Tess Gerritsen - Die Again

“I got held up at my mom’s. Why aren’t you there?”

“I thought it might be more efficient if I, uh, followed up on a few other things.”

“Instead of barfing into a sink all morning. Good choice.”

“I’m still waiting for the phone carrier to release Gott’s call log. Meantime, here’s something interesting I pulled off Google. Back in May, Gott was featured in Hub Magazine . Title of the article was: ‘The Trophy Master: An Interview with Boston’s Master Taxidermist.’ ”

“Yeah, I saw a framed copy of that interview hanging in his house. It’s all about his hunting adventures. Shooting elephants in Africa, elk in Montana.”

“Well, you should read the online comments about that article. They’re posted on the magazine’s website. Apparently, he got the lettuce eaters—that’s what Gott called the anti-hunting crowd—all pissed off. Here’s one comment, posted by Anonymous: ‘Leon Gott should be hung and gutted, like the fucking animal he is.’ ”

“ Hung and gutted? That sounds like a threat,” she said.

“Yeah. And maybe someone delivered.”

WHEN JANE SAW WHAT was displayed on the morgue table, she almost turned and walked right back out again. Even the sharp odor of formalin could not mask the stench of the viscera splayed across the steel table. Maura wore no respiratory hood, only her usual mask and plastic face guard. She was so focused on the intellectual puzzle posed by the entrails that she seemed immune to the smell. Standing beside her was a tall man with silvery eyebrows whom Jane did not recognize, and like Maura he was eagerly probing the array of viscera.

“Let’s start with the large bowel here,” he said, gloved hands sliding across the intestine. “We have cecum, ascending colon, transverse, descending colon …”

“But there’s no sigmoid colon,” said Maura.

“Right. The rectum is here, but there’s no sigmoid. That’s our first clue.”

“And it’s unlike the other specimen, which does have a sigmoid colon.”

The man gave a delighted chuckle. “I’m certainly glad you called me to see this. It’s not often I come across something this fascinating. I could dine out for months on this story.”

“Wouldn’t wanna be part of that dinner conversation,” said Jane. “I guess this is what they mean by reading the entrails .”

Maura turned. “Jane, we’re just comparing the two sets of viscera. This is Professor Guy Gibbeson. And this is Detective Rizzoli, homicide.”

Professor Gibbeson gave Jane a disinterested nod and dropped his gaze back to the intestines, which he obviously found far more fascinating.

“Professor of what subject?” asked Jane, still standing back from the table. From the smell.

“Comparative anatomy. Harvard,” he said without looking at her, his attention fixed on the bowel. “This second set of intestines, the one with the sigmoid colon, belongs to the victim, I presume?” he asked Maura.

“It appears so. The incised edges match up, but we’d need DNA to confirm it.”

“Now, turning our attention to the lungs, I can point out some pretty definitive clues.”

“Clues to what?” said Jane.

“To who owned this first set of lungs.” He picked up one pair of lungs, held them for a moment. Set them down and lifted the second set. “Similar sizes, so I’m guessing similar body masses.”

“According to the victim’s driver’s license, he was five foot eight and a hundred forty pounds.”

“Well, these would be his,” Gibbeson said, looking at the lungs he was holding. He put them down, picked up the other pair. “These are the lungs that really interest me.”

“What’s so interesting about them?” said Jane.

“Take a look, Detective. Oh, you’ll have to come much closer to see it.”

Suppressing a gag, Jane approached the butcher’s array of offal laid across the table. Detached from their owners, all sets of viscera looked alike to Jane, consisting of the same interchangeable parts that she, too, possessed. She remembered a poster of “The Visible Woman” hanging in her high school health class, revealing the organs in their anatomical positions. Ugly or beautiful, every woman is merely a package of organs encased in a shell of flesh and bone.

“Can you see the difference?” asked Gibbeson. He pointed to the first set of lungs. “That left lung has an upper lobe and a lower lobe. The right lung has both upper and lower lobes, plus a middle lobe. Which makes how many lobes in all?”

“Five,” said Jane.

“That’s normal human anatomy. Two lungs, five lobes. Now look at this second pair found in the same garbage pail. They’re of similar size and weight, but with an essential difference. You see it?”

Jane frowned. “It has more lobes.”

“Two extra lobes, to be exact. The right lung has four, the left has three. This is not an anatomical anomaly.” He paused. “Which means it’s not human.”

“That’s why I called Professor Gibbeson,” said Maura. “To help me identify which species we’re dealing with.”

“A large one,” said Gibbeson. “Human-sized, I’d say, judging by the heart and lungs. Now let’s see if we can find any answers in the liver.” He moved to the far end of the table, where the two livers were displayed side by side. “Specimen one has left and right lobes. Quadrate and caudate lobes …”

“That one’s human,” said Maura.

“But this other specimen …” Gibbeson picked up the second liver and flipped it over to examine the reverse side. “It has six lobes.”

Maura looked at Jane. “Again, not human.”

“So we’ve got two sets of guts,” said Jane. “One belonging to the victim, we assume. The other belonging to … what? A deer? A pig?”

“Neither,” said Gibbeson. “Based on the lack of sigmoid colon, the seven-lobed lungs, the six-lobed liver, I believe this viscera comes from a member of the family Felidae.”

“Which is?”

“The cat family.”

Jane looked at the liver. “That’d be one damn big kitty.”

“It’s an extensive family, Detective. It includes lions, tigers, cougars, leopards, and cheetahs.”

“But we didn’t find any carcass like that at the scene.”

“Did you check the freezer?” asked Gibbeson. “Find any meat you can’t identify?”

Jane gave an appalled laugh. “We didn’t find any tiger steaks. Who’d want to eat one, anyway?”

“There’s definitely a market for exotic meats. The more unusual the better. People pay for the experience of dining on just about anything, from rattlesnake to bear. The question is, where did this animal come from? Was it hunted illegally? And how on earth did it end up gutted in a house in Boston?”

“He was a taxidermist,” said Jane, turning to look at Leon Gott’s body, which lay on an adjacent table. Maura had already wielded her scalpel and bone saw, and in the bucket nearby Gott’s brain was steeping in a bath of preservative. “He’s probably gutted hundreds, maybe thousands of animals. Probably never imagined he’d end up just like them.”

“Actually, taxidermists process the body in a completely different way,” said Maura. “I did some research on the subject last night and learned that large-animal taxidermists prefer not to gut the animal before skinning, because body fluids can spoil the pelt. They make their first incision along the spine, and peel the skin away from the carcass in one piece. So evisceration would have occurred after the pelt was removed.”

“Fascinating,” said Gibbeson. “I didn’t know that.”

“That’s Dr. Isles for you. Full of all sorts of fun facts,” said Jane. She nodded to Gott’s corpse. “Speaking of facts, do you have a cause of death?”