Some more coffee, chief? And Michaud, also lost in thought, held out his cup. They’d barely left Cusack’s house, and he had the feeling they’d never get to Boundary. What with nothing around, he’d turned on the siren and the flashing lights to give himself the illusion of going faster, as it was impossible to accelerate on those hilly, winding roads. He’d probably wake some people in a few isolated houses, but what was one or two hours less sleep as long as you were alive.
Coming out of Rockwood, they saw two deer crossing the road, their eyes widened by the bright headlights. Michaud had to swerve to avoid them, and in so doing he spilled his coffee. The car’s tyres dug into the gravel on the shoulder, a few branches brushed across the windshield, and he gave a hard jerk to the steering wheel to get the car back on track. Unnerved by the speed with which it all happened, he stopped the car to mop his brow and pull himself together. Behind them, the deer had made it back into the forest, they wouldn’t be joining the dead animals you often saw lying in the ditch. Sorry, mumbled Michaud, his heart beating wildly in his chest, because he’d perhaps come close to his death himself, his and that of his partner, who was not now thinking about death, but about the fact that people around him were always excusing themselves, sorry, while their only fault was to be mortal. Michaud had manoeuvred well, he didn’t have to feel guilty. Still, they’d come close to flying into the woods and having their bodies end up between white sheets, surrounded by the smells of medicine and sickness.
Cusack replied to Michaud’s faint sorry by assuring him that he’d done fine, a real pro, and then they went silent. What could you add that wasn’t irrelevant, under the circumstances? Still, Michaud was surprised by Cusack’s recent reticence. Not long ago he’d have felt impelled to make a joke, to tell a story about deer and squealing tyres, but he’d confined himself to reassuring Michaud and handing him a rag from the glove compartment so he could wipe his shirt. Zaza Mulligan had found the chink in his armour, and had used it to pass through the breach leading to his heart. All the police go there sooner or later, all the bright ones, but Michaud couldn’t help feeling a certain compassion for his deputy, who’d just lost his virginity, in a sense, along with his protective shell, and didn’t yet know that beneath that old skin another shell would grow, harder to penetrate, it had to happen, because if you were in mourning for your virginity you either changed jobs or you stuck the barrel of your gun down your throat.
They were just about to get back on the road when the ambulance Westlake had called passed them. Michaud took off immediately and followed the other vehicle, whose tail lights at times vanished around a curve, swallowed up by the night, to reappear when the road straightened through the forest. Michaud kept his eyes on those lights while thinking of his childhood, the lights on the tractors in the fields when you had to cut the hay before the rain, of his first patrols along the border, with the smugglers’ lights blinking weakly between the trees, swallowed up by darkness, as had been the tractors over the hill, the throbbing of whose engines was itself muted. He thought of the laughable way in which those lights only deepened the night’s mystery, amplifying man’s puniness at the heart of that darkness. And he also felt small, lost on this road and hurtling towards the abyss, at the wheel of a vehicle wailing away that a disaster had just befallen some among us, though countless dramas occurred in the forest to which no attention was drawn, no flashing lights and no sirens.
Just before Boundary, the ambulance driver stopped at an intersection, not knowing whether to go left or right, allowing Michaud to wrench himself away from his thoughts. Abruptly, he changed lanes and passed the ambulance, signalling to the driver that he would lead the way, as Michaud knew where he was going, he knew it only too well, he was going where no one wanted to go, to one of those places where only men stupid enough to be cops headed in the middle of the night, while others slept and dreamt they were falling or sleeping with Elizabeth Taylor or Sophia Loren. He drove for two or three miles along a secondary road, then he put on his flashers for the benefit of the ambulance and turned onto Boundary Road after he had switched off his siren, which could neither speed up nor slow down the flow of time. Now all he had to do was let himself be guided by the glow down below, where the flashlights described a shifting shape, breathing to the pulse of a wounded animal.
