“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 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.”