by Kathy Reichs
Dr. Jean Pelletier is the most senior of the five pathologists at the Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale, Quebec’s central crime and medico-legal lab. He’s got bad joints and bad dentures, and zero tolerance for anything or anyone that wastes his time. Pelletier took one look and ordered a wrecking ball.
The exterior wall of the chimney was pulverized. A well-smoked corpse was extracted, strapped to a gurney, and transported to our lab. The next day Pelletier eyeballed the remains and said, “ossements.” Bones.
Enter I, Dr. Temperance Brennan, forensic anthropologist for North Carolina and Quebec. La Belle Province and Dixie? Long story, starting with a faculty swap between my home university, UNC-Charlotte, and McGill. When the exchange year ended, I headed south, but continued consulting for the lab in Montreal. A decade later, I’m still commuting, and lay claim to the mother lode of frequent flyer miles.
Pelletier’s demande d’expertise en anthropologie was on my desk when I arrived in Montreal for my February rotation.
It was now Wednesday, February 16, and the chimney bones formed a complete skeleton on my worktable. Though the victim hadn’t been a believer in regular checkups, eliminating dental records as an option, all skeletal indicators fit Bellemare. Age, sex, race, and height estimates, along with surgical pins in the right fibula and tibia, told me I was looking at the long-lost Cowboy.
Other than a hairline fracture of the cranial base, probably caused by the unplanned chimney dive, I’d found no evidence of trauma.
I was pondering how and why a man goes up on a roof and falls down the chimney, when the phone rang.
“It seems I need your assistance, Temperance.” Only Pierre LaManche called me by my full name, hitting hard on the last syllable, and rhyming it with “sconce” instead of “fence.” LaManche had assigned himself a cadaver that I suspected might present decomposition issues.
“Advanced putrefaction?”
“Oui.” My boss paused. “And other complicating factors.”
“Complicating factors?”
“Cats.”
Oh, boy.
“I’ll be right down.”
After saving the Bellemare report on disk, I left my lab, passed through the glass doors separating the medico-legal section from the rest of the floor, turned into a side corridor, and pushed a button beside a solitary elevator. Accessible only through the two secure levels comprising the LSJML, and through the coroner’s office below on eleven, this lift had a single destination: the morgue.
Descending to the basement, I reviewed what I’d learned at that morning’s staff meeting.
Avram Ferris, a fifty-six-year-old Orthodox Jew, had gone missing a week earlier. Ferris’s body had been discovered late yesterday in a storage closet on the upper floor of his place of business. No signs of a break-in. No signs of a struggle. Employee said he’d been acting odd. Death by self-inflicted gunshot wound was the on-scene assessment. The man’s family was adamant in its rejection of suicide as an explanation.
The coroner had ordered an autopsy. Ferris’s relatives and rabbi had objected. Negotiations had been heated.
I was about to see the compromise that had been reached.
And the handiwork of the cats.
From the elevator, I turned left, then right toward the morgue. Nearing the outer door to the autopsy wing, I heard sounds drifting from the family room, a forlorn little chamber reserved for those called upon to identify the dead.
Soft sobbing. A female voice.
I pictured the bleak little space with its plastic plants and plastic chairs and discreetly curtained window, and felt the usual ache. We did no hospital autopsies at the LSJML. No end-stage liver disease. No pancreatic cancer. We were scripted for murder, suicide, accidental and sudden and unexpected death. The family room held those just ambushed by the unthinkable and unforeseen. Their grief never failed to touch me.
Pulling open a bright blue door, I proceeded down a narrow corridor, passing computer stations, drying racks, and stainless steel carts on my right, more blue doors on my left, each labeled SALLE D’AUTOPSIE. At the fourth door, I took a deep breath and entered.
Along with the skeletal, I get the burned, the mummified, the mutilated, and the decomposed. My job is to restore the identity death has erased. I frequently use room four since it is outfitted with special ventilation. This morning the system was barely keeping up with the odor of decay.
