Cross Bones

by Kathy Reichs

  The odd molar had come from a different individual than the bones and teeth of the rest of the skeleton. I wanted it treated as a single case for DNA testing. I assigned the odd molar one sample number.

  I assigned a second, single sample number to one of the plugs I’d cut from the skeleton’s femur and one of the molars Bergeron had extracted from its jaw.

  I registered the second of the skeleton’s molars and the second bone plug for radiocarbon dating.

  When I’d completed the paperwork, I asked Denis to FedEx the bone and tooth samples to the respective labs.

  That was it. There was nothing else I could do.

  Days passed.

  Frost crept across my windows. Snow capped the slats of my side-yard fence.

  My casework entered a typical late winter lull. No hikers or campers. Fewer kids in the parks. Snow on the land, ice on the river. Scavengers hunkered in, waiting out winter.

  Come spring, the bodies would blossom like monarchs swarming north. For now, it was quiet.

  Tuesday morning, I purchased Yadin’s popular work on Masada. Beautiful photographs, chapters and chapters on the palaces, bathhouses, synagogues, and scrolls. But Jake was right. Yadin devoted barely a page to the cave skeletons, and included only one lonely photo. Hard to believe the book triggered such a controversy when it was published in ’66.

  Tuesday afternoon, Ryan learned that Hershel Kaplan had entered Israel on February 27. Kaplan’s present whereabouts were unknown. The Israel National Police were looking for him.

  Ryan phoned Wednesday afternoon to ask if I’d like to accompany him on a follow-up with Courtney Purviance, then grab some dinner.

  “Follow-up on what?”

  “No biggie, just a detail on one of Ferris’s associates. Guy named Klingman says he stopped by to see Ferris that Friday, couldn’t scare anyone up. Just dotting i’s and crossing t’s.”

  What the hell. I had nothing better to do.

  Ryan picked me up around four. Purviance lived in a typical Montreal walk-up in Saint-Léonard. Gray stone. Blue trim. Iron staircase shooting straight up the front.

  The lobby was small, the tile floor filmed by salty snowmelt. Beside the interior door were four mail slots, each with a handwritten nameplate and buzzer. Purviance lived in unit 2-B.

  Ryan thumbed the button. A female voice answered. Ryan gave his name. The woman responded with a question.

  While Ryan cleared security, I scanned the names of the other tenants.

  Purviance told Ryan to wait.

  He turned. I must have been smiling.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Look at these names.” I pointed to 1-A. “How does that translate in French?”

  “‘The pine.’”

  I tapped 1-B. “That’s ‘olive’ in Italian.” 2-A. “That’s ‘oak’ in Latvian. We’ve got an international arborist convention, right here in Saint-Léonard.”

  Ryan smiled and shook his head.

  “I don’t know how your brain works, Brennan.”

  “Stunning, isn’t it?”

  The door buzzed. We climbed to the second floor.

  When Ryan knocked, Purviance again asked that he identify himself. He did. A million locks rattled. The door cracked. A nose peeked out. The door closed. A chain disengaged. The door reopened.

  Ryan introduced me as a colleague. Purviance nodded and led us to a tiny living room filled with way too much furniture. Filled with way too much, period. Every shelf, tabletop, and horizontal surface was crammed with memorabilia.

  Purviance had been watching a Law & Order rerun. Briscoe was telling a suspect he didn’t know jack.

  Clicking off the TV, Purviance took a seat opposite Ryan. She was short, blonde, and twenty pounds overweight. I guessed her age at just north of forty.

  As the two talked, I checked out the apartment.

  The living room gave onto a dining room, which gave onto a kitchen, shotgun style. I assumed the bedroom and bath were reached by a short hallway branching off to the right. With the exception of the room in which we were seated, I guessed the place received natural light a total of one hour a day.

  I refocused on Ryan and Purviance. The woman looked drawn and weary, but now and then sunlight caught her face. When that happened Courtney Purviance was startlingly beautiful.

  Ryan was asking about Harold Klingman. Purviance was explaining that Klingman owned a shop in Halifax. Her fingers adjusted and readjusted the fringe on a throw pillow.

