Busted flat in Baton Rouge . . . . . .

21.

AT 6 6 A.M. A STEADY RAIN DRUMMED AGAINST MY WINDOWS A.M. A STEADY RAIN DRUMMED AGAINST MY WINDOWS. AN occasional car made soft shishing sounds as it pa.s.sed on some predawn journey. For the third time in as many days I saw daybreak, an event I embrace as eagerly as Joe Montana welcomes an all-out blitz. While not a day napper, neither am I an early riser. Yet three mornings this week I'd seen the sun come up, twice as I fell asleep, today as I tossed and turned after eleven hours in bed, feeling neither sleepy nor rested. occasional car made soft shishing sounds as it pa.s.sed on some predawn journey. For the third time in as many days I saw daybreak, an event I embrace as eagerly as Joe Montana welcomes an all-out blitz. While not a day napper, neither am I an early riser. Yet three mornings this week I'd seen the sun come up, twice as I fell asleep, today as I tossed and turned after eleven hours in bed, feeling neither sleepy nor rested.

Home after Gabby's call, I'd gone on an eating binge. Greasy fried chicken, rehydrated mashed potatoes with synthetic gravy, mushy corn on the cob, and soggy apple pie. Merci Merci, Colonel. Then a hot bath and a long pick at the scab on my right cheek. The microsurgery didn't help. I still looked like I'd been dragged. Around seven I turned on the Expos game, and fell asleep to the play-by-play.

I switched on my computer-6 A.M A.M. or 6 P.M P.M., it was alert and ready to perform. I had sent a message to Katy, relaying through the e-mail system at McGill to my mail server at UNC-Charlotte. She could access the message with her laptop and modem, and reply right from her bedroom. Yahoo! Hop aboard the Internet.

The screen's cursor blinked at me, insisting there was nothing in the doc.u.ment I'd created. It was right. The spreadsheet I had started on paper had only column headings but no content. When had I begun this? The day of the parade. Just one week, but it seemed like years. Today was the thirtieth. Four weeks to the day since Isabelle Gagnon's body was found, one week since Margaret Adkins had been murdered.

What had we accomplished since then except discover another body? A stakeout on the Rue Berger apartment confirmed that its occupant had not returned. Big surprise. The bust had turned up nothing useful. We had no leads on the ident.i.ty of "St. Jacques," and we hadn't identified the latest body. Claudel still wouldn't acknowledge the cases were linked, and Ryan thought of me as a "freelancer." Happy day.

Back to the spreadsheet. I expanded the column headings. Physical characteristics. Geography. Living arrangements. Jobs. Friends. Family members. Dates of birth. Dates of death. Dates of discovery. Times. Places. I entered everything I could think of that might reveal a link. At the far left I entered four row headings: Adkins, Gagnon, Trottier, "Inconnue." I'd replace the unknown designation when we tied a name to the St. Lambert bones. At seven-thirty I closed the file, packed the laptop, and got ready for work.

Traffic was clogged, so I cut down to the Ville-Marie tunnel. Full morning, but dark, heavy clouds trapped the city in murky gloom. The streets were covered with a wet sheen that reflected the brake lights of the morning rush hour.

My wipers beat a monotonous refrain, slapping water from two fan-shaped patches on the windshield. I leaned forward, bobbing my head like a palsied tortoise, searching for clear gla.s.s between the streaks. Time for new wipers, I told myself, knowing I wouldn't get them. It took a good half hour to reach the lab.

I wanted to get right to the files, to dig out minutiae and enter them into the spreadsheet, but there were two requisitions on my desk. A baby boy had been found in a munic.i.p.al park, his tiny body wedged in the rocks of a creek bed. According to LaManche's note, the tissue was desiccated and the internal organs unrecognizable, but otherwise the corpse was well preserved. He wanted an opinion on the infant's age. That wouldn't take long.

I looked at the police report attached to the other form. "Oss.e.m.e.nts trouves dans un bois." Bones found in the woods. My most common case. Could mean anything from a multiple ax murder to a dead cat.

I called Denis and requested radiographs of the infant, then went downstairs to look at the bones. Lisa brought a cardboard box from the morgue and placed it on the table.

"C'est tout?"

"C'est tout." That's all.

She handed me gloves, and I withdrew three clods of hard clay from the box. Bones protruded from each clump. I chipped at the soil, but it was hard as cement.

"Let's get photos and radiographs, then put these in a screen and get them soaking. Use dividers to keep the chunks separate. I'll be back down after the meeting."

The four other pathologists at the LML meet with LaManche each morning to review cases and receive autopsy a.s.signments. On the days I'm present, I attend. When I got upstairs LaManche, Natalie Ayers, Jean Pelletier, and Marc Bergeron were already seated around the small conference table in LaManche's office. From the activity board in the corridor, I knew that Marcel Morin was in court, and Emily Santangelo had taken a personal day.

