Déjà Dead

by Kathy Reichs

  “Merci. It’s okay.” I nodded at the gloves. “What have you got?”

  “This one is clean. No blood.” She gestured at Gabby’s glove. “I’m just starting on the one from the kitchen. Would you like to watch?”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ve taken scrapings from these brown spots and rehydrated the sample in saline.”

  She examined the liquid and placed the vial in a test tube tray. Then she withdrew a glass pipette with a long, hollow projection, held it over a flame to seal it, and twisted off the tip.

  “I’ll test for human blood first.”

  Removing a tiny bottle from the refrigerator, she broke the seal and inserted the thin, tubular point of a fresh pipette. Like a mosquito sucking blood, the antiserum moved up the tiny pipeline. She sealed the other end with her thumb.

  She then inserted the long beak of the pipette into the fire-sealed pipette, released her thumb, and allowed the antiserum to dribble out. She spoke as she worked.

  “The blood knows its own proteins, or antigens. If it recognizes foreigners, antigens that don’t belong, it tries to destroy them with antibodies. Some antibodies blow up foreign antigens, others clump them together. That clumping is called an agglutination reaction.

  “Antiserum is created in an animal, usually a rabbit or a chicken, by injecting it with the blood of another species. The animal’s blood recognizes the invaders and produces antibodies to protect itself. Injecting an animal with human blood produces human antiserum. Injecting it with goat blood produces goat antiserum. Horse blood produces horse antiserum.

  “Human antiserum creates an agglutination reaction when mixed with human blood. Watch. If this is human blood a visible precipitate will form in the test tube, right where the sample solution and the antiserum meet. We’ll compare to the saline as a control.”

  She tossed the pipette into a biological waste container and picked up the vial with the Tanguay sample solution. Using another pipette, she sucked the sample up the tube, released it into the antiserum, and set the pipette into a holder.

  “How long will it take?” I asked.

  “That depends on the strength of the antiserum. Anywhere from three to fifteen minutes. This is pretty good. Shouldn’t be more than five or six minutes.”

  We checked it after five, Françoise holding the pipettes under the Luxolamp, a black card behind for background. We checked again after ten. Fifteen. Nothing. No white band appeared between the antiserum and the sample solution. The mixture stayed as clear as the control saline.

  “So. It’s not human. Let’s see if it’s animal.”

  She went back to the refrigerator and withdrew a tray of small bottles.

  “Can you tell the exact species?” I asked.

  “No. Usually just family. Bovid. Cervid. Canid.”

  I looked at the tray. Written next to each bottle was an animal name. Goat. Rat. Horse. I pictured the paws in Tanguay’s kitchen.

  “Let’s try dogs.”

  Nothing.

  “What about something like a squirrel or a gopher?”

  She thought a minute then reached for a bottle. “Maybe rat.”

  In less than four minutes a tiny parfait had formed in the tube, yellow above, clear below, a layer of foggy white between.

  “Voilà,” said Françoise. “It’s animal blood. Something small, a mammal, like a rodent or a ground hog or something. That’s about all I’ll be able to determine. I don’t know if that helps you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That helps. May I use your phone?”

  “Bien sûr.”

  I dialed an extension down the hall.

  “Lacroix.”

  I identified myself and explained what I wanted.

  “Sure. Give me twenty minutes, I’m just finishing up a run.”

  I signed for the gloves, returned to my office, and spent the next half hour proofing and signing reports. Then I walked back to the corridor occupied by biology, and entered a door marked Incendie et Explosifs. Fire and Explosives.

  A man in a lab coat stood in front of an enormous piece of machinery. A label identified it as an X-ray diffractometer. He didn’t speak and I didn’t say anything until he had removed a slide with a small white smear and placed it on a tray. Then he gave me eyes as soft as a Disney fawn, lids drooping, lashes curling back like petals on a daisy.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur Lacroix. Comment ça va?”

  “Bien. Bien. You have them?”

  I held up two plastic bags.

  “Let’s get started.”

