The Bone Code

by Kathy Reichs

  In the driveway, car doors opening. Not slamming.

  Cops!

  I looked toward Huger. Blood was gushing from his shattered nose and split lower lip.

  A shouted order outside. A clipped response.

  Huger spit bloody saliva and broken teeth. Backhanded his mouth.

  Footsteps clomping up the back stairs. Others thundering through the house.

  “You’ve ruined everything,” Huger snarled, defeated.

  “My pleasure,” I said.

  As a uniform appeared on the top step, Vislosky came charging through the kitchen. Both had their weapons grasped two-handed at their jawlines.

  Vislosky halted at the open French doors. Tense. Ready. Then a slight easing of her spine.

  “You good?” she asked me, while keeping her gaze and her gun on Huger.

  I nodded. “There’s a Glock out here somewhere.”

  “Stand down,” Vislosky shouted to her backup. “Weapon in the area. But first, slap some bracelets on the guy with the dental issues.”

  The uniform cuffed Huger and handed him off to his partner.

  “You need an ambulance?” Vislosky asked me.

  “No.”

  “I think you do.”

  “You’ve been wrong before.”

  “I’m calling a bus anyway.”

  She did, then supported me as I limped into the kitchen.

  “You look like shit,” she said once I was settled as comfortably as possible.

  I nodded. It hurt. “How’d you get here so fast?”

  “I was just over the bridge in Mount Pleasant when you phoned. Good timing.”

  “Thanks.”

  I turned and hurled into Anne’s Murano glass bowl.

  40

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 25

  Neither Vislosky nor I had been overwhelmed with invitations. Being Canadian, Ryan had no plans. And to say Anne was insistent would be like saying the Allies dropped by at Normandy.

  Once we’d all accepted, she outdid herself transforming the entire first floor. Harvest-themed kitsch covered the walls. Gourds stuck with mums and Shasta daisies, cardboard Mayflower pop-ups, ceramic pumpkins and turkeys, and figurines of banqueting Pilgrims and Native Americans filled every horizontal surface. Spiced candles and apple pie diffusers scented the air.

  We took our places at five, every millimeter of tabletop crammed with platters and bowls overflowing with seasonal favorites. Turkey. Stuffing. Cranberry. Marshmallow-topped yams. Molded Jell-O. You know the drill.

  Anne reigned at the table’s head. I was seated to her left, next to Ryan. Vislosky was opposite me, an empty chair to her right. No amount of cajoling could get our jolly hostess to reveal the identity of the missing guest.

  We’d just filled our plates when Anne suggested a variation on an exercise Mama often forced on my sister Harry and me at mealtimes, a game that involved sharing our “warm fuzzies” and “cold pricklies” as she called them. I wasn’t a callous kid. But I hated laying out my feelings for the benefit of an audience. Still do.

  “I’ll start,” Anne said. “This Thanksgiving Day, I am grateful for such glorious weather, for being in the most beautiful place on God’s earth, and for the company of dear friends, old and new.”

  Anne raised her wineglass in Ryan’s direction.

  “I am thankful for the lovely and brilliant lady to my right. I hope she will always be a part of my life.”

  The lovely and brilliant lady kept her eyes on the plastic turkey beside her placemat. Wondered what it had to smile about.

  “Tempe?” Anne urged.

  “I am thankful that no one has teased me about my face. Except for Ryan’s Darth Vader quip.”

  “And Anne’s reference to Wile E. Coyote and the rake,” Vislosky said.

  “And that.”

  “Tonia?” Anne prompted after casting a withering look my way.

  “I’m thankful to have Huger’s ass in the bag.” Gruff. “Pass the cranberry.”

  Clearly, Vislosky’s enthusiasm matched mine.

  Nothing from the empty chair.

  “Well, then. I guess that’s it for gratitude.” Dramatic Anne sigh. “Fine. Let’s talk about Huger.”

  Not the divergent path I’d have chosen.

  “Let me get this straight.” Anne pointed one lacquered nail at me. “Huger was spiking vaccine with a virus that attacked what, now?”

  “Epithelial cells.”

