Déjà Dead

by Kathy Reichs

  I dialed the CUM squad room and asked for Charbonneau. After a pause I was told he wasn’t there. Neither was Claudel. I left a message, wondering if they were out on the street early or starting the day late.

  I dialed Andrew Ryan but his line was busy. Since I was accomplishing nothing by phone, I decided to drop by in person. Maybe Ryan would discuss Trottier.

  I rode the elevator to the first floor and wound my way back to the squad room. The scene was much livelier than during my last visit. As I crossed to Ryan’s desk I could feel eyes on my face. It made me vaguely uncomfortable. Obviously they knew about Friday.

  “Dr. Brennan,” said Ryan in English, unfolding from his chair and extending a hand. His elongated face broke into a smile when he saw the scab that was my right cheek. “Trying out a new shade of blush?”

  “Right. Crimson cement. I got a message you called?”

  For a moment he looked blank.

  “Oh yeah. I pulled the jacket on Trottier. You can take a look if you want.”

  He leaned over and fiddled with some folders on his desk, spreading them out in a fan-shaped heap. He selected one and handed it to me just as his partner entered the room. Bertrand strode toward us wearing a light gray sports jacket monochromatically blended to darker gray pants, a black shirt, and a black-and-white floral tie. Save for the tan, he looked like an image from 1950s TV.

  “Dr. Brennan, how goes it?”

  “Great.”

  “Wow, nice effect.”

  “Pavement is impersonal,” I said, looking around for a place to spread the file. “May I …” I gestured to an empty desk.

  “Sure, they’re out already.”

  I sat down and began sorting the contents of the folder, leafing through incident reports, untangling interviews, and turning over photos. Chantale Trottier. It was like walking barefoot across hot asphalt. The pain came back as though it had happened yesterday, and I had to keep looking away, allowing my mind breaks from the surging sorrow.

  On October 16, 1993, a sixteen-year-old girl rose reluctantly, ironed her blouse, and spent an hour shampooing and preening. She refused the breakfast her mother offered, and left her suburban home to join friends for the train ride to school. She wore a plaid uniform jumper and knee socks and carried her books in a backpack. She chatted and giggled, and ate lunch after math class. At the end of the day she vanished. Thirty hours later her butchered body was found in plastic garbage bags forty miles from her home.

  A shadow fell across the desk and I looked up. Bertrand held two mugs of coffee. The one he offered me said “Monday I Start My Diet.” Gratefully, I reached out and took it.

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Not much.” I took a sip. “She was sixteen. Found in St. Jerome.”

  “Yup.”

  “Gagnon was twenty-three. Found in Centre-ville. Also in plastic bags,” I mused aloud.

  He tipped his head.

  “Adkins was twenty-four, found at home, over by the stadium.”

  “She wasn’t dismembered.”

  “No, but she was cut up and mutilated. Maybe the killer got interrupted. Had less time.”

  He sipped his coffee, slurping loudly. When he lowered the mug, milky brown beads clung to his mustache.

  “Gagnon and Adkins were both on St. Jacques’s list.” I assumed the story had spread by now. I was right.

  “Yeah but the media went snake over those cases. The guy had clipped Allo Police and Photo Police articles on both of them. With pictures. He could just be a maggot that feeds on that kind of crap.”

  “Could be.” I took another sip, not really believing it.

  “Didn’t he have a whole dungheap of stuff?”

  “Yeah,” said Ryan from behind us. “Dickhead had clippings on all kinds of weird shit. Francoeur, didn’t you catch some of those dummy cases when you were with property?” This to a short, fat man with a shiny brown head who was eating a Snickers bar four desks over.

  Francoeur put down the candy, licking his fingers and nodding. His rimless glasses blinked as his head moved up and down.

  “Um. Hum. Two.” Lick. “Damnedest thing.” Lick. “This squirrel creeps the place, rifles the bedroom, then makes a big doll with a nightgown or a sweat suit, something that belongs to the lady of the house. He stuffs it, dresses it up in her underwear, then lays it out on the bed and slashes it. Probably makes him harder than a math final.” Lick. Lick. “Then he gets his sorry ass out of there. Doesn’t even take anything.”

