Grave Secrets

by Kathy Reichs

  Ryan repeated his command.

  Yellow to red.

  In the distance, a siren. A second. A third.

  The shooter tensed. Taking two steps backward, he bent toward a woman huddled on the sidewalk, never shifting the gun from Ryan’s face. The woman put her head to the pavement and flung both arms over it.

  “Don’t kill me. I have a baby.” The woman’s voice was frantic with terror.

  The shooter grabbed her by the jacket and dragged her across the cement.

  Ryan fired.

  The shooter’s body jerked. He dropped the woman and grabbed his right shoulder. Blood mushroomed across his shirt.

  Straightening, the shooter raised his Luger and squeezed off four rounds. Bullets pinged the wall above us. Fragments of brick rained down on our heads.

  “Oh God. Oh no.” Chantale’s voice was high and quavery.

  Ryan fired again.

  The woman shrieked as the shooter fell across her. I heard a skull crack pavement, the Luger skitter then drop from the curb, the woman scrabble up the sidewalk.

  The woman sobbed. The child cried. Otherwise, silence. No one spoke. No one moved.

  The sirens grew louder, built into a screaming chorus. Cruisers converged from every direction, tires screeching, lights flashing, radios crackling.

  Ryan rose, gun pointed at the sky. I watched him reach for his badge.

  Beside me, I heard Chantale draw a series of unsteady breaths. I looked over. Her chin quivered and both cheeks glistened. I reached out and stroked her hair.

  “It’s over.” My voice didn’t sound like my own. “You’re fine.”

  Chantale looked up. Only two tattoo tears remained on her face.

  “Am I?”

  I put my arm around her. She collapsed into me and wept silently.

  22

  AS ON THE MORNING AFTER THE ATTACK IN SOLOLÁ, I awoke with an ill-formed feeling of dread. In an instant the scene flooded back to me. I relived the explosion of Nordstern’s chest. Heard the crack of Ryan’s gun. Saw the shooter’s inert body, his blood oozing across the pavement. Though I’d been given no official word, I was certain both men were dead.

  I rubbed my hands up and down on my face, then closed my eyes and pulled the blanket over my head. Would there be no end to the killing?

  In my mind’s eye I saw Chantale, cheeks streaked with tears, body rigid with terror. A shiver ran through me as I thought of how close she and I had come to being injured or killed. How could I ever have told her mother?

  I imagined how devastated Katy would be should someone deliver news of my death. Thank God that would not be necessary.

  I remembered Nordstern in Guatemala City, and in the bar at Jillian’s minutes before his death. I felt a wave of remorse. I had disliked the man, had not been kind to him. But I’d never imagined him dead.

  Dead.

  Jesus! What had Nordstern discovered? What was so big that it had gotten him blasted on a Montreal street?

  My thoughts circled back to Chantale. What impact would these events have on her? There were so many directions a troubled adolescent could take. Repentance? Flight? Escape through drugs?

  Though tough on the outside, I suspected Chantale had an interior as fragile as a butterfly wing. Vowing I would stand by her, appreciated or not, I flung back the covers and headed for the shower.

  The summer that had dropped in so unexpectedly had bolted during the night. I exited my garage to a steady drizzle and temperatures in the forties. C’est la vie québécoise.

  The morning staff meeting was mercifully short and produced no anthropology cases. I spent the next hour cutting segments of eraser to proper lengths and gluing them to Susanne’s replica of the Paraíso skull. Except for some shine and subtle layering, her model looked exactly like the real thing.

  By 10 A.M. I was seated at a monitor in Imagerie, the section responsible for photography and computer imaging. Lucien, our graphics guru, was positioning the Paraíso model before a video camera when Ryan entered.

  “What’s sticking out all over that skull?”

  “Tissue depth markers.”

  “Of course.”

  “Each marker shows how much flesh there was at a specific point on the face or skull,” Lucien piped up. “Dr. Brennan cut them using standards for a Mongoloid female. Right?”

  I nodded.

