Max Kane

The Autopsy Suite at the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office is on the lowest floor, and it is very cold.

I had been there twice before. Both times I had been struck by the quality of the light, which is the whitest I have ever seen: a hard, flat, shadowless glare, thrown from a long row of tubes in the ceiling and reflected back from white tiles and white steel, so that nothing in the room seems to rest on anything else. It does not warm. It reveals. One has the sensation of walking into the inside of a refrigerator in which something has been very carefully prepared.

At ten past nine on the morning after the briefing, I stood in the doorway of it with a paper cup of coffee, and watched Hannah Frost fail to close a dead woman's mouth.

"It won't go," she said.

She did not look round. She was bending over the steel table in her green surgical gown, with her cap pushed back and her long white hands on either side of Kaylee Rhodes's face. The body lay on its back under a sheet drawn to the collarbone. The skin was a bluish gray. The hair had been combed back and arranged, and the torn nails had been trimmed and cleaned, and but for the one thing she might have been a woman asleep.

The mouth stood wide open.

"Rigor," said Hannah. "It's set solid in the masseters and the face. I've tried manipulation, I've tried warm water, I've tried everything the textbook suggests. It's as though she's still holding the scream." She straightened with a little grunt. "Her mother has asked for an open casket. Her mother. She wants to see her daughter's face before the funeral. And I can't give her anything but this."

"You could close the lid."

"I could." She looked at me. "I've done it before. I'll do it again. But I've been trying for an hour and a half to find some other way, and if I push any harder I'll fracture the mandible. The bones are fine at the moment, I've checked. They won't be fine after I've had a go with a mallet."

"Hannah," I said gently, "I think I know a man who can help."

…

I had made the request the previous afternoon, from a telephone in the corridor outside the briefing room, to a clerk in the Department of Corrections whose voice had been carefully drained of all feeling.

It was an unusual request. I had known it would be. I had spent half an hour on the telephone that evening with Leo, who had heard me out in a long uncomfortable silence and then said, "Doc, I've been a cop for twenty-six years. You want me to bring a convicted felon into a Medical Examiner's suite. To touch a body." And I had said that yes, I did, and had explained why, and he had thought for a long time and then said, with a kind of resigned dismay, "You're going to be the death of me."

The man arrived at nine thirty.

I heard him before I saw him: the slow, unhurried clink of steel on steel, a chain being dragged across tile. The door at the end of the corridor opened. Two uniformed officers came through, armed, with their hands on their holsters and their eyes on the floor, and between them, with his wrists shackled in front of him in a pair of gleaming new cuffs, walked a tall man in an orange jumpsuit.

I stopped breathing.

I had seen photographs. I had studied them for weeks, pinned to the wall of a room in Cambridge. I had known what to expect. But there is a difference between a photograph and a face, and I had not been ready for the particular quality of this one, which was the same as Magnus Kane's and utterly unlike it, as a man's voice is the same as his brother's on a bad telephone line.

It was the same long narrow skull, the same high forehead, the same straight dark brows. It was the same mouth, thin and exact, held in the same level line. But the eyes in the face were not Magnus's eyes. Magnus's eyes, in every picture, had been calm and light and faintly amused, the eyes of a man who has made his peace. These were dark, and watchful, and weary, and set in a web of fine lines. There was gray in his hair. There was a scar across the back of his left hand, running from knuckle to wrist. He moved with the particular economy of a man who has spent a long time in places where it does not pay to take up room.

"Maximilian Kane," said one of the officers.

"Thank you," said Hannah, in a stifled voice.

I stepped forward.

"Mr. Kane."

He turned his head.

"I am Atticus Vaughn. I wrote to you in March. I do not suppose you remember."

"I remember," said Max Kane.

His voice was lower than his brother's. It had a dry grain in it, like wood. He looked at me for a moment and I looked at him, and I counted, without meaning to, the muscles of his face. They did not move. They were perfectly still. But as his eyes passed over my shoulder and found the green-tiled door of the autopsy suite, with its stainless-steel handle and its little square window, the top of his shoulders rose.

I would not have seen it if I had not been looking. It lasted a tenth of a second. A single hard lift of the trapezius, like a dog's hackles, and then it was gone.

This was the room where his brother had worked.

…

"Gloves," said Max.

Hannah handed them to him. A guard unlocked one cuff, with an air of profound reluctance, and Max Kane, with the other wrist still chained to the officer's belt, stripped on the gloves in a single practiced motion and walked to the sink. He washed his hands slowly and thoroughly, with the grave attention of a man performing a rite. He used alcohol on them, rubbing it between the fingers and into the palms, up to the wrists. He dried them on a paper towel. Then he turned and looked at the table.

For a moment he stood quite still.

I have seen men look at the dead in a number of ways. I have seen them look away. I have seen them look hungrily, or professionally, or with the tight dull stare of the unwell. I had never seen anyone look at a corpse the way that Max Kane looked at Kaylee Rhodes. It was a look of attention so intense and so gentle that it was almost tender. It was the look of a man regarding a sleeping child.

