Die Again (4 page)

For a moment, the only sound in the garage was the humming of flies as Jane considered every urban legend she’d ever heard about stolen organs. Then she focused on the covered garbage can in the far corner. As she approached it, the stench of putrefaction grew even stronger, and flies swarmed in a hungry cloud. Grimacing, she lifted the edge of the lid. One quick glance was all she could stomach before the smell made her back away, gagging.

“I take it you found them,” said Maura.

“Yeah,” muttered Jane. “At least, the intestines. I’ll leave the full inventory of guts to you.”

“Neat.”

“Oh yeah, it’ll be lots of fun.”

“No, what I mean is, the perp was neat. The incision. The removal
of the viscera.” Paper shoe covers crackled as Maura crossed to the trash can. Both Jane and Frost backed away when Maura pried open the lid, but even from the opposite side of the garage they caught the stomach-turning whiff of rotting organs. The odor seemed to excite the gray tabby, who was rubbing against Maura with even more fervor, mewing for attention.

“Got yourself a new friend,” said Jane.

“Normal feline marking behavior. He’s claiming me as his territory,” said Maura as she plunged a gloved hand into the garbage can.

“I know you like to be thorough, Maura,” said Jane. “But how about picking through those in the morgue? Like, in a biohazard room or something?”

“I need to be certain …”

“Of what? You can
smell
they’re in there.” To Jane’s disgust, Maura bent over the garbage can and reached even deeper into the pile of entrails. In the morgue, she’d watched Maura slice open torsos and peel off scalps, de-flesh bones and buzz-saw through skulls, performing all these tasks with laser-guided concentration. That same icy focus was on Maura’s face as she dug through the congealed mass in the trash can, heedless of the flies now crawling in her fashionably clipped dark hair. Was there anyone else who could look so elegant while doing something so disgusting?

“Come on, it’s not like you haven’t seen guts before,” said Jane.

Maura didn’t answer as she plunged her hands deeper.

“Okay.” Jane sighed. “You don’t need us for this. Frost and I will check out the rest of the—”

“There’s too much,” Maura muttered.

“Too much what?”

“This isn’t a normal volume of viscera.”

“You’re the one who’s always talking about bacterial gases. Bloating.”

“Bloating doesn’t explain
this
.” Maura straightened, and what she held in her gloved hand made Jane cringe.

“A heart?”

“This is not a normal heart, Jane,” said Maura. “Yes, it has four chambers, but this aortic arch isn’t right. And the great vessels don’t look right, either.”

“Leon Gott was sixty-four,” said Frost. “Maybe he had a bad ticker.”

“That’s the problem. This doesn’t look like a sixty-four-year-old man’s heart.” Maura reached into the garbage pail again. “But
this
one does,” she said, and held out her other hand.

Jane looked back and forth between the two specimens. “Wait. There are
two
hearts in there?”

“And two complete sets of lungs.”

Jane and Frost stared at each other. “Oh shit,” he said.

F
ROST SEARCHED THE DOWNSTAIRS AND SHE TOOK THE UPSTAIRS. WENT
room by room, opening closets and drawers, peering under beds. No gutted bodies anywhere, nor any signs of a struggle, but plenty of dust bunnies and cat hair. Mr. Gott—if indeed he was the man hanging in the garage—had been an indifferent housekeeper, and scattered across his dresser were old hardware store receipts, hearing aid batteries, a wallet with three credit cards and forty-eight dollars in cash, and a few stray bullets. Which told her that Mr. Gott was more than a little casual about firearms. She wasn’t surprised to open his nightstand drawer and find a fully loaded Glock inside, with a round in the chamber, ready to fire. Just the tool for the paranoid homeowner.

Too bad the gun was upstairs while the homeowner was downstairs, getting his guts ripped out.

In the bathroom cabinet she found the expected array of pills for a man of sixty-four. Aspirin and Advil, Lipitor and Lopressor. And on the countertop was a pair of hearing aids—high-end ones. He hadn’t
been wearing them, which meant he might not have heard an intruder.