Some autopsies play to an empty house. Some pack them in. Despite the stench, Avram Ferris’s postmortem was standing room only.
LaManche. His autopsy tech, Lisa. A police photographer. Two uniforms. A Sûrété du Québec detective I didn’t know. Tall guy, freckled, and paler than tofu.
An SQ detective I did know. Well. Andrew Ryan. Six-two. Sandy hair. Viking blue eyes.
We nodded to each other. Ryan the cop. Tempe the anthropologist.
If the official players weren’t crowd enough, four outsiders formed a shoulder-to-shoulder wall of disapproval at the foot of the corpse.
I did a quick scan. All male. Two midfifties, two maybe closing out their sixties. Dark hair. Glasses. Beards. Black suits. Yarmulkes.
The wall regarded me with appraising eyes. Eight hands stayed clasped behind four rigid backs.
LaManche lowered his mask and introduced me to the quartet of observers.
“Given the condition of Mr. Ferris’s body, an anthropologist is needed.”
Four puzzled looks.
“Dr. Brennan’s expertise is skeletal anatomy.” LaManche spoke English. “She is fully aware of your special needs.”
Other than careful collection of all blood and tissue, I hadn’t a clue of their special needs.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” I said, pressing my clipboard to my chest.
Four somber nods.
Their loss lay at center stage, plastic sheeting stretched between his body and the stainless steel. More sheeting had been spread on the floor below and around the table. Empty tubs, jars, and vials sat ready on a rolling cart.
The body had been stripped and washed, but no incision had been made. Two paper bags lay flattened on the counter. I assumed LaManche had completed his external exam, including tests for gunpowder and other trace evidence on Ferris’s hands.
Eight eyes tracked me as I crossed to the deceased. Observer number four reclasped his hands in front of his genitals.
Avram Ferris didn’t look like he’d died last week. He looked like he’d died during the Clinton years. His eyes were black, his tongue purple, his skin mottled olive and eggplant. His gut was distended, his scrotum ballooned to the size of beach balls.
I looked to Ryan for an explanation.
“Temperature in the closet was pushing ninety-two,” he said.
“Why so hot?”
“We figure one of the cats brushed the thermostat,” Ryan said.
I did a quick calculation. Ninety-two Fahrenheit. About thirty-five Celsius. No wonder Ferris was setting a land record for decomposition.
But heat had been just one of this gentleman’s problems.
When hungry, the most docile among us grow cranky. When starved, we grow desperate. Id overrides ethics. We eat. We survive. That common instinct drives herd animals, predators, wagon trains, and soccer teams.
Even Fido and Fluffy go vulture.
Avram Ferris had made the mistake of punching out while trapped with two domestic shorthairs and a Siamese.
And a short supply of Friskies.
I moved around the table.
Ferris’s left temporal and parietal bones were oddly splayed. Though I couldn’t see the occipital, it was obvious the back of his head had taken a hit.
Pulling on gloves, I wedged two fingers under the skull and palpated. The bone yielded like sludge. Only scalp tissue was keeping the flip side together.
I eased the head down and examined the face.
It was difficult to imagine what Ferris had looked like in life. His left cheek wa
s macerated. Tooth marks scored the underlying bone, and fragments glistened opalescent in the angry red stew.
Though swollen and marbled, Ferris’s face was largely intact on the right.
I straightened, considered the patterning of the mutilation. Despite the heat and the smell of putrefaction, the cats hadn’t ventured to the right of Ferris’s nose or south to the rest of the body.
I understood why LaManche needed me.
“There was an open wound on the left side of the face?” I asked him.
“Oui. And another at the back of the skull. The putrefaction and scavenging make it impossible to determine bullet trajectory.”
“I’ll need a full set of cranial X-rays,” I said to Lisa.
“Orientation?”
“All angles. And I’ll need the skull.”
“Impossible.” Observer four again came alive. “We have an agreement.”