  “We’ve done gobs of facial reproductions like this.” He adjusted a light. “Though this is the first with a plastic skull.”

  Gobs?

  “Let me guess. The camera captures the image, sends it to the PC, and you connect the dots.”

  Ryan had a way of making complex things sound kindergarten simple.

  “There’s a bit more to it than that. But, yes, once I’ve drawn facial contours using the markers, I’ll choose features from the program’s database, find the best fit, and paste them in.”

  “This the technique you used for one of the Inner Life Empowerment bodies?”

  Ryan referred to a case he and I had worked several years back. A number of McGill students were recruited into a fringe sect led by a sociopath with delusions of immortality. When a skeleton turned up in a shallow grave near the group’s South Carolina commune, Lucien and I did a sketch to establish that the remains were those of a missing coed.

  “Yes. What’s up with Chantale?”

  “The judge agreed to give her another chance at home detention.”

  Last evening, while Ryan stayed to explain the shooting, I’d taken Chantale home. This morning he’d done a follow-up to be sure she was still there.

  “Think Mommy will keep a closer watch?” I asked.

  “I suspect Manuel Noriega enjoys more freedom than Chantale can hope for in the near future.”

  “She was pretty subdued last night,” I said.

  “The fuck-off-and-leave-me-alone demeanor has definitely lightened.”

  “How are you doing?” I asked, noticing the tension in his face.

  In Montreal, an internal investigation is mandated following every police shooting. To maintain impartiality, the CUM homicide section looks into shootings by SQ officers, and the SQ investigates incidents involving the CUM. As I was leaving with Chantale, I saw Ryan hand his gun to a CUM cop.

  Ryan shrugged. “Two DOAs. One was mine.”

  “It was a good shoot, Ryan. They know that.”

  “I turned Ste-Catherine into the O.K. Corral.”

  “The guy killed Nordstern and was about to take a hostage.”

  “Have you been called?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Something to look forward to.”

  “I’ll tell them exactly what went down. Have you got an ID on the shooter?”

  “Carlos Vicente. Held a Guatemalan passport.”

  “The moron carried his passport to a hit?”

  Ryan shook his head. “A key from the Days Inn on Guy. We tossed the room, found the passport in a carry-on bag.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a pro.”

  “We also found two thousand U.S. dollars and an airline ticket to Phoenix.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Dirty shorts.”

  I gave him the look.

  “I phoned Galiano. Nothing popped up when he ran Vicente’s name, but he’s going to dig deeper.”

  “What about Nordstern?”

  “Doesn’t look good for the Pulitzer.”

  More of the look.

  “I’m heading to the Hotel St. Malo now. Since Nordstern was your boy, I thought you might like to tag along.”

  “I need to finish this facial.”

  “I can do it, Dr. Brennan.” Lucien sounded like a second-stringer on a high school football team.

  I must have looked skeptical.

  “Let me give it a shot.” Please, Coach. Send me in.

  Why not? If Lucien’s sketch didn’t look right, I could always do my own.

  “O.K. Do a full frontal. Don’t force the features. Make sure they fit t
he bony architecture.”

  “Allons-y,” said Ryan.

  “Allons-y.” Let’s go.

  * * *

  The St. Malo was a tiny hotel on du Fort, approximately six blocks east of the Pepsi Forum.

  The proprietor was a tall, skeletal man with a wandering left eye, and skin the color of day-old tea. Though less than enthused about our visit, Ryan’s badge spurred him to do the right thing.

  Nordstern’s room was the size of a cell, with much the same ambience. Clean, functional, no frills. I took inventory in three seconds.

  Iron bed. Battered wardrobe. Battered dresser. Battered nightstand. Gideons’ Bible. Not a personal item in sight. Nothing in the drawers or wardrobe.

  The bathroom looked a little more lived-in. Toothbrush. Crest. Disposable razor. Gillette Cool Wave for sensitive skin. Dippity-Do Sport Gel. Hotel soap.

  “No shampoo,” I noted when Ryan drew the shower curtain back with his pen.

  “Who needs shampoo when you’ve got Dippity-Do?”

