Déjà Dead

by Kathy Reichs

  “Merde,” said Claudel. It was an acceptable alternative.

  Charbonneau leaned into the car and extracted a pack of Players from his jacket pocket. He slumped against a fender, lit up, and blew the smoke out the corner of his mouth.

  “Bastard can cut a crowd like a cockroach through shit.”

  “He knows his way around here,” I said, resisting the urge to explore the damage to my cheek. “That helps him.”

  He smoked for a moment.

  “Think it was our guy from the cash machine?”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t get a look at his face.”

  Claudel snorted, then pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and began wiping the perspiration from the back of his neck.

  I locked my one good eye on him. “Were you able to ID him?”

  Another snort.

  I looked at him shaking his head, and my plan of zero commentary evaporated.

  “You’re treating me like I’m not quite bright, Monsieur Claudel, and you’re starting to piss me off.”

  He gave another in his series of smirks.

  “How’s your face feel?” he asked.

  “Peachy!” I shot back between clenched teeth. “At my age free dermabrasion is a bonus.”

  “Next time you decide to go on a wild-assed crime fighting spree, don’t expect me to scrape you up.”

  “Next time do a better job of controlling an arrest scene and I won’t have to.” The blood was pounding in my temples, and my hands were clenched so tightly the nails were digging small crescents into the flesh of my palms.

  “Okay. Knock this shit off,” said Charbonneau, flipping his cigarette in a wide arc. “Let’s toss the apartment.”

  He turned to the patrolmen, who had been standing by quietly.

  “Call in recovery.”

  “You got it,” said the taller, moving toward the squad car.

  Silently, the rest of us followed Charbonneau to the red-brick building and reentered the corridor. The other patrolman waited outside.

  In our absence someone had closed the outer door, but the one leading to number 6 still stood wide. We entered the room and spread out as before, like characters in a stage play following directions for blocking.

  I moved toward the back. The hot plate was cold now, and the SpaghettiOs had not improved with age. A fly danced on the edge of the pan, reminding me of other, grislier leftovers that may have been abandoned by the occupant. Nothing else had changed.

  I walked over to the door in the far right corner of the room. Small chunks of plaster littered the floor, the result of a doorknob slammed against the wall with great force. The door was half open, revealing a wooden staircase descending to a lower floor. It dropped one step to a small landing, made a ninety-degree turn to the right, and disappeared into darkness. The landing was lined with tin cans where it met the back wall. Rusted hooks jutted from the wood at eye level. I could see a light switch on the wall to the left. The plate was missing, and the exposed wires looped around themselves like worms in a bait carton.

  Charbonneau joined me and eased the door back with his pen. I indicated the switch, and he used the pen to flip it. A bulb went on somewhere below, casting the bottom steps into shadowy relief. We listened to the gloom. Silence. Claudel came up behind us.

  Charbonneau stepped onto the landing, paused, and descended slowly. I followed, feeling each riser protest softly under my feet. My battered legs trembled as though I’d just run a marathon, but I resisted the temptation to touch the walls. The passage was narrow, and all I could see were Charbonneau’s shoulders ahead of me.

  At the bottom, the air was dank and smelled of mildew. Already my cheek felt like molten lava, and the coolness was a welcome relief. I looked around. It was a standard basement, roughly half the size of the building. The back wall was constructed of unfinished cinder blocks, and must have been added later to subdivide a larger area. A metal washtub stood ahead and to the right, with a long wooden workbench snugged up against it. Pink paint was peeling from the bench. Below it lay a collection of cleaning brushes, their bristles yellowed and covered in cobwebs. A black garden hose was coiled neatly on the wall.

  A behemoth furnace filled the space to the right, its round metal ducts branching and rising like the limbs of an oak. A midden of trash circled its base. In the dim light I could identify broken picture frames, bicycle wheels, bent and twisted lawn chairs, empty paint cans, and a commode. The castoffs looked like offerings to a Druid god.

  A bare bulb hung in the middle of the room, throwing about one watt of light. That was it. The rest of the cellar was empty.

