Deadly Decisions

by Kathy Reichs

  Nine months after Savannah’s disappearance, remains were found in Myrtle Beach. Suspecting a link to the Osprey case the Horry County coroner contacted North Carolina authorities and sent the bones to Chapel Hill. The medical examiner’s report noted consistency, but concluded that positive identification of the skeleton was not possible. Officially, no trace of Savannah was ever found.

  The last entry in the file was dated July 10, 1989. Following Dwayne Osprey’s death his wife had again been questioned. Brenda held to the story that her daughter had run away.

  We finished with the file after seven. My eyes burned and my back screamed from hours of bending over small print and bad handwriting. I was tired, discouraged, and I’d missed my flight. And I’d learned almost nothing. A sigh from Kate told me she was on the same page.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “Now let’s get you a place to stay, have a nice dinner, and figure where to go from here.”

  Seemed like a plan.

  I reserved a room at a Red Roof Inn on I-40 and booked a morning flight. Then I tried Kit but got no answer. Surprised, I left a message and the number for my cell phone. When I’d finished, Kate and I packed our respective bones and drove up Garner Road to her office.

  The structure housing the SBI stood in stark contrast to its ultramodern crime laboratory. While the latter is high-rise cement, all sterile and efficient, the headquarters building is only two stories, a genteel redbrick affair with cream-colored trim. Surrounded by manicured grounds and approached by an entrance lane of stately oaks, the complex blends better with the tiny antiques store it faces than with the megalith down the road.

  We parked on the main avenue, retrieved our packages, and headed toward the building. To the right lay a circular hedge with border plantings of marigolds and pansies. Three poles rose from the garden’s center, like the masts on a square rigger. I could hear the flap of fabric and the clink of metal as a uniformed officer lowered the last of the flags. He was backlit by a partial sun dropping below the roof of the Highway Patrol Training Center.

  We passed through the glass door with its North Carolina Department of Justice, State Bureau of Investigation crest, cleared security, and climbed to the second floor. Once again we secured the bones, this time in a locked cabinet in Kate’s small office.

  “What would you like to eat?”

  “Meat,” I said without hesitating. “Red meat marbled with real fat.”

  “We had cheeseburgers for lunch.”

  “True. But I just read a theory about the evolution of Neanderthals into modern human beings. Seems the key to the transition was increased fat in the diet. Maybe a pair of big prime ribs will help our thought processes.”

  “I’m convinced.”

  The beef turned out to be a good idea. Or maybe it was just the break from blurry print on photocopied documents. By the time our cobbler arrived we’d focused on the central question.

  The bones in Montreal were without a doubt Savannah’s. For the bones found here the jury was still out. Did a sickly sixteen-year-old girl with bad eyesight and a timid personality travel fifteen hundred miles north of her home to another country and die there? Or did some, but not all, of the bones belonging to a dead girl get taken from the Carolinas to Montreal and buried there?

  If death occurred in Montreal, the Myrtle Beach bones were not Savannah’s.

  Though Kate didn’t buy this theory, she did admit to its possibility.

  If the Myrtle Beach bones were Savannah’s, part of the skeleton had been moved.

  I’d studied the scene photos and found nothing disturbing. The decomposition appeared consistent with a period of nine months, and a postmortem interval that tallied with the date of Savannah’s disappearance. Unlike the pit at the Vipers’ clubhouse, this scene gave no indication of a secondary burial.

  This assumption presented several possibilities.

  Savannah died in Myrtle Beach.

  Savannah died elsewhere, then her body was brought to Myrtle Beach.

  Savannah’s body was dismembered, parts either brought to or left in Myrtle Beach, then the skull and leg bones separated and transported to Canada.

  But if the body had been deliberately separated, why were there no cut marks on any of the bones?

  The key question remained: How did Savannah, either in whole or part, alive or dead, end up in Quebec?

  “Do you think they’ll reopen the case?” I asked as we waited for the bill.