  Anne stared, wide-eyed. Chardonnay-eyed. I wasn’t judging. It was Thanksgiving, and she’d been cooking all week.

  “Blood vessels,” I clarified.

  “How’d that work again?” One corner of Vislosky’s mouth was hitching up. I suspected her question arose out of a wish to bait Anne rather than a desire for more detail.

  “The virus delivered the CRISPR/Cas9, which snipped the DNA and replaced the gene that would normally prevent infection from capno.”

  I pantomimed scissors with one hand. Then, calling Vislosky’s bluff, elaborated further.

  “Specifically, the blood cells were altered to make an adhesion molecule that allowed the bacteria to attach and grow.”

  “After an animal bite or scratch,” Anne said.

  “Yep.”

  “Once the vessels were modified, could they be changed back?” Ryan asked.

  “No. Since Huger’s virus targeted stem cells, the changes were permanent.” I narrowed my eyes to indicate he should change the subject. He didn’t.

  “That’s where GeneFree came in?”

  “Yes.” Spearing an olive a little too forcefully.

  “How?”

  “Yeah, how?” Anne echoed.

  “Huger’s testing could determine where you and your pet stood.”

  “And?”

  “If Lassie was infected with capno, one of Huger’s other websites could provide the secret potion to cure her.” Resigned to the fact that, despite my disapproval, we would talk about this. “And if testing determined that you carried the gene making you susceptible, GeneFree had the magic wand to block adhesion of the nasty little molecule.”

  “Huger hoped all that would make his sites worth millions to some large corporation,” Anne said.

  “Payday.” Vislosky’s tone was coated with disgust.

  “Melanie’s role would have been to spike certain batches of vaccine. When she got cold feet and threatened to blow the whistle, Murray and Huger took her out.” Anne’s revulsion was as palpable as Vislosky’s. “And poor little Ella just happened to be with her mother that day.”

  “Who fixed the system so Melanie could work in Canada without a visa?” Vislosky asked.

  “Unless Huger talks, we may never know that. Though it appears he arranged for the jobs at InovoVax through some family connection.” Ryan turned to me. “Didn’t Melanie say that in the video?”

  “Yes. And she alluded to a strange bond between Huger and Murray. She said it was as if the two fed off each other. Murray was flashy, an attention seeker, a big spender, addicted to fast cars and boats. Huger was an introvert, bitter at being ignored by his parents following the death of his brother.”

  “Right.” Vislosky snorted. “Blame the parents.”

  “After Melanie was killed, Murray must have altered the batches himself,” I added. “Dora Eisenberg said he was at InovoVax practically twenty-four seven.”

  Anne voiced the question that Ryan and I had considered.

  “Do you suppose they made other attempts during the fifteen years between the murders in Montreal and those here in Charleston?”

  “Again, unless Huger talks, we may never know,” I said.

  “How could someone do something so diabolical?” Far too much emotion from Anne.

  “Maybe the scheme evolved as Melanie implied.” I was thinking aloud in stream of consciousness. “Both men were brilliant, talented. Murray craved money and adulation. Huger was driven by a need to prove himself in general and to his parents in particular. He resented that his father
had lost the family fortune and wanted to show that he could get it back. Perhaps alone, neither would have acted as they did. But together, the catalysts of need and greed led to murder.”

  “How do you say shitbag in all caps?” Anne asked.

  “Lethal injection.” Vislosky forked a hunk of turkey the size of Kansas into her mouth.

  “Huger must be facing godzillion charges?” Anne directed this to Ryan.

  “Adulterating or misbranding a food or drug. Placing an adulterated substance into interstate commerce. Kidnapping. Attempted murder. Murder. Canada will push hard for extradition.”

  “Ain’t gonna happen,” Vislosky snapped. “Huger’s staying right here in the U S of A. In South Carolina, a death-penalty state.”

  “Any way to connect Huger to the explosion at InovoVax? Other than the fact that he was conveniently in Montréal—Anne exaggerated the French pronunciation—at the time?”

  “Claudel’s hoping to tie him to the purchase of the Semtex,” Ryan said.

