Déjà Dead

by Kathy Reichs

  Everyone shifted to make room, and a chair was shuffled into the circle. Bonjour’s and Comment ça 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.” 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 passed 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 assessing 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 knobs 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 assembled. 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 scraping 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.”r />
  “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 dick 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 passed 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 sûr.”

  She took off her glasses 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 breasts. 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.

  FRANCINE MORISETTE-CHAMPOUX WAS BEATEN AND SHOT TO DEATH in January 1993. A neighbor had seen her walking her small spaniel around ten one morning. Less than two hours later her husband discovered her body in the kitchen of their home. The dog was in the living room. Its head was never found.

  I remembered the case, though I wasn’t involved in the investigation. I’d commuted to the lab that winter, flying north for one week of every six. Pete and I were at each other constantly, so I’d agreed to spend the whole summer of ’93 in Quebec, optimistic the three-month separation might rejuvenate the marriage. Right. The brutality of the attack on Morisette-Champoux had shocked me then and did still. The crime scene photos brought it all back.

  She was lying half under a small wooden table, her arms and legs spread wide, white cotton panties stretched taught between her knees. A sea of blood surrounded her, giving way at its perimeter to the geometric pattern of the linoleum. Dark smears covered the walls and counter fronts. From off camera, the legs of an upturned chair seemed to point at her. You are here.

  Her body looked ghostly white against the crimson background. A pencil-thin line looped across her abdomen, a happy-face smile just above her pubis. She was slit from this scar upward to her breastbone, and her innards protruded from the opening. The handle of a kitchen knife was barely visible at the apex of the triangle formed by her legs. Five feet from her, between a work island and the sink, lay her right hand. She’d been forty-seven years old.

  “Jesus,” I whispered softly.

  I was picking my way through the autopsy report when Charbonneau appeared in my doorway. I guessed his mood was not congenial. His eyes looked bloodshot and he didn’t bother with greetings. He entered without asking and took the chair opposite my desk.

  Watching him, I felt a momentary sense of loss. The lumbering walk, the looseness in his movement, just the largeness of him touched something I thought I’d abandoned. Or been abandoned by.

  For a moment I saw Pete sitting across from me, and my mind flew backward in time. What an intoxicant his body had been. I never knew if it was his size, or the relaxed way he had of moving it. Maybe it was his fascination with me. That had seemed genuine. I could never get enough of him. I’d had sexual fantasies, damn good ones, but from the moment I saw him standing in the rain outside the law library they’d always involved Pete. I could use one right now, I thought. Jesus, Brennan. Get a grip. I snapped back to the present.

  I waited for Charbonneau to begin. He was staring down at his hands.

  “My partner can be a sonofabitch.” He spoke in English. “But he’s not a bad guy.”

  I didn’t respond. I noticed that his pants had four-inch hems, hand sewn, and wondered if he’d done the job himself.

  “He’s just—set in his ways. Doesn’t like change.”

  “Yes.”

  He wouldn’t meet my eyes. I felt unease.

  “And?” I encouraged.

  He leaned back and picked at a thumbnail, still avoiding eye contact. From a radio down the hall Roch Voisine sang softly of Hélène.

  “He says he’s going to file a complaint.” He dropped both hands and shifted his gaze to the window.

  “A complaint?” I tried to keep my voice flat.

  “With the minister. And the director. And LaManche. He’s even looking up your professional board.”

  “And what is Monsieur Claudel unhappy about?” Stay calm.

  “He says you’re overstepping your bounds. Interfering in stuff you got no business in. Messing up his investigation.” He squinted into the bright sunlight.

  I felt my stomach muscles tighten, and a hotness spread upward.

  “Go on.” Flat.

  “He thinks you’re …” He fumbled for a word, no doubt seeking a substitute for the one Claudel had actually used. “… overreaching.”

  “And what exactly does that mean?”

  He still avoided eye contact.

  “He says you’re trying to make the Gagnon case into a bigger deal than it really is, seeing all kinds of shit that isn’t there. He says you’re trying to turn a simple murder into an American-style psycho extravaganza.”

  “And why am I trying to do that?” My voice wavered slightl
y.

  “Shit, Brennan, this isn’t my idea. I don’t know.” For the first time his eyes met mine. He looked miserable. It was obvious he didn’t want to be there.

  I stared back, not really seeing him, just using the time to quell the alarm call going out to my adrenals. I had some idea of the type of inquiry a letter of complaint could set in motion, and I knew it wouldn’t be good. I’d investigated such charges when I sat on the board’s ethics committee. Regardless of outcome, it was never pretty. Neither of us spoke.

  “Hélène the things you do. Make me crazy ’bout you,” crooned the radio.

  Don’t kill the messenger, I told myself. My eyes dropped to the dossier on my desk. A body with skin the color of milk reproduced in a dozen glossy rectangles. I considered the photos, then looked at Charbonneau. I hadn’t wanted to broach this yet, didn’t feel ready, but Claudel was forcing my hand. What the hell. Things couldn’t get worse.

  “Monsieur Charbonneau, do you remember a woman named Francine Morisette-Champoux?”

  “Morisette-Champoux.” He repeated the name several times, twirling through his mental Rolodex. “That was several years ago, eh?”

  “Almost two. January of 1993.” I handed him the photos.

  He thumbed through them, nodding his head in recognition. “Yeah, I remember. So?”

  “Think, Charbonneau. What do you recall about the case?”

  “We never got the turd that did it.”

  “What else?”

  “Brennan, tell me you’re not trying to hook this one in, too?”

  He went through the photos again, the nodding transformed to negative shaking.

  “No way. She was shot. Doesn’t fit the pattern.”

  “The bastard slit her open and cut her hand off.”

  “She was old. Forty-seven, I think.”

  I gave him an icy stare.

  “I mean, older than the others,” he mumbled, reddening.

  “Morisette-Champoux’s killer drove a knife up her vagina. According to the police report there was extensive bleeding.”