by Kathy Reichs
“My name is Temperance Brennan. I’m here with Detective Andrew Ryan. We wish to speak to you concerning Mélanie Chalamet.”
“Piss off.”
I tried French.
“Va chier, mon tabarnac.”
Rough translation: go shit, asshole. Awesome. I’d been disparaged in two languages.
Hiding a smile, Ryan raised his brows and pointed to his chest. I yielded center stage at the bouquet.
“Madame Sorg, we’re so very sorry to call unannounced.” Oozing gentlemanly charm.
The eye in the peephole blinked.
“We wish only a few moments of your time.” So honeyed that I feared an onslaught of cavities.
“I’m naked in here.”
“We’re happy to wait.” Ryan didn’t miss a beat. I admired that.
Immediately, a bolt turned, followed by another.
I cast a bemused glance at Ryan. He shrugged.
The door opened.
In her youth, F. Sorg’s height may have been equal to mine, but postural kyphosis had bent her spine, lowering her sight line to mid-chest on me. Thus, the ladder at her side.
“Thank you so much for talking with us.” Despite his nonchalance, Ryan appeared relieved to see the old woman’s piss-yellow housecoat. To see any attire, I suspected.
“You gotta speak loud. My ears are shit.”
Ryan pumped up the volume. “Thank you so much f—”
“Christ almighty. I’m hard of hearing, not deaf.”
Sorg twisted her head sideways in order to take in our faces. Lingered on Ryan. “Aren’t you a good-looking stud.”
“Madam Sorg—”
“Name’s Florence.”
I observed as Ryan smooth-talked Florence. The old woman had astonishingly wrinkled skin and blue-tinted white hair that allowed a good view of her scalp. But the intensity of her gaze suggested a scalpel-sharp mind.
“You checking me out, handsome?”
“We’d like to discuss Mélanie Chalamet.” Ryan stayed on topic. “I believe you are her aunt?”
“Who told you that?”
“Dora Eisenberg.”
“Don’t miss seeing that cow waddling up my walk.”
“Twenty years ago, Mélanie was working at InovoVax, is that correct?”
“Might be.”
“She and her children lived in this building?”
“Maybe.”
“They left suddenly in the summer of 2002?”
“Mon esti de tabarnac, are you stupid?” Sorg’s head swiveled while maintaining its sixty-degree angle as she shifted her focus from Ryan to me and back. Made me think of a turtle.
“I don’t understand,” Ryan said.
“That girl didn’t leave.”
“She didn’t?”
“Of course not.”
“Then—” Ryan began.
“Some sonofabitch murdered her ass.”
29
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 15
Sorg was a hoarder.
Tupperware bins, cardboard cartons, and bundled newspapers and magazines lined both sides of the hall. The living room, small to begin with, was reduced to just enough open space for an upholstered grouping, a coffee table, and an ancient TV.
Sorg waddle-swayed to the sofa and winged an elbow at it. Easing into one of the chairs, she craned her head up and regarded us with cerulean eyes.
“Do you know who killed Mélanie?” Ryan asked as we sat.
“What? Do I look like the Great Karnak?”
“You said—”
“I know what I said. I meant the girl wouldn’t just up and leave one of her kids. Someone musta whacked her.”
One of her kids? Lena? My pulse quickened.
“This is just your theory?” Ryan asked.
“You got a better one?”
Sadly, we didn’t.
As Ryan interviewed Sorg, I did a visual sweep of the room. Boxes, tubs, and freestanding articles of all kinds took up most of the square footage—books, picture frames, cushions, folded clothing, dolls, stuffed animals, small appliances. I counted four ironing boards, six blenders, and eleven brooms. Fortunately, due to Sorg’s limited reach, the stacks surrounding us weren’t perilously high.
“You were Mélanie’s aunt?”
“I’m ninety-four years old, sonny.”
“You certainly don’t look it.” Ryan flashed a charm-your-knickers-off grin.
