by Kathy Reichs
The driver was leaning on the hood of his taxi. He smiled, took my bag, and placed it in the trunk.
I was climbing in, thinking about the long trip back, about what I would say to Slidell and Barrow, when I spotted Ryan weaving through sunscreen-slicked tourists heading for the beach. He’d shaved and changed into a black polo and jeans. An overstuffed backpack hung from one shoulder.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Out of Cheerios,” he replied.
We passed the next two hours in silence. At Daniel Oduber Quirós International, we checked in, made our way through security, handed in our boarding passes, finally took our seats, and buckled in. Not a word.
I had the window this time, watched as Costa Rica disappeared beneath us. When I could take the silence no longer, “Wonder what the weather’s like in Charlotte.”
“Continued dark overnight, widely scattered light by morning.”
Recognizing the George Carlin quote, I smiled to myself. The old Ryan was still in there somewhere.
Then I was out.
I awoke to the captain announcing our landing. And wishing his passengers and crew a happy Thanksgiving.
As we wound down the ramp from the airport parking deck, I offered Ryan the guest room.
“A hotel close to the law enforcement center will be fine.”
I wasn’t surprised. So why the hollow feeling? Relief? Resignation? Sadness that at last I had full confirmation?
Yes. Definitely sadness.
I said nothing.
“It’s better this way.” In response to my silence.
“I’m good with it,” I said.
“I’m not the same person, Tempe. Not the man I was.”
I dropped him at the Holiday Inn on College.
It was after ten when I hit the annex. The place seemed incomplete without Birdie. After downing the takeout burritos I’d grabbed en route home, I phoned Barrow.
He was impressed that I’d bagged my quarry. And pleased. Suggested a meet at eight the next morning. Said he’d call Rodas and Slidell.
After disconnecting, I dialed the Holiday Inn. Asked for Ryan. Shocker—they connected me. He’d actually checked in.
I offered a ride in the morning. Ryan said he’d find his own way to the CCU. Or back to the airport, I thought cynically.
That was all I could handle.
Exhausted, I fell into bed.
“Wish I could say you look good.” Slidell was eyeing Ryan with an expression of amusement.
Ryan shrugged.
“What the fuck’s with your hair?”
“Been touring with Shaggy.”
The reggae reference was lost on Slidell, whose musical taste ran to C&W and sixties rock and roll.
Barrow cleared his throat. “The sooner we start, the sooner we get home to leftover turkey.”
“Or back on the street,” Slidell said.
“This will be short. There’s nothing new on Pomerleau. Leal is still missing; Detective Slidell says so far, the tech boys have recovered nothing from her Mac. They’re still at it.”
“The computer’s not out there.” This was Slidell’s way of saying, “Don’t discuss it with the press.”
“Right,” Barrow affirmed. “The media’s starting to turn ugly. Mainly, I wanted to get us all face-to-face—”
“Without that fuckwad Tinker.”
Barrow slid a look to Slidell before continuing. “I wanted Detective Ryan to meet Detective Rodas.”
The men nodded at each other, acknowledging earlier introductions.
“Dr. Brennan has briefed Detective Ryan on details of the Vermont and Charlotte cases.” Question, not statement.
“Yes.” I’d done it with zero feedback on the drive from the airport to Ryan’s hotel.
“I’m only here as an observer.” Ryan favored me with a sideways glance. “And to appease Dr. Stalker.”
Hurt and anger reared up in equal proportions. I fought both down.
“Two murders,” Barrow said. “And Shelly Leal is missing one week today.”
“Still, the link is weak.” Ryan often played devil’s advocate.
“DNA connects Gower to Nance and both to Pomerleau. The MO for Leal is identical.”
Ryan rubbed a thumbnail along the edge of the table. Thinking about long-ago girls in a cellar? His dead daughter? A bottle of Scotch he’d left in his room?
“Ryan—” I started.
“I’ll be no good to you.”
“You know Pomerleau,” I said.