  “Would Klingman’s visit to Ferris have been unusual?”

  “Mr. Klingman often dropped by the warehouse when he was in Montreal.”

  “You were out sick that Friday.”

  “I have sinus problems.”

  I believed it. Purviance’s speech was punctuated with frequent sniffing. She cleared her throat repeatedly. Every few seconds, a hand darted from the pillow and swiped her nose. I found myself fighting the urge to hand her a tissue.

  “You said earlier that Ferris was acting moody just before his death. Can you elaborate on that?”

  Purviance shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know. He seemed quieter.”

  “Quieter?”

  “He didn’t joke around as much.” The fringe-straightening intensified. “Kept to himself more.”

  “Got any theories why that might have been?”

  Purviance snorted, then abandoned the pillow for a go at her nose. “Talked much with Miriam?”

  “You think there was trouble on the home front?”

  Purviance raised her brows and palms in a “beats me” gesture.

  “Did Ferris ever mention marital difficulties?”

  “Not directly.”

  Ryan asked a few more questions about Purviance’s relationship with Miriam, then moved on to other topics. Another fifteen minutes, and he wrapped up.

  After leaving, we grabbed an early dinner on Saint-Laurent. Ryan asked my impression of Purviance. I told him the lady clearly had no love for Miriam Ferris. And she needed a good nasal spray.

  Thursday, the Donovan Joyce book arrived. The Jesus Scroll. I opened it around noon, intending a quick scan.

  At some point it began to snow. When I looked up, the sky had dimmed, and my side-yard fence caps had grown into tall, furry hats.

  Joyce’s theory was more bizarre than that in my airport novel. It went something like this.

  Jesus was Mary’s illegitimate son. He survived the cross. He married Mary Magdalene. He lived to a ripe old age, wrote his last will and testament, and was killed during the final siege at Masada.

  Jake’s summary of Joyce’s involvement with Max Grosset had been accurate. According to Joyce, Grosset was an American professor with a British accent who’d worked as a volunteer archaeologist at Masada. Grosset told Joyce, during a chance encounter at Ben-Gurion airport in December of 1964, that he’d unearthed the Jesus scroll the previous field season, hidden it, then returned to Masada to retrieve it.

  Joyce got a peek at Grosset’s scroll in the airport men’s room. To Joyce, the writing looked Hebrew. Grosset said it was Aramaic, and translated the first line. Yeshua ben Ya’akob Gennesareth. “Jesus of Gennesareth, son of Jacob/James.” The writer had added the astonishing information that he was the last in the line of the Maccabean kings of Israel.

  Though offered $5,000, Joyce refused to assist Grosset in smuggling the scroll out of Israel. Grosset succeeded on his own, and the scroll ended up in Russia.

  Later, unable to pursue his original book topic because he’d been denied permission to visit Masada, and intrigued by what he’d seen in the men’s room at Ben-Gurion, Joyce had researched the name on the scroll. The appellation “Son of James” was used, Joyce concluded, because Joseph had died childless, and, according to Jewish law, his brother James would have raised Mary’s illegitimate child. “Gennesareth” was one of history’s several names for the Sea of Galilee.

  Joyce was so convinced of the scroll’s authenticity that he spent the next eight ye
ars researching Jesus’ life.

  I was still reading when Ryan arrived with enough food to feed Guadalajara.

  I popped a Diet Coke. Ryan popped a Moosehead. As we ate enchiladas, I hit the main points.

  “Jesus viewed himself as a descendant in the Hasmonean line.”

  Ryan looked at me.

  “The Maccabean kings. His movement wasn’t simply religious. It was a grab for political power.”

  “Oh good. Another conspiracy theory.” Ryan dipped a finger in the guacamole. I handed him a tortilla.

  “According to Joyce, Jesus wanted to be king of Israel. That pissed Rome off, and the penalty was death. But Jesus wasn’t betrayed, he surrendered to authorities following negotiation by an intermediary.”

  “Let me guess. Judas?”

  “Yep. The deal was that Pilate would release Barabas, and Jesus would turn himself in.”

  “And why would he do that?”

  “Barabas was his son.”

