The Mephisto Club

her with a smile. “You think I’d give you a final answer without actually examining it?”
    “You seem to know already.”
    “I’ve narrowed it down, that’s all I can tell you.” He resumed climbing the stairs. “Its class is Gastropoda,” he said. Climbed another step. “Order: Caenogastropoda.” Another step, another chant. “Superfamily: Buccinacea.”
    “Excuse me. What does all that mean?”
    “It means that your little seashell is, first of all, a gastropod, which translates to
stomach foot.
It’s the same general class of mollusk as a land snail or a limpet. They’re univalves, with a muscular foot.”
    “That’s the name of this shell?”
    “No, that’s just the phylogenetic class. There are at least fifty thousand different varieties of gastropods around the world, and not all of them are ocean dwellers. The common land slug, for instance, is a gastropod, even though it has no shell.” He reached the top of the stairs and led the way through a hall with yet more display cases containing a silent menagerie of creatures, their glassy eyes staring back at Jane in disapproval. So vivid was her impression of being watched that she paused and glanced back at the deserted gallery, at cabinet after cabinet of mounted specimens.
    Nobody here but us murdered animals.
    She turned to follow Von Schiller.
    He had vanished.
    For a moment she stood alone in that vast gallery, hearing only the thump of her own heartbeat, feeling the hostile gazes of those countless creatures trapped behind glass. “Dr. Von Schiller?” she called, and her voice seemed to echo through hall after hall.
    His head popped out from behind a cabinet. “Well, aren’t you coming?” he asked. “My office is right here.”
    Office
was too grand a word for the space he occupied. A door with the plaque —DR. HENRY VON SCHILLER, PROFESSOR EMERITUS— led to a windowless nook scarcely larger than a broom closet. Crammed inside were a desk, two chairs, and little else. He flipped on the wall switch and squinted in the harsh fluorescent glare.
    “Let’s see it, then,” he said, and eagerly snatched the ziplock bag that she held out to him. “You say you found this at a crime scene?”
    She hesitated, then said, merely, yes.
Rammed down the throat of a dead woman
was what she didn’t say.
    “Why do you think it’s significant?”
    “I’m hoping you can tell me.”
    “May I handle it?”
    “If you really need to.”
    He opened the bag and, with arthritic fingers, he removed the seashell. “Oh yes,” he murmured as he squeezed behind his desk and settled into a creaking chair. He turned on a gooseneck lamp and pulled out a magnifying glass and a ruler. “Yes, it’s what I thought. Looks like about, oh, twenty-one millimeters long. Not a particularly nice specimen. These striations aren’t all that pretty, and it’s got a few chips here, you see? Could be an old shell that’s been tumbled around in some hobbyist’s collection box.” He looked up, blue eyes watery behind spectacles.
“Pisania maculosa.”
    “Is that its name?”
    “Yes.”
    “Are you sure?”
    He set down the magnifying lens with a thud and stood up. “You don’t trust me?” he snapped. “Come on, then.”
    “I’m not saying I don’t trust—”
    “Of course that’s what you’re saying.” Von Schiller scuttled out of his office, moving with a speed she had not known he was capable of. Annoyed and in a hurry to defend himself, he shuffled through gallery after gallery, leading Jane deep into a gloomy maze of specimen cabinets, past the stares of countless dead eyes, and down a row of display cases tucked into the farthest corner of the building. Clearly, this was not a well-visited section of the museum. Typed display labels were yellowed with age, and dust filmed the glass cases. Von Schiller squeezed down a narrow corridor between cabinets, pulled open a drawer, and took out a specimen box.
    “Here,” he said, opening the box. He took out a handful of shells and placed them, one by one, on top of a glass case. “
Pisania maculosa.
And here’s another, and another. And here’s
yours.
” He looked at her with the indignation of an insulted academic. “Well?”
    Jane scanned the array of seashells, all of them with the same graceful curves, the same spiraling striations. “They do look alike.”
    “Of course they do! They’re the same species! I know what I’m talking about. This
is
my field, Detective.”
    And what a