Gary Miller came to meet them, waving his light to show them where to park farther down. Miller looked like someone who’d lost his dog, his eyes sombre and his jaw set, ready to strike out at anyone who uttered the dog’s name. It’s over there, he told the police, directing his light towards the undergrowth, then without a word he guided them through the branches, the dead trees, the young firs choking off each other’s air. Behind them, the ambulance workers, with their stretchers, cursed the branches under their breath, while the doctor accompanying them, the same one who had pronounced Zaza Mulligan dead, wondered what he was doing again in this unhappy wood. After about ten minutes they came out into a clearing where other men were gathered, most at the edge of the trees, on the periphery, and one last one on his knees in the centre of the clearing, Vic Morgan, holding in his arms a limp body he was rocking in time with his prayers, open your eyes, Sissy darling, tell me something, prayers that rose up like a song of love in the cool darkness.
No one dared to go near, no one dared to interrupt that song to go and place his hand on Morgan’s shoulder and tell him that his daughter would never again open her eyes. All were motionless, even Ed McBain, Morgan’s closest friend, waiting for a sign from him, waiting for dawn, a bit of real light in the clearing. Stay here, Michaud ordered Cusack, the doctor, and the ambulance workers, and he crossed the invisible barrier separating Morgan from the other men, because that was what was expected of a chief inspector, that he wade into the mud, where no one wants to go. That’s why he was paid, so he could serve as confessor, go-between, or advance guard, that he turn himself into a kamikaze when the situation required an imbecile to throw himself from a bridge to help another imbecile. He was called in extremis as soon as there was a bit of blood and broken glass, then he was scorned if he dared to stop you for speeding, so as to prevent more glass shards from glistening on the wet road. That was his role, to endure the contempt and walk through the mud, so he told those around him not to move, stay here, and he went to kneel in front of Morgan.
Seeing Sissy, whose head was resting in the hollow of Vic Morgan’s arms, Michaud almost fell backwards, and had to hold back the question that was pushing him away: what the hell? Sissy Morgan, whom he’d seen whole a few days earlier, had no hair. Someone had sliced away her long mane and her skull was now covered with only a few scattered tufts, like the bald heads of ancient dolls. But Sissy’s wholeness had not just been violated by an absence of hair. Below her left knee her long leg had disappeared, severed by the trap, torn away by the dry clack of rusted metal.
Michaud’s first feeling was not one of compassion, but of anger. Who could be so demented as to attack an innocent child in that way? For a moment he just wanted to drive from this damn clearing all the men planted there like stakes a sledge hammer had pounded into the soft ground, not daring to talk, not daring to smoke, and to leave Morgan with his daughter, to leave him alone, goddammit, leave him bloody well alone, since nothing would be able to bring back that child, but then he grabbed hold of himself. If they left Morgan with Sissy, they’d find him totally insane in a few hours. He’d already aged ten years, maybe more, how to know when time hurls itself into the void, and he seemed already blind. His scorched gaze swept across the night without seeing it, searing away in turn the shapes, the shadows, the men who were no longer there. He didn’t see Michaud either, considering him an object whose presence was as insignificant as a speck of dust on his shoulder, and he kept on singing, Sissy my darling, Sissy my love. Michaud let him rock his child for a bit longer, while trying to master the rage tautening his nerves under his skin, then he bent over him. She’s dead, he managed to murmur, in de
fiance of the damn lump turning over itself deep in his throat. He wanted to take the young girl from Morgan’s arms, but Morgan came out with a hoarse noise, a kind of bark, and he tightened his grip around Sissy, crushing her limp arms, crushing her breast, a dog refusing to let go of its bone.
Fighting his desire to leave the man in peace, Michaud repeated she’s dead, signalling to Ed McBain, who was holding himself ready to intervene, to grab hold of Morgan while he pulled his daughter out of his arms. A dirty job, a cop’s job. She’s dead, Vic, McBain murmured in his turn, she’s dead, because there was nothing else to say, dead, for Christ’s sake, then he seized Morgan’s shoulders, who crumpled, letting slip from his knees Sissy’s limp body, which rolled onto the ground, dead, Sissy, indeed, her tufts of hair pointing at the starry sky and her neck curiously bent.
