Crossing the Line

by Frédérique Molay

  They arrived at the nearby Rue des Saints-Pères in no time. It reminded Nico of his days at the prestigious Paris Institute of Political Studies—Sciences-Po. At the time, he already wanted to take the officer’s exam and go to the national police academy. It took him months to tell his father, who headed a business empire and wanted his son to take over one day. Anya had been forced to issue an ultimatum. If he didn’t tell his father, she would, which would surely make the man even angrier. So, with sweaty palms and a heart fighting its way out of his chest, Nico had faced the man. The blood had drained from his father’s face. He stood up without saying a word and grabbed a glass and a bottle of Spiritus, a gut-burning Polish alcohol. He poured it and downed the drink without blinking. Nico hadn’t dared to move until Anya stormed into the room, put the bottle away, and laid into both of them.

  “You’re both idiots. Nico, you’re not ten years old anymore. Take responsibility for your choices. If you want to play cops and robbers, that’s up to you. My life will become hell. I’ll wake up every morning praying that nobody shoots you in the head and will go to sleep every night thanking the Lord that you are still with us. But what counts is that you are happy. As for you,” Anya continued, pointing at her husband, “you’re just acting like a bully. Tell him what’s in your heart. That’s the only thing worth saying.”

  His father cleared his throat. He hesitated, then finally said, “I love you, son” and took Nico in his arms.

  “Good. Case closed,” Anya proclaimed, leaving the room.

  She had always been theatrical. Nico had pursued his dream of becoming a police officer and chasing criminals. But that didn’t stop him from helping his father from time to time, and they had brokered some fine business transactions together before his death.

  Commander Kriven drove through the gates at 47 Rue des Saints-Pères, the entrance reserved for service vehicles. A woman who looked about sixty years old was waiting for them. She was shivering in the cold, despite the winter coat wrapped around her.

  Nico got out of the car and held out his hand. “Chief Sirsky from the Criminal Investigation Division.”

  “Elisabeth Bordieu, administrative manager of the Body Donation Center,” she said, shaking his hand and looking impressed.

  Nico was used to his position having that effect and also knew that his six-foot-two stature, blond hair, and blue eyes made an impression on women.

  “This is my team. Let’s hurry. You don’t want to catch cold.”

  She led them into a vast gray garage where merchandise of all types was loaded and unloaded, from food to school supplies, manuals, equipment, and furniture. Two light-colored wooden coffins sat in a corner. The group’s footsteps on the concrete floor echoed as they made their way to the large double doors. Elisabeth Bordieu gave them a hard push. On the other side, a steep ramp led to the basement. There was no noise, and the silence in this seemingly secret passageway was both fascinating and chilling. A rusty freight elevator took them to the sixth floor. Its cables creaked the whole way. Clearly, this university had seen better days.

  The elevator let them off at the end of a long hallway. The red door at the other end caught their attention. A sign indicated limited access. Nearby, two rooms faced each other, the Poirier and Farabeuf labs.

  Elisabeth Bordieu stopped and said, “I don’t exactly know where to start.”

  Nico gave her a reassuring look. “You can start by telling us where the head is.”

  “Marcel, one of our body processors, brought it back into his workshop. We have a heavy schedule this afternoon, and we couldn’t hold up the anatomy lab.”

  “Is that the same Marcel who drilled into the tooth and found the message?” Nico asked.

  “Exactly. During lunch hour.”

  Kriven glanced at his superior officer, as if to say there were better ways to spend a lunch hour.

  “He’s in charge of the subjects, and he’s a perfectionist,” Bordieu said, clearing her throat.

  “The subjects?” Nico asked.

  “The anatomy subjects. The deceased, if you prefer. We don’t refer to them as dead bodies here,” she continued.

  “I understand,” Nico responded. The choice of words depended so much on who was talking. Anatomy subjects, dead bodies; tomato, tomahto.

  “Some courses require only certain anatomical parts,” Bordieu went on.

  “That would be heads for the dentists, in this case.”

  “That’s right. They are still working in the Farabeuf Lab. But orthopedic surgeons might need hands or elbows.”

  Clearly, her job meant a lot to her. Nico was sure that Elisabeth Bordieu knew everything there was to know about “anatomy subjects” and didn’t keep nine-to-five hours. He admired her. But if he were to listen to his ex-wife, he admired women’s qualities and capabilities a little too much.

  “I suggest that Captain Vidal and his assistant, Lieutenant Almeida, examine the head.”

  “I’m not sure that… Well, I mean the workshop is rather off-putting, to say the least, and generally only the processors go in there.”

  “Don’t worry. These are seasoned detectives. Nothing behind that door could shock them, and the information they gather is privileged.”

  “I’ll let Marcel know, then.”

  “Yes, it’s best that he be there. In the meantime, three of my men will question the dentists.”

  Nico gave the signal to the detectives in the squad in charge of canvassing, and Kriven’s new assistant, who had replaced Captain Ader.