“I’m a mess.”
Slidell snorted. “Should take the heat off my ass.”
“I’m sorry.” Ryan wagged his head. “I’m done with cracked skulls and slit throats and cigarette burns. No more dead kids.”
“What about live ones?”
Ryan’s thumb continued its slow back-and-forth. I wanted to slap him, to shake him to his senses. Instead I kept my voice even and neutral. “Pomerleau’s thrill didn’t come from killing. You know that. She fed her victims just enough to keep them alive so she could torture and rape them. She and her twisted sidekick.”
“Neal Wesley Catts,” Rodas tossed in. “Aka Stephen Menard.”
“Leal could be alive,” I continued. “But if Nance and Gower are indicative, it’s not like the old days. Pomerleau’s pattern has changed. Leal won’t last long.”
Still Ryan said nothing.
Rodas placed a palm on the cardboard box holding his case notes. “I have to head north in the morning. Would you at least skim the file?”
Ryan closed his eyes.
I looked at Slidell. He shrugged.
A very long moment passed.
Ryan ran a hand over his jaw. Sighed. Then his eyes rose to mine. “One day.”
He looked at his wrist. Which bore no watch.
“Twenty-four hours.”
CHAPTER 8
RYAN AND I got coffee before plunging into the Nance file. We wouldn’t drink it. The stuff tasted like liquefied dung. It was a ritual, like sharpening a pencil or straightening a blotter. Meaningless action as prelude to the real show.
We started with a section titled Summary of the Crime.
On April 17, 2009, at 1620 hours, Elizabeth Ellen “Lizzie” Nance, eleven, left the Isabelle Dumas School of Dance, located in the Park Road Shopping Center, heading for the Charlotte Woods apartment complex on East Woodlawn. A motorist reported seeing a child matching Lizzie’s description at the intersection of Park and Woodlawn roads at approximately 1630 hours.
Lizzie lived with her mother, Cynthia Pridmore, thirty-three, and sister, Rebecca Pridmore, nine. Cynthia Pridmore reported her daughter missing, by phone, at 1930 hours. She reported having contacted the school, several of Lizzie’s classmates, and her former husband, Lionel Nance, thirty-nine. Pridmore said she and Nance repeatedly drove the route between the school and the home. Said her daughter could not be a runaway. An MP file was opened, with Detective Marjorie Washington as lead investigator.
On April 30, 2009, a groundskeeper, Cody Steuben, twenty-four, found a child’s decomposed body at the Latta Plantation nature preserve, northwest of Charlotte. Medical examiner Timothy Larabee identified the remains as those of Lizzie Nance. The case was transferred to the homicide unit, with Detective Erskine Slidell as lead investigator.
Lizzie Nance was a sixth-grade student with no history of drug, alcohol, or mental issues. A low-risk victim. Cynthia Pridmore was a legal secretary, twice divorced. The second former husband, John Pridmore, thirty-nine, sold real estate. Lionel Nance was an electrician, unemployed at the time of his daughter’s disappearance.
Neither of the Pridmores had an arrest record. Lionel Nance had a 2001 arrest for public drunkenness.
Witnesses who knew the victim all stated that the person responsible had to be someone she knew or someone she trusted. Witnesses all doubted Nance or either of the Pridmores was involved.
We skimmed a few newspaper articles. It was the usual bloodlust frenzy. The disappea
rance. The search. The angelic little face with the long brown hair. The headline screaming that the child was dead.
I was still reading when Ryan leaned back in his chair. I laid down the page. “You okay?”
“Rosy.”
“Move on to crime scene?”
“Sure.”
I exchanged the folder we had for the crime scene search report.
CSS arrived at 0931 hours, 4/30/09. The site was an open field surrounded by woods, an unsecured area, but one not normally visited by the public. The body had been left fifteen feet north of a small access road.
The victim lay faceup, clothed, with feet together, arms straight at the sides. There was little damage attributable to animal activity. Some debris had accumulated on the remains (leaves, twigs, et cetera, collected by CSS), but no attempt had been made at concealment or burial.
