Déjà Dead

by Kathy Reichs

I let that sink in.

  “She was still alive.”

  He nodded. I didn’t need to explain that a wound inflicted after death will bleed very little since the heart is no longer pumping and blood pressure is gone. Francine Morisette-Champoux had bled profusely.

  “With Margaret Adkins it was a metal statue. She was also alive.”

  Silently, I reached behind me and pulled the Gagnon file. I withdrew the scene photos and spread them in front of him. There was the torso lying on its plastic bag, dappled by the four o’clock sunlight. Nothing had been moved but the covering of leaves. The plunger lay in place, its red rubber cup snug against the pelvic bones, its handle projecting toward the body’s severed neck.

  “I believe Gagnon’s killer shoved that plunger into her with enough force to drive the handle through her belly and clear up to her diaphragm.”

  He studied the photos for a long time.

  “Same pattern with all three victims,” I hammered on. “Forceful penetration with a foreign object while the victim is alive. Body mutilation after death. Coincidence, Monsieur Charbonneau? How many sadists do we want out there, Monsieur Charbonneau?”

  He ran his fingers through the bristle on his head, then drummed them on the arm of the chair.

  “Why didn’t you tell us this sooner?”

  “I just realized the Morisette-Champoux connection today. With only Adkins and Gagnon, it seemed a bit thin.”

  “What does Ryan say?”

  “Haven’t told him.”

  Unconsciously I fingered the scab on my cheek. I still looked like I’d gone to a TKO with George Foreman.

  “Shit.” He said it with little force.

  “What?”

  “I think I’m beginning to agree with you. Claudel’s going to bust my balls about this.” More drumming. “What else?”

  “The saw marks and pattern of dismemberment are almost identical for Gagnon and Trottier.”

  “Yeah. Ryan told us that.”

  “And the unknown from St. Lambert.”

  “A fifth?” It came out “fit.”

  “You’re very quick.”

  “Thanks.” Back to drumming. “Know who she is yet?”

  I shook my head. “Ryan’s working on it.”

  He ran a meaty hand over his face. His knuckles were covered with patches of coarse gray hair, miniature versions of the crop on his head.

  “So what do you think about victim selection?”

  I gave a palm up gesture. “They’re all female.”

  “Great. Ages?”

  “Sixteen to forty-seven.”

  “Physicals?”

  “A mix.”

  “Locations?”

  “All over the map.”

  “So what’s the sicko bastard go for? The way they look? The boots they wear? The place they shop?”

  I replied with silence.

  “You find anything common to all five?”

  “Some sonofabitch beat the crap out of them, then killed them.”

  “Right.” Tilting forward, he placed his hands on his knees, hunched and lowered his shoulders, and gave a deep sigh. “Claudel’s going to shit flaming bullets.”

  When he’d gone I called Ryan. Neither he nor Bertrand was in, so I left a message. I went through the other dossiers, but found little of interest. Two drug dealers blasted and sawed up by former friends in crime. A man killed by his nephew, dismembered with a power saw, then stored in the basement freezer. A power failure had brought him to the attention of the rest of the family. A female torso washed up in a hockey bag, with head and arms found downriver. The husband was convicted.

  I closed the last file and realized I was starving—1:50 P.M. No wonder. I bought a ham and cheese croissant and a Diet Coke in the cafeteria on the eighth floor, and returned to my office, ordering myself to take a break. Ignoring the order, I tried Ryan again. Still out. A break it would be. I bit the sandwich and allowed my thoughts to meander. Gabby. Nope. Out of bounds. Claudel. Veto. St. Jacques. Off limits.

  Katy. How could I get through to her? Right now, no way. By default, back to Pete, and I felt a familiar flutter in my stomach. Remember the tingling skin, the pounding blood, the warm wetness between my legs. Yes, there had been passion. You’re just horny, Brennan. I took another bite of my sandwich.

  The other Pete. The nights of anger. The arguments. The dinners alone. The cold shroud of resentment that had smothered the lust. I took a swig of Coke. Why was I thinking about Pete so often? If we had a chance to do it all again … Thanks, Ms. Streisand.

