The Mephisto Club

Joe got called away just a while ago, so he won’t be seeing you tonight. He said he’d meet you in the morning, over at the house. Just give him a call tomorrow.” Kibbie took a breath. “So, are you ready for this?”
    “That bad, huh?”
    “Let’s put it this way: I hope I never see anything like this again.”
    They started up the hall to the elevator, and he pressed the Down button.
    “After two weeks, I guess she’s in pretty bad shape,” said Jane.
    “Actually, there’s been minimal decomposition. The house was vacant. No heat, no power. It’s probably about thirty degrees inside. Like storing meat in a freezer.”
    “How did she end up there?”
    “We have no idea. There were no signs of forced entry, so she must have had a key. Or the killer did.”
    The elevator door opened and they stepped in, Kibbie flanked by the two women. A buffer between Maura and Jane, who still had not said a word to each other since they’d left the car.
    “Who owns that vacant house?” asked Jane.
    “A woman who lives out of state now. She inherited it from her parents, and she’s been trying to sell it for years. We haven’t been able to contact her. Even the realtor doesn’t know where she is.” They stepped out of the elevator on the basement level. Kibbie led the way down the hall and pushed through a door, into the morgue anteroom.
    “There you are, Dr. Kibbie.” A young blond woman in hospital scrubs set down the paperback romance she’d been reading and stood to greet them. “I was wondering if you were still coming down.”
    “Thanks for waiting, Lindsey. These are the two ladies I told you about, from Boston. “Detective Rizzoli and Dr. Isles.”
    “You drove all that way to see our gal, huh? Well, let me roll her out for you.” She stepped through double doors into the autopsy lab and flipped the wall switch. Fluorescent lights glared down on the empty table. “Dr. Kibbie, I’ve really got to leave soon. Could you roll her back into the cooler and lock up for me when you’re done? Just pull the hallway door shut when you go.”
    “You going to try and catch the rest of the game?” asked Kibbie.
    “If I don’t show up, Ian’s never going to talk to me again.”
    “Does Ian actually talk?”
    Lindsey rolled her eyes. “Dr. Kibbie.
Please.
”
    “I keep telling you, you should give my nephew a call. He’s premed at Cornell. Some other girl’s going to snap him right up if you aren’t quick.”
    She laughed as she pulled open the refrigerator door. “Yeah, like I’d ever want to marry a doctor.”
    “I’m truly hurt by that.”
    “I mean, I want a guy who’ll be home for dinner.” She tugged on a gurney, wheeling it out of the refrigerator. “You want her on the table?”
    “The gurney’s fine. We’re not going to cut.”
    “Let me just double-check that I’ve pulled the right one.” She glanced at the attached tag, then reached for the zipper. She betrayed no hesitation, no squeamishness, as she unzipped the bag to expose the corpse’s face. “Yep, this is it,” she said, and straightened, flipping back her blond hair, her face pink with the bloom of youth. A startling contrast to the lifeless face and desiccated eyes that stared up from the opening in the shroud.
    “We can take it from here, Lindsey,” said Dr. Kibbie.
    The girl gave a wave. “Remember to pull the door shut all the way,” she said cheerfully and walked out, leaving behind an incongruous trace of perfume.
    Maura pulled latex gloves from a box on the countertop. Then she crossed to the gurney and unzipped the bag all the way open. As the plastic parted, no one said a word. What lay on that gurney silenced them all.
    At four degrees Centigrade, bacterial growth is arrested, decay halted. Despite the passage of at least two weeks, the freezing temperatures of the vacant house had preserved the corpse’s soft tissues, and there was no need for menthol ointment to mask any overwhelming odors. The harsh lights revealed far worse horrors than mere putrefaction. The throat lay open and exposed by a single deep slash that had transected the trachea, slicing all the way to the cervical spine. But that fatal stroke of the blade was not what captured Maura’s gaze; she stared, instead, at the naked torso. At the multitude of crosses that had been carved on the breasts, on the abdomen. Holy symbols cut into the parchment of human skin. Blood encrusted the carvings, and countless rivulets had seeped from