  He led me into a small room with an apparatus the size of a photocopier, two monitors, and a printer. A periodic chart of the elements hung on the wall above.

  Lacroix laid the evidence bags on a counter and pulled on surgical gloves. Gingerly, he withdrew each suspect glove, inspected it, then laid it on its plastic bag. The gloves stretched across his hands looked identical to those on the counter.

  “First we look for gross characteristics, details of manufacturing. Weight. Density. Color. How the rims are finished.” He turned each glove over and over, examining as he spoke. “These two look quite similar. Same rim technique. See?”

  I looked. The wrist of each glove ended in a border that rolled outward onto itself.

  “They’re not all like that?”

  “No. Some roll in, some roll out. These are both outies. So. Now we see what’s in them.”

  He carried Gabby’s glove to the machine, raised the cover, and placed it on a tray inside.

  “With very small samples I use those little holders.” He pointed to a tray of small plastic tubes. “I stretch a square of polypropylene window film across the holder, then use press-on tabs to make a sticky spot to hold the fragment. That’s not necessary with this. We’ll just put the whole glove in.”

  Lacroix flipped a switch and the apparatus whirred to life. A box positioned on a pole in one corner lit up, the word X RAY white against a red background. A panel of buttons glowed, indicating the machine’s condition. Red: X rays. White: Power. Orange: Shutter open.

  For a few moments Lacroix adjusted dials, then he closed the cover and moved to a chair in front of the monitors.

  “S’il vous plaît.” He indicated the other chair.

  A desert landscape appeared on the first monitor, a granular backdrop of synclines and anticlines, with shadows and boulders scattered here and there. Superimposed on that scene was a series of concentric circles, the two smallest and most central shaped like footballs. Two hashed lines intersected at right angles, forming a cross directly over the bull’s-eye circles.

  Lacroix adjusted the image by manipulating a joy stick. Boulders shifted in and out of the circles.

  “That’s the glove we’re looking at, magnified eighty times. I’m just picking a target location. Each run samples an area of about three hundred microns, approximately the area inside the dotted circle. So you want to direct your X rays onto the best part of your sample.”

  He shifted the crosshairs a few more moments, then settled on a boulderless patch.

  “There. That should be good.”

  He flipped a switch and the machine hummed.

  “Now we’re creating a vacuum. That’ll take a couple of minutes. Then the scan. That’s very quick.”

  “And this will determine what’s in the glove.”

  “Oui. It’s a form of X-ray analysis. X-ray microfluorescence can determine what elements are present in a sample.”

  The humming stopped and a pattern began to form on the right-hand monitor. A series of tiny red mounds sprouted across the bottom of the screen, then grew against a bright blue background, a thin yellow stripe up the middle of each. In the lower left-hand corner was an image of a keyboard, each key marked with the abbreviation for an element.

  Lacroix typed in commands, and letters appeared on the screen. Some mounds remained small, others grew into tall peaks, like the giant termite castles I’d seen in Australia.

  “C’est ça.”
That’s it. Lacroix pointed at a column on the far right. It rose from the bottom to the top of the screen, where its top was truncated. A smaller peak to its right climbed to a quarter of its height. Both were marked Zn.

  “Zinc. That’s standard. It’s found in all these gloves.”

  He indicated a pair of peaks to the far left, one low, the other rising three quarters of the distance up the screen. “That low one is magnesium. Mg. The tall one marked Si is silicon.” Farther to the right a double peak bore the letter S.

  “Sulfur.”

  A Ca peak spired halfway up the screen.

  “Quite a bit of calcium.”

  Beyond the calcium a gap, then a series of low mounds, foothills to the zinc pinnacle. Fe.

  “A little iron.”

  He leaned back and summarized. “Pretty common cocktail. Lots of zinc, with silicon and calcium, the other major components. I’ll print these, then let’s test another spot.”

  We ran ten tests. All showed the same combination of elements.

  “Right, then. The other glove.”

  We repeated the procedure with the glove from Tanguay’s kitchen.

  The peaks for zinc and sulfur were similar, but this glove contained more calcium, and had no iron, silicon, or magnesium. A small spike indicated the presence of potassium. It was the same on every run.