  We returned to the bedroom.

  “Guy traveled light,” said Ryan, dragging a hockey bag from under the bed.

  “Crafty, though. Knew how to blend with the natives.”

  “It’s an athletic bag.”

  “It’s a hockey bag.”

  “The NHL has twenty-four franchises south of the border.”

  “Hockey hasn’t adulterated the American sense of fashion.”

  “Your people wear cheese on their heads.”

  “Are you going to open the bag?”

  I watched Ryan remove several shirts and a pair of khaki pants.

  “A boxer man.”

  He used thumb and forefinger to extract the shorts, then reached back in and withdrew a passport.

  “American.”

  “Let’s see.”

  Ryan flipped it open, then handed it to me.

  Nordstern was not having a good hair day when the photo was taken. Nor did he look like he’d had much sleep. His skin was pale and the flesh under his eyes looked dark and puffy.

  Again, I felt a wave of remorse. While I hadn’t liked Nordstern, I would never have wished him such an end. I looked at his possessions, evidence of a life interrupted. I wondered if Nordstern had a wife or girlfriend. Kids. Who would notify them of his death?

  “Must have applied for the passport prior to the Dippity-Do epiphany,” Ryan said.

  “This was issued last year.” I read further. “Nordstern was born in Chicago on July seventeenth, 1966. Jesus, I thought he was in his twenties.”

  “It’s the gel. Shaves years.”

  “Get over the hair gel.”

  Ryan wasn’t really making light of Nordstern’s death. He was using cop humor to break the tension. I was doing it myself. But his flippancy was starting to annoy me.

  Ryan pulled out four books. All were familiar. Guatemala: Getting Away with Murder; Las Massacres en Rabinal; State Violence in Guatemala: 1960–1999; Guatemala: Never Again.

  “Maybe Nordstern really was researching human rights work,” I said.

  Ryan opened a zippered pocket.

  “Hell-o.”

  He fished out a plane ticket, a key, and a spiral notebook. I waited while he checked the ticket.

  “He flew to Montreal last Thursday on American.”

  “The twelve fifty-seven through Miami?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s the flight Mrs. Specter and I took.”

  “You didn’t see him?”

  “We rode up front, got on last, got off first, waited in the VIP lounge between flights.”

  “Maybe Nordstern was dogging you.”

  “Or maybe he was following the ambassador’s wife.”

  “Good point.”

  “Round-trip ticket?”

  Ryan nodded. “Open return.”

  As Ryan inspected the key, I stared at Nordstern’s belongings. Obviously the man expected to return to the St. Malo. Had he realized the danger he was in? Had he considered the possibility of sudden death?

  Ryan held up the key. A plastic tag identified its owner as the Hotel Todos Santos on Calle 12 in Zone 1.

  “So Nordstern was going back to Guatemala,” I said.

  When Ryan opened the spiral, a square white envelope fell to the floor. The sound told me what it held.

  I retrieved the envelope and slid a compact disk onto my palm. It had five letters penned on a homemade label: SCELL.

  “What the frig is scell?” Ryan asked.

  “Punk rock?” I was still discomfited by my ignorance of the genre.

  “Igneous rock?”

  “Maybe it’s a code in Spanish.” It didn’t sound right even as I said it.

  “Skeleton?” Ryan suggested.

  “With a ‘c’?”

  “Maybe the guy couldn’t spell.”

  “He was a journalist.”

  “Cell phone?”

  “‘S’?”

  We both said the name at the same time.

  “Specter.”

  “Jesus, you think Nordstern tapped the kid’s cell phone?”

  I remembered Chantale’s mother in migraine mode.

  “Did you catch Mrs. Specter’s reference to her husband’s games?”

  “Think hubby has a zipper problem?”

  “Maybe Nordstern had no interest at all in Chan-tale.”

  “Was using her to hook a bigger fish?”

  “Maybe that’s what Nordstern meant when he said I was off track.”

  “A philandering ambassador isn’t much of a scoop.”

  “No. It isn’t,” I agreed.

