane, this moment preserved for the evidence files. Her head, my hands.

“You said…you said that was arterial spray on the wall,” said Frost.

Maura nodded. “In the bedroom.”

“She was alive.”

“Yes.”

“And this-decapitation-took only seconds?”

“With a sharp knife, a skillful hand, a killer could certainly do it in that time. Only the vertebral column might slow him down.”

“Then she knew, didn’t she? She must have felt it.”

“I highly doubt that.”

“If someone cuts off your head, you’d be conscious for at least a few seconds. That’s what I heard on The Art Bell Show. Some doctor was on the radio with him, talking about what it’s like to be guillotined. That you’re probably still conscious as your head drops into the bucket. You can actually feel yourself falling into it.”

“That may be true, but-”

“The doctor said that Mary, Queen of Scots was still trying to speak, even after they cut off her head. Her lips kept moving.”

“Jesus, Frost,” said Jane. “Like I need to be creeped out even more?”

“It’s possible, isn’t it? That this victim felt her head come off?”

“It’s highly unlikely,” said Maura. “And I’m not saying that just to ease your mind.” She turned the head sideways on the table. “Feel the cranium. Right here.”

Frost stared at her in horror. “No, that’s okay. I don’t need to.”

“Come on. Pull on a glove and run your fingers over the temporal bone. There’s a scalp laceration. I didn’t see it until we washed away the blood. Palpate the skull here and tell me what you feel.”

It was clearly the last thing Frost wanted to do, but he pulled on a glove and tentatively placed his fingers on the cranium. “There’s a, uh, dip in the bone.”

“A depressed skull fracture. You can see it on x-ray.” Maura crossed to the light box and pointed to the skull table. “On the lateral film, you see fractures fanning out from that impact point. They radiate like a spiderweb across the temporal bone. In fact, that’s exactly what we call this type of fracture. A mosaic or spiderweb pattern. It’s in a particularly critical location, because the middle meningeal artery runs right under here. If you rupture that, the patient bleeds into the cranial cavity. When we open the skull, we’ll see if that’s what happened.” She looked at Frost. “This was a significant blow to the head. I think the victim was unconscious when the cutting began.”

“But still alive.”

“Yes. She was definitely still alive.”

“You don’t know that she was unconscious.”

“There are no defense wounds on her limbs. No physical evidence that she fought back. You don’t just let someone cut your throat without a struggle. I think she was stunned by that blow. I don’t think she felt the blade.” Maura paused and added, quietly, “At least, I hope not.” She moved to the corpse’s right side, grasped the amputated arm, and lifted the incised end to the magnifier. “We have more tool markings here on the cartilage surface, where he disarticulated the elbow joint,” she said. “It looks like the same blade was used here. Very sharp, serrated edge.” She opposed the unattached arm to the elbow, as though assembling a mannequin, and eyed the match. There was no expression of horror on her face, only concentration. She might be studying widgets or ball bearings, not incised flesh. Not the limb of a woman who’d once lifted that arm to brush back her hair, to wave, to dance. How did Maura do it? How did she walk into this building every morning, knowing what waited for her? Day after day, picking up the scalpel, dissecting the tragedy of lives cut short? I deal with those tragedies, too. But I don’t have to saw open skulls or thrust my hands into chests.

Maura circled to the corpse’s left side. Without hesitation, she picked up the severed hand. Chilled and drained of blood, it looked like wax, not flesh, like a movie propmaster’s idea of what a real hand would look like. Maura swung the magnifier over it and inspected the raw, cut surface. For a moment she said nothing, but a frown was now etched on her forehead.

She set down the hand and lifted the left arm to examine the wrist stump. Her frown deepened. Again she picked up the hand and opposed the two wounds, trying to match the incised surfaces, hand to wrist, waxy skin to waxy skin.

Abruptly she set down the body parts and looked at Yoshima. “Could you put up the wrist and hand films?”

“You’re done with all these skull x-rays?”

“I’ll get back to those later. Right now I want to see the left hand and wrist.”

Yoshima removed the first set of x-rays and mounted a fresh set. Against the backlight of the viewing box, hand and finger bones glowed, the columns of phalanges like slender stalks of bamboo. Maura stripped off her gloves and approached the light box, her gaze riveted on the images. She said nothing; it was her silence that told Jane that something was very wrong.

Maura turned and looked at her. “Have you searched the victim’s entire house?”

“Yes, of course.”

“The whole house? Every closet, every drawer?”

“There wasn’t a lot there. She’d moved in just a few months before.”

“And the refrigerator? The freezer?”

“CSU went through it. Why?”

“Come look at this x-ray.”

Jane pulled off her soiled gloves and crossed to the light box to scan the films. She saw nothing there to account for Maura’s sudden tone of urgency, nothing that did not correspond with what she saw lying on the table. “What am I supposed to look at?”

“You see this view of the hand? These little bones here are called the carpals. They make up the base of the hand, before the finger bones branch off.” Maura took Jane’s hand to demonstrate, turning it palm side up, revealing the scar that would forever remind Jane of what another killer had done to her. A record of violence, marked in her flesh by Warren Hoyt. But Maura made no comment on the scar; instead she pointed to the meaty base of Jane’s palm, near the wrist.