Fingerprinting was impossible due to decomposition, but both hands were bagged. Photographs were taken of the victim and the surroundings.
The detailed report of each crime scene tech followed. Leaving those to Ryan, I moved on to the section labeled Evidence/Property Recovered/Analyzed.
Each article had been entered into a grid. The five columns were headed: Control #. Item. Location. Type of Collection. Results.
The rows contained pitifully few entries. Photographs, forty-five. A soda can. Leaves. Bark chips. A rusty battery. Hair. A weathered sneaker, woman’s size ten. The hair was Lizzie’s. The can, battery, and shoe were negative for DNA or latent prints.
I must have made a sound. Or Ryan caught something in my face. “What?”
“Katy took ballet when she was a kid.” I was referring to my daughter. “She carried her slippers in a bag and wore street shoes to and from class.”
Ryan cocked a brow. I rotated the property log so he could read it. When he’d finished, “Where are the kid’s dance shoes?”
“Exactly.”
“None of the CSS techs refer to shoes. Nothing on a bag or backpack.” Ryan rolled his head, trying to release tension in his neck.
“How about you take the witnesses and I take the autopsy report?” I suggested.
“You don’t have to protect me.”
“I’m not.” I was. “Interviewing is closer to your skill set.”
The section labeled Witnesses was ten pages long. Standard. When a child was murdered, the cops talked to everyone who ever intersected the kid’s life.
The interviews were listed in chronological order. The first was that of the groundskeeper who discovered the body. He’d been questioned by Slidell.
I turned to the section labeled Medical Examiner’s Report.
Elizabeth Ellen Nance. Victim is described as an 11-year-old white female, 57.5” in height, slender build, brown hair. Autopsy conducted on 5/1. Remains are partially skeletal with putrefied tissue remaining on the cranial posterior, torso, limbs, and feet.
The body is clothed in a green wool jacket, black leotard, black tights, pink cotton underwear, and blue plastic shoes. The panties appear to be in place. All clothing is heavily soiled. No bloodstaining is observed.
The body shows no evidence of sharp or blunt force trauma.
There is no fracturing of the skull, internally or externally. The skull base is intact. The facial bones are intact. The dentition is present and intact except for two right maxillary incisors that appear to have been lost postmortem.
The hyoid wings are not fused to the body. What remains of the laryngeal and tracheal cartilages is intact. Observation of aspirated blood in the upper airway or bronchi is not possible. Observation of obstruction of the airways or bronchi is not possible.
Parallel grooving on two right medial hand phalanges is consistent with rodent scavenging. Two right distal hand phalanges are missing. Neither hand shows trauma consistent with defensive wounding.
A number of fine hairs and/or fibers are observed on the ventral aspect of the right forearm. A sampling of these was taken by the crime lab.
Decomposition makes it impossible to determine if there is trauma of the external genitalia or fluid deposit or any other extraneous material around the genitalia or in the pubic area. The flesh of the lower torso in the area of the lower abdomen and thighs and legs is putrefied, but the bones show no fractures or other trauma.
Submitted for evidence:
1. scalp hair
2. bags removed from right and left hands
3. right- and left-hand fingernail remnants
4. clothing and evidence sheet in which the body was wrapped
5. hair/fibers collected from the right forearm
Blood ethanol and carbon monoxide levels: undetermined
Manner of death: homicide
Cause of death: undetermined
Such a pitifully small amount of information.
The clock said 1:10. Ryan was still wading through interviews.
“Anything?” I asked.
“Kid’s uncle sounds like a punk, but no.”
“Grab some lunch?”
We rode in silence to the basement. I got a salad. Ryan went for a pizza slice that had been waiting awhile for a buyer. We took our trays to a table by the back wall.
“This civilian review system is good.” My attempt to open conversation.
“Seems so.”
“The investigation was thorough enough. The cops just had nothing to work with.”