  Relaxation therapy wasn’t working. I reread Lucie’s printout, careful not to drip mustard on it. I reviewed the list on page three, trying to read the items Lucie had crossed out, but her pencil marks obscured the letters. Out of curiosity, I erased each of her lines and read the entries. Two cases involved bodies stuffed into barrels then doused with acid. A new twist on the ever-popular drug burn.

  The third item puzzled me. Its LML number indicated a 1990 case, and that Pelletier had been the pathologist. No coroner was listed. In the name field it read: Singe. The data fields for date of birth, date of autopsy, and cause of death were empty. The entry “démembrement/postmortem” had prompted the computer to include the case in Lucie’s list.

  Finishing the croissant, I went to the central files and pulled the jacket. It contained only three items: a police incident report, a one-page opinion by the pathologist, and an envelope of photographs. I thumbed through the pictures, read the reports, then went in search of Pelletier.

  “Got a minute?” I said to his hunched back.

  He turned from the microscope, glasses in one hand, pen in the other. “Come in, come in,” he urged, sliding the bifocals onto his face.

  My office had a window; his had space. He strode across it and gestured to one of two chairs flanking a low table in front of his desk. Reaching into his lab coat, he withdrew a pack of du Maurier’s and extended it to me. I shook my head. We’d been through the ritual a thousand times. He knew I didn’t smoke, but would always offer. Like Claudel, Pelletier was set in his ways.

  “What can I help you with?” he said, lighting up.

  “I’m curious about an old case of yours. Goes back to 1990.”

  “Ah, Mon Dieu, can I remember that far back? I can barely remember my own address sometimes.” He leaned forward, cupped his mouth, and looked conspiratorial. “I write it on matchbooks, just in case.”

  We both laughed. “Dr. Pelletier, I think you remember just about everything you want to remember.”

  He shrugged and wagged his head, all innocence.

  “Anyway, I brought the file.” I held it up, then opened it. “Police report says the remains were found in a gym bag behind the Voyageur bus station. Wino opened it, thinking maybe he could find the owner.”

  “Right,” said Pelletier. “Honest rubbies are so common they should form their own fraternal organization.”

  “Anyway, he didn’t like the aroma. Said”—I skimmed the incident report to find the exact phrase—“‘the smell of Satan rose up out of the bag and surrounded my soul.’ Unquote.”

  “A poet. I like that,” said Pelletier. “Wonder what he’d say about my shorts.”

  I ignored that and read on. “He took the bag to a janitor, who called the police. They found a collection of body parts wrapped up in some sort of tablecloth.”

  “Ah, oui. I remember that one,” he said, pointing a yellowed finger at me. “Grisly. Horrible.” He had that look.

  “Dr. Pelletier?”

  “The case of the terminal monkey.”

  “Then I read your report correctly?”

  He raised his eyebrows questioningly.

  “It really was a monkey?”

  He nodded gravely. “Capucin.”

  “Why did it come here?”

  “Dead.”

  “Yes.” Everyone’s a comedian. “But why a coroner case?”

  The look on my face must have prompted a straight answer
. “Whatever was in there was small, and someone had skinned it and cut it up. Hell, it could have been anything. Cops thought it might be a fetus or a neonate, so they sent it to us.”

  “Was there anything odd about the case?” I wasn’t sure what I was looking for.

  “Nah. Just another sliced-up monkey.” The corners of his mouth twitched slightly.

  “Right.” Dumb question. “Anything strike you about the way the monkey was cut up?”

  “Not really. These monkey dismemberments are all the same.”

  This was going nowhere.

  “Did you ever find out whose monkey it was?”

  “Actually, we did. A blurb appeared in the paper, and some guy called from the university.”

  “UQAM?”

  “Yeah, I think so. A biologist or zoologist or something. Anglophone. Ah. Wait.”

  He went to a desk drawer, pushed the contents around, then withdrew a stack of business cards bound with a rubber band. Rolling the band off, he flicked through the cards and handed one to me.

  “That’s him. I saw him when he came to ID the deceased.”