  “Here’s to le détective.” Anne raised her glass.

  We all drank to Claudel.

  “Is he talking at all?” Anne was on a roll. “Huger, not Claudel.”

  Vislosky levered one shoulder. “Under advice of counsel, the bastard’s being very cagey. His lawyer has pointed out, and unfortunately the guy’s right, that we have very little physical evidence linking Huger to any of the homicides. Or to the tampering, for that matter. It may be that our best case is the assault and attempted murder by drowning of Tempe. Those are solid.”

  “Why didn’t he just shoot her, like the others?”

  “A lot of people knew what Tempe was investigating,” Vislosky said. “This time he had to make it look accidental.”

  “Don’t quit on the murders of the women.”

  We all looked at Ryan.

  “An IT tech in Montreal managed to recover a few voice mails from the Samsung Galaxy found in the rubble at InovoVax.”

  “Murray’s mobile?” I asked.

  “Yep. One of the messages was left by a caller with an eight-four-three exchange.”

  “Had to be Huger. We can trace the number and probably identify the voice.”

  “According to the tech, the caller sounded furieux.” No translation needed.

  We waited as Ryan pulled out his own phone, scrolled, and read. “I quote: ‘Charleston harbor two. St. Lawrence two. Laurier zero. Balanced score, asshole?’ ”

  “Holy crap. When was that left?” I asked.

  “November first.”

  “Three days after the hit-and-run.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “Murray must have told Huger I was reopening the investigation into the container vics. Huger ordered him either to scare me off or to take me out. But how did he know?” I asked.

  “Carrot Hair.”

  Six eyes again swiveled to Ryan.

  “Laura Bianchi. The journalist who showed up at the exhumation.”

  “Of course!” I said. Which compelled a brief explanation of the pic and the article in the Gazette. When I’d finished, I said, more resolute now, “So. Bears or Panthers?”

  The others looked at me as if I’d spoken ancient Sumerian.

  “Chicago is playing Carolina this weekend. Who’s your pick?”

  “Oh, dear Lord.” Eyes in full orbit, Anne got to her feet. “Almost time for dessert, but first, I have something that may jolt the fillings right out of your teeth.”

  With that dramatic declaration, she disappeared through the swinging doors, returned moments later, butt first, with something substantial wrapped in her arms.

  Turning, she announced, “Y’all, meet Anne. Same name, no relation.”

  No Relation Anne was a female mannequin, consisting only of torso, neck, and head. As we watched, our Anne placed No Relation Anne in the vacant chair and snugged her up to the table.

  The sight of the new arrival generated an odd uneasiness.

  I studied the dummy’s features, and the uneasiness intensified. A sensation similar to the one I’d experienced when first viewing Polly Beecroft’s photos.

  Snap!

  “Resusci Annie!” I exclaimed.

  “Aka Rescue Annie.” Anne beamed. “More folks have locked lips with this lady than have kissed the Blarney Stone.”

  Ryan and Vislosky looked lost.

  “It’s a CPR doll,” I explained. “But what—?”

  Anne cut me off. “We all know about L’Inconnue, right?”

  “The unknown subject dragged from the Seine a century ago,” Vislosky said.

  “Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to score a name or determine the woman’s manner of death, but I did learn an interesting factoid about her death mask.”

  No one interrupted.

  “About sixty years ago, an Austrian doctor named Peter Safar developed the basics of CPR. Long story short, Safar asked a Norwegian toymaker named Asmund Laerdal to design a life-size mannequin for use as a training tool. Figuring men would be grossed out doing mouth-to-mouth on a male dummy, Laerdal decided the doll should be female. As the story goes, he saw a L’Inconnue on a wall, thought her face was beautiful, and used the mask as his model.”

  Anne patted the mannequin’s head.

  “Since then, millions have learned CPR on this little gal.”

  “I was one of them.” I now realized why Polly and her relatives had looked vaguely familiar. “Where did you get her?”