  “Sperm?”

  “Nope. Believes in safe sleaze, I guess.”

  “What’s he use?”

  “Probably a knife, but we never found it. He must bring it with him.”

  Francoeur peeled back the wrapper and took another bite of Snickers.

  “How’s he get in?”

  “Bedroom window.” It came out through caramel and peanuts.

  “When?”

  “Night, usually.”

  “Where’s he put on these little freak shows?”

  Francoeur chewed slowly for a moment, then, using a thumbnail, removed a speck of peanut from his molar. He inspected and flicked it.

  “One was in St. Calixte, and I think the other was St. Hubert. The one this guy clipped went down a couple of weeks ago in St. Paul-du-Nord.” His upper lip bulged as he ran his tongue over his incisors. “And I think one fell to the CUM. I sort of remember a call about a year ago from someone over there.”

  Silence.

  “They’ll pop him, but this squirrel isn’t exactly high priority. He doesn’t hurt anybody and he doesn’t take anything. He’s just got a twisted idea of a cheap date.”

  Francoeur crumbled the Snickers wrapper and arced it into the wastebasket beside his desk.

  “I hear the concerned citizen in St. Paul-du-Nord refused to follow up with a complaint.”

  “Yeah,” said Ryan, “those cases are about as rewarding as a lobotomy with a Scout knife.”

  “Our hero probably clipped the story because he gets a hard-on reading about busting someone’s bedroom. He had a story on that girl out in Senneville and we know he wasn’t the one grabbed her. Turned out the father had the kid stashed the whole time.” Francoeur leaned back in his chair. “Maybe he just identifies with a kindred pervert.”

  I listened to this exchange without really looking at the participants. My eyes drifted over a large city map behind Francoeur’s head. It was similar to the one I’d seen in the Berger apartment, but drawn to a smaller scale, extending out to include the far eastern and western suburbs off the island of Montreal.

  The discussion snaked around the squad room, scooping up anecdotes of Peeping Toms and other sexual perverts. As it meandered from desk to desk, I rose quietly and crossed to the map for a closer view, hoping to draw as little attention to myself as possible. I studied it, replaying the exercise Charbonneau and I had gone through on Friday, mentally plotting the location of the X’s. Ryan’s voice startled me.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  I took a container of pins from a ledge below the map. Each was topped by a large, brightly colored ball. Choosing a red one, I placed it at the southwest corner of Le Grand Séminaire.

  “Gagnon,” I said.

  Next I placed one below the Olympic Stadium.

  “Adkins.”

  The third went in the upper-left corner, near a broad expanse of river known as Lac des Deux-Montagnes.

  “Trottier.”

  The island of Montreal is shaped like a foot with its ankle dipping in from the northwest, its heel to the south, and its toes pointing northeast. Two pins marked the foot, just above the sole, one in the heel of Centreville, another to the east, halfway up the toes. The third lay up the ankle, on the far western end of the island. There was no apparent pattern.

  “St. Jacques marked this one and this one,” I said, pointing to one of the downtown pins, then to the one on the east end.

  I searched the south shore, following the V
ictoria Bridge across to St. Lambert, then dropping south. Finding the street names I’d seen on Friday, I took a fourth pin and pushed it in on the far side of the river, just below the arch of the foot. The scatter made even less sense. Ryan looked at me quizzically.

  “That was his third X.”

  “What’s there?”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “Hell if I know. Could be his dead dog Spike.” He glanced at his watch. “Look, we’ve got this …”

  “Don’t you think it would be a good idea to find out?”

  He looked at me for a long time before he answered. His eyes were neon blue, and I was mildly surprised that I’d never noticed them before. He shook his head.

  “It just doesn’t feel right. It isn’t enough. Right now your serial killer idea’s got more holes than the Trans-Canada. Fill them in. Get me something else, or get Claudel to do a request for an SQ search. So far, this isn’t our baby.”

  Bertrand was signaling to him, pointing at his watch, then hitching his thumb at the door. Ryan looked at his partner, nodded, then turned the neon back on me.

