Die Again, Page 3

She and Frost followed the trail of paw prints, passing beneath the glassy eyes of a zebra and a lion, a hyena and a warthog. This collector did not discriminate by size; even the smallest creatures had their ignominious place on these walls, including four mice posed with tiny china cups, seated around a miniature table. A Mad Hatter’s grotesque tea party.

  As they moved through the living room and into a hallway, the stench of putrefaction grew stronger. Though she could not yet see its source, Jane could hear the ominous buzz of its supplicants. A fat fly buzzed a few lazy circles around her head and drifted away through a doorway.

  Always follow the flies. They know where dinner is served.

  The door hung ajar. Just as Jane pushed it wider, something white streaked out and shot past her feet.

  “Holy crap!” yelled Frost.

  Heart banging, Jane glanced back at the pair of eyes peering out from under the living room sofa. “It’s just a cat.” She gave a relieved laugh. “That explains the smaller paw prints.”

  “Wait, you hear that?” said Frost. “I think there’s another cat in there.”

  Jane took a breath and stepped through the doorway, into the garage. A gray tabby trotted over to greet her and silkily threaded back and forth between her legs, but Jane ignored it. Her gaze was fixed on what hung from the ceiling hoist. The flies were so thick she could feel their hum in her bones as they swarmed around the ripe feast that had been flayed open for their convenience, exposing meat that now squirmed with maggots.

  Frost lurched away, gagging.

  The nude man hung upside down, his ankles bound with orange nylon cord. Like a pig carcass hanging in a slaughterhouse, his abdomen had been sliced open, the cavity stripped of all organs. Both arms dangled free, and the hands would have almost touched the floor—if the hands had still been attached. If hunger had not forced Bruno the dog, and maybe the two cats as well, to start gnawing off the flesh of their owner.

  “So now we know where that finger came from,” Frost said, his voice muffled behind his sleeve. “Jesus, it’s everyone’s worst nightmare. Getting eaten by your own cat …”

  For three starving house pets, what now hung from the hoist would certainly look like a feast. The animals had already disarticulated the hands and stripped away so much skin and muscle and cartilage from the face that the white bone of one orbit was exposed, a pearly ridge peeking through shredded flesh. The facial features were gnawed beyond recognition, but the grotesquely swollen genitals left no doubt this was a man—an older one, judging by the silvery pubic hair.

  “Hung and dressed like game,” said a voice behind her.

  Startled, Jane turned to see Dr. Maura Isles standing in the doorway. Even at a death scene as grotesque as this one, Maura managed to look elegant, her black hair as sleek as a gleaming helmet, her gray jacket and pants perfectly tailored to her slim waist and hips. She made Jane feel like the sloppy cousin with flyaway hair and scuffed shoes. Maura did not quail from the smell but moved straight to the carcass, heedless of the flies that were dive-bombing her head. “This is disturbing,” she said.

  “Disturbing?” Jane snorted. “I was thinking more along the lines of totally fucked up.”

  The gray tabby abandoned Jane and went to Maura, where it rubbed back and forth against her leg, purring loudly. So much for feline loyalty.

  Maura nudged the cat away with her foot, but her attention stayed focused on the body. “Abdominal and thoracic organs missing. The incision looks very decisive, from pubis down to xiphoid. It’s what a hunter would do to a deer or a boar. Hang it, gut it, leave it to age.” She glanced up at the ceiling hoist. “And that looks like something you’d use to hang game. Clearly this house belongs to a hunter.”

  “Those look like what a hunter would use, too,” said Frost. He pointed to the garage workbench, where a magnetized rack held a dozen lethal-looking knives. All of them appeared clean, the blades bright and gleaming. Jane stared at the boning knife. Imagined that razor edge slicing through flesh as yielding as butter.

  “Odd,” said Maura, focusing on the torso. “These wounds here don’t look like they’re from a knife.” She pointed to three incisions that sliced down the rib cage. “They’re perfectly parallel, like blades mounted together.”

  “Looks like a claw mark,” said Frost. “Could the animals have done that?”

