The Silent Girl

had a chance to struggle.” She cradled the head and tilted it forward. “Can someone hold the cranium in position for me? I want to approximate the wound edges.”
    Without any hesitation, Detective Tam stepped forward and cradled the head in his gloved hands. While a human torso can be viewed as merely impersonal skin and bone and muscle, a corpse’s face reveals more than most cops want to see. Johnny Tam, though, did not shy away from the view. He stared straight into the dead woman’s eyes, as though hoping they might provide answers to his many questions.
    “That’s it, right there,” said Maura, sliding the magnifier over the skin. “I don’t see any serration marks. Nothing that would tell me what kind of knife …” She paused.
    “What?” asked Jane.
    “This angle is strange. It’s not your usual slashed throat.”
    “Yeah, those are so boring.”
    “Consider for a moment how you’d go about cutting a throat,” said Maura. “To penetrate this deep, all the way to vertebrae, you’d approach it from behind. You’d grab the victim’s hair, pull the head back, and slice across the front, from ear to ear.”
    “The commando method,” said Tam.
    “The rear approach gives you control of the victim and maximizes exposure of the throat. And it usually results in a curved incision when the wound’s later approximated. But this slash is angled slightly upward, right to left. It was delivered with the head in a neutral position, not tilted back.”
    “Maybe the killer was standing in front of her,” said Jane.
    “Then why didn’t she resist? There’s no bruising to indicate a struggle. Why would she just stand there while someone practically slices off her head?”
    Yoshima said: “I’ve put up the X-rays.”
    They all turned to the viewing box where the radiographs were now displayed, bones glowing white on the backlit screen. She focused first on the films of the right wrist stump and the severed hand,mentally comparing the angles of the transected triquetral bone. They were a match.
    “It’s definitely her hand,” Maura confirmed.
    “Not that I ever doubted it,” said Jane.
    Maura next focused on the neck X-rays, on the gap in the soft tissues where the flesh had been so cleanly divided. Her gaze instantly fixed on a bright sliver in the cervical vertebra. “Did you do a lateral on this C-spine?” she asked.
    Yoshima had clearly anticipated her request, because he immediately pulled down the hand and wrist films and clipped up a new radiograph, this one a side view of the neck. “I saw that thing earlier. Thought you’d want to see more detail on it.”
    Maura stared at the lateral view of the fifth cervical vertebra. The object, razor-thin, was visible on this X-ray as well.
    “What is that?” asked Jane, moving close beside her.
    “It’s something metallic, and it’s embedded in the anterior fifth vertebra.” She turned to the autopsy table. “I think part of the blade sheared off when the killer made his cut, and a chip is lodged in her neck bone.”
    “Which means we might be able to analyze the metal,” said Jane. “Identify who manufactured the knife.”
    “I don’t think it was a knife,” said Maura.
    “An ax?”
    “An ax would leave a cleft, and we’d see crush changes on the soft tissues. She has neither. This incision is fine and linear. It was made by a blade that’s razor-sharp, and long enough to practically transect the neck with one sweep.”
    “Like a machete?” asked Jane.
    “Or a sword.”
    Jane looked at Tam. “We’re looking for Zorro.” Her laugh was interrupted by the sound of her ringing cell phone. She stripped off her gloves and reached for the phone clipped to her belt. “Rizzoli.”
    “Have you seen any sword injuries before, Dr. Isles?” Tam asked, still studying the X-ray.
    “One, in San Francisco. A man hacked his girlfriend to death with a samurai sword.”
    “Would metal analysis tell you if this was a samurai sword?”
    “They’re mass-produced these days, so it probably wouldn’t help us unless we could find the weapon itself. Still, you never know when trace evidence like this ends up being just the puzzle piece needed to convict.” She looked at Tam, whose face was bathed in the glow from the viewing box. Even though a bouffant paper cap covered his hair, she was once again struck by his intensity. And lack of humor. “You ask good questions,” she said.
    “Just trying to learn.”
    “Rizzoli’s a smart