While Michaud gently turned over Sissy’s remains, who, Sissy, why? ashamed of having lifted up her father’s arms, McBain helped Morgan to stand and led him off, come on, Vic, come on, his eyes brimming with tears and his voice thick. Vic Morgan, now, didn’t resist. He held Sissy in his blinded eyes, his arms still tensed beneath the weight of the absent body. The doctor then came over, leaving his thermos with its coffee at the foot of a tree, lamps were brought in, and the inspection of the body, the site, was able to begin, with Cusack bombarding the scene with flashes from his camera, a Polaroid that had cost a fortune and had made a big hole in Michaud’s budget.
Sissy Morgan, it appeared, had succumbed to the same kind of wound as Zaza Mulligan. The same in life, the same in death, with the difference that this time the trap had severed the left leg, whose lower section lay a few steps from the corpse. A man who came up to position his light at the side, along the perimeter marked out by Cusack, fought back a strangled cry when he saw the end of the leg and the foot, a high-pitched sigh that caught in his throat, and he went to vomit far from Sissy, splattering his shoes and his pants. Along with the vomit, out came a groan, like that of Vic Morgan. Everyone there lowered their heads, unable to groan in their turn, to expel the breath on which they were choking.
As for Michaud, he was trying to deflect the paths of boomerangs that were zeroing in from every direction, coming together to form an instrument whose blades slashed into his raw flesh. He’d known they’d return, he’d known that instinctively, as soon as he’d had to give up watching the end of Bonanza three weeks earlier. And with them there returned the young girls, Esther Conrad, Zaza Mulligan, their faces superimposed on that of Sissy Morgan, all three pallid, all three victims of the rage beauty can inspire, because there was no doubt in Michaud’s mind that Sissy had been murdered, from which he deduced that Zaza Mulligan had suffered the same fate, dragged by force onto a path she didn’t want to take. The horror before his eyes could not have resulted from a banal coincidence.
That was what the medical examiner thought as well, as did all the men gathered under the cold sky, that the past couldn’t strike twice with the same precision. Zaza Mulligan, just like Sissy Morgan, had not stepped on her own into the trap between whose jaws she’d spilled her blood. Sometimes you needed a second death to explain the cause of the first, Michaud thought to himself, looking upon the pale face of Sissy Morgan, now identical to Zaza’s, two sisters, two silenced twins. You needed that mirror image, that concurrence of motives, that perfect overlapping of two distant events so as to understand, too late, that the first prefigured the one that would explain it. Sissy Morgan’s end shone a terrible clarity on that of Zaza Mulligan, which all the men present would have preferred not to see: Pete Landry’s traps came out of the earth, but it was not a dead man who had disinterred them. A killer roamed Boundary’s woods.
The anguish, the tension, were palpable in the silences and the sniffling, but you also sensed the slow ascension of rage. They were seeking a motive, a reason for this carnage beyond the two girls’ provocative beauty, Zaza’s navel, the cut of Sissy’s white shorts. Those illicit thoughts had to be cast out in the light of these killings, and now a loathing set in, the desire to strike down and pummel to death, the men’s feeling of impotence magnifying their anger exponentially.
Michaud saw this dark energy as an electric current connecting the men, fathers, brothers, fearful in the knowledge that there was a monster on the loose who could act again. He knew that sooner or later a meltdown would come, and people would start suspecting a neighbour, a son, a brother, if the killer were not caught soon. The tension abroad in the clearing was nothing compared to the undercurrent of suspicion that would run through Boundary from one end to the other as of the next night, and he feared the worst, the projection of shame onto an object without face or body. If he wanted to sort out this affair before people went at each other’s throats, he needed calm, he had to deal with Sissy, who, Sissy, why?