  “They’re too deep for a cat or dog. These appear to be postmortem, with minimal oozing …” She straightened, focusing on the floor. “If he was butchered right here, the blood must have been hosed away. See that drain in the concrete? It’s something a hunter would install if he used this space to hang and age meat.”

  “What’s the thing about aging? I never understood the point of hanging meat,” said Frost.

  “Postmortem enzymes act as a natural tenderizer, but it’s usually done at temperatures just above freezing. In here it feels like, what, about fifty degrees? Warm enough to get decomp. And maggots. I’m just glad it’s November. It would smell a lot worse in August.” With a pair of tweezers, Maura picked off one of the maggots and studied it as it squirmed in her gloved palm. “These look like third instar stage. Consistent with a time of death about four days ago.”

  “All those mounted heads in the living room,” said Jane. “And he ends up hanging, like some dead animal. I’d say we’ve got a theme going here.”

  “Is this victim the homeowner? Have you confirmed his identity?”

  “Kind of hard to make a visual ID with his hands and face gone. But I’d say the age matches. The homeowner of record is Leon Gott, age sixty-four. Divorced, lived alone.”

  “He certainly didn’t die alone,” said Maura, staring into the gaping incision at what was now little more than an empty shell. “Where are they?” she said, and suddenly turned to face Jane. “The killer hung the body here. What did he do with the organs?”

  For a moment, the only sound in the garage was the humming of flies as Jane considered every urban legend she’d ever heard about stolen organs. Then she focused on the covered garbage can in the far corner. As she approached it, the stench of putrefaction grew even stronger, and flies swarmed in a hungry cloud. Grimacing, she lifted the edge of the lid. One quick glance was all she could stomach before the smell made her back away, gagging.

  “I take it you found them,” said Maura.

  “Yeah,” muttered Jane. “At least, the intestines. I’ll leave the full inventory of guts to you.”

  “Neat.”

  “Oh yeah, it’ll be lots of fun.”

  “No, what I mean is, the perp was neat. The incision. The removal of the viscera.” Paper shoe covers crackled as Maura crossed to the trash can. Both Jane and Frost backed away when Maura pried open the lid, but even from the opposite side of the garage they caught the stomach-turning whiff of rotting organs. The odor seemed to excite the gray tabby, who was rubbing against Maura with even more fervor, mewing for attention.

  “Got yourself a new friend,” said Jane.

  “Normal feline marking behavior. He’s claiming me as his territory,” said Maura as she plunged a gloved hand into the garbage can.

  “I know you like to be thorough, Maura,” said Jane. “But how about picking through those in the morgue? Like, in a biohazard room or something?”

  “I need to be certain …”

  “Of what? You can smell they’re in there.” To Jane’s disgust, Maura bent over the garbage can and reached even deeper into the pile of entrails. In the morgue, she’d watched Maura slice open torsos and peel off scalps, de-flesh bones and buzz-saw through skulls, performing all these tasks with laser-guided concentration. That same icy focus was on Maura’s face as she dug through the congealed mass in the trash can, heedless of the flies now crawling in her fashionably clipped dark hair. Was there anyone else who could look so elegant while doing something so disgusting?

  “Come on, it’s not like you haven’t seen guts before,” said Jane.

  Maura didn’t answer as she plunged her hand
s deeper.

  “Okay.” Jane sighed. “You don’t need us for this. Frost and I will check out the rest of the—”

  “There’s too much,” Maura muttered.

  “Too much what?”

  “This isn’t a normal volume of viscera.”

  “You’re the one who’s always talking about bacterial gases. Bloating.”

  “Bloating doesn’t explain this.” Maura straightened, and what she held in her gloved hand made Jane cringe.

  “A heart?”

  “This is not a normal heart, Jane,” said Maura. “Yes, it has four chambers, but this aortic arch isn’t right. And the great vessels don’t look right, either.”

  “Leon Gott was sixty-four,” said Frost. “Maybe he had a bad ticker.”

  “That’s the problem. This doesn’t look like a sixty-four-year-old man’s heart.” Maura reached into the garbage pail again. “But this one does,” she said, and held out her other hand.

