Déjà Dead (12 page)

I refused to allow my concern for Gabby’s safety to overpower me. When I got home, I resorted to a childhood ritual that works when I’m tense or overwrought: I ran a hot bath and filled it with herbal salts. I put a Chris Rea CD on full volume, and, as I soaked, he sang to me of the road to hell. The neighbors would have to survive. After my bath, I tried Katy’s number, but, once again, got her machine. Then I shared milk and cookies with Birdie, who preferred the milk, left the dishes on the counter, and crawled into bed.

My anxiety was not completely dissipated. Sleep didn’t come easily, and I lay in bed for some time, watching the shadows on the ceiling, and fighting the impulse to call Pete. I hated myself for needing him at such times, for craving his strength whenever I felt upset. It was one ritual I’d vowed to break.

Eventually sleep took me down like a whirlpool, swirling all thoughts of Pete, and Katy, and Gabby, and the murders from my consciousness. It was a good thing. It’s what got me through the following day.

I
SLEPT SOUNDLY UNTIL NINE-FIFTEEN THE NEXT MORNING
. I’
M NOT
usually a napper, but it was Friday, June 24, St. Jean Baptiste Day,
La Fête Nationale du Québec
, and I was encouraging the holiday languor allowed on such days. Since the feast of St. John the Baptist is the principal holiday for the province, almost everything is closed. There would be no
Gazette
at my door that morning, so I made coffee, then walked to the corner in search of an alternative paper.

The day was bright and vivid, the world displayed on active matrix. Objects and their shadows stood out in sharp detail, the colors of brick and wood, metal and paint, grass and flowers screaming out their separate places on the spectrum. The sky was dazzling and absolutely intolerant of clouds, reminding me of the robin’s egg blue on the holy cards of my childhood, the same outrageous blue. I was certain St. Jean would have approved.

The morning air felt warm and soft, perfect with the smell of window box petunias. The temperature had climbed gradually but persistently over the past week, with each day’s high surpassing its predecessor. Today’s forecast: thirty-two degrees Celsius. I did a quick conversion: about eighty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. Since Montreal is built on an island, the surrounding moat of the St. Lawrence ensures constant humidity. Yahoo! It would be a Carolina day: hot and humid. Bred in the South, I love it.

I purchased
Le Journal de Montréal
. The “number one daily French paper in America” was not as fastidious about taking the day off as the English language
Gazette
. As I walked the half block back to my condo, I glanced at the front page. The headline was written in three-inch letters the color of the sky:
BONNE FÊTE QUÉBEC
!

I thought about the parade and the concerts to follow at Parc Maisonneuve, about the sweat and the beer that would flow, and about the political rift that divided the people of Quebec. With a fall election due, passions were high, and those pushing for separation were hoping fervently that this would be the year. T-shirts and placards already clamored:
L’an prochain mon pays!
Next year my own country! I hoped the day would not be marred by violence.

Arriving home, I poured myself a coffee, mixed a bowl of Müeslix, and spread the paper on the dining room table. I am a news junkie. While I can go several days without a newspaper, contenting myself with a regular series of eleven o’clock TV fixes, before long I have to have the written word. When traveling, I locate CNN first, then unpack. I make it through the hectic days of the work week, distracted by the demands of teaching or casework, soothed by the familiar voices of “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” knowing that on the weekend I will catch up.

I cannot drink, loathe cigarette smoke, and was logging a lean year for sex, so Saturday mornings I reveled in journalistic orgies, allowing myself hours to devour the tiniest minutiae. It isn’t that there’s anything new in the news. There isn’t. I know that. It’s like balls in a Bingo hopper. The same events keep coming up over and over. Earthquake. Coup d’état. Trade war. Hostage taking. My compulsion is to know which balls are up on any given day.

Le Journal
is committed to the format of short stories and abundant pictures. Though not
The Christian Science Monitor
, it would do. Birdie knew the routine, and hoisted himself onto the adjacent chair. I’m never sure if he’s attracted by my company, or by hopes of Müeslix leavings. He arched his back, settled with all four feet drawn primly in, and fixed his round yellow eyes on me, as if seeking the answer to some profound feline mystery. As I read, I could feel his gaze on the side of my face.

