The Mephisto Club

by Tess Gerritsen

  “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 closer, emerging at last from his dusty hiding place, did she see the creased face, the wire-rim spectacles. Distorted blue eyes peered at her through thick lenses.

  “You wouldn’t be that woman from the police, would you?” he asked.

  “Dr. Von Schiller? I’m Detective Rizzoli.”

  “I knew you had to be. No one else would wander in this late in the day. The door’s normally locked by now, so you’re getting a bit of a private tour here.” He gave a wink, as though this special treat should stay a secret between them. A rare chance to ogle dead bugs and stuffed birds without the hordes pressing in. “Well, did you bring it?” he asked.

/>   “I’ve got it right here.” She removed the evidence bag from her pocket, and his eyes lit up at the sight of the contents, visible through the clear plastic.

  “Come, on, then! Let’s go up to my office where I can get a good look at it under my magnifier. My eyes aren’t so good anymore. I hate the fluorescent lamp up there, but I do need it for something like this.”

  She followed him toward the stairwell, matching her pace to his agonizingly slow shuffle. Could this guy still be teaching? He seemed far too old to even make it up the stairs. But Von Schiller was the name recommended to her when she’d called the comparative zoology department, and there was no mistaking the gleam of excitement in his eyes when he’d spotted what she had brought in her pocket. He could not wait to get his hands on it.

  “Do you know much about seashells, Detective?” Von Schiller asked as he slowly climbed the stairs, his gnarled hand grasping the carved banister.

  “Only what I’ve learned from eating clams.”

  “You mean you’ve never collected them?” He glanced back. “Did you know Robert Louis Stevenson once said, ‘It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be born a millionaire’?”

  “Did he, now?” I think I’d rather be a millionaire.

  “It’s a passion I’ve had since I was a child. My parents would take us every year to the Amalfi Coast. My bedroom was filled with so many boxes of shells I could barely turn around. I still have them all, you know. Including a lovely specimen of Epitonium celesti. Rather rare. I bought it when I was twelve, and paid quite a dear price for it. But I’ve always thought that spending money on shells is an investment. The most exquisite art of Mother Nature.”

  “Did you get a look at the photos I e-mailed you?”

  “Oh, yes. I forwarded the photo to Stefano Rufini, an old friend of mine. Consults for a company called Medshells. They locate rare specimens from around the world and sell them to wealthy collectors. He and I agree about your shell’s probable origins.”

  “So what is this shell?”

  Von Schiller glanced back at her with a smile. “You think I’d give you a final answer without actually examining it?”

  “You seem to know already.”

  “I’ve narrowed it down, that’s all I can tell you.” He resumed climbing the stairs. “Its class is Gastropoda,” he said. Climbed another step. “Order: Caenogastropoda.” Another step, another chant. “Superfamily: Buccinacea.”

  “Excuse me. What does all that mean?”

  “It means that your little seashell is, first of all, a gastropod, which translates to stomach foot. It’s the same general class of mollusk as a land snail or a limpet. They’re univalves, with a muscular foot.”

  “That’s the name of this shell?”

  “No, that’s just the phylogenetic class. There are at least fifty thousand different varieties of gastropods around the world, and not all of them are ocean dwellers. The common land slug, for instance, is a gastropod, even though it has no shell.” He reached the top of the stairs and led the way through a hall with yet more display cases containing a silent menagerie of creatures, their glassy eyes staring back at Jane in disapproval. So vivid was her impression of being watched that she paused and glanced back at the deserted gallery, at cabinet after cabinet of mounted specimens.

  Nobody here but us murdered animals.

  She turned to follow Von Schiller.

  He had vanished.

  For a moment she stood alone in that vast gallery, hearing only the thump of her own heartbeat, feeling the hostile gazes of those countless creatures trapped behind glass. “Dr. Von Schiller?” she called, and her voice seemed to echo through hall after hall.

  His head popped out from behind a cabinet. “Well, aren’t you coming?” he asked. “My office is right here.”

  Office was too grand a word for the space he occupied. A door with the plaque—DR. HENRY VON SCHILLER, PROFESSOR EMERITUS—led to a windowless nook scarcely larger than a broom closet. Crammed inside were a desk, two chairs, and little else. He flipped on the wall switch and squinted in the harsh fluorescent glare.

  “Let’s see it, then,” he said, and eagerly snatched the ziplock bag that she held out to him. “You say you found this at a crime scene?”

  She hesitated, then said, merely, yes. Rammed down the throat of a dead woman was what she didn’t say.

  “Why do you think it’s significant?”

  “I’m hoping you can tell me.”

  “May I handle it?”

  “If you really need to.”