  “It’s doubtful. Everyone was pretty well convinced Dwayne did it. The investigation had stalled long before his accident, but his death really capped it.”

  I handed the waiter my Visa card, ignoring Kate’s protests.

  “What now?”

  “Here’s my thinking,” she said. “First of all, that was a sneak play on the check.”

  Yeah. Yeah. I urged her on with a hand gesture.

  “Savannah’s skull was found on biker property in Quebec.”

  She enumerated points by raising fingers.

  “The Vipers are a puppet club for the Hells Angels, correct?”

  I nodded.

  “The Angels were gathering just down the highway from Savannah’s hometown the week she disappeared.”

  A third finger joined the other two.

  “Her skeleton turned up in Myrtle Beach State Park, a stone’s throw from the party venue.”

  Her eyes met mine.

  “Seems worth looking into.”

  “But you did that.”

  “We didn’t have the Quebec link.”

  “What do you propose?”

  “The early eighties were a wild ride for Carolina bikers. Let’s pull out my gang files and see what we can see.”

  “They go back that far?”

  “The gathering of historic information is one of my mandates. Predicate acts are often important in RICO investigations, especially old homicides.”

  She referred to the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act signed by Nixon in 1970. The statute was often used in the prosecution of organized crime.

  “Also, gang members often shift between chapters and it’s helpful to know who was at what location at what time when you’re looking for witnesses. I have tons of information, including photos and videos.”

  “I’ve got all night,” I said, spreading my hands.

  “Let’s go look at bikers.”

  And that’s what we did until my cell phone rang at 5:23 A.M. The call was from Montreal.

  LES APPARTEMENTS DU SOLEIL WERE ANYTHING BUT SUNNY, contrary to their name. But naming the place after its actual attributes would have been bad marketing. The building was dark and cheerless, its windows clouded by grime and painted shut by decades of careless maintenance. The tiny balconies jutting from each of its three floors were wrapped in turquoise siding and packed with rusted grills and cheap lawn chairs, plastic garbage cans, and assorted types of athletic equipment. One or two had flowerpots, the contents brown and withered from seasons past.

  But no one could fault the heating system. In the day I’d been gone in North Carolina spring had finally made it to Quebec, and I touched down to a report of sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. It was above that now, but the Soleil’s radiators soldiered on, raising the temperature inside to well over eighty. The heat and the odor of putrefaction combined to make one queasy and inclined toward shallow breathing.

  From where I stood I could see into each of the rooms that made up the squalid little flat. The kitchen lay to my left, the living room to my right, the bedroom and bath straight ahead. The place looked as if its occupant had been holding a garage sale, though the filth and stench would have discouraged even the most ardent bargain hunter.

  Every elevated surface was heaped with tools, magazines, paperback books, bottles and broken appliances, and the floor was crammed with camping equipment, automobile and motorcycle parts, tires, cardboard boxes, hockey sticks, and plastic bags tied with metal twisters. A pyramid of beer cans ros
e almost to the ceiling at the far end of the living room, with torn and curling posters tacked to the wall on either side. The poster on the right advertised a Grateful Dead concert. July 17, 1983. Below it a White Power fist advocated Aryan purity.

  On the top left a poster entitled Le Hot Rod showed a penis in Ray-Bans, a smoking cigarette tucked between it and its companion genitalia. The image below featured an upright phallus, the words Astro-Cock in bold letters across the top. The organ was circled by the symbols of the Zodiac, a message of wisdom under each. I took a pass on consulting my sign.

  As far as I could see, the only furniture available for practical use consisted of a Formica table and single chair in the kitchen, a twin bed in the bedroom, and an armchair in the living room. A body now occupied the armchair, its head a distorted red mass above a blackened torso and limbs. Embedded in the flesh I could see a shattered skull and facial bones, a partial nostril with mustache skirt, and one complete eye. The lower jaw hung slack but intact, showing a purpled tongue and rotten teeth stained brown.