  “What does this mean?” I asked, already certain of the answer.

  “Each manufacturer uses a slightly different recipe for the latex. There will even be variation among gloves from the same company, but it will be within limits.

  “So these gloves are not a pair?”

  “They weren’t even made by the same company.”

  He got up to remove the glove. My mind was stumbling over our finding.

  “Would X-ray diffraction give more information?”

  “What we’ve done, X-ray microfluorescence, tells what elements are present in an object. X-ray diffraction can describe the actual mixture of the elements. The chemical structure. For example, with microfluorescence we can know that something contains sodium and chloride. With diffraction we can tell that it is made up of sodium-chloride crystals.

  “To oversimplify, in the X-ray diffractometer a sample is rotated and hit with X rays. The X rays bounce off the crystals, and their pattern of diffraction indicates the structure of those crystals.

  “So one limitation with diffraction is that it can only be done on materials with a crystalline structure. That’s about eighty percent of everything that comes in. Unfortunately, latex is not crystalline in structure. Diffraction probably wouldn’t add much anyway. These gloves are definitely made by different manufacturers.”

  “What if they’re just from different boxes? Surely individual batches of latex must vary.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then:

  “Wait. Let me show you something.”

  He disappeared into the main lab and I could hear him talking to the technician. He reappeared with a stack of printouts, each composed of seven or eight sheets showing the familiar spire and steeple patterning. He unfolded each series and we looked at the variations in pattern.

  “Each of these shows a sequence of tests done on gloves from a single manufacturer, but sampled from different boxes. There is variation, but the differences are never as great as those in the gloves we just analyzed.”

  I examined several series. The size of the peaks varied, but the components showed consistency.

  “Now. Look at this.”

  He unfurled another series of printouts. Again, there were some differences, but overall the mix was the same.

  Then I caught my breath. The configuration looked familiar. I looked at the symbols. Zn. Fe. Ca. S. Si. Mg. High zinc, silicon, and calcium content. Traces of the other elements. I laid the printout from Gabby’s glove above the series. The pattern was almost identical.

  “Monsieur Lacroix, are these gloves from the same manufacturer?”

  “Yes, yes. That’s my point. From the same box, probably. I just remembered this.”

  “What case is this?” My heart rate had picked up tempo.

  “It came in just a few weeks ago.” He flipped to the first sheet in the series. Numéro d’événement: 327468. “I can pull it up on the computer.”

  “Please.”

  Data filled the screen in seconds. I scanned it.

  Numéro d’événement: 327468. Numéro de LML: 29427. Requesting Agency: CUM. Investigators: L. Claudel and M. Charbonneau. Recovery location: 1422 Rue Berger. Recovery date: 24/06/94.

  An old rubber glove. Maybe the guy worried about his nails. Claudel! I thought he’d meant a glove for household cleaning! St. Jacques had a surgical glove! It matched the one in Gabby’s grave!

  I thanked Monsieur Lacroix, gathered the printouts, and left. I returned the gloves to property, my mind tearing through what I’d just learned. The glove from Tanguay’s kitchen did not match the one buried with Gabby’s body. Tanguay’s prints were on it. The outside stains were animal blood. The glove found with Gabby was clean. No blood. No prints. St. Jacques had a surgical glove. It matched the one in Gabby’s grave. Was Bertrand right? Were Tanguay and St. Jacques the same person?

  A pink slip waited on my desk. CUM Ident had called. The photos of the Rue Berger flat had been archived on a CD-ROM disk. I could view it there or check it out. I called to request the latter, told them I’d be there shortly.

  I fought my way to CUM headquarters, cursing the rush-hour traffic and the tourists that clogged the Old Port area. Leaving the car double-parked, I bolted the steps and went directly to the desk sergeant on the third floor. Amazingly, he had the disk. I signed it out, dashed back to the car, and stuffed it in my briefcase.

  All the way home I kept looking over my shoulder, watching for Tanguay. Watching for St. Jacques. I couldn’t stop myself.