  “Commander Kriven and I will stay with you, Mrs. Bordieu. We need to understand how your department works, how the head ended up here, and, most of all, who it belongs to.”

  4

  Nico and Kriven sat down at the round cherrywood table in Elisabeth Bordieu’s office. A secretary brought them three cups of coffee. A large window looked onto the snowy Paris rooftops and the occasional swirls of chimney smoke.

  “So you are in charge of body donations. What is the relationship with the university?” Nico asked.

  “The Body Donation Center is a full-fledged department of Paris Descartes University. Our mission is research and teaching, and we work under a professor of medicine—he’s a distinguished neurologist—and his assistant. There are four units. The administrative unit has four processors, two secretaries, and myself. The other three are the scientific council, which approves research and handles publications, the ethics committee, and the video unit, which offers courses via video conferencing in France and abroad. In some countries, body donation is forbidden, which makes it difficult for surgeons in training.”

  Elisabeth Bordieu seemed organized and methodical.

  “So, is your department the only one authorized to accept bodies that arrive here at the university?” David Kriven asked.

  “That’s right.”

  Nico sipped the warm coffee. “Did the head we’re here to inspect come from a body donation?”

  “It did. We receive 650 bodies a year, on average, which represent a third of the donations made in France. Ours is a major donation center.”

  “What procedures do body donors have to follow?”

  “Donating your body to science is something like writing a will. What I mean is that it must be voluntary and documented. Anyone interested in doing so must provide a handwritten, signed, and dated letter stating his or her intention.”

  Bordieu walked over to her computer, and the printer spit out a sample letter, which she handed to the detectives. It felt like a foretaste of death. He wondered what motivated those who would agree to sign over their bodies. What would he do?

  “Why?” he asked.

  Bordieu focused on him. “For more than forty years I’ve been working with dead bodies, to use the term I detest. It’s a profession quite unlike any other. I’m surrounded by exceptional people whose only ambition is to improve the lives of others. And even with all my experience, I still wonder why people donate their bodies to science. Maybe i
t’s to ensure that science keeps progressing. Maybe it’s to feel like they are helping others after they die. I imagine that in your job, you have your fair share of questions. Why do men kill, Inspector?”

  As Captain Pierre Vidal went through the red door and entered the domain of the body processors, he could still hear his boss’s words. “These are seasoned detectives. Nothing behind that door could shock them.” Well, he got that wrong. Vidal had smelled plenty of blood in his career and had seen many mutilated bodies. But this was something else altogether. It was much more insidious. His legs felt weak, and the pressure in his chest was making it hard to breathe.

  The acrid, fetid stink of the dead struck him first. That was followed by the smell of chemicals and bleach. The room was cold and damp. Faucets with hoses lined the hallway off three large cold-storage rooms. Through windows in the doors, he could see the bodies piled up and cut up like pieces of meat.

  Lieutenant Almeida’s face had gone pale, and Vidal was concerned that he might faint. What sissies we must look like, he thought. Marcel, however, was in his element and clearly excited about the police being there.

  He led them to his lab at the end of the hallway. There was the head, staring at them, its mouth open.

  “Shit,” Almeida said. The lieutenant took out his digital camera and started taking pictures from all angles.

  “What’s that?” Captain Vidal asked as his slipped on a pair of nitrile gloves, which he used instead of the regular variety because he was allergic to latex.

  A number was written in black pen on the forehead.

  “His name,” Marcel said. “Let me introduce 510.”

  “Nice to meet you, 510,” Vidal responded.

  “Don’t be offended if he doesn’t say hello. He’s lost his voice,” Marcel said with a chuckle.

  “Has anyone touched him?” Vidal asked.

  “Of course, but always with gloves.”

  “Who?”

  “Me, the three other people who work here, the dentists in the Farabeuf Lab, ophthalmologists, neurologists.”

  An eyelid had been sewn shut, and there were stitches running behind the left ear.

  “He’s still holdin’ up well,” Marcel said, looking proud as he gazed at his body-free ward.

  “We’re going to have to take it off your hands,” Vidal said. “It’s evidence now.” Almeida pulled out a lamp with colored filters. Ultraviolet light uncovered fingerprints. Violet was for blood, and blue and green were for fibers, urine, and sperm. In this case, it was hard to find anything useful, because the body fluids could be from anyone in the building.

  “Was the head preserved in the cold room?” Vidal asked.

  “Yes, at thirty-nine degrees. That allows us to work on the parts for about a month. I freeze the bodies at minus four degrees when necessary, and that way we can keep them for several months.”

  “Where’s the rest of 510?”

  “I thought he’d be better off in the fridge. I gotta warn you, students in digestive surgery had a crack at him this morning. And Italian orthopedic surgeons worked on his arm. When docs are learning some techniques, it’s best not to work on living subjects, so they come here.”

  “This head, 510, seems awfully pale.”

  “Normal. We wash the head to get rid of blood and other substances before it gets any kind of injection.”

  “You mean injections to color the arterial and venous systems? What technique do you use?” Vidal asked.