  “Sonofabitch must’ve been waiting at the top,” said Charbonneau, gazing up the stairs, hands on his hips.

  “Madame Fatass might have told us the guy had this little hidey-hole,” said Claudel, teasing at the trash pile with the tip of his shoe. “Regular Salman Rushdie down here.”

  I was impressed by the literary reference, but having returned to my original plan of neutral observation, said nothing. My legs were beginning to ache, and something was very wrong in my neck.

  “Fucker could’ve scrambled us from behind that door.”

  Charbonneau and I didn’t reply. We’d had the same thought.

  Dropping his hands, Charbonneau crossed to the stairs and started up. I followed, beginning to feel a bit like Tonto. When I emerged into the room, the heat rolled over me. I crossed to the makeshift table and started examining the collage on the wall above.

  The central piece was a large map of the Montreal area. Cutouts from magazines and newspapers surrounded it. Those on the right were standard issue pornography shots, the progeny of Playboy and Hustler. Young women stared from them, their bodies in distorted positions, their clothes absent or in disarray. Some pouted, some invited, and some feigned looks of orgasmic bliss. None was very convincing. The collagist was eclectic in his taste. He exhibited no preference as to body type, race, or hair color. I noted that the edges of each picture were carefully trimmed. Each was set equidistant from its neighbors and stapled in place.

  A grouping of newspaper articles occupied the space to the left of the map. Although a few were in English, the majority were drawn from the French press. I noticed that those in English were always accompanied by pictures. I leaned close and read a few sentences about a groundbreaking at a church in Drummondville. I moved to a French article on a kidnapping in Senneville. My eyes shifted to an ad for Videodrome, claiming to be the largest distributor of pornographic films in Canada. There was a piece from Allo Police on a nude dance bar. It showed “Babette” dressed in leather cross garters and draped with chains. There was another on a break-in in St.-Paul-du-Nord in which the burglar had constructed a dummy of his victim’s nightclothes, stabbed it repeatedly, then left it on her bed. Then I spotted something that again turned my blood to ice.

  In his collection St. Jacques had carefully clipped and stapled three articles side by side. Each described a serial killer. Unlike the others, these appeared to be photocopies. The first described Léopold Dion, “The Monster of Pont-Rouge.” In the spring of 1963 police had discovered him at home with the bodies of four young men. They had all been strangled.

  The second recounted the exploits of Wayne Clifford Boden, who strangled and raped women in Montreal and Calgary beginning in 1969. When arrested in 1971, his final count was four. In the margin someone had written “Bill l’étrangleur.”

  The third article covered the career of William Dean Christenson, alias Bill l’éventreur, Montreal’s own Ripper. He’d killed, decapitated, and dismembered two women in the early 1980s.

  “Look at this,” I said to no one in particular. Though the room was stifling, I felt cold all over.

  Charbonneau came up behind me. “Oh, baby, baby,” he intoned flatly, as his eyes swept over the arrangement to the right of the map. “Love in wide angle.”

  “Here,” I said, pointing at the articles. “Look at these.”

&nbs
p; Claudel joined us and the two men scanned them wordlessly. They smelled of sweat and laundered cotton and aftershave. Outside I could hear a woman calling to Sophie, and wondered briefly if she beckoned a pet or a child.

  “Holy fuck,” breathed Charbonneau, as he grasped the theme of the stories.

  “Doesn’t mean he’s Charlie Manson,” scoffed Claudel.

  “No. He’s probably working on his senior thesis.”

  For the first time I thought I detected a note of annoyance in Charbonneau’s voice.

  “The guy could have delusions of grandeur,” Claudel went on. “Maybe he watched the Menendez brothers and thought they were keen. Maybe he thinks he’s Dudley DoRight and wants to fight evil. Maybe he’s practicing his French and finds this more interesting than Tin Tin. How the fuck do I know? But it doesn’t make him Jack the Ripper.” He glanced toward the door. “Where the hell is recovery?”

  Sonofabitch, I thought, but held my tongue.