Everyone shifted to make room, and a chair was shuffled into the circle. Bonjour Bonjour's and Comment ca va Comment ca va's were exchanged.

"Marc, what brings you in on a Thursday?" I asked.

"Holiday tomorrow."

I'd completely forgotten. Canada Day.

"Going to the parade?" asked Pelletier, poker-faced. His French wore the trappings of the Quebec back country, making it difficult for me to unravel his words. For months I hadn't understood him at all, and had missed his wry comments. Now, after four years, I caught most of what he said. I had no trouble following his drift this morning.

"I think I'll skip this one."

"You could just get your face painted at one of those booths. It might be easier."

Chuckles all around.

"Or maybe a tattoo. Less painful."

"Very funny."

Feigned innocence, eyebrows raised, shoulders hoisted, palms up. What? Settling back, he clamped the last two inches of an unfiltered cigarette between yellowed fingers, and inhaled deeply. Someone once told me that Pelletier had never traveled outside Quebec Province. He was sixty-four years old.

"There are only three autopsies," LaManche began, distributing the list of that day's cases.

"Pre-holiday lull," said Pelletier, reaching for his printout. His dentures clicked softly when he spoke. "Things'll get busier."

"Yes." LaManche picked up his red marker. "At least the weather is cooler. Perhaps that will help."

He went over the day's melancholy roster, supplying additional information on each case. A suicide by carbon monoxide. An old man found dead in his bed. A baby tossed into a park.

"The suicide looks pretty straightforward." LaManche scanned the police report. "White male . . . Age twenty-seven . . . Found behind the wheel in his own garage . . . fuel tank empty, key in the ignition, turned to the 'on' position."

He laid several Polaroids on the table. They showed a dark blue Ford centered in a one-car garage. A length of flexible tubing, the type used to vent clothes dryers, ran from the exhaust pipe into the car's right rear window. LaManche read on.

"History of depression . . . Note d'adieu Note d'adieu." He looked at Nathalie. "Dr. Ayers?"

She nodded and reached for the paperwork. He marked "Ay" in red on the master list, and picked up the next set of forms.

"Number 26742 is a white male . . . Age seventy-eight . . . Controlled diabetic." His eyes skipped through the summary report, pulling out the pertinent information. "Hadn't been seen for several days . . . Sister found him . . . No signs of trauma." He read to himself for a few seconds. "Curious thing is there was a delay between the time she found him and the time she called for help. Apparently the lady did some housecleaning in between." He looked up. "Dr. Pelletier?"

Pelletier shrugged and extended his hand. LaManche placed a red "Pe" on his list, then pa.s.sed him the forms. They were accompanied by a plastic bag full of prescription and over-the-counter drugs. Pelletier took the materials, making a wisecrack which I missed.

My attention was turned to the stack of Polaroids accompanying the baby case. Taken from several angles, they showed a shallow creek with a small footbridge arching across it. A little body lay among the rocks, its tiny muscles shriveled, its skin yellowed like old parchment. A fringe of fine hair floated round its head, another rimmed its pale blue eyelids. The child's fingers were splayed wide, as if grasping for help, for something to cling to. He was nude, and lay half in and half out of a dark green plastic bag. He looked like a miniature pharaoh, exposed and discarded. I was beginning to dislike plastic bags intensely.

I returned the photos to the table and listened to LaManche. He'd finished his summary, and was marking "La" on the master sheet. He would do the autopsy, I would narrow the age range by a.s.sessing skeletal development. Bergeron would have a go at the teeth. Nods all around. There being no further discussion, the meeting broke up.

I got coffee and returned to my office. A large brown envelope lay on the desk. I opened it and slipped the first of the baby's X rays onto the light box. Withdrawing a form from the drawer in my worktable, I started my survey. Only two carpals were present in each hand. No caps at the ends of the finger bones. I looked at the lower arms. No cap on either radius. I finished with the upper body, listing on my inventory sheet those bony elements that were present, and noting which had not yet formed. Then I did the same for the lower body, shifting from film to film to be sure of my observations. The coffee grew cold.

An infant is born with its skeleton incomplete. Some bones, such as the carpals in the hand, are absent at birth, appearing months, or even years later. Other bones lack k.n.o.bs and ridges that will eventually give them their adult form. The missing parts emerge in predictable succession, allowing for fairly accurate age estimates for very young children. This baby had lived only seven months.

I summarized my conclusions on yet another form, placed all the paperwork in a yellow file folder, and dropped it on the stack for the secretarial pool. It would come back with the report typed in my preferred format, with all supporting materials and diagrams duplicated and a.s.sembled. They would also polish my French. I made a verbal report to LaManche. Then I moved on to my clumps.

The clay hadn't dissolved, but had softened enough to allow me to pry out the contents. After fifteen minutes of sc.r.a.ping and teasing, the matrix yielded eight vertebrae, seven long bone fragments, and three chunks of pelvis. All showed evidence of butchering. I spent thirty minutes washing and sorting the mess, then cleaned up and jotted a few notes. On my way upstairs, I asked Lisa to photograph the partial skeletons of the three victims: two white-tailed deer and one medium sized dog. I filled out another report form and dropped this folder on top of the earlier one. Odd, but not a forensic problem.