I found it on page two, between a story about a strangled priest and coverage of World Cup soccer.

VICTIM FOUND MURDERED AND MUTILATED

A twenty-four-year-old woman was found murdered and savagely disfigured in her east end home yesterday afternoon. The victim, identified as Margaret Adkins, was a homemaker and the mother of a six-year-old son. Mme. Adkins was last known to be alive at 10
A.M
., when she spoke by phone to her husband. Her brutally beaten and mutilated body was discovered by her sister around noon.

According to CUM police, there were no signs of forced entry, and it is unclear how her attacker gained access to the home. An autopsy was performed at the Laboratoire de Médecine Légale by Dr. Pierre LaManche. Dr. Temperance Brennan, an American forensic anthropologist and expert in skeletal trauma, is examining the bones of the victim for indications of knife marks. . . .

The story continued with a patchwork of speculations on the victim’s final comings and goings, a synopsis of her life, a heartrending account of the reaction of her family, and promises that the police were doing everything possible to apprehend the killer.

Several photos accompanied the article, depicting the grizzly drama and its cast of characters. There, in shades of gray, were the apartment and its staircase, the police, the morgue attendants pushing the gurney with its sealed body bag. A scattering of neighbors lined the sidewalk, held back by crime scene tape, their curiosity frozen in grainy black and white. Among the figures inside the tape I recognized Claudel, his right arm raised like the conductor of a high school band. A circular inset presented a close-up of Margaret Adkins, a blurred but happier version of the face I’d seen on the autopsy table.

A second photograph showed an older woman with bleached hair curled tightly around her head, and a young boy in shorts and an Expos T-shirt. A bearded man in wire-rimmed glasses had one arm placed protectively around the shoulders of each. All three stared from the page with grief and puzzlement, the expression common to those left in the wake of violent crime, a look with which I’ve become all too familiar. The caption identified them as the mother, son, and common-law husband of the victim.

I was dismayed to see the third photo: a shot of me at a disinterment. I was familiar with it. Taken in 1992 and kept on file, it was frequently exhumed and reprinted. I was, as usual, identified as “. . .
une anthropologiste américaine
.”

“Damn!”

Birdie flicked his tail and looked disapproving. I didn’t care. My vow to banish the murders from my mind for the entire holiday weekend had been short-lived. I should have known the story was going to be in today’s paper. I finished the last, cold dregs of my coffee and tried Gabby’s number. No answer. Though there could be a million explanations, that, too, made me cranky.

I went to the bedroom to dress for Tai Chi. The class normally met on Tuesday nights, but since no one was working, they’d voted to hold a special session today. I hadn’t been sure I wanted to go, but the article and the unanswered phone settled it. At least for an hour or two my mind would be clear.

Again, I was wrong. Ninety minutes of “stroking the bird,” “waving hands like clouds,” and “needle at the bottom of the sea” did nothing to put me in a holiday mood. I was so distracted that I was out of sync the entire workout, and came away more aggravated than before.

Driving home, I turned on the radio, bent on herding my thoughts like a shepherd tends his flock, nurturing the frivolous and driving off the macabre. I was determined that the weekend could still be salvaged.

“. . . was killed sometime around noon yesterday. Mme. Adkins was expected by her sister, but did not keep the appointment. The body was discovered at 1327 Desjardins. Police could find no evidence of a break-in, and suspect Mme. Adkins may have known her assailant.”

I knew I should change the station. Instead, I let the voice suck me in. It stirred what was simmering on my mental back burner, bringing my frustrations to the surface and demolishing with finality any possibility of a weekend furlough.

“. . . the results of an autopsy have not been released. Police are scouring east end Montreal, questioning everyone who knew the victim. The incident is the twenty-sixth homicide this year in the CUM. Police are asking anyone with information to call the homicide squad at 555-2052.”

Without making a conscious decision, I did an about-face and headed toward the lab. My hands steered and my feet worked the pedals. Within twenty minutes I was there, determined to accomplish something, but unsure what.

