The Mephisto Club

moment they drove without speaking. Then he said, “You know, I never heard my parents argue. Not once, in all the years I was growing up.”
    “Go ahead, rub it in. I know my family’s a bunch of loudmouths.”
    “You come from a family that makes its feelings known, that’s all. They slam doors and they yell and they laugh like hyenas.”
    “Oh, this is getting better and better.”
    “I wish I’d grown up in a family like that.”
    “Right.” She laughed.
    “My parents didn’t yell, Jane, and they didn’t slam doors. They didn’t much laugh, either. No, Colonel Dean’s family was far too disciplined to ever stoop to anything as common as emotions. I don’t remember him ever saying, ‘I love you,’ to either me or to my mother. I had to learn to say it. And I’m still learning.” He looked at her. “You taught me how.”
    She touched his thigh. Her cool impenetrable guy. There were still a few things left to teach him.
    “So never apologize for them,” he said. “They’re the ones who made you.”
    “Sometimes I wonder about that. I look at Frankie and I think, please God, let me be the baby they found on the doorstep.”
    He laughed. “It was pretty tense tonight. What
was
the story there, anyway?”
    “I don’t know.” She sank back against the seat. “But sooner or later, we’ll hear all about it.”

SIX
    Jane slipped paper booties over her shoes, donned a surgical gown, and looped the ties behind her waist. Gazing through the glass partition into the autopsy lab, she thought:
I really don’t want to go in there.
But already Frost was in the room, gowned and masked, with just enough of his face visible for Jane to see his grimace. Maura’s assistant, Yoshima, pulled x-rays out of an envelope and mounted them on the viewing box. Maura’s back obstructed Jane’s view of the table, hiding what she had little wish to confront. Just an hour ago, she had been sitting at her kitchen table, Regina cooing on her lap as Gabriel had cooked breakfast. Now the scrambled eggs churned in her stomach and she wanted to yank off this gown and walk back out of the building, into the purifying snow.
    Instead she pushed through the door, into the autopsy room.
    Maura glanced over her shoulder, and her face betrayed no qualms about the procedure to follow. She was merely a professional like any other, about to do her job. Though they both dealt in death, Maura was on far more intimate terms with it, far more comfortable staring into its face.
    “We were just about to start,” said Maura.
    “I got hung up in traffic. The roads are a mess out there this morning.” Jane tied on her mask as she moved toward the foot of the table. She avoided looking at the remains but focused, instead, on the x-ray viewing box.
    Yoshima flipped the switch and the light flickered on, glowing behind two rows of films. Skull x-rays. But these were unlike any skull films Jane had seen before. Where the cervical spine should be, she saw only a few vertebrae, and then…nothing. Just the ragged shadow of soft tissue where the neck had been severed. She pictured Yoshima positioning that head for the films. Had it rolled around like a beach ball as he’d set it on the film cassette, as he’d angled the collimator? She turned away from the light box.
    And found herself staring at the table. At the remains, displayed in anatomical position. The torso was on its back, the severed parts laid out approximately where they should be. A jigsaw puzzle in flesh and bone, the pieces waiting for reassembly. Though she did not want to look at it, there it was: the head, which had tilted onto its left ear, as though the victim was turning to look sideways.
    “I need to approximate this wound,” said Maura. “Can you help me hold it in position?” A pause. “Jane?”
    Startled, Jane met Maura’s gaze. “What?”
    “Yoshima’s going to take photos, and I need to get a look through the magnifier.” Maura grasped the cranium in her gloved hands and rotated the head, trying to match the wound edges. “Here, just hold it in this position. Pull on some gloves and come around to this end.”
    Jane glanced at Frost.
Better you than me,
his eyes said. She moved to the head of the table. There she paused to snap on gloves, then reached down to cradle the head. Found herself gazing into the victim’s eyes, the corneas dull as wax. A day and a half in a refrigerator had chilled the flesh, and as she cupped the face, she thought of the