Free Die Again by Tess Gerritsen

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.