“This was the most screwed-up Christmas we’ve ever had,” said Jane as they drove home. Regina had fallen asleep in her car seat, and for the first time all evening Jane and Gabriel could have a conversation without distractions. “It’s not usually this way. I mean, we have our squabbles and all, but my mom usually wrangles us all together in the end.” She glanced at her husband, whose face was unreadable in the shadowy car. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“You had no idea you were marrying into a nuthouse. Now you’re probably wondering what you got yourself into.”

“Yep. I’d say it’s time to trade in the wife.”

“Well, you’re thinking that a little, aren’t you?”

“Jane, don’t be ridiculous.”

“Hell, there are times when I’d like to run away from my family.”

“But I definitely don’t want to run away from you.” He turned his gaze back to the road, where windblown snow swirled past their headlights. For a moment they drove without speaking. Then he said, “You know, I never heard my parents argue. Not once, in all the years I was growing up.”

“Go ahead, rub it in. I know my family’s a bunch of loudmouths.”

“You come from a family that makes its feelings known, that’s all. They slam doors and they yell and they laugh like hyenas.”

“Oh, this is getting better and better.”

“I wish I’d grown up in a family like that.”

“Right.” She laughed.

“My parents didn’t yell, Jane, and they didn’t slam doors. They didn’t much laugh, either. No, Colonel Dean’s family was far too disciplined to ever stoop to anything as common as emotions. I don’t remember him ever saying, ‘I love you,’ to either me or to my mother. I had to learn to say it. And I’m still learning.” He looked at her. “You taught me how.”

She touched his thigh. Her cool impenetrable guy. There were still a few things left to teach him.

“So never apologize for them,” he said. “They’re the ones who made you.”

“Sometimes I wonder about that. I look at Frankie and I think, please God, let me be the baby they found on the doorstep.”

He laughed. “It was pretty tense tonight. What was the story there, anyway?”

“I don’t know.” She sank back against the seat. “But sooner or later, we’ll hear all about it.”

Jane slipped paper booties over her shoes, donned a surgical gown, and looped the ties behind her waist. Gazing through the glass partition into the autopsy lab, she thought: I really don’t want to go in there. But already Frost was in the room, gowned and masked, with just enough of his face visible for Jane to see his grimace. Maura’s assistant, Yoshima, pulled x-rays out of an envelope and mounted them on the viewing box. Maura’s back obstructed Jane’s view of the table, hiding what she had little wish to confront. Just an hour ago, she had been sitting at her kitchen table, Regina cooing on her lap as Gabriel had cooked breakfast. Now the scrambled eggs churned in her stomach and she wanted to yank off this gown and walk back out of the building, into the purifying snow.

Instead she pushed through the door, into the autopsy room.

Maura glanced over her shoulder, and her face betrayed no qualms about the procedure to follow. She was merely a professional like any other, about to do her job. Though they both dealt in death, Maura was on far more intimate terms with it, far more comfortable staring into its face.

“We were just about to start,” said Maura.

“I got hung up in traffic. The roads are a mess out there this morning.” Jane tied on her mask as she moved toward the foot of the table. She avoided looking at the remains but focused, instead, on the x-ray viewing box.

Yoshima flipped the switch and the light flickered on, glowing behind two rows of films. Skull x-rays. But these were unlike any skull films Jane had seen before. Where the cervical spine should be, she saw only a few vertebrae, and then…nothing. Just the ragged shadow of soft tissue where the neck had been severed. She pictured Yoshima positioning that head for the films. Had it rolled around like a beach ball as he’d set it on the film cassette, as he’d angled the collimator? She turned away from the light box.

And found herself staring at the table. At the remains, displayed in anatomical position. The torso was on its back, the severed parts laid out approximately where they should be. A jigsaw puzzle in flesh and bone, the pieces waiting for reassembly. Though she did not want to look at it, there it was: the head, which had tilted onto its left ear, as though the victim was turning to look sideways.

“I need to approximate this wound,” said Maura. “Can you help me hold it in position?” A pause. “Jane?”

Startled, Jane met Maura’s gaze. “What?”

“Yoshima’s going to take photos, and I need to get a look through the magnifier.” Maura grasped the cranium in her gloved hands and rotated the head, trying to match the wound edges. “Here, just hold it in this position. Pull on some gloves and come around to this end.”

Jane glanced at Frost. Better you than me, his eyes said. She moved to the head of the table. There she paused to snap on gloves, then reached down to cradle the head. Found herself gazing into the victim’s eyes, the corneas dull as wax. A day and a half in a refrigerator had chilled the flesh, and as she cupped the face, she thought of the butcher counter in her local supermarket, with its icy chickens wrapped in plastic. We are all, in the end, merely meat.

Maura bent over the wound, studying it through the magnifier. “There seems to be a single sweep across the anterior. Very sharp blade. The only notching I see is quite a ways back, under the ears. Minimal bread-knife repetition.”

“A bread knife’s not exactly sharp,” said Frost, his voice sounding very far away. Jane looked up and saw that he had retreated from the table and was standing halfway to the sink, his hand covering his mask.

“By bread-knifing, I’m not referring to the blade,” said Maura. “It’s a cutting pattern. Repeated slices going deeper, in the same plane. What we see here is one very deep initial slice, cutting right through the thyroid cartilage, down to the spinal column. Then a quick disarticulation, between the second and third cervical vertebrae. It could have taken less than a minute to complete this decapitation.”

Yoshima moved in with the digital camera, taking photos of the approximated wound. Frontal view, lateral. Horror from every angle.

“Okay, Jane,” said Maura. “Let’s take a look at the incision plane.” Maura grasped the head and turned it upside down. “Hold it there for me.”

Jane caught a glimpse of severed flesh and the open windpipe, and she abruptly averted her gaze, blindly holding the head in place.

Again, Maura moved in with the magnifier to examine the cut surface. “I see striations on the thyroid cartilage. I think the blade was serrated. Get some shots of this.”

Once again, the shutter clicked as Yoshima leaned in for more photos. My hands will be in these shots, thought Jane, this moment preserved for the evidence files. Her head, my hands.

“You said…you said that was arterial spray on the wall,” said Frost.

Maura nodded. “In the bedroom.”

“She was alive.”

“Yes.”

“And this-decapitation-took only seconds?”

“With a sharp knife, a skillful hand, a killer could certainly do it in that time. Only the vertebral column might slow him down.”

“Then she knew, didn’t she? She must have felt it.”

“I highly doubt that.”

“If someone cuts off your head, you’d be conscious for at least a few seconds. That’s what I heard on The Art Bell Show. Some doctor was on the radio with him, talking about what it’s like to be guillotined. That you’re probably still conscious as your head drops into the bucket. You can actually feel yourself falling into it.”