LaManche raised a gloved hand. “I have the responsibility to determine the truth in this matter.”
“You gave your word there would be no retention of specimens.” Though the man’s face was the color of oatmeal, a pink bud was mushrooming on each of his cheeks.
“Unless absolutely unavoidable.” LaManche was all reason.
Observer four turned to the man on his left. Observer three raised his chin and gazed down through lowered lids.
“Let him speak.” Unruffled. The rabbi counseling patience.
LaManche turned to me.
“Dr. Brennan, proceed with your analysis, leaving the skull and all untraumatized bone in place.”
“Dr. LaManche—”
“If that proves unworkable, resume normal protocol.”
I do not like being told how to do my job. I do not like working with less than the maximum available information, or employing less than optimum procedure.
I do like and respect Pierre LaManche. He is the finest pathologist I’ve ever known.
I looked at my boss. The old man nodded almost imperceptibly. Work with me, he was signaling.
I shifted my gaze to the faces hovering above Avram Ferris. In each I saw the age-old struggle of dogma versus pragmatics. The body as temple. The body as ducts and ganglia and piss and bile.
In each I saw the anguish of loss.
The same anguish I’d overheard just minutes before.
“Of course,” I said quietly. “Call when you’re ready to retract the scalp.”
I looked at Ryan. He winked, Ryan the cop hinting at Ryan the lover.
The woman was still crying when I left the autopsy wing. Her companion, or companions, were now silent.
I hesitated, not wanting to intrude on personal sorrow.
Was that it? Or was that merely an excuse to shield myself?
I often witness grief. Time and again I am present for that head-on collision when survivors face the realization of their altered lives. Meals that will never be shared. Conversations that will never be spoken. Little Golden Books that will never be read aloud.
I see the pain, but have no help to offer. I am an outsider, a voyeur looking on after the crash, after the fire, after the shooting. I am part of the screaming sirens, the stretching of the yellow tape, the zipping of the body bag.
I cannot diminish the overwhelming sorrow. And I hate my impotence.
Feeling like a coward, I turned into the family room.
Two women sat side by side, together but not touching. The younger could have been thirty or fifty. She had pale skin, heavy brows, and curly dark hair tied back on her neck. She wore a black skirt and a long black sweater with a high cowl that brushed her jaw.
The older woman was so wrinkled she reminded me of the dried-apple dolls crafted in the Carolina mountains. She wore an ankle-length dress whose color fell somewhere between black and purple. Loose threads spiraled where the top three buttons should have been.
I cleared my throat.
Apple Granny glanced up, tears glistening on the face of ten thousand creases.
“Mrs. Ferris?”
The gnarled fingers bunched and rebunched a hanky.
“I’m Temperance Brennan. I’ll be helping with Mr. Ferris’s autopsy.”
The old woman’s head dropped to the right, jolting her wig to a suboptimal angle.
“Please accept my condolences. I know how difficult this is for you.”
The younger woman raised two heart-stopping lilac eyes. “Do you?”
Good question.
Loss is difficult to understand. I know that. My understanding of loss is incomplete. I know that, too.
I lost my brother to leukemia when he was three. I lost my grandmother when she’d lived more than ninety years. Each time, the grief was like a living thing, invading my body and nesting deep in my marrow and nerve endings.
Kevin had been barely past baby. Gran was living in memories that didn’t include me. I loved them. They loved me. But they were not the entire focus of my life, and both deaths were anticipated.
How did anyone deal with the sudden loss of a spouse? Of a child?
I didn’t want to imagine.
The younger woman pressed her point. “You can’t presume to understand the sorrow we feel.”
Unnecessarily confrontational, I thought. Clumsy condolences are still condolences.
“Of course not,” I said, looking from her to her companion and back. “That was presumptuous of me.”
Neither woman spoke.
“I am very sorry for your loss.”
The younger woman waited so long I thought she wasn’t going to respond.