The SQ building was quiet, the usual tumult hushed by the desertion of all but an unlucky few. The lobby guards eyed me suspiciously, but said nothing. It may have been the ponytail and spandex, or it may have been a general surliness at having drawn holiday duty. I didn’t care.

The LML and LSJ wings were completely abandoned. The empty offices and labs seemed to lie in repose, regrouping for the aftermath of a long, hot weekend. My office was as I’d left it, the pens and markers still scattered across the desktop. As I picked them up I looked around, my eyes roving over unfinished reports, uncataloged slides, and an ongoing project on maxillary sutures. The empty orbits of my reference skulls regarded me blankly.

I still wasn’t sure why I was there or what I planned to do. I felt tense and out of sorts. Again I thought of Dr. Lentz. She’d led me to recognize my alcohol addiction, to face my growing alienation from Pete. Gently but relentlessly her words had picked at the scabs that covered my emotions. “Tempe,” she’d say, “must you always be in control? Can no one else be trusted?”

Maybe she was right. Perhaps I was just trying to escape the guilt that always plagued me when I couldn’t resolve a problem. Maybe I was simply evading inactivity and the feeling of inadequacy that accompanied it. I told myself the murder investigation really wasn’t my responsibility, that the homicide detectives had that duty, and my job was to assist them with complete and accurate technical support. I chided myself for being there simply for lack of alternative invitations. It didn’t work.

Although I recognized the logic of my own arguments by the time the pencil clean-up was complete, I still couldn’t escape the feeling that there was something I needed to do. It gnawed at me, like a hamster with a carrot. I couldn’t shake the nagging sensation that I was missing some tiny element that was important to these cases in a way I didn’t yet understand. I needed to do something.

I pulled a file jacket from the cabinet where I keep old case reports, and another from my current case pile, and laid them beside the Adkins dossier. Three yellow folders. Three women yanked from their surroundings and slaughtered with psychopathic malevolence. Trottier. Gagnon. Adkins. The victims lived miles apart and were dissimilar in background, age, and physical characteristics, yet I couldn’t shake the conviction that the same hand had butchered all three. Claudel could see only the differences. I needed to find the link that would convince him otherwise.

Tearing off a sheet of lined paper, I constructed a crude chart, heading the columns with categories I thought might be relevant. Age. Race. Hair color/length. Eye color. Height. Weight. Clothing when last seen. Marital status. Language. Ethnic group/religion. Place/type of residence. Place/type of employment. Cause of death. Date and time of death. Postmortem body treatment. Location of body.

I started with Chantale Trottier, but realized quickly that my files wouldn’t contain all the information I needed. I wanted to see the full police reports and scene photos. I looked at my watch—1:45
P.M
. Trottier had been an SQ case, so I decided to drop down to the first floor. I doubted there would be much activity in the homicide squad room, so it might be a good time to request what I wanted.

I was right. The huge room was almost empty, its colony of regulation gray metal desks largely uninhabited. Three men clustered together in the far corner of the room. Two occupied adjoining desks, facing each other across stacks of file folders and overflowing in-baskets.

A tall, lanky man with hollow cheeks and hair the color of hand-rubbed pewter sat with his chair tipped back, feet propped high and ankles crossed. His name was Andrew Ryan. He spoke in the hard, flat French of an anglophone, stabbing the air with a ballpoint pen. His jacket hung from the chair back, its empty arms swinging in rhythm to the pen thrusts. The tableau reminded me of firemen at a firehouse, relaxed but ready at a moment’s notice.

Ryan’s partner watched him from across the desk, head tilted to one side, like a canary inspecting a face outside its cage. He was short and muscular, though his body was beginning to take on the bulges of middle age. He had the unlined tan of a bronzing salon, and his thick black hair was styled and perfectly combed. He looked like a would-be actor in a promo shot. I suspected even his mustache was professionally coifed. A wooden plaque on his desk said Jean Bertrand.

The third man perched on the edge of Bertrand’s desk, listening to the banter and inspecting the tassles on his Italian loafers. When I saw him my spirits dropped like an elevator.

“. . . like a goat shitting cinders.”