Tess Gerritsen - Die Again

“I believe I do,” said Maura, stripping off blood-smeared gloves. “The extensive scavenger damage to his face and neck obscured the antemortem injuries. But his X rays gave us some answers.” She went to the computer screen and clicked through a series of X-ray images. “I saw no foreign objects, nothing to indicate the use of a firearm. But I did find this.” She pointed to the skull radiograph. “It’s very subtle, which is why I didn’t detect it on palpation. It’s a linear fracture of the right parietal bone. His scalp and hair may have cushioned the blow enough so that we don’t see any concave deformation, but just the presence of a fracture tells us there was significant force involved.”

“So it’s not from falling.”

“The side of the head is an odd location for a fracture caused by a fall. Your shoulder would cushion you as you hit the ground, or you’d reach out to catch yourself. No, I’m inclined to think this was from a blow to the head. It was hard enough to stun him and take him down.”

“Hard enough to kill him?”

“No. While there is a small amount of subdural blood inside the cranium, it wouldn’t have been fatal. It also tells us that after the blow, his heart was still beating. For a few minutes, at least, he was alive.”

Jane looked at the body, now merely an empty vessel robbed of its internal machinery. “Jesus. Don’t tell me he was alive when the killer started gutting him.”

“I don’t believe evisceration was the cause of death, either.” Maura clicked past the skull films, and two new images appeared on the monitor. “This was.”

The bones of Gott’s neck glowed on the screen, views of his vertebrae both head-on and from the side.

“There are fractures and displacement of the superior horns of the thyroid cartilage as well as the hyoid bone. There’s massive disruption of the larynx.” Maura paused. “His throat was crushed, most likely while he was lying supine. A hard blow, maybe from the weight of a shoe, straight to the thyroid cartilage. It ruptured his larynx and epiglottis, lacerated major vessels. It all became clear when I did the neck dissection. Mr. Gott died of aspiration, choking on his own blood. The lack of arterial splatter on the walls indicates the evisceration was done postmortem.”

Jane was silent, her gaze fixed on the screen. How much easier it was to focus on a coldly clinical X ray than to confront what was lying on the table. X rays conveniently stripped away skin and flesh, leaving only bloodless architecture, the posts and beams of a human body. She thought of what it took to slam your heel down on a man’s neck. And what did the killer feel when that throat cracked under his shoe, and he watched consciousness fade from Gott’s eyes? Rage? Power? Satisfaction?

“One more thing,” said Maura, clicking to a new X-ray image, this one of the chest. With all the other damage done to the body, it was startling how normal the bony structures appeared, ribs and sternum exactly where they should be. But the cavity was weirdly empty, missing its usual foggy shadows of hearts and lungs. “This,” said Maura.

Jane moved closer. “Those faint scratches on the ribs?”

“Yes. I pointed it out on the body yesterday. Three parallel lacerations. They go so deep, they actually penetrated to bone. Now look at this.” Maura clicked to another X ray, and the facial bones appeared, sunken orbits and shadowy sinuses.

Jane frowned. “Those three scratches again.”

“Both sides of the face, penetrating to bone. Three parallel nicks. Because of the soft-tissue damage by the owner’s pets, I couldn’t see them. Until I looked at these X rays.”

“What kind of tool would do that?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see anything in his workshop that would make these marks.”

“You said yesterday it looked like it was done postmortem.”

“Yes.”

“So what’s the point of these lacerations if it’s not to kill or to inflict pain?”

Maura thought about it. “Ritual,” she said.

For a moment there was only silence in the room. Jane thought of other crime scenes, other rituals. She thought of the scars she would always carry on her hands, souvenirs of a killer who’d had rituals of his own, and she felt those scars ache again.

The buzz of the intercom almost made her jump.

“Dr. Isles?” said Maura’s secretary. “Phone call for you from a Dr. Mikovitz. He says you left a message this morning with one of his colleagues.”

“Oh, of course.” Maura picked up the phone. “This is Dr. Isles.”

Jane turned her gaze back to the X ray, to those three parallel nicks on the cheekbones. She tried to imagine what could have left such a mark. It was a tool that neither she nor Maura had encountered before.

Maura hung up and turned to Dr. Gibbeson. “You were absolutely right,” she said. “That was the Suffolk Zoo. Kovo’s carcass was delivered to Leon Gott on Sunday.”

“Hold on,” said Jane. “What the hell is Kovo?”

Maura pointed to the unidentified set of entrails on the morgue table. “That’s Kovo. A snow leopard.”

“KOVO WAS ONE OF OUR MOST POPULAR EXHIBITS. HE WAS WITH US nearly eighteen years, so we were all heartbroken when he had to be euthanized.” Dr. Mikovitz spoke in the hushed voice of a grieving family member, and judging by the many photos displayed on the walls of his office, the animals in the Suffolk Zoo were indeed like family to him. With his wiry red hair and wisp of a goatee, Dr. Mikovitz looked like a zoo denizen himself, perhaps some exotic species of monkey with wise dark eyes that now regarded Jane and Frost across his desk. “We haven’t yet issued any press release about it, so I was startled when Dr. Isles inquired whether we’d had any recent losses in our large-cat collection. How on earth did she know?”

“Dr. Isles is good at sniffing out all sorts of obscure information,” said Jane.

“Yes, well, she certainly caught us by surprise. It’s something of a, well, sensitive matter.”

“The death of a zoo animal? Why?”

“Because he had to be euthanized. That always gets negative reactions. And Kovo was a very rare animal.”

“What day was this done?”

“It was Sunday morning. Our veterinarian Dr. Oberlin came in to administer the lethal injection. Kovo’s kidneys had been failing for some time and he’d lost a great deal of weight. Dr. Rhodes pulled him off exhibit a month ago, to spare him the stress of being in public. We hoped we could pull him through this illness, but Dr. Oberlin and Dr. Rhodes finally agreed that it was time to do it. Much as it grieved them both.”

“Dr. Rhodes is another veterinarian?”

“No, Alan is an expert on large-cat behavior. He knew Kovo better than anyone else did. He’s the one who delivered Kovo to the taxidermist.” Dr. Mikovitz glanced up at a knock on his door. “Ah, here’s Alan now.”

The title Large-Cat Expert conjured up images of a rugged outdoorsman in safari clothes. The man who walked into the office was indeed wearing a khaki uniform with dusty trousers and stray burrs clinging to his fleece jacket, as if he’d just come off a hiking trail, but there was nothing particularly rugged about Rhodes’s pleasantly open face. In his late thirties, with springy dark hair, he had the block-shaped head of Frankenstein’s monster, but a friendly version.

“Sorry I’m late,” said Rhodes, clapping dust from his pant legs. “We had an incident at the lion enclosure.”

“Nothing serious, I hope?” said Dr. Mikovitz.

“No fault of the cats. It’s the damn kids. Some teenager thought he’d prove his manhood, so he climbed the outer fence and fell into the moat. I had to go in and drag him out.”