  Charbonneau and I turned our attention to the desktop. A stack of newspapers leaned against the wall. Charbonneau used his pen to rifle through them, lifting the edges then allowing the sections to drop back into place. The stack contained only want ads, most from La Presse and the Gazette.

  “Maybe the toad was looking for a job,” said Claudel sardonically. “Thought he’d use Boden as a reference.”

  “What was that underneath?” I’d seen a flash of yellow as the bottom section was lifted briefly.

  Charbonneau nudged the pen under the last section in the pile and levered it upward, tipping the stack toward the wall. A yellow tablet lay under it. I wondered briefly if pen manipulation was required training for detectives. He allowed the newspapers to drop back to the desktop, slid the pen to the back of the stack, and pushed at the tablet, sliding it forward and into view.

  It was a lined yellow pad, the type favored by attorneys. We could see that the top page was partially filled with writing. Bracing the stack with the back of his hand, Charbonneau teased the tablet out and slid it into full view.

  The impact of the serial killer stories was nothing compared to the jolt I felt on seeing what was scrawled there. The fear that I’d kept down deep in its lair lunged out and grabbed me in its teeth.

  Isabelle Gagnon. Margaret Adkins. Their names leapt out at me. They were part of a list of seven that ran along the bound edge of the tablet. Beside each, running sideways across the page, was a series of columns separated by vertical lines. It looked like a crude spreadsheet containing personal data on each of the individuals listed. It did not look unlike my own spreadsheet, except I didn’t recognize the other five names.

  The first column listed addresses, the second phone numbers. The next held brief notations on the residence. Apt. w/ outsd. entr., condo, 1st flr.; house w/ yd. The next column contained sets of letters behind some names, for others it was blank. I looked at the Adkins entry. Hu. So. The combinations looked familiar. I closed my eyes and ran a key word search. Kinship charts.

  “Those are people they live with,” I said. “Look at Adkins. Husband. Son.”

  “Yeah. Gagnon’s got Br and Bf. Brother, boyfriend,” said Charbonneau.

  “Big fag,” added Claudel. “What’s Do mean?” he asked, referring to the last column. St. Jacques had written it behind some names, left no notation for others.

  No one had an answer.

  Charbonneau flipped back the first sheet and everyone fell silent reading the next set of notations. The page was divided in half with one name at the top and another halfway down. Below each was another set of columns. That on the left was headed “Date,” the next two were marked “In” and “Out.” The empty spaces were filled with dates and times.

  “Jesus H. Christ, he stalked them. He picked them out and tracked them like goddamn quail or something,” exploded Charbonneau.

  Claudel said nothing.

  “This sick sonofabitch hunted women,” repeated Charbonneau, as if rephrasing it would somehow make it more believable. Or less.

  “Some research project,” I said softly. “And he hasn’t turned it in yet.”

  “What?” asked Claudel.

  “Adkins and Gagnon are dead. These dates are recent. Who are the others?”

  “Shit.”

  “Where the fuck is recovery?” Claudel strode over to the door and disappeared into the corridor. I could hear him swearing at the patrolman.

  My eyes wandered back to the wall. I didn’t want to think about the list anymore today. I was hot and exhausted and in pain, and there was no satisfaction in the realization that I was probably right, and that now we would work together. That even Claudel would come on board.

  I looked at the map, searching for something to divert myself. It was a large one showing in rainbow detail the island, the river, and the jumble of communities comprising the CUM and surrounding areas. The pink municipalities were crisscrossed by small white streets, and linked by red arterial roads and large blue autoroutes. They were dotted by the green of parks, golf courses, and cemeteries, the orange of institutions, the lavender of shopping centers, and the gray of industrial areas.

  I found Centre-ville and leaned closer to try to locate my own small street. It was only one block long and, as I searched for it, I began to understand why taxis had so much difficulty finding me. I vowed to be more patient in the future. Or at least more specific. I traced Sherbrooke west to intersect Guy, but found I’d gone too far. It was then I had my third shock of the afternoon.

