The Mephisto Club

“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.

The dead do not require such speedy intervention. Now, as she slid the laryngoscope blade into the mouth, there was no squealing heart monitor, no Code Blue team staring at her, no life hanging in the balance. Eve Kassovitz was a patient subject as Maura tilted the blade, lifting the tongue out of the way. She bent down and peered into the throat. The neck was long and slender, and on her first try, Maura easily spotted the vocal cords, like pale pink straps flanking the airway. Trapped between them was an object that glistened back at her.

“Forceps,” she said, holding out her hand. Yoshima placed the instrument in her palm.

“You see it?” asked Jane.

“Yes.”

Maura snagged the object and gently withdrew it from the throat. She dropped it onto a specimen tray, and it clattered against stainless steel.

“Is that what I think it is?” said Jane.

Maura turned over the specimen, and it gleamed like a pearl under the bright lights.

A seashell.

EIGHTEEN

The afternoon light had darkened to a somber gray by the time Jane drove onto the Harvard University campus and parked her car behind Conant Hall. The lot was nearly empty, and as she stepped out into a bitter wind, she glanced at old brick buildings that looked deserted, at fine feathers of snow swirling across frozen pavement, and she realized that by the time she finished her task here, it would be dark.

Eve Kassovitz was a cop, too. Yet she never saw death coming.

Jane buttoned up her coat collar and started toward the University Museum buildings. In a few days, when students returned from winter break, the campus would come alive again. But on this cold afternoon, Jane walked alone, eyes narrowed against the wind’s bite. She reached the side entrance to the museum and found the door locked. No surprise; it was a Sunday afternoon. She circled around to the front, trudging a shoveled path between banks of dirty snow. At the Oxford Street entrance she paused to stare up at the massive brick building. The words above the doorway read, MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY.

She climbed the granite stairs and stepped into the building, and into a different era. Wood floors creaked beneath her feet. She smelled the dust of many decades and the heat of ancient radiators, and saw row after row of wooden display cabinets.

But no people. The entrance hall was deserted.

She walked deeper into the building, past glass-enclosed specimen cases, and paused to stare at a collection of insects mounted on pins. She saw monstrous black beetles with pincers poised to nip tender skin, and winged roaches, carapaces gleaming. With a shudder she walked on, past butterflies bright as jewels, past a cabinet with birds’ eggs that would never hatch, and mounted finches that would never again sing.

The creak of a footstep told her she was not alone.

She turned and stared up the narrow aisle between two tall cabinets. Backlit by the wintry light glowing through the window, the man was just a bent and faceless silhouette shuffling toward her. Only as he moved