  He opened the bag and, with arthritic fingers, he removed the seashell. “Oh yes,” he murmured as he squeezed behind his desk and settled into a creaking chair. He turned on a gooseneck lamp and pulled out a magnifying glass and a ruler. “Yes, it’s what I thought. Looks like about, oh, twenty-one millimeters long. Not a particularly nice specimen. These striations aren’t all that pretty, and it’s got a few chips here, you see? Could be an old shell that’s been tumbled around in some hobbyist’s collection box.” He looked up, blue eyes watery behind spectacles. “Pisania maculosa.”

  “Is that its name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He set down the magnifying lens with a thud and stood up. “You don’t trust me?” he snapped. “Come on, then.”

  “I’m not saying I don’t trust—”

  “Of course that’s what you’re saying.” Von Schiller scuttled out of his office, moving with a speed she had not known he was capable of. Annoyed and in a hurry to defend himself, he shuffled through gallery after gallery, leading Jane deep into a gloomy maze of specimen cabinets, past the stares of countless dead eyes, and down a row of display cases tucked into the farthest corner of the building. Clearly, this was not a well-visited section of the museum. Typed display labels were yellowed with age, and dust filmed the glass cases. Von Schiller squeezed down a narrow corridor between cabinets, pulled open a drawer, and took out a specimen box.

  “Here,” he said, opening the box. He took out a handful of shells and placed them, one by one, on top of a glass case. “Pisania maculosa. And here’s another, and another. And here’s yours.” He looked at her with the indignation of an insulted academic. “Well?”

  Jane scanned the array of seashells, all of them with the same graceful curves, the same spiraling striations. “They do look alike.”

  “Of course they do! They’re the same species! I know what I’m talking about. This is my field, Detective.”

  And what a really useful field it is, she thought as she took out her notebook. “What’s the species name again?”

  “Here, give that to me.” He snatched away her notebook and she watched him write down the name, scowling as he did it. This was not a nice old guy. No wonder they hid him away in a broom closet.

  He handed back the notebook. “There. Properly spelled.”

  “So what does this mean?”

  “It’s the name.”

  “No, I mean what’s the significance of this particular shell?”

  “Is it supposed to mean something? You’re Homo sapiens sapiens, this is Pisania maculosa. That’s just the way it is.”

  “This shell, is it rare?”

  “Not at all. You can easily buy them over the Internet, from any number of dealers.”

  Which made the shell little more than useless as a way to track a killer. With a sigh, she put away her notebook.

  “They’re quite common in the Mediterranean,” he said.

  She looked up. “The Mediterranean?”

  “And the Azores.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not really clear exactly where the Azores are.”

  He gave her a sour look of disbelief. Then he waved her over to one of the cases, where dozens of shells were displayed, along with a faded map of the Mediterranean. “There,” he said, pointing. “It’s these islands here, to the west of Spain. Pisania maculosa ranges throughout this area, from the A
zores to the Mediterranean.”

  “And nowhere else? The Americas?”

  “I’ve just told you its range. Those shells I brought out to show you—they were all collected in Italy.”

  She was silent a moment, her gaze still on the case. She could not remember the last time she’d really studied a map of the Mediterranean. Her world, after all, was Boston; crossing the state line was the equivalent of a foreign trip. Why a seashell? Why this particular seashell?

  Her eyes then focused on the eastern corner of the Mediterranean. On the island of Cyprus.

  Red ocher. Seashells. What is the killer trying to tell us?

  “Oh,” said Von Schiller. “I didn’t know anyone else was here.”

  Jane had not heard any footsteps, even on the creaking wood floors. She turned to see a young man looming right behind her. Most likely a graduate student, judging by his rumpled shirt and blue jeans. He certainly looked like a scholar, with heavy black-framed glasses, his face washed out to a wintry pallor. He stood so silent that Jane wondered if the man could speak.

  Then the words came out, his stuttering so tortured that it was painful to hear. “P-p-professor Von Schiller. It’s t-t-time to c-c-close.”

  “We’re just finishing up here, Malcolm. I wanted to show Detective Rizzoli some examples of Pisania.” Von Schiller placed the shells back in their box. “I’ll lock up.”

  “B-b-but it’s my—”

  “I know, I know. Just because I’ve gotten on in years, no one trusts me to turn one stupid key anymore. Look, I’ve still got papers on my desk that I need to sort through. Why don’t you show the detective out? I promise I’ll lock the door when I leave.”

  The young man hesitated, as though trying to come up with the words to protest. Then he simply sighed and nodded.

  Jane slipped the evidence bag containing the shell back into her pocket. “Thank you for your help, Dr. Von Schiller,” she said. But the old man was already shuffling away to return the box of shells to its drawer.

  The young man said nothing as he led Jane through the gloomy exhibit halls, past animals trapped behind glass, his sneakers setting off barely a creak on the wood floors. This was hardly the place a young man should be spending a Sunday evening, she thought. Keeping company with fossils and pierced butterflies.