  The card read: Parker T. Bailey, Ph.D., Professeur de Biologie, Université du Québec à Montréal, and gave e-mail, telephone, and fax numbers, along with an address.

  “What was the story?” I asked.

  “The gentleman keeps monkeys at the university for his research. One day he came in and found one less subject.”

  “Stolen?”

  “Stolen? Liberated? Escaped? Who knows? The primate was AWOL.” The expression sounded odd in French.

  “So he read about the dead monkey in the paper and called here?”

  “C’est ça.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “The monkey?”

  I nodded.

  “We released it to …” He gestured at the card.

  “Dr. Bailey,” I supplied.

  “Oui. There were no next of kin. At least, not in Quebec.” Not a twitch.

  “I see.”

  I looked at the card again. This is nothing, my left brain said, while at the same time I heard myself asking, “May I keep this?”

  “Of course.”

  “One other thing.” I laid the trap for myself. “Why do you call it the case of the terminal monkey?”

  “Well, it was,” he answered, surprised.

  “Was what?”

  “The monkey. It was terminal.”

  “Yes. I see.”

  “Also, that’s where it was.”

  “Where?”

  “The terminal. The bus terminal.”

  Some things do translate. Unfortunately.

  For the rest of the afternoon I pulled details from the four principal files and entered them into the spreadsheet I’d created. Color of hair. Eyes. Skin. Height. Religion. Names. Dates. Places. Signs of the Zodiac. Anything and everything. Doggedly, I plugged it in, planning to search for links later. Or perhaps I thought the patterns would form by themselves, the interconnecting bits of information drawn to each other like neuropeptides to receptor sites. Or maybe I just needed a rote task to occupy my mind, a mental jigsaw puzzle to give the illusion of progress.

  At four-fifteen I tried Ryan again. Though he wasn’t at his desk, the operator thought she’d seen him, and reluctantly began a search. While I waited, my eye fell on the monkey file. Bored, I dumped out the photos. There were two sets, one of Polaroids, the other of five-by-seven color prints. The operator came back on to tell me Ryan was not in any of the offices she’d rung. Yes, sigh, she’d try the coffee room.

  I thumbed through the Polaroids. Obviously taken when the remains arrived in the morgue. Shots of a purple and black nylon gym bag, zipped and unzipped, the latter showing a bundle in its interior. The next few showed the bundle on an autopsy table, before and after it was unrolled.

  The remaining half dozen featured the body parts. The scale on the ID card confirmed that the subject was, indeed, tiny, smaller than a full-term fetus or newborn. Putrefaction was advancing nicely. The flesh had begun to blacken and was smeared with something that looked like rancid tapioca. I thought I could identify the head, the torso, and the limbs. Other than that, I couldn’t tell squat. The pictures had been taken from too far away, and the detail was lousy. I rotated a few, looking for a better angle, but it was impossible to make out much.

  The operator came back with resolve in her voice. Ryan was not there. I’d have to try tomorrow. Denying her the opportunity to launch the argument she’d prepared, I left another message, and hung up.

  The five-by-seven close-ups had been taken following cleaning. The detail that had escaped the Polaroids was fully captured in the prints. The tiny corpse had been skinned and disjointed. The photographer, probably Denis, had arranged the pieces in anatomical order, then carefully photographed each in turn.

  As I worked my way through the stack, I couldn’t help noting that the butchered parts looked vaguely like rabbit about to become stew. Except for one thing. The fifth print showed a small arm ending in four perfect fingers and a thumb curled onto a delicate palm.

  The last two prints focused on the head. Without the outer covering of skin and hair it looked primordial, like an embryo detached from the umbilicus, naked and vulnerable. The skull was the size of a tangerine. Though the face was flat and the features anthropoid, it didn’t take Jane Goodall to know that this was no human primate. The mouth contained full dentition, molars and all. I counted. Three premolars in each quadrant. The terminal monkey had come from South America.

  It’s just another animal case, I told myself, returning the pictures to their envelope. We’d get them occasionally, because someone thought the remains to be human. Bear paws skinned and left behind by hunters, pigs and goats slaughtered for meat, the unwanted portions discarded by a roadside, dogs and cats abused and thrown in the river. The callousness of the human animal always astounded me. I never got used to it.