“Not unusual with stranger abductions.”
“A stranger abduction but no sexual assault?”
“That’s what the ME concluded?”
“He left it undetermined. But the clothes were undisturbed, so he felt pretty strongly there’d been no rape. Cause of death was also undetermined.”
We ate without speaking for a few moments.
“Pomerleau’s MO was to kidnap kids and keep them alive for her sick little fantasies. Why change that?” I’d been asking myself that since learning about the DNA hit.
“When torture’s no longer enough, these sickos up the ante.”
Something else had been bothering me. “That last night on de Sébastopol. Pomerleau set the house on fire.” And left me in it to die. I didn’t say that. “She escaped before Claudel could arrest her. Why was her DNA in the Canadian system?”
“Couple of years ago some counties in California started collecting DNA from violent offenders who’d died before authorities got their genetic profiles.”
“Using what?”
“Old court exhibits, blood or saliva from a vic or a crime scene. They’ve been comparing those profiles to genetic profiles obtained from unsolveds.”
“Cases with DNA from unidentified perps.”
“Right.”
“Will that hold up in court?”
“Doubtful. But they’ve managed to close some cold cases.”
“So Canada’s doing the same thing?”
“I’ve been out of the loop. But I’m guessing it’s something similar. When we first found Pomerleau, she went to Montreal General, right?”
Flashbulb image. Deathly white bodies in a pitch-black cell. I nodded.
“Doctors probably took blood from Pomerleau when she was admitted. Crime scene collected biological material from the house on de Sébastopol. The profiles matched. When Pomerleau became a suspect in the homicides, she went into the NDDB.”
“That tracks.”
Back upstairs, Ryan continued reading the witness interviews while I turned to the next folder: Related Investigations. I’d been at it an hour, and was well into a section headed Investigators’ Notes, when an entry caused me to sit up straighter.
The note was described as handwritten, dated 5/2/2009. There was no name to indicate who had made it.
Forensics computer tech F. G. Ferrara called to advise that the Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop computer collected from the victim’s bedroom had yielded no useful information. Email and browser history empty.
I raced through the rest of the page. The next. Found no further reference to t
he computer or to Ferrara. “Ryan.”
He looked up. I rotated the page and jabbed the entry with my finger. While he read, I dialed Slidell.
My call rolled to voicemail. I left a message: “Phone me.”
I dialed Barrow. Asked him to come back to the CCU. He was there in under a minute. “What’s up?”
I showed him the entry.
“What’s Slidell say?”
“He’s not answering. Is Ferrara still up on four?”
“Hold on.” Barrow stepped out, returned moments later.
“Frank Ferrara moved to Ohio in 2010.”
“Pay was too high here, hours too short.” The old Ryan wit.
“Something like that.”
“What’s the chance that PC is still around?” I asked.
“Was it logged as evidence?”
“No.”
“Five years?” Barrow wagged his head slowly.
“Does Cynthia Pridmore still live in Charlotte?”
“Oh, yeah. She calls every few months asking for updates. Mainly to keep us thinking about Lizzie.”
“Give her a buzz?”
Barrow hesitated. “I hate to raise hopes.”
Ryan and I waited.
“Let me see what I can do.”
Barrow was back in twenty minutes. His face spoke of a painful conversation. Of a woman’s days again haunted by guilt and grief. Of her nights again filled with dread of what lay within sleep.
“Pridmore remembers a cop collecting the Dell, along with other items from her daughter’s room. Recalls questioning about Lizzie’s use of email and the Net. That’s it.”
“Where’s the laptop now?” I asked.
“Pridmore got it back. Two years later used it to trade up to a newer model.”
“Did you ask if Lizzie’s other files were saved first?”
Barrow nodded. “They were. Pridmore copied the photos and Word docs to disk before wiping the drive for resale. Remembers a school report on ER nursing. The assignment was to research a career—that’s what the kid wanted to be. After reading it, she couldn’t bear to look at anything else.”