As she started downstairs, the telephone rang in the living room. By the time she reached it, the answering machine had already kicked in and she heard a man’s voice leave a message.

Hey, Leon, you never got back to me about the trip to Colorado. Let me know if you want to join us. Should be a good time
.

Jane was about to play the message again, to see the caller’s phone number, when she noticed that the
PLAY
button was smeared with what looked like blood. According to the blinking display, there were two recorded messages, and she’d just heard the second one.

With a gloved finger she pressed
PLAY
.

November three, nine fifteen
A.M.
:… and if you call immediately, we can lower your credit card rates. Don’t miss this opportunity to take advantage of this special offer
.

November six, two
P.M.
: Hey, Leon, you never got back to me about the trip to Colorado. Let me know if you want to join us. Should be a good time
.

November 3 was a Monday, today was a Thursday. That first message was still on the machine, unplayed, because at nine on Monday morning, Leon Gott was probably dead.

“Jane?” said Maura. The gray tabby had followed her into the hallway and was weaving figure of eights between her legs.

“There’s blood on this answering machine,” said Jane, turning to look at her. “Why would the perp touch it? Why would he check the victim’s messages?”

“Come see what Frost found in the backyard.”

Jane followed her into the kitchen and out the back door. In a fenced yard landscaped only with patchy grass stood an outbuilding with metal siding. Too big to be just a storage shed, the windowless structure looked large enough to hide any number of horrors. As Jane stepped inside, she smelled a chemical odor, alcohol-sharp. Fluorescent bulbs cast the interior in a cold, clinical glare.

Frost stood beside a large worktable, studying a fearsome-looking
tool bolted to it. “I thought at first this was a table saw,” he said. “But this blade doesn’t look like any saw I’ve ever come across. And those cabinets over there?” He pointed across the workshop. “Take a look at what’s inside them.”

Through the glass cabinet doors, Jane saw boxes of latex gloves and an array of frightening-looking instruments laid out on the shelves. Scalpels and knives, probes and pliers and forceps.
Surgeon’s tools
. Hanging from wall hooks were rubber aprons, splattered with what looked like bloodstains. With a shudder, she turned and stared at the plywood worktable, its surface scarred with nicks and gouges, and saw a clump of congealed, raw meat.

“Okay,” Jane murmured. “Now I’m freaking out.”

“This is like a serial killer’s workshop,” said Frost. “And this table is where he sliced and diced the bodies.”

In the corner was a fifty-gallon white barrel mounted to an electrical motor. “What the hell is that thing for?”

Frost shook his head. “It looks big enough to hold …”

She crossed to the barrel. Paused as she spotted red droplets on the floor. A smear of it streaked the hatch door. “There’s blood all around here.”

“What’s inside the barrel?” said Maura.

Jane gave the fastening bolt a hard pull. “And behind door number two is …” She peered into the open hatch. “Sawdust.”

“That’s all?”

Jane reached into the barrel and sifted through the flakes, stirring up a cloud of wood dust. “Just sawdust.”

“So we’re still missing the second victim,” said Frost.

Maura went to the nightmarish tool that Frost had earlier thought was a table saw. As she examined the blade, the cat was at her heels again, rubbing against her pant legs, refusing to leave her alone. “Did you get a good look at this thing, Detective Frost?”

“I got as close as I wanted to get.”

“Notice how this circular blade has a cutting edge that’s bent sideways? Obviously this isn’t meant for slicing.”

Jane joined her at the table and gingerly touched the blade edge. “This thing looks like it’d rip you to shreds.”

“And that’s probably what it’s for. I think it’s called a flesher. It’s used not to cut but to grind away flesh.”

“They
make
a machine like that?”

Maura crossed to a closet and opened the door. Inside was a row of what looked like paint cans. Maura reached for one large container and turned it around to read the contents. “Bondo.”