  So why did this case hold my attention? Another look at the five-by-sevens. Okay. The monkey had been cut up. Big deal. So are a lot of animal carcasses that we see. Some asshole probably got his jollies tormenting and killing it. Maybe it was a student, pissed off at his grade.

  With the fifth photo I stopped, my eyes cemented to the image. Once again, my stomach muscles knotted. I stared at the photo, then reached for the phone.

  THERE’S NOTHING EMPTIER THAN A CLASSROOM BUILDING AFTER hours. It’s how I imagine the aftermath of a neutron bomb. Lights burn. Water fountains spew forth on command. Bells ring on schedule. Computer terminals glow eerily. The people are absent. No one quenching a thirst, scurrying to class, or clicking on keyboards. The silence of the catacombs.

  I sat on a folding chair outside Parker Bailey’s office at the Université du Québec à Montréal—UQAM. Since leaving the lab, I’d worked out at the gym, bought groceries at the Provigo, and fed myself a meal of vermicelli and clam sauce. Not bad for a quick and dirty. Even Birdie was impressed. Now I was impatient.

  To say the biology department was quiet would be like saying a quark is small. Up and down the corridor every door was closed. I’d perused the bulletin boards, read the graduate school brochures, the field school announcements, the offers to do word processing or tutoring, the notices announcing guest speakers. Twice.

  I looked at my watch for the millionth time—9:12 P.M. Damn. He should be here by now. His class ended at nine. At least, that’s what the secretary had told me. I got up and paced. Those who wait must pace—9:14. Damn.

  At 9:30 I gave up. As I slung my purse over my shoulder, I heard a door open somewhere out of sight. In a moment a man with an enormous stack of lab books hurried around the corner. He kept adjusting his arms to keep the books from falling. His cardigan looked as if it had left Ireland before the potato famine. I guessed his age at around forty.

  He stopped when he saw me, but his face registered nothing. I started to introduce myself when a notebook slipped from the stack. We both lunged for it. Not a good move
by him. The better part of the pile followed, scattering across the floor like confetti on New Year’s Eve. We gathered and restacked for several minutes, then he unlocked his office and dumped the books on his desk.

  “Sorry,” he said in heavily accented French. “I—”

  “No problem,” I responded in English. “I must have startled you.”

  “Yes. No. I should have made two trips. This happens a lot.” His English was not American.

  “Lab books?”

  “Yeah. I just taught a class in ethological methodology.”

  He was brushed with all the shades of an Outer Banks sunset. Pale pink skin, raspberry cheeks, and hair the color of a vanilla wafer. His mustache and eyelashes were amber. He looked like a man who’d burn, not tan.

  “Sounds intriguing.”

  “Wish more of them thought so. Can I—”

  “I’m Tempe Brennan,” I said, reaching into my bag and offering him a card. “Your secretary said I could catch you now.”

  As he read the card, I explained my visit.

  “Yeah, I remember. I hated losing that monkey. It really cheesed me off at the time.” Suddenly, “Would you like to sit?”

  Without waiting for a reply, he began shoveling objects from a green vinyl chair and heaping them onto the office floor. I stole a peek around. His tiny quarters made mine look like Yankee Stadium.

  Every inch of wall space that wasn’t covered with shelves was blanketed with pictures of animals. Sticklebacks. Guinea fowl. Marmosets. Warthogs. Even an aardvark. No level of the Linnaean hierarchy had been neglected. It reminded me of the office of an impressario, with celebrity associations displayed like trophies. Only these photos weren’t signed.

  We both sat, he behind his desk, feet propped on an open drawer, I in the recently cleared visitor’s chair.

  “Yeah. It really cheesed me off,” he repeated, then switched the topic suddenly. “You’re an anthropologist?”

  “Um. Hm.”

  “Do much with primates?”

  “No. Used to, but not anymore. I’m on the anthropology faculty at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Occasionally I teach a course on primate biology or behavior, but I’m really not involved in that work anymore. I’m too busy with forensic research and consulting.”