  Someone had collected shards of bone and brain pudding and sealed them in a Ziploc bag. The plastic sack lay in the man’s lap, as though he’d been put in charge of watching over his own brain. A large flap of skin clung to the edge of the chair, smooth and shiny as the belly of a perch.

  The deceased sat opposite a small TV on which a coat hanger had been rigged to replace the broken antenna. One twisted end projected toward his head, like the finger of an eyewitness pointing to its find. No one had bothered to turn the set off and I could hear Montel talking with women whose mothers had stolen their lovers. I wondered what the discussants would think of their grisly viewer.

  A member of the Ident section dusted the bedroom for latent prints, while another did the same in the kitchen. A third worked a camcorder, slowly sweeping each room, then zooming in for close-ups of the jumbles of junk. Before I’d gotten there, she’d shot dozens of stills of the victim and his gloomy surroundings.

  LaManche had been and gone. Since the body wasn’t badly burned and decomposition was only moderate I wasn’t really needed, but that hadn’t been clear in the early stages. Initial reports described a body and a fire, so I’d been called and transport arrangements had been made. By the time the scene was assessed, I was in transit from Raleigh and the simplest thing was to follow through with the original plan. Quickwater had picked me up at the airport and brought me here.

  Les Appartements du Soleil were located southwest of Centreville, on a small street running east from rue Charlevoix. The neighborhood, known as Pointe-St-Charles, was on the island of Montreal, so the murder fell to the CUM.

  Michel Charbonneau stood across the room, his face the color of Pepto-Bismol, his hair projecting in clammy spikes. He was jacketless, his collar soaked with sweat, his tie hanging below the open top button of his shirt. Even loosened it was much too short. I watched him pull a hankie from his pocket and wipe it across his forehead.

  Charbonneau once told me that as a teen he’d worked in the Texas oil fields. Though he loved the cowboy life, the heat won out and he’d returned to his home in Chicoutimi, eventually drifting to Montreal, where he joined the city police force.

  At that moment Quickwater emerged from the kitchen. The victim was known to have gang connections, so Carcajou would also be involved.

  The constable joined Charbonneau and the two stood watching a team examine bloodstains in a corner behind the victim. Ronald Gilbert held a gray-and-white L-shaped ruler against the wall while a younger man shot videos and prints. They repeated the shots with a plumb line, then Gilbert switched to sliding calipers and took a series of measurements. He entered the data into a laptop computer, then went back to the ABFO ruler and plumb line. More video footage. More photos. More measurements. Blood was everywhere, speckling the ceiling and walls and mottling objects stacked against the baseboards. The two looked like they’d be at their task a long time.

  I took a deep breath and approached the detectives.

  “Bonjour. Comment ça va?”

  “Eh, Doc. How’s tricks?” Charbonneau’s English was an odd blend of québécois and Texas slang, most of the latter out-of-date.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur Quickwater.”

  Quickwater rotated slightly, looking annoyed at having to acknowledge my presence, then returned his attention to the blood-spatter team. They were filming an acoustic guitar propped upright on a rusted birdcage. Behind the cage I could see an athletic cap jammed against the wall, the letters “-cock-” visible in the center of a wine-colored blotch. I thought of the posters and wondered what lewd macho message we’d been spared by the gore.

  “Where’s Claudel?” I asked Charbonneau.

  “Checking out a suspect, but he’ll be here soon. These guys are really something, aren’t they?” Charbonneau’s voice filled with disgust. “Got the moral qualities of dung beetles.”

  “This is definitely gang-related?”

  “Yeah. The guy that’s not looking too good over there is Yves Desjardins, street name ‘Cherokee.’ He was a Predator.”

  “Where do they fit in?”

  “The Predators are another Hells Angels puppet club.”

  “Like the Vipers.”

  “You got it.”

  “So this was a Rock Machine hit?”

  “Probably. Though I understand Cherokee hadn’t been active in years. He had a bad liver. No. Colon cancer. That was it. Not surprising given the shit these guys usually have on board.”

  “What had he done to anger the opposition?”