  “Green latex suspension. After washing, I inject an ammoniac solution that keeps the latex from hardening too fast. Then the needle goes into soapy water, and I fill the syringe with the magic potion and do the injection in one fell swoop. When the latex hardens, it’s easy to dissect the part, because the vessels keep some of their flexibility. That’s the advantage.”

  “You know a lot about this.”

  “It’s my job. I pamper them.”

  “Where is the message you found in the tooth?”

  “Here, in this tray. It says, ‘I was murdered.’ Blows your mind, doesn’t it?”

  Vidal used tweezers to pick up the piece of plastic. He slid it into a numbered evidence container. He added the date, time, place, and his initials. The police had to follow strict conservation and tracing procedures for any evidence to hold up in court. Almeida was taking samples for a DNA test they would do later. Then they started examining the mouth.

  “The message was hidden there, in that filling,” Marcel said.

  As Vidal examined the filling, something caught his eye, something the dentists hadn’t pointed out. It was a new element in the case. And a big one.

  “Why would someone give his or her body to science?” Elisabeth Bordieu repeated the question. “It might be because the person is alone, or doesn’t have any close family members, or wants to spare the family the burden of dealing with a funeral and all the ceremony. And there is also the feeling, as illusory as it is, of staying a little bit longer in the world of the living.”

  Commander Kriven cleared his throat and asked, “Once the person writes the official donation letter, what happens?”

  “When we receive the letter, we send a donor card,” she said, holding out a sample. “Death to serve life” was written on the back. The orange card detailed the procedure to be followed when the donor died.

  “I presume you have some, well, losses,” Kriven said.

  “That’s true. Not all the bodies make it to us. There are quite a few reasons for this. We need to get the body within twenty-four hours, or forty-eight if it’s kept in cold storage. Sometimes it takes longer than that to get here. Sometimes the relatives are not aware of the arrangements the deceased has made. There are also families that refuse, overriding the person’s wishes. Sometimes the relatives can’t find the donor card, or the donor changed his or her mind and destroyed the card without informing us. The other possibility, which is the exception, would be some legal obstacle, such as a suspicious death.”

  “Well, our head made it here,” Kriven said.

  “That means that a doctor signed a mandatory noncontagion certificate specifying that the donor didn’t have any communicable disease, and the family gave permission for incineration.”

  “What happens then?” Nico asked.

  “The family pays an accredited private transport company to deliver the subject. It can be an undertaker or a specialist who works with us. The body is dropped off at 47 Rue des Saints-Pères. Then a special elevator takes the body to the sixth floor, where your colleagues are right now. The processors start by taking blood and tissue samples. The secretary fills in admission forms, and the body is registered. It gets a bracelet with the donor’s number, age, and blood-test results.”

  “Just like at the hospital when you have a baby,” Kriven said.

  “A poet once wrote, ‘We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time,’” Bordieu said.

  “That was T.S. Eliot,” Nico said.

  “I’m impressed. I like the poem, because it relates to what we do here. By allowing physicians and students to examine the dead, we can help them learn about life. As for the specifics, each subject gets a number, which is written on the thorax, forehead, and each limb. We keep the bodies in cold storage. Sometimes we embalm them, which allows us to keep them for a whole year. It all depends on who has reserved what. I’m directly responsible for the scheduling. Our students use these subjects, as do students from the European School of Surgery, which is housed in this building. Other institutions, like physical therapy schools, give courses on the premises too, and there’s continuing training. We have four dissection labs and some smaller research rooms.”

  “What happens to the bodies afterward?”

  “They are put in coffins and transferred to the Joncherolles crematorium in Villetaneuse, where they are incinerated anonymously. The ashes are then scattered in Division 102 of the Paris Thiais
Cemetery. There is a small marker so that families can visit.”

  “What number was our head?”

  “Number 510.”

  “Can you guarantee that we can trace it?”

  “Of course.”

  “So you’ll be able to bring together all the parts belonging to the body?”

  “We keep track of all the body parts, and we’ve already brought Number 510 together. Marcel handled it himself. He’s the most qualified processor in the department.”

  “I have no doubt that your system is very efficient, but I have to ask these questions.”

  “You must understand. I love my job, and it’s important to me that it all runs smoothly and that we treat the subjects with respect.”

  “So I gather,” Nico said. He gave her his most reassuring smile. “You mentioned anonymity, which is an essential element in body donation.”

  “It’s necessary, and that is what donors want.”

  “Yet you know their identity.”

  “It’s registered in a notebook. My successor will certainly prefer computerized records, but I’m old school. The notebook contains all the donor information, and it keeps track of where all the body parts go.”

  “So let’s get down to the key question. Who is 510?”

  There was nothing reassuring to the detectives in the Farabeuf Lab. It was huge but oppressive. “Death is different every time you look at it,” Captain Franck Plassard said to himself. “You can eat the same dish a hundred times, and it never tastes the same, just as no crime ever resembles another, and there’s no getting used to it.”