“ ’Course I do. And I earned every damn wrinkle. And the hump.”
“Perhaps her great-aunt?”
“Sounds right. I came north so long ago the good Lord was still thinking up rocks. Right after the war. The big one. Never took to French, but I learned all the cuss words. I like Quebecois cuss words. They’re churchy.”
“Came north from where?”
“Vermont. Married a Montrealer. Stayed that way forty-one years. Then the big C took him.”
Ryan nodded sadly. “We understand Mélanie was also American, that she was in Canada illegally, and that her actual name was Melanie Chalmers.”
“I’m noting your verb tense. That mean I was right about her being dead?”
“Dr. Brennan and I are looking into—”
“Took you dumbasses two decades to get around to investigating?”
Ryan ignored that. “What can you tell us about Melanie?”
Sorg closed her eyes and dug through memories hoarded in her mind. “She wasn’t no dummy, had a degree in biology from some uni in the States. Don’t recall which one.” A pause for more excavation. “Before coming here, she worked for some outfit called HGP.”
“Do you know how she got the job at InovoVax?”
“Some hotshot colleague helped her. That’s all she’d say.”
“Do you know who?”
“Are you the one with the hearing deficit?”
“Did she ever mention a man named Arlo Murray?”
“Esti. That bastard was a pain in her tushy.”
“How so?”
“Constantly badgered her at work. Guy had the balls to come here once. I heard them arguing about someone named Christian. No.” A gnarled finger shot up. “Christopher. All the shouting gave me the collywobbles. Not that I was listening on purpose.”
“What did you mean, she wouldn’t have abandoned one of her kids?” I asked.
“Meant exactly that. She wouldn’t have split without that baby.”
“Lena?” Pulse humming.
“No. Shirley Temple.”
I just looked at her.
“Hell, yeah, Lena. Poor little thing, left all alone.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“Not much to tell. She dropped Lena with the sitter and went shopping with Ella. I think the kid needed shoes. Maybe it was shorts.”
“And?”
“And she never came back.”
“Who was the sitter?”
“Sabine Esnault. I knew her from my canasta group. Stubborn as a bucket of mud. Don’t matter. She’s dead now. Got the big C, too. Gone in six months. Cancer’s a mean bastard.”
“It was Esnault who turned Lena over to child services?”
“You implying I should have stepped up? I was seventy-five years old, tabarnac.”
“Not at all. I’m just trying to verify facts.”
Sorg glared at me. She looked like an angry turtle in a housecoat.
“I understand Lena moved frequently while in foster care. Did you follow her progress?”
“I wasn’t so good at keeping up. Gotta admit, I feel bad about that.”
“Did you ever see her again?”
“She came by twice. The first time five, maybe six years ago. She’d learned we’re related. I guess when you turn sixteen, you get to look at your own file. Or maybe she hacked it. I don’t know. But there she was, sitting where you are now.”
“What did she want?”
“What do you think? My recipe for poutine?” Air puffed through the crenellated lips. “She was asking abou
t her mother and sister, of course. Wasn’t much I could tell her. The three of ’em was only here a year or so. The second visit was a couple years later. She’d tried to get info from that buttwipe from Melanie’s work.”
“Arlo Murray?”
“He shut her down. Now, why in bloody hell would he do that?”
Good question, Florence.
“I’ll tell you why.” Again, a knobby finger shot up to emphasize her point. “I’ll bet my ass he’s the one killed her.”
I decided to switch tacks. “Did Melanie leave any belongings in her apartment?”
“Not much. Clothing, some toys, a bike, a camera. She rented furnished, ya know. I own the building, so I had to clean the place out.”
“What did you do with her things?”
“They’re here somewhere.”
“Do you think you could find them?”
“ ’Course I could. I’m not daft.”
Sorg grunt-shoved to her feet and shuffled to one of two closed doors at the rear of the apartment. When she opened the left one, we could see a narrow path cutting through lofty mounds of junk.