  Jane looked back and forth between the two specimens. “Wait. There are two hearts in there?”

  “And two complete sets of lungs.”

  Jane and Frost stared at each other. “Oh shit,” he said.

  Three

  Frost searched the downstairs and she took the upstairs. Went room by room, opening closets and drawers, peering under beds. No gutted bodies anywhere, nor any signs of a struggle, but plenty of dust bunnies and cat hair. Mr. Gott—if indeed he was the man hanging in the garage—had been an indifferent housekeeper, and scattered across his dresser were old hardware store receipts, hearing aid batteries, a wallet with three credit cards and forty-eight dollars in cash, and a few stray bullets. Which told her that Mr. Gott was more than a little casual about firearms. She wasn’t surprised to open his nightstand drawer and find a fully loaded Glock inside, with a round in the chamber, ready to fire. Just the tool for the paranoid homeowner.

  Too bad the gun was upstairs while the homeowner was downstairs, getting his guts ripped out.

  In the bathroom cabinet she found the expected array of pills for a man of sixty-four. Aspirin and Advil, Lipitor and Lopressor. And on the countertop was a pair of hearing aids—high-end ones. He hadn’t been wearing them, which meant he might not have heard an intruder.

  As she started downstairs, the telephone rang in the living room. By the time she reached it, the answering machine had already kicked in and she heard a man’s voice leave a message.

  Hey, Leon, you never got back to me about the trip to Colorado. Let me know if you want to join us. Should be a good time.

  Jane was about to play the message again, to see the caller’s phone number, when she noticed that the PLAY button was smeared with what looked like blood. According to the blinking display, there were two recorded messages, and she’d just heard the second one.

  With a gloved finger she pressed PLAY.

  November three, nine fifteen A.M.: … and if you call immediately, we can lower your credit card rates. Don’t miss this opportunity to take advantage of this special offer.

  November six, two P.M.: Hey, Leon, you never got back to me about the trip to Colorado. Let me know if you want to join us. Should be a good time.

  November 3 was a Monday, today was a Thursday. That first message was still on the machine, unplayed, because at nine on Monday morning, Leon Gott was probably dead.

  “Jane?” said Maura. The gray tabby had followed her into the hallway and was weaving figure of eights between her legs.

  “There’s blood on this answering machine,” said Jane, turning to look at her. “Why would the perp touch it? Why would he check the victim’s messages?”

  “Come see what Frost found in the backyard.”

  Jane followed her into the kitchen and out the back door. In a fenced yard landscaped only with patchy grass stood an outbuilding with metal siding. Too big to be just a storage shed, the windowless structure looked large enough to hide any number of horrors. As Jane stepped inside, she smelled a chemical odor, alcohol-sharp. Fluorescent bulbs cast the interior in a cold, clinical glare.

  Frost stood beside a large worktable, studying a fearsome-looking tool bolted to it. “I thought at first this was a table saw,” he said. “But this blade doesn’t look like any saw I’ve ever come across. And those cabinets over there?” He pointed across the workshop. “Take a look at what’s inside them.”

  Through the glass cabinet doors, Jane saw boxes of latex gloves and an array of frightening-looking instruments laid out on the shelves. Scalpels and knives, probes and pliers and forceps. Surgeon’s tools. Hanging from wall hooks were rubber aprons, splattered with what looked like bloodstains. With a shudder, she turned and stared at the plywood worktable, its surface scarred with nicks and gouges, and saw a clump of congealed, raw meat.

  “Okay,” Jane murmured. “Now I’m freaking out.”

  “This is like a serial killer’s workshop,” said Frost. “And this table is where he sliced and diced the bodies.”

  In the corner was a fifty-gallon white barrel mounted to an electrical motor. “What the hell is that thing for?”

  Frost shook his head. “It looks big enough to hold …”

  She crossed to the barrel. Paused as she spotted red droplets on the floor. A smear of it streaked the hatch door. “There’s blood all around here.”

  “What’s inside the barrel?” said Maura.

  Jane gave the fastening bolt a hard pull. “And behind door number two is …” She peered into the open hatch. “Sawdust.”

  “That’s all?”

