The Mephisto Club

“That may be true, but-”

“The doctor said that Mary, Queen of Scots was still trying to speak, even after they cut off her head. Her lips kept moving.”

“Jesus, Frost,” said Jane. “Like I need to be creeped out even more?”

“It’s possible, isn’t it? That this victim felt her head come off?”

“It’s highly unlikely,” said Maura. “And I’m not saying that just to ease your mind.” She turned the head sideways on the table. “Feel the cranium. Right here.”

Frost stared at her in horror. “No, that’s okay. I don’t need to.”

“Come on. Pull on a glove and run your fingers over the temporal bone. There’s a scalp laceration. I didn’t see it until we washed away the blood. Palpate the skull here and tell me what you feel.”

It was clearly the last thing Frost wanted to do, but he pulled on a glove and tentatively placed his fingers on the cranium. “There’s a, uh, dip in the bone.”

“A depressed skull fracture. You can see it on x-ray.” Maura crossed to the light box and pointed to the skull table. “On the lateral film, you see fractures fa

“But still alive.”

“Yes. She was definitely still alive.”

“You don’t know that she was unconscious.”

“There are no defense wounds on her limbs. No physical evidence that she fought back. You don’t just let someone cut your throat without a struggle. I think she was stu

Maura circled to the corpse’s left side. Without hesitation, she picked up the severed hand. Chilled and drained of blood, it looked like wax, not flesh, like a movie propmaster’s idea of what a real hand would look like. Maura swung the magnifier over it and inspected the raw, cut surface. For a moment she said nothing, but a frown was now etched on her forehead.

She set down the hand and lifted the left arm to examine the wrist stump. Her frown deepened. Again she picked up the hand and opposed the two wounds, trying to match the incised surfaces, hand to wrist, waxy skin to waxy skin.

Abruptly she set down the body parts and looked at Yoshima. “Could you put up the wrist and hand films?”

“You’re done with all these skull x-rays?”

“I’ll get back to those later. Right now I want to see the left hand and wrist.”

Yoshima removed the first set of x-rays and mounted a fresh set. Against the backlight of the viewing box, hand and finger bones glowed, the columns of phalanges like slender stalks of bamboo. Maura stripped off her gloves and approached the light box, her gaze riveted on the images. She said nothing; it was her silence that told Jane that something was very wrong.

Maura turned and looked at her. “Have you searched the victim’s entire house?”

“Yes, of course.”

“The whole house? Every closet, every drawer?”

“There wasn’t a lot there. She’d moved in just a few months before.”

“And the refrigerator? The freezer?”

“CSU went through it. Why?”

“Come look at this x-ray.”

Jane pulled off her soiled gloves and crossed to the light box to scan the films. She saw nothing there to account for Maura’s sudden tone of urgency, nothing that did not correspond with what she saw lying on the table. “What am I supposed to look at?”

“You see this view of the hand? These little bones here are called the carpals. They make up the base of the hand, before the finger bones branch off.” Maura took Jane’s hand to demonstrate, turning it palm side up, revealing the scar that would forever remind Jane of what another killer had done to her. A record of violence, marked in her flesh by Warren Hoyt. But Maura made no comment on the scar; instead she pointed to the meaty base of Jane’s palm, near the wrist.

“The carpal bones are here. On the x-ray, they look like eight little stones. They’re just small chunks of bone, held together by ligaments and muscles and co

“Okay. So?”

“This one here, in this proximal row”-Maura pointed to the x-ray, to a bone near the wrist-“it’s called the scaphoid. You’ll notice there’s a joint space beneath it, and then on this film, there’s a distinct chip of another bone. It’s part of the styloid process. When he cut off this hand, he also took off a fragment of the arm bone.”

“I’m still not getting the significance.”

“Now look at the x-ray of the arm stump.” Maura pointed to a different film. “You see the distal end of the two forearm bones. The thi

Jane frowned. “It’s intact. On this arm x-ray, that bone is all here.”

“That’s right. Not only is it intact, there’s even a chunk of the next bone still attached to it. A chip from the scaphoid.”

In that chilly room, Jane’s face suddenly felt numb. “Oh man,” she said softly. “This is starting to sound bad.”

“It is bad.”

Jane turned and crossed back to the table. She stared down at the severed hand, lying beside what she had believed-what they had all believed-was the arm it had once been attached to.

“The cut surfaces don’t match,” said Maura. “Neither do the x-rays.”

Frost said, “You’re telling us this hand doesn’t belong to her?”

“We’ll need DNA analysis to confirm it. But I think the evidence is right here, on the light box.” She turned and looked at Jane. “There’s another victim that you haven’t found yet. And we have her left hand.”