“There.” Pointing at a collection of boxes piled two deep and six high between a heaped bed and the easternmost wall. “Bottom three, second stack in.”
“May we move—” Ryan began, with little enthusiasm.
“Knock yourself out.”
We did. For forty minutes, my claustrophobia sensors at DEFCON 1.
The boxes produced a single item of potential interest: a corrugated file labeled InovoVax.
We found Sorg in the living room watching a rerun of Cheers, the volume cranked to a thousand decibels.
“May we keep this?” I shouted, holding up the file.
“Whatever.” Focused on an exchange between Norm and Cliff.
“There was an old camcorder in one of the boxes, but we saw no videotapes.”
The thunderous laugh track obliterated her answer.
“I’m sorry?”
The network cut to commercial.
Sorg swiveled to face us. “Tapes?”
I nodded.
“They were in a kitchen drawer.”
“And?”
“Second time she come, I give ’em to Lena.”
* * *
“What’s a collywobble?” I asked when we were again in the Jeep.
“It’s your mother tongue.”
“Crotchety old biddy.”
“But not daft.”
As Ryan drove, I started thinking out loud, summarizing what we knew and, more important, what we didn’t.
“In 2000, Melanie Chalmers is using the alias Mélanie Chalamet. She and her children are living, if not off the grid, at least in its outer reaches. Other than Sorg, maybe Eisenberg, they have no family or close friends.”
“Which explains why no one reports them missing,” Ryan said. “And why they turn up in none of our searches.”
“Who do you suppose this Christopher is?”
“First time that name’s come up.”
“What got Murray so steamed that he visited Melanie at home to argue about Christopher?”
Ryan offered no speculation.
I returned to my timeline.
“Melanie disappears in 2002. People believe she’s left Canada, but she hasn’t. She and her daughter Ella have been murdered, their bodies stuffed into a polypropylene bin. Lena enters foster care. In 2006, the bin washes ashore in Saint-Anicet.”
Questions bubbled in my brain like lotto balls.
“Why did Melanie relocate to Quebec? Where did she come from? Vermont? Who got her the job at InovoVax?”
“I’ll look into all of that.”
“According to Sorg and Eisenberg, there were bad feelings between Melanie and Murray.”
“Maybe over this dude Christopher?”
“Whoever the hell he is. Funny Eisenberg didn’t mention him.”
“I’ll request employee records at InovoVax going back to 2000.”
“I’m sure Murray will hop right on that.”
“If he stonewalls, I’ll have Claudel get a subpoena.”
I picked up the narrative.
“In 2015, when Lena turns sixteen and accesses her records, she tracks Sorg and demands information about her mother and sister. Sorg tells her about InovoVax, Murray, and Christopher and gives her videotapes. Lena goes to Murray, but he refuses to help her. Why?”
“Because he’s an arrogant tool, or because there’s stuff he doesn’t want her to know?”
“Around this same time, Lena tells Harmony Boatwright that she’s made a breakthrough in her search. She goes to Charleston, and Harmony joins her there.”
“Why Charleston?”
“I don’t know.”
I’d asked myself that question a million times. What linked Montreal and Charleston?
“Lena and Harmony are shot in the head, the same MO as with Melanie and Ella,” I continued. “This year, during the hurricane, their bodies wash ashore.”
Sudden thought. I twisted toward Ryan.
“All four victims were dumped in medical-waste containers. Such containers would be common at a place like InovoVax.”
“Yes.” Noncommittal.
“Eisenberg said Melanie’s file was deleted from the InovoVax system. Why?”
“Maybe it’s routine.”
“Or maybe it was done to cover someone’s tracks.”
“Whose?”
“I don’t know.” I was saying that a lot. “Do you think Sorg could be right about Murray?”
“Being an arrogant tool doesn’t make the guy a murderer.”
“No,” I agreed. “It doesn’t.”
Still.