  I GOT HOME ABOUT FIVE-THIRTY AND SAT IN THE SILENCE OF THE apartment, assessing what else I could do. Nothing. Ryan was right. Tanguay could be out there, waiting for his chance at me. I wouldn’t make it easier for him.

  But I had to eat. And keep busy.

  As I let myself out the front door, I scanned the street. There. In the alley to the left of the pizza parlor. I nodded to the two uniforms and pointed in the direction of Ste. Catherine. I could see them confer, then one got out.

  My street crosses Ste. Catherine, not far from Le Faubourg. As I walked toward the market I could sense the annoyance of the cop on my tail. No matter. The day was glorious. I hadn’t noticed at the lab. The heat had broken and huge white clouds floated in a dazzling blue sky, casting islands of shadow over the day and its players. It felt good to be outside.

  Veggies. At La Plantation I squeezed avocados, evaluated the color of bananas, chose broccoli, brussels sprouts, and baking potatoes with the concentration of a neurosurgeon. A baguette at the boulangerie. A chocolate mousse at the pâtisserie. I picked up pork chops, ground beef, and a tourtière at the boucherie.

  “C’est tout?”

  “No, what the hell. Give me a T-bone. Really thick.” I held my thumb and index finger an inch apart.

  As I watched him remove the saw from its hook, the cognitive itch began again. I tried to scratch it into a full-blown idea, but with no more success than I’d had before. The saw? Too obvious. Anyone can buy a chef’s saw. The SQ had run that lead to a dead end, contacting every outlet in the province. Thousands had been sold.

  What, then? I’d learned that trying to pry an idea out of the subconscious only drives it deeper. If I let it drift, eventually it will float to the surface. I paid for my meat and went home, with a brief detour at the Rue Ste. Catherine Burger King.

  What greeted me was the last thing I wanted to see. Someone had called. For several minutes I sat on the edge of the couch, clutching my packages and staring at the tiny indicator light. One message. Was it Tanguay? Would he speak to me, or would I hear the sound of his listening, followed by a dial tone?

  “You’re being hys
terical, Brennan. It’s probably Ryan.”

  I dried my palm, reached out, and pushed the button. It wasn’t Tanguay. It was worse.

  “Hey, Mom. Y’all out having a good time? Hello? Are you there? Pick u-up.” I could hear what sounded like traffic, as if she were calling from an outside phone. “Guess not. Well, I can’t talk anyway. I’m on the road. On the road again …” She did a Willie Nelson imitation. “Pretty good, eh? Anyway, I’m coming to visit, Mom. You’re right. Max is a pecker head. I don’t need that.” I heard a voice in the background. “Okay, just give me a minute,” she said to whoever it was. “Listen, I got a chance to visit New York. The Big Apple. I hooked a free trip, so here I am. Anyway, I can get a ride to Montreal, so I’m coming up. See you soon!”

  Click.

  “No! Don’t come here, Katy. No!” I spoke to the empty air.

  I listened to the tape rewind. Jesus, what a nightmare! Gabby is dead. A psychopath placed a picture of Katy and me in her grave. Now Katy is on her way here. Blood pounded in my temples. My mind raced. I have to stop her. How? I don’t know where she is.

  Pete.

  As his phone rang I had a flashback. Katy at three. At the park. I was talking to another mother, my eyes on Katy as she poured sand into plastic containers. Suddenly, she dropped her shovel and ran to the swings. She hesitated a moment, watching the iron pony swing back, then ran to it, her face exuberant with the feel of spring and the sight of the colorful mane and bridle moving through the air. I knew it would hit her and I could not stop it. It was happening again.

  No answer on Pete’s direct line.

  I tried his switchboard number. A secretary told me he was away, taking a deposition. Of course. I left a message.

  I stared at the answering machine. I shut my eyes and took several long, deep breaths, willing my heart to a slower pace. The back of my head felt as though it were clamped in a vise, and I was hot all over.

  “This will not happen.”

  I opened my eyes to see Birdie gazing at me from across the room.

  “This will not happen,” I repeated to him.