Die Again Page 6

  Her mother’s house seemed smaller every year, as though it were shrinking with age. Walking up to the front door with Regina in tow, Jane saw that the porch needed fresh paint, the gutters were clogged with autumn leaves, and the perennials in front still needed to be clipped back for the winter. She’d have to get on the phone with her brothers and see if they could all pitch in for a weekend, because Angela obviously needed the help.

  She could also use a good night’s sleep, thought Jane when Angela opened the front door. Jane was startled by how tired her mother looked. Everything about her seemed worn down, from her faded blouse to her baggy jeans. When Angela bent down to pick up Regina, Jane spotted gray roots on her mother’s scalp, a startling sight because Angela was meticulous about her hairdresser appointments. Was this the same woman who’d shown up at a restaurant just last summer wearing red lipstick and spike heels?

  “Here’s my little pumpkin,” Angela cooed as she carried Regina into the house. “Nonna’s so glad to see you. Let’s go shopping today, why don’t we? Aren’t you tired of these dirty overalls? We’ll buy you something new and pretty.”

  “Don’t like pretty!”

  “A dress, what do you think? A fancy princess dress.”

  “Don’t like princess.”

  “But every girl wants to be a princess!”

  “I think she’d rather be the frog,” said Jane.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, she’s just like you.” Angela sighed in frustration. “You wouldn’t let me put you in a dress, either.”

  “Not everyone’s a princess, Ma.”

  “Or ends up with Prince Charming,” muttered Angela as she walked away carrying her granddaughter.

  Jane followed her into the kitchen. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m going to make some more coffee. You want some?”

  “Ma, I can see that something’s going on.”

  “You’ve gotta go to work.” Angela set Regina in her high chair. “Go, catch some bad guys.”

  “Is it too much work for you, babysitting? You know you don’t have to do it. She’s old enough for day care now.”

  “My granddaughter in day care? Not gonna happen.”

  “Gabriel and I have been talking about it. You’ve already done so much for us, and we think you deserve a break. Enjoy your life.”

  “She is the one thing I look forward to every day,” said Angela, pointing to her granddaughter. “The one thing that keeps my mind off …”

  “Dad?”

  Angela turned away and began filling the coffee reservoir with water.

  “Ever since he came back,” said Jane, “I haven’t seen you look happy. Not one single day.”

  “It’s gotten so complicated, having to make a choice. I’m getting pulled back and forth, stretched like taffy. I wish someone would just tell me what to do, so I wouldn’t have to choose between them.”

  “You’re the one who has to make the choice. Dad or Korsak. I think you should choose the man who makes you happy.”

  Angela turned a tormented face to hers. “How can I be happy if I spend the rest of my life feeling guilty? Having your brothers tell me that I chose to break up the family?”

  “You didn’t choose to walk out. Dad did.”

  “And now he’s back and he wants us all to be together again.”

  “You have a right to move on.”

  “When both my sons are insisting I give your father another chance? Father Donnelly says it’s what a good wife should do.”

  Oh great, thought Jane. Catholic guilt was the most powerful guilt of all.

  Jane’s cell phone rang. She glanced down and saw it was Maura calling; she let it go to voice mail.

  “And poor Vince,” said Angela. “I feel guilty about him, too. All the wedding plans we made.”

  “It could still happen.”

  “I don’t see how, not now.” Angela sagged back against the kitchen counter as the coffeemaker gurgled and hissed behind her. “Last night I finally told him. Janie, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life.” And it showed on her face. The puffy eyes, the drooping mouth—was this the new and future Angela Rizzoli, sainted wife and mother?

  There are already too many martyrs in the world, thought Jane. The idea that her mother would willingly join those legions made her angry.

  “Ma, if this decision makes you miserable, you need to remember that it’s your decision. You’re choosing not to be happy. No one can make you do that.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Because it’s true. You’re the one in control, and you have to take the wheel.” Her phone pinged with a text message, and she saw it was Maura again. STARTING AUTOPSY. RU COMING?

  “Go on, go to work.” Angela waved her away. “You don’t need to bother yourself with this.”

  “I want you to be happy, Ma.” Jane turned to leave, then looked back at Angela. “But you have to want it, too.”

  It was a relief for Jane to step outside, take a breath of fresh cold air, and purge the gloom of the house from her lungs. But she couldn’t shake off her annoyance at her dad, at her brothers, at Father Donnelly, at every man who presumed to tell a woman what her duty was.

  When her phone rang again, she answered with an irritated: “Rizzoli!”

  “Uh, it’s me,” said Frost.

  “Yeah, I’m on my way to the morgue. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “You’re not there already?”

  “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 dis
interested 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?”

  “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 bo
dy, 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.