  “Cherokee ran some kind of spare-parts business.” When Charbonneau made a sweeping gesture I could see a dark crescent under his armpit. “But apparently sprockets and carburetors weren’t profitable enough. We found about two kilos of coke hidden in the big brave’s underwear drawer. No doubt a safe spot since the guy looks like he never changed his shorts. Anyway, that’s probably what inspired the surprise visit. But who knows? Maybe it was retaliation for the Marcotte hit.”

  “Spider.”

  Charbonneau nodded.

  “Were there signs of forced entry?”

  “There’s a broken window in the bedroom, but that’s not how they got in.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Most of the fragments are in the alley. Looks like the window was popped from inside.”

  “By whom?”

  He gave a palms-up gesture.

  “So how did the killer get in?”

  “He must have let them in.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Cherokee was wily as a pit bull and just a little less friendly. But he’d outlived the stats and was probably starting to feel immortal.”

  “Except for the cancer.”

  “Right. Let me show you something.”

  Charbonneau crossed to the body and I followed. Close up the smell was stronger, a nauseating blend of charred wool, gasoline, excrement, and putrefying flesh. He pulled out his hankie and held it across his nose.

  “Check out the tattoos.” Muffled.

  Cherokee’s right hand was in his lap, his left flung at an odd angle across the arm of the chair, fingers hanging toward the carpet. Despite a thick layer of soot, a cluster of skulls was clearly visible on his right wrist. There were fifteen in all, arranged in a pyramid like the mysterious offerings found in European caves. But these trophies showed a distinction our Neanderthal ancestors had failed to make. Thirteen of the skulls had black eyes, two had red.

  “They’re like notches on a gun.” Charbonneau took the cloth from his mouth just long enough to speak. “Black means he killed a male, red a female.”

  “Pretty stupid to advertise.”

  “Yeah, but our boy here was old school. Today they’re listening more to their lawyers.”

  From the amount of bloating and skin slippage I guessed the victim had been dead a couple of days.

  “How was he found?”

  “The usual. A neighbor complained about a foul
odor. Amazing anyone would notice in this shithole.”

  I looked at the body again. Other than the bad teeth and mustache it was impossible to tell what the man had looked like. What was left of his head rested against the back of the chair, a dark blossom staining the upholstery around it. I could see shotgun pellets in the flesh that had been his face.

  “Like the special effects?”

  Charbonneau pointed at the small braided carpet below the victim’s feet. It was badly charred, as was the underside of the chair. Cherokee himself was smoke-blackened, and his dangling left hand, jean cuffs, and boots were singed. But beyond that there was little damage due to burning.

  A fire had been set in front of the chair, and the lingering smell of gasoline suggested the use of an accelerant. Flames had probably engulfed the body, but then, lacking fuel, petered out. By then the killers were long gone.

  Charbonneau lifted the hankie again.

  “Typical biker shit. Blast the target then torch the body. Only this team must have failed Arson 101.”

  “Why would this guy open the door if he was dealing coke in someone else’s backyard?”

  “Maybe his colon backed up into his brain. Maybe he was smacked on drugs. Maybe he suffered from delusions of normalcy. Hell, who knows how they think? Or if they think.”

  “Could it have been his own club?”

  “Ain’t without precedent.”

  Claudel arrived at that moment and Charbonneau excused himself to join his colleagues. While I was curious about the suspect he’d been interrogating, I didn’t want to take on a Claudel-Quickwater tag team, so I moved to the far side of the room and resumed observation of the blood-spatter analysts. By now they’d finished the west wall and were rounding the corner onto the north.

  Though I’d positioned myself as far from the body as I could get, the smell in the room was becoming unbearable. And Charbonneau was right. The corpse was only one element in the sickening cocktail of mildew, motor oil, stale beer, perspiration, and years of bad cooking. It was hard to imagine how anyone could have lived in such a putrid atmosphere.

  I looked at my watch. Two-fifteen. Starting to think about a taxi, I turned to the window at my back.