The Mephisto Club

broke off her gaze and focused instead on the other two detectives, Barry Frost and Eve Kassovitz. Adding Kassovitz to the team had been a mistake. The woman’s very public barfing into the snowbank was now common knowledge in the unit, and Jane could have predicted the practical jokes that followed. The day after Christmas, a giant plastic bucket, labeled with Kassovitz’s name, had mysteriously appeared on the unit’s reception desk. The woman should have just laughed it off, or maybe gotten pissed about it. Instead she looked as beaten down as a clubbed seal, and she sat slumped in her chair, too demoralized to say much. No way was Kassovitz going to survive this boys’ club if she didn’t learn to punch back.
    “So we have a killer who not only dismembers his victims,” said Zucker, “but he also transfers body parts between his crime scenes. Do you have a photo of the hand?”
    “We have lots of photos,” said Jane. She passed the autopsy file to Zucker. “By its appearance, we’re pretty sure the hand is a female’s.”
    The images were gruesome enough to turn anyone’s stomach, but Zucker’s face betrayed no shock, no disgust, as he flipped through them. Only keen curiosity. Or was that eagerness she saw in his eyes? Did he enjoy the view of atrocities visited on a young woman’s body?
    He paused over the photo of the hand. “No nail polish, but the fingers definitely look manicured. Yes, I agree it looks like a woman’s.” He glanced at Jane, his pale eyes peering at her over wire-rim glasses. “What do you have back on these fingerprints?”
    “The owner of that hand has no criminal record. No military service. Nothing in NCIC.”
    “She’s not in any database?”
    “Not her fingerprints, anyway.”
    “And this hand isn’t medical waste? A hospital amputation, maybe?”
    Frost said, “I checked with every medical center in the greater Boston area. In the past two weeks, there’ve been two hand amps, one at Mass Gen, another at Pilgrim Hospital. Both were the result of trauma. The first was a chain saw accident. The second was a dog attack. In both cases, the hands were so badly mangled they couldn’t be reattached. And the first case was a man’s.”
    “This hand was not dug up out of hospital waste,” said Jane. “And it wasn’t mangled. It was sliced off with a very sharp, serrated blade. Also, it wasn’t done with any particular surgical skill. The tip of the radius was sheared off, with no apparent attempt at controlling blood loss. No tied-off vessels, no dissection of skin layers. Just a clean cut.”
    “Do we have any missing persons it might match?”
    “Not in Massachusetts,” said Frost. “We’re widening the net. Any white female. She can’t have gone missing too long ago, since the hand looks pretty fresh.”
    “It could have been frozen,” said Marquette.
    “No,” said Jane. “There’s no cellular damage under the microscope. That’s what Dr. Isles said. When you freeze tissue, the expansion of water ruptures cells, and she didn’t find that. The hand may have been refrigerated, or packed in ice water, like they do to transport harvested organs. But it wasn’t frozen. So we think the owner of that hand was probably killed no more than a few days ago.”
    “If she was killed,” said Zucker.
    They all stared at him. The terrible implication of his words made them all pause.
    “You think she could still be
alive
?” said Frost.
    “Amputations in and of themselves aren’t fatal.”
    “Oh, man,” said Frost. “Cut off her hand without killing her…”
    Zucker flipped through the rest of the autopsy photos, pausing over each one with the concentration of a jeweler peering through his loupe. At last he set them down. “There are two possible reasons why a killer would cut up a body. The first is purely practical. He needs to dispose of it. These are killers who are self-aware and goal-directed. They understand the need to dispose of forensic evidence and hide their crimes.”
    “Organized killers,” said Frost.
    “If dismemberment is followed by the scattering or concealment of body parts, that would imply planning. A cognitive killer.”
    “These parts weren’t in any way concealed,” said Jane. “They were left around the house, in places where he knew they’d be found.” She handed another stack of photos to Zucker. “Those are from the crime scene.”
    He opened the folder and paused, staring at the first image. “This gets