  “Doesn’t seem like enough to get a guy capped.”

  “How about hair from an ambassador’s pet turning up in the jeans of a murder victim?”

  “Fifty-pound perch.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “What?”

  “I just remembered something.”

  Ryan gave me a “bring it on” gesture.

  “I told you that two members of our team were shot while driving to Chupan Ya.”

  “Yes.”

  “Carlos died, Molly survived.”

  “How is she?”

  “Her doctors anticipate a full recovery. She’s gone back to Minnesota, but Mateo and I visited her in the hospital in Sololá before I left Guatemala. Her recall was fuzzy, but Molly thought she remembered her attackers talking about an inspector. Mateo and I speculated they might have been saying Specter.”

  “Moby fucking Dick.”

  I slid the disk back into its sleeve.

  When I looked up, Ryan’s eyes were on mine. They were not smiling.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Why was a Chicago reporter trailing people in Montreal based on a story in Guatemala? Think about that.”

  I had been.

  “Nordstern was into something so hot it got him assassinated in a foreign country.”

  I’d definitely been thinking about that.

  “You keep your head up, Brennan. These people were willing to burn Nordstern. They’re ruthless. They won’t stop there.”

  I felt goose bumps crimp the flesh on my arms. The moment passed. Ryan smiled, returned to cop flippant.

  “I’ll give Galiano a heads-up on the Todos Santos,” said Ryan.

  “I also suggest you get down and dirty on Specter while I finish my facial reproduction. Then we’ll play the disc, read Nordstern’s notebook, and get some sense of what he was up to.”

  Ryan’s grin broadened.

  “Damn. The rumors are right.”

  “What rumors?” I asked.

  “You are the brains of the operation.”

  I resisted the urge to kick his ankle.

  * * *

  The call came as I was still shaking rain from my umbrella. The voice on the other end was the last I wanted to hear. I invited its owner to my office with an enthusiasm I reserve for IRS auditors, Klansmen, and Islamic fundamentalists.

  Sergeant-détective Luc Clau
del appeared within minutes, back rigid, face pinched into its usual look of disdain. I rose but remained behind my desk.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur Claudel. Comment ça va?”

  I did not expect a greeting. I was not disappointed.

  “I must pose a few questions.”

  Claudel viewed me as an unfortunate necessity, a status grudgingly granted following my input into the successful resolution of a number of CUM homicide cases. Claudel’s demeanor toward me was always cool, reserved, and rigidly francophone. His use of English surprised me.

  “Please have a seat,” I said.

  Claudel sat.

  I sat.

  Claudel placed a tape recorder on my desk.

  “This conversation will be recorded.”

  Of course I have no objection, you arrogant, hawk-faced prick.

  “No problem,” I said.

  Claudel activated the recorder, gave the time and date, and identified those present at the interview.

  “I am heading the inquiry into last night’s shooting.”

  Oh happy day. I waited.

  “You were present?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you have an unobstructed view of the events that transpired?”

  “I did.”

  “Were you able to hear words exchanged between Lieutenant-détective Andrew Ryan and his target?”

  Target?

  “I was.”

  Claudel kept his eyes on a point halfway between us.

  “Was the man armed?”

  “He had a Luger nine-millimeter.”

  “Did the man indicate that he intended to discharge his firearm?”

  “The sonovabitch shot Nordstern then turned the gun on Ryan.”

  “Please. Do not get ahead of me.”

  The air space between my molars reduced to zero.

  “Following the shooting of Olaf Nordstern, did Lieutenant-détective Ryan instruct the gunman to relinquish his weapon?”

  “More than once.”

  “Did the gunman comply?”

  “He grabbed a woman cowering on the sidewalk. She asked to be excused because of parental responsibility, but I believe the request was about to be denied.”

  Claudel’s eyebrows formed a V above his eyes.

  “Dr. Brennan, I am going to ask you once again to allow me to do this in my own manner.”

  Steady.

  “Did the gunman attempt to take a hostage?”

  “Yes.”

  “In your opinion, was the hostage in clear and present danger?”