  My finger hovered above Atwater, just outside the orange polygon demarcating Le Grand Séminaire. My eye was drawn to a small symbol sketched in pen at its southwest corner, a circle enclosing an X. It lay close to the site where Isabelle Gagnon’s body had been discovered. With my heart pounding, I shifted to the east end and tried to find the Olympic Stadium.

  “Monsieur Charbonneau, look at this,” I said, my voice strained and shaky.

  He came closer.

  “Where’s the stadium?”

  He touched it with his pen and looked at me.

  “Where’s Margaret Adkins’s condo?”

  He hesitated a minute, leaned in, and started to point to a street running south from Parc Maisonneuve. His pen rested in midair as we both stared at the tiny figure. It was an X drawn and circled in pen.

  “Where did Chantale Trottier live?”

  “Ste. Anne-de-Bellevue. Too far out.”

  We both stared at the map.

  “Let’s search it systematically, sector by sector,” I suggested. “I’ll start in the upper left-hand corner and work down, you start with the lower right and work up.”

  He found it first. The third X. The mark was on the south shore, near St. Lambert. He knew of no homicides in that district. Neither did Claudel. We looked for another ten minutes, but found no other X’s.

  We were just starting a second search when the crime scene van pulled up in front.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” asked Claudel as they came through the door with their metal cases.

  “It’s like driving through Woodstock out there,” said Pierre Gilbert, “only less mud.” His round face was completely encircled by curly beard and curlier hair, reminding me of a Roman god. I could never remember which one. “What’ve we got here?”

  “Girl killed over on Desjardins? Pussbag that lifted her card calls this little hole home,” said Claudel. “Maybe.”

  He indicated the room with a sweep of his arm. “Put a lot of himself into it.”

  “Well, we’ll take it out,” said Gilbert with a smile. His hair was clinging in circles to his wet forehead. “Let’s dust.”

  “There’s a basement, too.”

  “Oui.” Save for the inflection, dropping then rising, it sounded more like a question than an assent. Whyyyy?

  “Claude, why don’t you start down below? Marcie, take the counter back there.”

  Marcie moved to the back of the room, removed a canister from her metal suitcase, and began brushing black powd
er on the Formica counter. The other technician headed downstairs. Pierre put on latex gloves and began removing sections of newspaper from the desktop and placing them in a large plastic sack. It was then I had my final shock of the day.

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” he said, lifting a small square from what had been the middle of the stack. He studied it a long time. “C’est toi?”

  I was surprised to see him look at me.

  Wordlessly I walked over and glanced at what he had. I was unnerved to see my own familiar jeans, my “Absolutely Irish” T-shirt, my Bausch and Lomb aviator sunglasses. In his gloved hand he held the photo which had appeared in Le Journal that morning.

  For the second time that day I saw myself locked at an exhumation two years in the past. The picture had been cut and trimmed with the same careful precision as those on the wall. It differed in only one respect. My image had been circled and recircled in pen, and the front of my chest was marked with a large X.

  I SLEPT A LOT OF THE WEEKEND. SATURDAY MORNING I HAD TRIED getting up, but that was short-lived. My legs trembled, and if I turned my head long fingers of pain shot up my neck and grabbed the base of my skull. My face had crusted over like crème brûlée, and my right eye looked like a purple plum gone bad. It was a weekend of soup, aspirin, and antiseptic. I spent the days dozing on the couch, keeping abreast of O. J. Simpson’s escapades. At night I was asleep by nine.

  By Monday the jackhammer had stopped pounding inside my cranium. I could walk stiffly and rotate my head somewhat. I got up early, showered, and was in my office by eighty-thirty.

  There were three requisitions on my desk. Ignoring them, I tried Gabby’s number, but got only her machine. I made myself a cup of instant coffee and uncurled the phone messages I’d taken from my slot. One was from a detective in Verdun, another from Andrew Ryan, the third a reporter. I threw the last away and set the others by the phone. Neither Charbonneau nor Claudel had called. Nor had Gabby.