Part 5 (2/2)
”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 cla.s.s, revealing the organs in their anatomical positions. Ugly or beautiful, every woman is merely a package of organs encased in a sh.e.l.l 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 a.s.sume. 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 d.a.m.n big kitty.”
”It's an extensive family, Detective. It includes lions, tigers, cougars, leopards, and cheetahs.”
”But we didn't find any carca.s.s 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 carca.s.s 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?”
”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 cus.h.i.+oned 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 cus.h.i.+on 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 ma.s.sive 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.
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