  “I see.” Ryan wasn’t buying any of it.

  “This prisoner exchange involved an escape mechanism, and the whole plan depended on controlling the clock.”

  “Life is timing.”

  “Do you want to hear this?”

  “Is there any possibility of sex right now?”

  I narrowed my eyes.

  “I want to hear this.”

  “There were two forms of crucifixion—slow and fast. Slow, a prisoner could last up to seven days. Fast, you were dead in twenty-four hours. According to Joyce, Jesus and his followers had to time his execution so that fast was the only option.”

  “Fast would be my choice.”

  “Sabbath was approaching. And Passover. According to Jewish law, no corpse could remain on a cross.”

  “But crucifixion was a Roman show.” Ryan went for another enchilada. “Historians agree Pilate was a tyrant and a bully. Would he have given a rat’s ass about Jewish law?”

  “It was in Pilate’s interest to keep the locals happy. Anyway, the plot involved the use of a death-mimicking drug. Papaver somniferum or Claviceps purpurea.”

  “I love it when you talk dirty.”

  “The opium poppy and ergot, a lysergic-acid producing fungus. In modern lingo, heroin and LSD. Both were known in Judea. The drug would have been administered via the sponge on the reed. According to the Gospels, Jesus first refused the sponge, later accepted it, drank, and immediately died.”

  “Only you’re saying he lived.”

  “I’m not saying it. Joyce is.”

  “How do you get a live body down from a cross in front of witnesses and guards?”

  “Keep the witnesses at a distance. Bribe the guards. It’s not like there was a coroner standing by.”

  “Let me get this straight. Jesus is out cold. He’s whisked to the tomb, later spirited away, nursed back to health, and somehow ends up at Masada.”

  “That’s what Joyce says.”

  “What was this wingnut doing in Israel?”

  “Nice to see you’re keeping an open mind. Joyce went to research a book on Masada. But the Israeli authorities denied him access.”

  “Maybe the Grosset incident is a figment of Joyce’s imagination. Or a story he invented out of spite.”

  “Maybe it is.” I helped myself to the last of the salsa. “Or maybe it’s real.”

  Nothing much happened for the next few days. I finished the Joyce book. I finished the Yadin book.

  Jake was right on that account, too. Yadin described the remains from the Herodian period. He discussed the Romans who’d occupied Masada briefly after 73 C.E., and Byzantine monks who’d settled there in the fifth and sixth centuries. He gave detailed information on the period of the Jewish revolt, including an elaborate discussion of the three skeletons found in the northern palace. Wide-angles, close-ups, diagrams, maps. But just one photo and a few paragraphs on the cave skeletons.

  Curious.

  On Sunday, Ryan and I went skating on Beaver Lake, then gorged on mussels at L’Actuel on rue Peel. I had la casserole marinière au vin blanc. Ryan had la casserole à l’ail. I’ve got to credit the boy. He can handle garlic that would kill a marine.

  On Monday I logged into my e-mail and found a report from the radiometric-testing lab.

  I hesitated. What if the skeleton was only a century old? Or medieval, like the shroud of Turin?

  What if it dated to the time of Christ?

  If it did, it did. So what? My estimate of age at death made the individual too old to be Jesus. Or too young, if you believed Joyce.

  I double-clicked to open the file.

  The lab had found sufficient organic material to triple-test each bone and tooth sample. The results were presented as raw data, then calibrated to a date in years before present, and to a calendar date range, given as C.E. or B.C.E. Nothing politically incorrect about archaeology.

  I looked at the dates derived from the tooth.

  Sample 1: Mean Date (BP—years before present)

  1,970 +/- 41 years

  Calendar date range 6 BCE—76 CE

  Sample 2: Mean Date (BP—years before present)

  1,937 +/- 54 years

  Calendar date range 14 CE—122 CE

  Sample 3: Mean Date (BP—years before present)

  2,007 +/- 45 years

  Calendar date range 47 BCE—43 CE

  I looked at the femoral dates. Total overlap with the dental dates.

  Two millennia.

  The skeleton dated to the time of Christ.