“An automotive product?” said Jane, glimpsing the image of a car on the label.

“The label says it’s filler, for car body work. To repair dings and scratches.” Maura set the can of Bondo back on the shelf. She couldn’t shake the gray cat, who followed her as she went to the cabinet and peered through glass doors at the knives and probes, laid out like a surgeon’s tool kit. “I think I know what this room was used for.” She turned to Jane. “You know that second set of viscera in the trash can? I don’t believe they’re human.”

“L
EON
G
OTT WAS NOT
a nice man. And I’m trying to be charitable,” said Nora Bazarian as she wiped a mustache of creamed carrots from her one-year-old son’s mouth. In her faded jeans and clinging T-shirt, with her blond hair pulled back in a girlish ponytail, she looked more like a teenager than a thirty-three-year-old mother of two. She had a mother’s skill at multitasking, efficiently feeding spoonfuls of carrots into her son’s open mouth between loading the dishwasher, checking on a cake in the oven, and answering Jane’s questions. No wonder the woman had a teenager’s waistline; she didn’t sit still for five seconds.

“You know what he yelled at my six-year-old?” said Nora. “
Get off my lawn
. I used to think that was just a caricature of cranky old men, but Leon actually said that to my son. All because Timmy wandered next door to pet his dog.” Nora closed the dishwasher with a bang. “Bruno has better manners than his owner did.”

“How long did you know Mr. Gott?” asked Jane.

“We moved into this house six years ago, just after Timmy was born. We thought this was the perfect neighborhood for kids. You can see how well kept the yards are, for the most part, and there are other young families on this street, with kids Timmy’s age.” With balletic grace she pivoted to the coffeepot and refilled Jane’s cup. “A few days after we moved in, I brought Leon a plate of brownies, just to say hello. He didn’t even say thanks, just told me he didn’t eat sweets, and handed them right back. Then he complained that my new baby was crying too much, and why couldn’t I keep him quiet at night? Can you believe that?” She sat down and spooned more carrots into her son’s mouth. “To top it off, there were all those dead animals hanging on his wall.”

“So you’ve been inside his house.”

“Only once. He sounded so proud when he told me he’d shot most of them himself. What kind of a person kills animals just to decorate his walls?” She wiped a carroty dribble from the baby’s chin. “That’s when I decided we’d just stay away from him. Right, Sam?” she cooed. “Just stay away from that mean man.”

“When did you last see Mr. Gott?”

“I talked to Officer Root about all this. I last saw Leon over the weekend.”

“Which day?”

“Sunday morning. I saw him in his driveway. He was carrying groceries into his house.”

“Did you see anyone visit him that day?”

“I was gone for most of Sunday. My husband’s in California this week, so I took the kids down to my mom’s house in Falmouth. We didn’t get home till late that night.”

“What time?”

“Around nine thirty, ten.”

“And that night, did you hear anything unusual next door? Shouts, loud voices?”

Nora set down the spoon and frowned at her. The baby gave a
hungry squawk, but Nora ignored him; her attention was entirely focused on Jane. “I thought—when Officer Root told me they found Leon hanging in his garage—I assumed it was a suicide.”

“I’m afraid it’s a homicide.”

“You’re certain? Absolutely?”

Oh yes. Absolutely
. “Mrs. Bazarian, if you could think back to Sunday night—”

“My husband isn’t coming home until Monday, and I’m alone here with the kids. Are we safe?”

“Tell me about Sunday night.”

“Are my children
safe
?”

It was the first question any mother would ask. Jane thought about her own three-year-old daughter, Regina. Thought about how she would feel in Nora Bazarian’s position, with two young children, living so close to a place of violence. Would she prefer reassurance, or the truth, which was that Jane didn’t know the answer. She couldn’t promise that anyone was ever safe.

“Until we know more,” said Jane, “it would be a good idea to take precautions.”

“What
do
you know?”