While the medical examiner raised up the dead girl’s hand with a delicacy he must have reserved only for women whose acquiescence was now complete, Michaud asked Cusack to send someone for reinforcements. They’d need them for a meticulous search of the site, because Michaud wanted every square inch of this cursed clearing and all the paths leading up to it to be gone over with a fine-tooth comb, even if the men had to sleep in the open and survive on spruce sap for the next ten days. His rage was seething inside his chest, and he’d sworn, as soon as he saw the heartbreaking and macabre tableau formed by Vic Morgan and his daughter, that no such tableau would ever again take on life before his eyes.
As Cusack gave orders to Scott Miller, who went to summon the reinforcements and bring them back, Michaud left the body to thank the exhausted men for their help, and asked them to go home, explaining that the affair was now in the hands of the police, and their presence would only cover the tracks, of which there were already too many, would tramp possible clues into the ground, in short, sow confusion in an operation that he wanted to be as precise as clockwork. He did, however, omit the last remark, while asking them to remain in Boundary with their families until he gave them permission to leave. There were some protests, a few men wanting to help in the investigation, others having only one thought in their heads, to pull their wives and children out of their beds as soon as they got back, throw them into their car along with the dog, the cat, the canary, the youngest’s collection of duck feathers, the eldest’s record player, and break camp before dawn. Several voices were raised at the same time, forgetting the respect due to the dead, and Michaud could make out nothing in this jumble of languages out of which curses emerged from two worlds where resentment was articulated by scoffing sacred figures, before finding common cause around the figure of Christ.
Bob Lamar, who was part of the group that found Sissy, and who was acting as interpreter, fortunately came to his aid, wiping his red eyes fiercely with his hand, and confusing the names of Frenchie, his daughter, and Sissy, the deceased. Despite the anguish eating away at him, Lamar supported Michaud, and he was able to persuade the men to go home to sleep, knowing that none of them would in fact sleep that night, and perhaps not the next night either, because Zaza Mulligan’s long legs would from now on be curled around the severed leg of Sissy Morgan, fouling their sheets with a thick liquid to which would be glued some strands of knifed-off hair. Only Ed McBain stayed behind to watch over Vic Morgan, who refused to leave Sissy, and to prevent him from decapitating himself with the trap that had killed his daughter, his only child.
After the others left, a strange calm descended on the clearing. At the edge of the woods, Ed McBain waited beside Vic Morgan’s slumped body, the stretcher-bearers withdrew to the opposite side, waiting for a sign from the medical examiner or Michaud to carry the body away, and Cusack swept the ground with his flashlight, seeking a bit of truth among the dozens of footprints pressed into the wet grass. At the centre of it all were the medical examiner and Sissy, the face of one caught in a halo of white light, the other lit three-quarters. An unreal scene in a world too hard-edged. Michaud came near and saw the medical examiner’s li
ps moving, as if he were reciting a prayer. But he wasn’t praying, he never prayed, certain that the body he was cutting up had never possessed any other soul than the one delusively generated by the mechanics of the heart and brain. On the contrary, he was reciting a poem, a pagan prayer exalting the power of death, and mourning the tenuousness of the beauty there before it. “How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?”
Shakespeare, he told Michaud, when he saw that he was being observed, then he added that there was no more he could do here, he had to take the body to the morgue where his instruments awaited him. Michaud replied that he could soon leave, but that he first needed a few minutes with the young girl before the stretcher-bearers intervened. He wanted to gather his thoughts in her presence, to try to make her talk. The medical examiner didn’t react, he knew the dead talked. So he left Michaud with Sissy, who would reveal secrets to him as well when he came to examine her internal organs. He withdrew to smoke, repeating a few lines from a poem that had come back to him when he had once again noted the fragility of a man’s bones: “since brass, nor stone, nor earth…”
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