Tess Gerritsen - The Mephisto Club

“I’m sure you’re wondering what this is all about.”

“Actually, I am.”

“I promise not to pick your brain about the investigation.”

“I can’t talk about it anyway. You do know that.”

“Understood. That’s not why I’m inviting you.”

“Then why?” A blunt, inelegant question, but she had to ask it.

“We share common interests. Common concerns.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

“Join us on Saturday, around seven. We can talk about it then.”

“Let me check my schedule first. I’ll let you know.” She hung up.

“What was that all about?” asked Jane.

“He just invited me to dinner.”

“He wants something from you.”

“Not a thing, he claims.” Maura crossed to the cabinet for a fresh pair of gloves. Although her hands were steady as she pulled them on, she could feel her face flushing, her pulse throbbing in her fingertips.

“You believe that?”

“Of course not. That’s why I’m not going.”

Jane said quietly, “Maybe you should.”

Maura turned to look at her. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’d like to know more about the Mephisto Foundation. Who they are, what they do at their secret little meetings. I may not be able to get the information any other way.”

“So you want me to do it for you?”

“All I’m saying is, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea if you go. As long as you’re careful.”

Maura crossed to the table. Staring down at Eve Kassovitz, she thought: This woman was a cop and she was armed. Yet even she wasn’t careful enough. Maura picked up the knife and began to cut.

Her blade traced a Y on the torso, two incisions slicing from both shoulders to meet lower than usual beneath the sternum. To preserve the stab wound. Even before the ribs were cut, before the chest was opened, she knew what she would find inside the thorax. She could see it in the chest films now hanging on the light box: the globular outline of the heart, far larger than it should be in a healthy young woman. Lifting off the shield of breastbone and ribs, she peered into the chest and slid her hand beneath the swollen sac that contained the heart.

It felt like a bag filled with blood.

“Pericardial tamponade,” she said, and looked up at Jane. “She bled into the sac that surrounds her heart. Since it’s a confined space, the sac becomes so taut, the heart can’t pump. Or the stab itself may have caused a fatal arrhythmia. Either way, this was a quick and efficient kill. But he had to know where to aim the blade.”

“He knew what he was doing.”

“Or he got lucky.” She pointed to the wound. “You can see the blade pierced just below the xiphoid process. Anywhere above that, the heart’s pretty well protected by the sternum and ribs. But if you enter here, where this wound is located, and aim the blade at just the right angle…”

“You’ll hit the heart?”

“It’s not difficult. I did it as an intern, on my ER rotation. With a needle, of course.”

“On a dead person, I hope.”

“No, she was alive. But we couldn’t hear her heartbeat, her blood pressure was crashing, and the chest x-ray showed a globular heart. I had to do something.”

“So you stabbed her?”

“With a cardiac needle. Removed enough blood from the sac to keep her alive until she could make it to surgery.”

“It’s like that spy novel, Eye of the Needle, ” said Yoshima. “The killer stabs his victims straight in the heart, and they die so fast, there’s hardly any blood. It makes a pretty clean kill.”

“Thank you for that useful tip,” said Jane.

“Actually, Yoshima raises a good point,” said Maura. “Our perp chose a quick method to kill Eve Kassovitz. But with Lori-Ann Tucker, he took his time removing the hand, the arm, the head. And then he drew the symbols. With this victim, he didn’t waste a lot of time. Which makes me think Eve was killed for a more practical reason. Maybe she surprised him, and he simply had to get rid of her, on the spot. So he did it the fastest way he could. A blow to the head. And then a quick stab to the heart.”

“He took the time to draw those symbols on the door.”

“How do we know he didn’t draw them first? To go with the bundle he’d just delivered on the doorstep?”

“You mean the hand.”

Maura nodded. “His offering.”

Her blade was back at work, cutting, resecting. Out came lungs, which she dropped into a steel basin, where they formed a spongy mass. A glance at the pink surface, a few slices into each of the lobes, told her these had been the healthy lungs of a nonsmoker, designed to serve their owner well into old age. Maura moved on to the peritoneal cavity, gloved hands reaching into the abdomen to resect stomach and pancreas and liver. Eve Kassovitz’s belly had been enviably flat, the reward no doubt of many hours laboring at sit-ups and stomach crunches. How easily all that effort was reduced by a scalpel to incised muscle and gaping skin. The basin slowly filled with organs, loops of small intestine glistening like tangled eels, liver and spleen settling into a bloody mound. Everything healthy, so healthy. She sliced into the retroperitoneum, removed velvety smooth kidneys, sliced off tiny chunks, which she dropped into a specimen jar. They sank into formalin, trailing swirls of blood.

Straightening, she looked at Yoshima. “Can you put up the skull films now? Let’s see what we have.”

He pulled down the torso x-rays and began mounting a new set, which she had not yet examined. Films of the head now glowed on the viewing box. She focused on the table of bone just beneath the scalp laceration, searching the outline of the cranium for some telltale fracture line or depression that she’d been unable to palpate, but she saw none. Even without a fracture, the blow could still have been enough to stun the victim into submission, to bring her down long enough for the killer to yank open her jacket and lift her sweater.

To thrust the blade into her heart.

At first, the skull was what held Maura’s focus. Then she moved on to a lateral view and focused on the neck, her gaze stopping on the hyoid bone. Posterior to it was a cone-shaped opacity unlike anything she had seen before. Frowning, she moved closer to the light box and stood staring at the anomaly. On the frontal view, it was almost hidden against the greater density of the cervical vertebrae. But on the lateral view it was clearly visible, and it was not part of the skeletal structure.

“What on earth is this?” she murmured.

Jane moved beside her. “What’re you looking at?”

“This thing here. It’s not bone. It’s not a normal part of the neck.”

“Is that something in her throat?”

Maura turned back to the table and said to Yoshima, “Could you get the laryngoscope for me?”

Standing at the head of the table, Maura tilted up the chin. She had first used a laryngoscope as a fourth-year medical student, when she’d tried to insert an endotracheal tube into a man who was not breathing. The circumstances were frantic, the patient in cardiac arrest. Her supervising resident allowed Maura only one attempt at the intubation. “You get ten seconds,” he’d said, “and if you can’t, then I take over.” She’d slipped in the laryngoscope and peered into the throat, looking for the vocal cords, but all she could see was tongue and mucosa. As the seconds ticked by, as a nurse pumped on the chest and the Code Blue team watched, Maura had struggled with the instrument, knowing that with every second the patient was deprived of oxygen, more brain cells could die. The resident finally took the instrument from her hands and nudged her aside to do the job himself. It had been a humiliating demonstration of her incompetence.