Free Die Again by Tess Gerritsen Page A

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 hisshoe, 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.”

“K OVO 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,