I settled back in my seat. As we rode in silence, new images joined the balls bubbling in my mind. Headlights on a rainy street. A body slamming a bus stop upright.
“Can you check out what model car Murray drives?” I asked. “Or have Claudel do it?”
Our eyes met. Ryan’s looked dubious.
“Humor me,” I said.
“OK.” Then, “Where to?”
“I’m ninety-nine percent certain the remains at the morgue are those of Melanie and Ella, but I want to take one final look.”
“That thorny one percent.”
“When I’m finished with the bones, I’ll start going through Melanie’s papers.”
* * *
Two hours later, the skeletons lay articulated on their stainless-steel gurneys, one adult, one juvenile. Brown and weathered, they looked like macabre Halloween props.
I’d been over every bone and tooth. Checked every measurement, reviewed every morphological detail, reassessed all trauma. Though confirmation by DNA was still lacking, there was no doubt in my mind.
I looked at my clipboard. At the form I’d completed fifteen years earlier.
LSJML-41207 Os non identifiés d’une femme. The unidentified woman was Melanie Chalmers/Mélanie Chalamet.
I flipped the page.
LSJML-41208 Os non identifiés d’un enfant. The unidentified child was Ella Chalmers/Chalamet.
A mother dead at age thirty-two. Her child dead at age ten.
Silence echoed in the empty morgue. Expectant?
“Who are you, Mélanie Chalamet?” I whispered. “Where did you come from? Why did you move to Canada and change your name? Whom did you fill with such rage or so seriously threaten that they took your life? And why your daughter’s?”
I lifted the ziplock lying beside the small, unfinished skull. Stared at the garish plastic ring only a child could love.
My eyes drifted to the little orbits, sightless forever.
“I am so sorry, Ella. I promise—”
Tears threatened. I blinked them away.
“I will never stop looking.”
30
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16
Claudel phoned at eight the next morning. He’d wasted no time. And was his usual surly self.
“My first sweep is suggesting
that Arlo Murray is as clean as a urinal in a convent.”
“No arrests?”
“I dislike repeating myself.”
“What kind of car does he drive?”
“A Lexus LC 500.”
“What do they look like?” Automotive detail is not my thing.
“The one that ran you down?”
“Does it have fog lights?”
“All cars have fog lights. In case of fog.”
Easy, Brennan.
“Is Murray’s right fog light broken?” Enunciating each word.
“I’ll be checking that out. And I’ll be canvassing body shops to see if any Lexus 500 was brought in recently for repairs.”
“Find out everything you can about him.”
“I intend to know the nature of the gentleman’s polyps. But one question, s’il vous plaît. Why are you so certain Murray is dirty?”
“He and Melanie started working at InovoVax at the same time, both having come from the States. Two witnesses say there was friction between them, yet Murray lied about knowing Melanie. Years later, when Melanie’s daughter Lena showed up asking questions about her mother, Murray refused to help her.”
“Oui, mais—”
“Think about this. The day after Ryan phoned to request an interview, Melanie’s file is deleted from the InovoVax system.”
“Murray would have had access, but undoubtedly others as well.”
“I have a bad feeling about this guy. He should be under surveillance.”
“Couldn’t do my job without you, Dr. Brennan.”
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Ryan was gone, as usual. How could a human being be that stealthy that early? Most mornings, I scrabbled around like a squirrel in a feeder.
Ryan had made coffee. Without clanging a cup or banging a cabinet door.
After filling a mug, I took Melanie’s file to the dining-room table. I was spending so much time there lately that Birdie hopped up, Pavlovian, and curled beside me.
The file’s contents were disappointingly meager. Six sheets of paper. I skimmed the first. It seemed to be a schedule, but out of context, the dates, abbreviations, and series of numbers were meaningless.
The rest of the pages, all blue-lined and torn from a spiral notebook, were written in some sort of shorthand or code. I began culling recognizable words and phrases and entering them into a Word document.
antigen; antibody; replicated; inactivated; attenuated; purified; surface proteins
