The Mephisto Club

do know that.”
    “Understood. That’s not why I’m inviting you.”
    “Then why?” A blunt, inelegant question, but she had to ask it.
    “We share common interests. Common concerns.”
    “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
    “Join us on Saturday, around seven. We can talk about it then.”
    “Let me check my schedule first. I’ll let you know.” She hung up.
    “What was that all about?” asked Jane.
    “He just invited me to dinner.”
    “He wants something from you.”
    “Not a thing, he claims.” Maura crossed to the cabinet for a fresh pair of gloves. Although her hands were steady as she pulled them on, she could feel her face flushing, her pulse throbbing in her fingertips.
    “You believe that?”
    “Of course not. That’s why I’m not going.”
    Jane said quietly, “Maybe you should.”
    Maura turned to look at her. “You can’t be serious.”
    “I’d like to know more about the Mephisto Foundation. Who they are, what they do at their secret little meetings. I may not be able to get the information any other way.”
    “So you want me to do it for you?”
    “All I’m saying is, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea if you go. As long as you’re careful.”
    Maura crossed to the table. Staring down at Eve Kassovitz, she thought:
This woman was a cop and she was armed. Yet even she wasn’t careful enough.
Maura picked up the knife and began to cut.
    Her blade traced a Y on the torso, two incisions slicing from both shoulders to meet lower than usual beneath the sternum. To preserve the stab wound. Even before the ribs were cut, before the chest was opened, she knew what she would find inside the thorax. She could see it in the chest films now hanging on the light box: the globular outline of the heart, far larger than it should be in a healthy young woman. Lifting off the shield of breastbone and ribs, she peered into the chest and slid her hand beneath the swollen sac that contained the heart.
    It felt like a bag filled with blood.
    “Pericardial tamponade,” she said, and looked up at Jane. “She bled into the sac that surrounds her heart. Since it’s a confined space, the sac becomes so taut, the heart can’t pump. Or the stab itself may have caused a fatal arrhythmia. Either way, this was a quick and efficient kill. But he had to know where to aim the blade.”
    “He knew what he was doing.”
    “Or he got lucky.” She pointed to the wound. “You can see the blade pierced just below the xiphoid process. Anywhere above that, the heart’s pretty well protected by the sternum and ribs. But if you enter here, where this wound is located, and aim the blade at just the right angle…”
    “You’ll hit the heart?”
    “It’s not difficult. I did it as an intern, on my ER rotation. With a needle, of course.”
    “On a dead person, I hope.”
    “No, she was alive. But we couldn’t hear her heartbeat, her blood pressure was crashing, and the chest x-ray showed a globular heart. I had to do something.”
    “So you
stabbed
her?”
    “With a cardiac needle. Removed enough blood from the sac to keep her alive until she could make it to surgery.”
    “It’s like that spy novel,
Eye of the Needle,
” said Yoshima. “The killer stabs his victims straight in the heart, and they die so fast, there’s hardly any blood. It makes a pretty clean kill.”
    “Thank you for that useful tip,” said Jane.
    “Actually, Yoshima raises a good point,” said Maura. “Our perp chose a quick method to kill Eve Kassovitz. But with Lori-Ann Tucker, he took his time removing the hand, the arm, the head. And then he drew the symbols. With this victim, he didn’t waste a lot of time. Which makes me think Eve was killed for a more practical reason. Maybe she surprised him, and he simply had to get rid of her, on the spot. So he did it the fastest way he could. A blow to the head. And then a quick stab to the heart.”
    “He took the time to draw those symbols on the door.”
    “How do we know he didn’t draw them first? To go with the bundle he’d just delivered on the doorstep?”
    “You mean the hand.”
    Maura nodded. “His offering.”
    Her blade was back at work, cutting, resecting. Out came lungs, which she dropped into a steel basin, where they formed a spongy mass. A glance at the pink surface, a few slices into each of the lobes, told her these had been the healthy lungs of a nonsmoker, designed to serve their owner well into old age. Maura moved on to the