  I said nothing. My eyes roved over his face, rummaging for a sign of encouragement. If it was there, I couldn’t find it.

  “Gotta go. Just leave the file on my desk when you’re done.”

  “Right.”

  “And … Uh … Keep your head up.”

  “What?”

  “I heard what you found in there. This prick could be more than just your average dirtbag.” He reached into his pocket, withdrew a card, and wrote something on it. “You can get me at this number just about any time. Call if you need help.”

  • • •

  Ten minutes later I was sitting at my desk, frustrated and antsy. I was trying to concentrate on other things, but having little success. Every time a phone rang in an office along the corridor, I reached for mine, willing it to be Claudel or Charbonneau. At ten-fifteen I called again.

  A voice said, “Hold, please.” Then.

  “Claudel.”

  “It’s Dr. Brennan,” I said.

  The silence was deep enough to scuba.

  “Oui.”

  “Did you get my messages?”

  “Oui.”

  I could tell he was going to be as forthcoming as a bootlegger at a tax audit.

  “I wondered what you dug up on St. Jacques?”

  He gave a snort. “Yeah, St. Jacques. Right.”

  Though I felt like reaching across the line to rip out his tongue, I decided the situation called for tact, rule number one in the care and handling of arrogant detectives.

  “You don’t think that’s his real name?”

  “If that’s his real name, I’m Margaret Thatcher.”

  “So, where are you?”

  There was another pause, and I could see him turning his face to the ceiling, deciding how best to rid himself of me.

  “I’ll tell you where we are, we’re nowhere. We didn’t get piss all. No dripping weapons. No home movies. No rambling confession notes. No souvenir body parts. Zip.”

  “Prints?”

  “None usable.”

  “Personal effects?”

  “The guy’s taste falls somewhere between severe and stark. No decorative touches. No personal effects. No clothes. Oh yeah, one sweatshirt and an old rubber glove. A dirty blanket. That’s it.”

  “Why the glove?”

  “Maybe he worried about his nails.”

  “What do you have?”

  “You saw it. His collection of Miss Show Me Your Twangie shots, the map, the newspapers, the clippings, the list. Oh, and some Franco-American spaghetti.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No toiletries? Drugstore items?”

  “Nada.”

  I picked through that for a moment.

  “Doesn’t sound like he really lives there.”

  “If he does, he’s the filthiest sonofabitch you’ll ever meet. He doesn’t brush his teeth or shave. No soap. No shampoo. No floss.”

  I gave that some thought.

  “How do you read it?”

  “Could be the little freak just uses the place as a hidey-hole for his true crime and porno hobby. Maybe his old lady doesn’t like his taste in art. Maybe she doesn’t let him jack off at home. How should I know?”

  “What about the list.”

  “We’re checking out the names and addresses.”

  “Any in St. Lambert?”

  Another pause.

  “No.”

  “Any more information on how he might have gotten Margaret Adkins’s bank card?”

  This time the pause was longer, more palpably hostile.

  “Dr. Brennan, why don’t you stick to what you do and let us catch the killers?”

  “Is he?” I couldn’t resist asking.

  “What?”

  “A killer?”

  I found myself listening to a dial tone.

  • • •

  I spent what was left of the morning estimating the age, sex, and height of an individual from a single ulna. The bone was found by children digging a fort near Pointe-aux-Trembles, and probably came from an old cemetery.

  At twelve-fifteen I went upstairs for a Diet Coke. I brought it back to my office, closed the door, and took out my sandwich and peach. Swiveling to face the river, I encouraged my thoughts to wander. They didn’t. Like a Patriot missile, they homed in on Claudel.

  He still rejected the idea of a serial killer. Could he be right? Could the similarities be coincidental? Could I be manufacturing associations that weren’t there? Could St. Jacques merely have a grotesque interest in violence? Of course. Movie producers and publishing houses make millions off the same theme. Maybe he wasn’t a killer himself, maybe he just charted the murders or played some kind of voyeuristic tracking game. Maybe he found Margaret Adkins’s bank card. Maybe he stole it before her death and she hadn’t yet missed it. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

  No. It didn’t tally. If not St. Jacques, there was someone out there responsible for several of these deaths. At least some of the murders were linked. I didn’t want to wait for another butchered body to prove me right.