  “As you know, I went to Savannah last week to see Josh filming.” To the others, “Josh is my son. He’s an actor and was playing a doc in a soap. The scene was taking place in an ER, and there was a CPR dummy tucked into one corner. I’d just learned about Resusci Annie, so when the crew broke set, I asked if I could have her. They said hell yes. One less prop to deal with.”

  Anne circled to her place for a sip of wine.

  “I’m not giving up, mind you. But for now, I hope Polly will be pleased to know that her maybe ancestor has helped save the lives of beaucoup people.”

  “I’m sure she will,” I said.

  We all pitched in clearing dishes and wrapping leftovers. Then Anne served pumpkin pie, and we poured coffee and moved out onto the deck.

  The shattered planter was gone, the furniture back in proper alignment. Not a single sign remained of the life-and-death struggle that had taken place there just five days earlier.

  Except for my Anakin Skywalker face.

  I settled into one of the Pawleys Island rockers. Ryan took the one next to mine.

  The moon hung low and full and was the same orange hue as Anne’s designer pumpkins. An amber triangle sparked the water’s surface from its lower border at the horizon all the way to the shore.

  Inevitably, the conversation drifted back to Huger’s scheme to profit off the misery of others. To the monstrous misuse of his knowledge of human genomics.

  We discussed the wonder and the power of the double-helix molecule.

  We marveled at how a shared sequencing of base pairs had given Polly and Harriet and their great-aunt and grandmother identical features.

  At how a malevolent chromosome had saddled Tereza Deacon with Silver-Russell syndrome, a condition that had altered her body and shaped her short life.

  At the irony of the single biggest breakthrough in the container-case investigations.

  Genetic genealogy had linked Aubrey Sullivan Huger to his youngest victim, Harmony Boatwright.

  The man’s own DNA had brought him down.

  EPILOGUE

  The earth revolved and rotated.

  A new year began.

  JANUARY 3

  I was eating leftover Chinese takeout, thinking about booking a haircut, when footsteps sounded on the back stairs. Heavy ones.

  I rose from the table to peek outside.

  Katy stood on my porch wearing desert camo fatigues and cover, combat boots, and aviator shades. An Army-issue duffel lay at her feet. A backpack hung from her left shoulder.

  Katy looke
d lean and tanned. Confident. A different person from the troubled kid who’d enlisted four long years ago.

  Fighting back tears of joy, I opened the door.

  “Sergeant Petersons reporting for duty.” Smiling broadly, Katy whipped off the aviators and pointed them at me. “You’d better have chocolate chip cookies, soldier.”

  I threw my arms around my daughter, lumpy pack and all.

  “I love you, sweetheart,” I whispered. “I am so very proud of you.”

  I said the words then. Repeated them often throughout her stay.

  Katy’s return brought me greater happiness than I can begin to describe. But her presence prompted thoughts of other daughters. Other mothers.

  I’d taken a break from death. A holiday reprieve.

  Now I was ready.

  I made two calls.

  JANUARY 10

  Early morning, my phone rang. The update was better than I’d hoped.

  Vislosky’s efforts had produced an address for Bonnie Bird Boatwright. For the past six years, Harmony’s mother had been living in a women’s commune in northern Minnesota.

  Bonnie Bird had asked that her daughter’s remains be transferred from the Charleston morgue to a funeral home in Nashville. She’d purchased two gravestones and side-by-side plots. One for herself. One for Harmony.

  JANUARY 22

  My mobile rang as I was returning from dropping Katy at the airport. This time, the news was mixed.

  Grudgingly, cemetery manager Rémi Arbour had followed through on my request to contact Ariel, the woman I’d met at Le Repos Saint-François d’Assise—the one who’d given me that tiny prayer card to slip into what turned out to be Ella’s body bag. Hearing Arbour’s wheezy, nasal French triggered a flood of memories of that day in 2010. The graveyard. The markers with their forlorn inscriptions.

  LSJML-41207 Os non identifiés d’une femme.

  LSJML-41208 Os non identifiés d’un enfant.

  He had good news and bad.

  The good. Ariel Caldrea was still an active member of the church on rue Sherbrooke. Parishioners still attended anonymous interments at Saint-François.