"No scalpel," he said.

"No," said Hannah. "I thought—"

"No scalpel. No mallet." He did not look at her. "May I?"

He laid his hands on the dead woman's face.

…

I should like to be able to say precisely what I saw. I cannot. It was too quick, and too quiet, and I had no vocabulary for it. I will tell you only that he put the fingertips of both hands against her temples, very lightly, as one rests a hand on a sleeper's brow, and held them there. His eyes closed. His breath slowed. For perhaps ten seconds nothing whatever happened.

"The masseter and the temporalis," he said at last, softly. "They're locked. All the way down into the cheek. She clenched her jaw. Not once. For a long time." His thumb moved, a quarter of an inch, along the line of the cheekbone. "Very hard. Look at the wear on the molars. She was grinding her teeth as she died."

"I didn't—" said Hannah.

"You wouldn't have seen it. It's in the muscle." He opened his eyes. "Doctor, will you stand on that side? And hold her head. Gently. I won't hurt her."

Hannah stepped forward.

Max's right thumb found a place below the ear, a soft hollow just behind the angle of the jaw, and pressed.

There was a small dry sound, like a green twig breaking.

It was not a loud sound. But it filled the room. I saw the officers by the door start. I saw Hannah's lips go white. And then Max Kane began to move his hands, and the face of Kaylee Rhodes began to change.

He worked in strokes. I could not follow the pattern. A long slow stroke up the forehead, with the heels of both palms. A circling motion over the cheeks. A pressure on the inner corner of each eye, held, released. A kneading, almost like bread, along the line of the jaw. His fingers were very light and very sure and very slow, and under them, like a photograph coming up in a tray of developer, the terror drained out of the dead face. The brow smoothed. The skin of the cheeks, which had been drawn up into tight shining ridges, relaxed. The lips drew together. The mouth, which had stood open for thirty hours, closed with the soft final sound of a book.

It took four minutes and forty seconds. I know because I looked at my watch.

When he stepped back, he had to steady himself with a hand on the edge of the table. His forehead was wet.

"There," said Max Kane.

…

I do not know how to describe what lay on the table.

She looked—not peaceful. That is not the word. She looked herself. She was a pretty, tired, slightly freckled young woman with a wide mouth and a small scar through one eyebrow, who had gone to sleep after a long day with her hair on the pillow. The frozen mask of terror was gone. In its place was a face I could have recognized in a crowd.

"God," said Hannah. She was crying. I had not noticed. "Oh, God."

"The mother can see her now," said Max.

"I—yes. Thank you. Thank you, I—"

"Don't thank me." He peeled off the gloves and dropped them in the bin. "I do this for time off. It's in the agreement." His voice was flat. "You'll want to look at her left eyelid, Doctor. There's something on it."

Hannah bent. She drew the lid gently down with her thumb, and looked, and made a small sound in her throat.

"What is it?" I said.

"A mark." She straightened. "A little—an abrasion, here, at the corner. Very faint. It looks like a—"

"Like someone brushed her eye with a lash," said Max. "Or a fingernail. Her own, probably. She'd have rubbed it, in the dark, when the light flickered." He glanced at me. "It's nothing. A scratch. But it's the sort of thing I notice."

"You are quite certain no one touched her?"

"No one touched her face." He said it with absolute conviction. "I would have known. A hand leaves a signature in the muscle, like a signature in clay. There's nothing here but her own. She did this to herself, Mr. Vaughn. With her own hands, and her own mind. Whoever built that box only turned the key."

…

They took him back at ten.

He went without protest, the two officers closing in on either side, the chain clinking. Hannah had retreated to the end of the room and stood with her back to us, cleaning an instrument that did not need cleaning. I walked with Max to the door.

He did not look at me. He stared straight ahead at the white tiles of the corridor, with his shoulders squared and the muscle of his jaw working very slightly under the skin.

"Thank you," I said.

"I told you. It's in the agreement."

"Even so."

He said nothing. We reached the door. One of the officers pushed it open. I could see the long corridor outside, with its ranks of fluorescent lights, and at the end of it the elevator, and beyond the elevator the world.

"Mr. Vaughn."

I stopped.

He was standing in the doorway with the officers on either side of him. He had not turned. He spoke to the corridor, so quietly that I had to lean in to hear.

"My brother never wrote in red ink."

I felt my breath go still.

"Not once, in all the years I knew him. He kept a drawer of red pens for his students and never used them himself. He said it was a color for people who'd already lost." A pause. "The only time he ever picked up a red pen was the night our father died. He wrote one line in the margin of a book, and then he burned the book." His head turned, at last, a few degrees, and I saw one dark eye. "If he wrote something in red ink, Mr. Vaughn, it wasn't an accusation. It was a confession."

They took him away.

I stood in the doorway until the sound of the chain had died. Then I took out my steel pen and held it in my fist so hard that the cap left a white print in my palm.

Red ink.

A confession.

Behind me, in the cold white room, Hannah Frost was still washing her hands.