  I experienced a moment of total blankness. Then arguments and questions bumper-car-ed through my brain.

  What did it mean?

  Who to call?

  I dialed Ryan, got his voice mail, and left a message telling him the bones were two thousand years old.

  I dialed Jake. Voice mail. Same message.

  Now what?

  Sylvain Morissonneau.

  The urge expelled all momentary uncertainty. Grabbing jacket and purse, I bolted for the Montérégie.

  Within an hour I was at l’Abbaye Sainte-Marie-des-Neiges. This time I went straight through the orange door into the lobby separating the library from Morissonneau’s office corridor. No one appeared.

  Muffled chanting floated from somewhere to my right. I started toward it.

  I’d gone ten yards when a voice stopped me.

  “Arrêtez!” More hiss than speech. Halt!

  I turned.

  “You have no right to be here.” In the dim light, the monk’s eyes looked devoid of pupils.

  “I’ve come to see Father Morissonneau.”

  The hooded face stiffened.

  “Who are you?”

  “Dr. Temperance Brennan.”

  “Why do you disturb us in our sorrow?” The dead black eyes bore straight into mine.

  “I’m sorry. I must speak with Father Morissonneau.”

  Something flicked in the gaze, like a match flaring behind darkly tinted glass. The monk crossed himself.

  His next words sent ice up my spine.

  16

  “DEAD?”

  Not a flicker in the gargoyle stare.

  “When?” I sputtered. “How?”

  “Why have you come here?” The monk’s voice wasn’t cold or warm. It was neutral, devoid of emotion.

  “Father Morissonneau and I met not long ago. He seemed fine.” I made no effort to mask my shock. “When did he die?”

  “Almost a week ago.” Flat, revealing nothing beyond the words.

  “How?”

  “You are family?”

  “No.”

  “A journalist?”

  “No.”

  I dug a card from my purse and handed it to him. The monk’s eyes slid down, back up.

  “On Wednesday, March second, the Abbot failed to return from his morning walk. The grounds were searched. His body was found on one of the paths.”

  I sucked in air.

  “His heart had failed.”

  I thought back
. Morissonneau had looked perfectly healthy. Robust, even.

  “Was the abbot under the care of a physician?”

  “I am not at liberty to share that information.”

  “Did he have a history of coronary disease?”

  The monk didn’t bother to answer that.

  “Was the coroner notified?”

  “The Lord God reigns over life and death. We accept his wisdom.”

  “The coroner doesn’t,” I snapped.

  Strobe images. Ferris’s shattered skull. Morissonneau stroking a box of old bones. A Burne-Jones painting The Resurrection. Words about jihad. Assassination.

  I was growing frightened. And angry.

  “Where is Father Morissonneau now?”

  “With the Lord.”

  I gave the monk a screw-you look.

  “Where is his body?”

  The monk frowned.

  I frowned.

  A robed arm unfolded and gestured in the direction of the door. I was being ushered out.

  I could have argued that the priest’s death should have been reported, that by failing to do so the monks had broken the law. This didn’t seem the time.

  Mumbling condolences, I hurried from the monastery.

  On the drive back to Montreal, my fear escalated. What had Jake said about the skeleton Morissonneau had given me? Its discovery could be explosive.

  Explosive how?

  Avram Ferris had possessed the skeleton and he’d been shot. Sylvain Morissonneau had possessed the skeleton and he was dead.

  Now I possessed the skeleton. Was I in danger?

  Every few minutes my eyes jerked to the rearview mirror.

  Had Morissonneau really died of natural causes? The man had been in his fifties. He’d looked perfectly fit.

  Had be been murdered?

  My chest felt tight. The car seemed hot and cramped. Though the weather was frigid, I cracked a window.

  Ferris had died sometime over the weekend of February twelfth. Kessler/Kaplan had entered Israel on the twenty-seventh. Morissonneau had been found dead on March second.

  If Morissonneau’s death was due to foul play, Kaplan couldn’t have been involved.

  Unless Kaplan had returned to Canada.

  Again, I checked my rear. Nothing but empty highway.

  I’d visited Morissonneau on Saturday, the twenty-sixth. He’d died four days later.