Lucie had left a note on my desk. I found her in her office, back to the door, eyes shifting between a terminal screen and an open dossier. She typed with one hand and held her place in the dossier with the other, her index finger moving slowly from entry to entry.

"Got your note," I said.

She raised the finger, typed a few more strokes, then laid a ruler across the file. Pivoting and thrusting in one motion, she rolled to her desk.

"I pulled up what you asked for. Sort of."

She dug through one stack of paper, shifted to another, then returned to the first, searching more slowly. Finally she withdrew a small stack of papers stapled at the corner, scanned a few pages, then extended the collection to me.

"Nothing before '88."

I leafed through the pages, dismayed. How could there be so many?

"First I tried calling up cases with 'dismemberment' as my key word. That's the first list. The long one. I got all the people who threw themselves in front of trains, or fell into machinery and had limbs ripped off. I didn't think you wanted that."

Indeed. It seemed to be a list of every case in which an arm, leg, or finger had been traumatically severed at or even near the time of death.

"Then I tried adding 'intentional,' to limit the selections to cases in which the dismemberment was done on purpose."

I looked at her.

"I got nothing."

"None?"

"That doesn't mean there weren't any."

"How come?"

"I didn't enter this data. Over the past two years we've had special funding to hire part-time workers to get historical data on-line as quickly as possible." She gave an exasperated sigh and shook her head. "The ministry dragged its heels for years getting computerized, now they want everything up to date overnight. Anyway, the data entry people have standard codes for the basics: date of birth, date of death, cause of death, and so on. But for something that's odd, something that occurs only rarely, they're pretty much on their own. They make up a code."

"Like a dismemberment."

"Right. Someone might call it an amputation, someone else might use the term disjointing, usually they just use the same word the pathologist put in the report. Or they might just enter it as cutting or sawing."

I looked back at the lists, thoroughly discouraged.

"I tried all of those, and a few others. No go."

So much for this idea.

"'Mutilation' brought up the other really long list." She waited while I turned to the second page. "That was even worse than 'dismemberment.'

"Then I tried 'dismemberment' in combination with 'postmortem' as a limiter, to select out the cases in which the"-she turned her palms upward and made a scratching motion with her fingers, as if trying to tease the word from the air-"the event took place after death."

I looked up, hopeful.

"All I got was the guy with his d.i.c.k chopped off."

"Computer took you literally."

"Huh?"

"Never mind." Another joke that didn't travel.

"Then I tried 'mutilation' in combination with the 'postmortem' limiter, and . . ." She reached across the desk and displayed the last printout. "Bango! Is that what you say?"

"Bingo."

"Bingo! I think this may be what you want. You can ignore some of it, like those drug things where they used acid." She pointed to several lines she'd penciled out. "Those are probably not what you want."

I nodded absently, totally absorbed by page three. It listed twelve cases. She'd drawn lines through three of them.

"But I think maybe some of the others might be of interest to you."

I was hardly hearing her. My eyes had been drifting through the list, but were now riveted on the sixth name down. A tingle of uneasiness pa.s.sed through me. I wanted to get back to my office.

"Lucie, this is great," I said. "This is better than I'd hoped for."

"Anything you can use?"

"Yes. Yes, I think so," I said, trying to sound casual.

"Do you want me to call these cases up?"

"No. Thanks. Let me look this over, then I think I'd rather pull the complete files." Let me be wrong on this one, I prayed to myself.

"Bien sur."

She took off her gla.s.ses and began polishing a lens on the hem of her sweater. Without them she looked incomplete, wrong somehow, like John Denver after he switched to contacts.

"I'd like to know what happens," she said, the pink rectangles back flanking the bridge of her nose.

"Of course. I'll tell you if anything breaks."

As I walked away I heard the wheels of her chair gliding across the tile.

In my office, I laid the printout on my desk and looked at the list. One name stared at me. Francine Morisette-Champoux. Francine Morisette-Champoux. I'd forgotten all about her. Stay cool, I told myself. Don't jump to conclusions.

I forced myself to go over the other entries. Gagne and Valencia were in there, a pair of drug dealers with a lousy business sense. So was Chantale Trottier. I recognized the name of a Honduran exchange student whose husband had put a shotgun to her face and pulled the trigger. He had driven her from Ohio to Quebec, cut off her hands, and dumped her nearly headless body in a provincial park. As a parting gesture, he'd carved his initials on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I didn't recognize the other four cases. They were before 1990, before my time. I went to the central files and pulled them, along with the jacket on Morisette-Champoux.

I stacked the files according to their LML numbers, thus achieving chronological order. I'd go about this systematically. Violating that resolution as soon as I made it, I went right to the Morisette-Champoux folder. Its contents made my anxiety rocket.