“I’m Miriam Ferris. Avram is . . . was my husband.” Miriam’s hand came up and paused, as if uncertain as to its mission. “Dora is Avram’s mother.”
The hand fluttered toward Dora, then dropped to rejoin its counterpart.
“I suppose our presence during the autopsy is irregular. There’s nothing we can do.” Miriam’s voice sounded husky with grief. “This is all so . . .” Her words trailed off, but her eyes stayed fixed on me.
I tried to think of something comforting, or uplifting, or even just calming to say. No words formed in my mind. I fell back on clichés.
“I do understand the pain of losing a loved one.”
A twitch made Dora’s right cheek jump. Her shoulders slumped and her head dropped.
I moved to her, squatted, and placed my hand on hers.
“Why Avram?” Choked. “Why my only son? A mother should not bury her son.”
Miriam said something in Hebrew or Yiddish.
“Who is this God? Why does he do this?”
Miriam spoke again, this time with quiet reprimand.
Dora’s eyes rolled up to mine. “Why not take me? I’m old. I’m ready.” The wrinkled lips trembled.
“I can’t answer that, ma’am.” My own voice sounded husky.
A tear dropped from Dora’s chin to my thumb.
I looked down at that single drop of wetness.
I swallowed.
“May I make you some tea, Mrs. Ferris?”
“We’ll be fine,” Miriam said. “Thank you.”
I squeezed Dora’s hand. The skin felt dry, the bones brittle.
Feeling useless, I stood and handed Miriam a card. “I’ll be upstairs for the next few hours. If there’s anything I can do, please don’t hesitate to call.”
Exiting the viewing room, I noticed one of the bearded observers watching from across the hall.
As I passed, the man stepped forward to block my path.
“That was very kind.” His voice had a peculiar raspy quality, like Kenny Rogers singing “Lucille.”
“A woman has lost her son. Another her husband.”
“I saw you in there. It is obvious you are a person of compassion. A person of honor.”
Where was this going?
The man hesitated, as though debating a few final points with himself. Then he reached into a pocket, withdrew an envelope, and handed it to me.
“This is the reason Avram
Ferris is dead.”
2
THE ENVELOPE HELD A SINGLE BLACK-AND-WHITE print. Pictured was a supine skeleton, skull twisted, jaw agape in a frozen scream.
I flipped the photo. Written on the back were the date, October 1963, and a blurry notation. H de 1 H. Maybe.
I looked a question at the bearded gentleman blocking my way. He made no move to explain.
“Mr.—?”
“Kessler.”
“Why are you showing this to me?”
“I believe it’s the reason Avram Ferris is dead.”
“So you’ve said.”
Kessler crossed his arms. Uncrossed them. Rubbed palms on his pants.
I waited.
“He said he was in danger.” Kessler jabbed four fingers at the print. “Said if anything happened it would be because of this.”
“Mr. Ferris gave this to you?”
“Yes.” Kessler glanced over his shoulder.
“Why?”
Kessler’s answer was a shrug.
My eyes dropped back to the print. The skeleton was fully extended, its right arm and hip partially obscured by a rock or ledge. An object lay in the dirt beside the left knee. A familiar object.
“Where does this come from?” I looked up. Kessler was again checking to his rear.
“Israel.”
“Mr. Ferris was afraid his life was in danger?”
“Terrified. Said if the photo came to light there’d be havoc.”
“What sort of havoc?”
“I don’t know.” Kessler raised two palms. “Look, I have no idea what the picture is. I don’t know what it means. I agreed to keep it. That’s it. That’s my role.”
“What was your connection to Mr. Ferris?”
“We were business associates.”
I held out the photo. Kessler dropped his hands to his sides.
“Tell Detective Ryan what you’ve told me,” I said.
Kessler stepped back. “You know what I know.”
At that moment my cell sounded. I slipped it from my belt.
Pelletier.
“Got another call about Bellemare.”
Kessler sidestepped me and moved toward the family room.
I waggled the print. Kessler shook his head no and hurried down the hall.