  Jane reached into the barrel and sifted through the flakes, stirring up a cloud of wood dust. “Just sawdust.”

  “So we’re still missing the second victim,” said Frost.

  Maura went to the nightmarish tool that Frost had earlier thought was a table saw. As she examined the blade, the cat was at her heels again, rubbing against her pant legs, refusing to leave her alone. “Did you get a good look at this thing, Detective Frost?”

  “I got as close as I wanted to get.”

  “Notice how this circular blade has a cutting edge that’s bent sideways? Obviously this isn’t meant for slicing.”

  Jane joined her at the table and gingerly touched the blade edge. “This thing looks like it’d rip you to shreds.”

  “And that’s probably what it’s for. I think it’s called a flesher. It’s used not to cut but to grind away flesh.”

  “They make a machine like that?”

  Maura crossed to a closet and opened the door. Inside was a row of what looked like paint cans. Maura reached for one large container and turned it around to read the contents. “Bondo.”

  “An automotive product?” said Jane, glimpsing the image of a car on the label.

  “The label says it’s filler, for car body work. To repair dings and scratches.” Maura set the can of Bondo back on the shelf. She couldn’t shake the gray cat, who followed her as she went to the cabinet and peered through glass doors at the knives and probes, laid out like a surgeon’s tool kit. “I think I know what this room was used for.” She turned to Jane. “You know that second set of viscera in the trash can? I don’t believe they’re human.”

  “Leon Gott was not a nice man. And I’m trying to be charitable,” said Nora Bazarian as she wiped a mustache of creamed carrots from her one-year-old son’s mouth. In her faded jeans and clinging T-shirt, with her blond hair pulled back in a girlish ponytail, she looked more like a teenager than a thirty-three-year-old mother of two. She had a mother’s skill at multitasking, efficiently feeding spoonfuls of carrots into her son’s open mouth between loading the dishwasher, checking on a cake in the oven, and answering Jane’s questions. No wonder the woman had a teenager’s waistline; she didn’t sit still for five seconds.

  “You know what he yelled at my six-year-old?” said Nora. “Get off my lawn. I used to think that was just a caricature of cranky old men, but Leon actually said that to my son. All because Timmy wandered next door to pet his dog.” Nora closed the
dishwasher with a bang. “Bruno has better manners than his owner did.”

  “How long did you know Mr. Gott?” asked Jane.

  “We moved into this house six years ago, just after Timmy was born. We thought this was the perfect neighborhood for kids. You can see how well kept the yards are, for the most part, and there are other young families on this street, with kids Timmy’s age.” With balletic grace she pivoted to the coffeepot and refilled Jane’s cup. “A few days after we moved in, I brought Leon a plate of brownies, just to say hello. He didn’t even say thanks, just told me he didn’t eat sweets, and handed them right back. Then he complained that my new baby was crying too much, and why couldn’t I keep him quiet at night? Can you believe that?” She sat down and spooned more carrots into her son’s mouth. “To top it off, there were all those dead animals hanging on his wall.”

  “So you’ve been inside his house.”

  “Only once. He sounded so proud when he told me he’d shot most of them himself. What kind of a person kills animals just to decorate his walls?” She wiped a carroty dribble from the baby’s chin. “That’s when I decided we’d just stay away from him. Right, Sam?” she cooed. “Just stay away from that mean man.”

  “When did you last see Mr. Gott?”

  “I talked to Officer Root about all this. I last saw Leon over the weekend.”

  “Which day?”

  “Sunday morning. I saw him in his driveway. He was carrying groceries into his house.”

  “Did you see anyone visit him that day?”

  “I was gone for most of Sunday. My husband’s in California this week, so I took the kids down to my mom’s house in Falmouth. We didn’t get home till late that night.”

  “What time?”

  “Around nine thirty, ten.”

  “And that night, did you hear anything unusual next door? Shouts, loud voices?”

  Nora set down the spoon and frowned at her. The baby gave a hungry squawk, but Nora ignored him; her attention was entirely focused on Jane. “I thought—when Officer Root told me they found Leon hanging in his garage—I assumed it was a suicide.”