  What would it take to convince Claudel I wasn’t a dimwit with an overactive imagination? He resented my involvement in his territory, thought I was overstepping my bounds. He’d told me to stick to what I do. And Ryan. What had he said? Potholes. Not enough. Find stronger evidence of a link.

  “All right, Claudel, you sonofabitch, that’s exactly what you’ll get.”

  I said it aloud, snapping my chair into full upright position and tossing my peach pit into the wastebasket.

  So.

  What do I do?

  I dig up bodies. I look at bones.

  IN THE HISTOLOGY LAB I ASKED DENIS TO PULL OUT CASES 25906-93 and 26704-94. I cleared the table to the right of the operating scope and placed my clipboard and pen. I took out two tubes of vinyl polysiloxane and positioned them, along with a small spatula, a tablet of coated papers, and a digital caliper accurate to .0001 inch.

  Denis placed two cardboard boxes on the end of the table, one large and one small, each sealed and carefully labeled. I eased the lid from the larger box, selected portions of Isabelle Gagnon’s skeleton, and laid them out on the right half of the table.

  Next I opened the smaller box. Though Chantale Trottier’s body had been returned to her family for burial, segments of bone had been retained as evidence, a standard procedure in homicide cases involving skeletal injury or mutilation.

  I removed sixteen Ziploc bags and put them on the left side of the table. Each was marked as to body part and side. Right wrist. Left wrist. Right knee. Left knee. Cervical vertebrae. Thoracic and lumbar vertebrae. I emptied each bag and arranged the contents in anatomical order. The two segments of femur went next to their corresponding portions of tibia and fibula to form the knee joints. Each wrist was represented by six inches of radius and ulna. The ends of the bones sawed
at autopsy were clearly notched. I would not confuse these cuts with those made by the killer.

  I pulled the mixing pad toward me, opened one of the tubes, and squeezed a bright blue ribbon of dental impression material onto the top sheet. Next to it I squirted a white ribbon from the second tube. Selecting one of Trottier’s arm bones, I placed it in front of me and picked up the spatula. Working quickly, I mixed the blue catalyst and the white base, kneading and scraping the two squiggles into a homogenous goo. I scraped the compound into a plastic syringe, then squeezed it out like cake decoration, carefully covering the joint surface.

  I laid the first bone down, cleaned the spatula and syringe, tore off the used sheet, and began the process anew with another bone. As each mold hardened I removed it, marked it as to case number, anatomical site, side, and date, and placed it next to the bone on which it had been formed. I repeated the procedure until a rubbery blue mold sat next to each of the bones in front of me. It took over two hours.

  Next I turned to the microscope. I set the magnification and adjusted the fiber-optic light to angle across the viewing plate. Starting with Isabelle Gagnon’s right femur I began a meticulous examination of each of the small nicks and scratches I had just cast.

  The cut marks seemed to be of two types. Each arm bone had a series of trench-like troughs lying parallel to its joint surfaces. The walls of the troughs were straight and dropped to meet their floors at ninety-degree angles. Most of the trench-like cuts were less than a quarter of an inch in length and averaged five hundredths of an inch across. The leg bones were circled by similar grooves.

  Other marks were V-shaped, narrower, and lacked the squared-off walls and floors of the trench-like grooves. The V-shaped cuts lay parallel to the trenches on the ends of the long bones, but were unaccompanied in the hip sockets and on the vertebrae.

  I diagrammed the position of each mark, and recorded its length, width, and, in the case of the trenches, depth. Next I observed each trench and its corresponding mold from above and in cross-section. The molds allowed me to see minute features not readily apparent when viewing the trenches directly. Tiny bumps, grooves, and scratches marking the walls and floors appeared as three-dimensional negatives. It was like viewing a relief map, the islands, terraces, and synclines of each trench replicated in bright blue plastic.