“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 disinterested 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 likel
y 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.”
SEVEN
“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.”
“Oh my God. Are we going to have any liability issues?”
“I doubt it. He was never in any real danger, and I think he found it so humiliating he’ll never tell a soul.” Rhodes gave a pained smile to Jane and Frost. “Just another fun day with idiot humans. My lions, at least, have more than an ounce of common sense.”
“This is Detective Rizzoli, Detective Frost,” said Mikovitz.
Rhodes extended a callused hand to them. “I’m Dr. Alan Rhodes. I’m a wildlife biologist specializing in felid behavior. All cats, large and small.” He glanced at Mikovitz. “So have they found Kovo?”
“I don’t know, Alan. They just arrived, and we haven’t gotten to that subject yet.”
“Well, we need to know.” Rhodes turned back to Jane and Frost. “Animal pelts deteriorate quite rapidly after death. If it isn’t immediately harvested and processed, it loses its value.”
“How valuable is a snow leopard pelt?” asked Frost.
“Considering how few of the animals there are in the world?” Rhodes shook his head. “I’d say priceless.”
“And that’s why you wanted the animal stuffed.”
“Stuffed is rather an inelegant term,” said Mikovitz. “We wanted Kovo preserved in all his beauty.”
“And that’s why you brought him to Leon Gott.”
“For skinning and mounting. Mr. Gott is—was—one of the best taxidermists in the country.”
“Did you know him personally?” asked Jane.
“Only by reputation.”
Jane looked at the large-cat expert. “And you, Dr. Rhodes?”
“I met him for the first time when Debra and I delivered Kovo to his house,” said Rhodes. “I was shocked this morning when I heard about his murder. I mean, we’d just seen him alive on Sunday.”
“Tell me about that day. What you saw, what you heard at his house.”
Rhodes glanced at Mikovitz, as if to confirm he should answer their questions.
“Go ahead, Alan,” said Mikovitz. “It’s a murder investigation, after all.”
“Okay.” Rhodes took a breath. “On Sunday morning, Greg—Dr. Oberlin, our veterinarian—euthanized Kovo. According to the agreement, we had to deliver the carcass immediately to the taxidermist.
Kovo weighed over a hundred pounds, so one of our zookeepers, Debra Lopez, assisted me. It was a pretty sad drive. I worked with that cat for twelve years, and we had a bond, the two of us. Which sounds insane, because you can’t really trust a leopard. Even a supposedly tame one can kill you, and Kovo was certainly large enough to bring down a man. But I never felt threatened by him. I never sensed any aggression in him at all. It’s almost as if he understood I was his friend.”
“What time did you arrive at Mr. Gott’s house on Sunday?”
“Around ten A.M., I guess. Debra and I brought him straight there, because the carcass needs to be skinned as soon as possible.”
“Did you talk much with Mr. Gott?”
“We stayed awhile. He was really excited about working on a snow leopard. It’s such a rare animal, he’d never handled one before.”
“Did he seem at all worried about anything?”
“No. Just euphoric about the opportunity. We carried Kovo into his garage, then he brought us into the house to show us the animals he’s mounted over the years.” Rhodes shook his head. “I know he was proud of his work, but I found it sad. All those beautiful creatures killed just to be trophies. But then, I’m a biologist.”
“I’m not a biologist,” said Frost. “But I found it pretty sad, too.”
“That’s their culture. Most taxidermists are also hunters, and they don’t understand why anyone would object to it. Debra and I tried to be polite about it. We left his house around eleven, and that was it. I don’t know what else I can tell you.” He looked back and forth at Jane and Frost. “So what about the pelt? I’m anxious to know whether you found it, because it’s worth a hell of a lot to—”
“Alan,” said Mikovitz.
The two men glanced at each other, and both fell silent. For a few seconds, no one said anything, a pause so significant that it might as well have come with a blinking alert: Something is wrong. There’s something they’re trying to hide.
“This pelt is worth a hell of a lot to whom?” said Jane.
The Rizzoli & Isles Series 11-Book Bundle Page 317