by Kathy Reichs
I screamed.
“Goddamn you, Gabby! You stupid bitch! What are you doing? What have I done to you? You bitch! You goddam bitch!”
I sat back on my heels, hands on my thighs, making no attempt to control the tears bathing my face or the sobs racking my body.
I ROCKED BACK AND FORTH FROM MY KNEES TO HEELS, SOBBING AND shouting. My words made little sense and when mingled with the sobbing became incoherent. I knew the voice was mine, but I had no power to stop it. Gibberish I didn’t recognize flew from my mouth as I rocked and sobbed and shrieked.
Soon the sobbing won out over the shrieking and receded to a muffled sucking sound. With one last shudder, I stopped my rocking and focused on Gabby. She, too, was crying.
She stood across the room, one hand clutching the light switch, the other pressed to her chest. Her fingers twitched open then closed. Her chest heaved with each intake of breath, and tears ran down her face. She wept silently, and seemed frozen in place except for that one clutching hand.
“Gabby?” My voice broke, and it came out “—by?”
She gave a tight nod, her dreadlocks bobbing about her ashen face. She started making little sucking sounds, as if trying to pull back her tears. Speech seemed beyond her capabilities.
“Jesus Christ, Gabby! Are you crazy?” I whispered, reasonably controlled. “What are you doing here? Why didn’t you call?”
She seemed to consider the second question, but attempted to answer the first.
“I needed to … talk to you.”
I just stared at her. I’d been trying to find this woman for three weeks. She’d avoided me. It was four-thirty in the morning, she’d just broken into my home, and aged me at least a decade.
“How did you get in here?”
“I still have a key.” More gulping sounds, but quieter, slower. “From last summer.”
She moved a trembling hand from the light switch and displayed a key dangling from a small chain.
I felt anger rising in me, but my exhaustion held it in check.
“Not tonight, Gabby.”
“Tempe, I …”
I gave her a look intended to freeze her in place once more. She stared back, not comprehending, plaintive.
“Tempe, I can’t go home.”
Her eyes were dark and round, her body rigid. She looked like an antelope cut from the herd and cornered. A very large antelope, but terrified nonetheless.
Wordlessly, I pushed to my feet, got towels and linens from the hall closet and dropped them on the guest room bed.
“We’ll talk in the morning, Gabby.”
“Tempe, I …”
“In the morning.”
As I fell asleep I thought I heard her dial the phone. It didn’t matter. Tomorrow.
• • •
And talk we did. For hours and hours. Over bowls of cornflakes and plates of spaghetti. Sipping endless cappuccinos. We talked curled on the couch and on long walks up and down Ste. Catherine. It was a weekend of words, most of them pouring from Gabby. At first I was convinced she had come unglued. By Sunday night I wasn’t so sure.
The recovery team came by late Friday morning. In deference to me, they called ahead, arrived without fanfare, and worked quickly and efficiently. They accepted Gabby’s presence as a natural development. The comfort of a friend after a night of fright. I told Gabby there had been an intruder in the garden, leaving out mention of the head. She had enough on her mind. The team left with encouraging words. “Don’t worry, Dr. Brennan. We’ll get the bastard. You hang in there.”
Gabby’s situation was as harrowing as mine. Her former informant had become her stalker. He was everywhere. Sometimes she’d see him on a bench in the park. Other times he’d follow her on the street. At night he’d hang around St. Laurent. Though she now refused to talk to him, he was always there. He kept his distance, but his eyes never left her. Twice she thought he’d been in her apartment.
I said, “Gabby, are you sure?” I meant, Gabby are you losing it?
“Did he take anything?”
“No. At least, I don’t think so. Nothing I’ve noticed. But I know he went through my things. You know how you can tell. Nothing was gone, but things were a bit off. Just sort of rotated in place.”
“Why didn’t you return my calls?”
“I stopped answering the phone. It rang a dozen times a day and no one would be on the other end. Same with the answering machine. Lots of hang-ups. I just stopped using it.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“And say what? I’m being stalked? I’ve made myself a victim? I can’t handle my own life? I thought if I treated him like the maggot he is he’d lose interest. Slither away and pupate somewhere else.”
Her eyes looked tortured.
“And I knew what you’d say. You’re losing it, Gabby. You’re letting your paranoia control you, Gabby. You need help, Gabby.”
I felt a stab of guilt, remembering the way I’d hung up with her last. She was right.
“You could have called the police. They’d give you protection.” Even as I said it I didn’t believe it.
“Right.” And then she told me about Thursday night.
“I got home about 3:30 A.M. and I could tell someone had entered the apartment. I’d used the old trick of stretching a thread across the lock. Well, seeing it gone totally unnerved me. I had been in a pretty good mood since I hadn’t seen the creep all night. Also, I’d just had the locks changed, so I was feeling secure about the apartment for the first time in months. Seeing that thread on the floor just destroyed me. I couldn’t believe he’d gotten in again. I didn’t know if he was still inside and I didn’t want to find out. I bolted and came here.”
Bit by bit she talked of the past three weeks, recounting incidents as they came into her head. As her narrative unfolded over the weekend, my mind rearranged the disjointed episodes into a chronology. Though the man harassing her had done nothing overtly aggressive, I saw a pattern of increasing boldness. By Sunday I began to share her fear.
We decided she would stay with me for the time being, though I wasn’t so sure what score my place would earn in a safety check. Late Friday Ryan had called to tell me the patrol unit would be there through Monday. I’d nod to them as we set out on our walks. Gabby thought they were a response to the garden intruder. I didn’t suggest otherwise. I needed to bolster her newborn sense of safety, not wreck it.
I suggested we contact the police about her stalker, but she adamantly refused, fearing their involvement would compromise her girls. I also suspected she was afraid of losing their trust and her access to them. Reluctantly, I agreed.
On Monday I left her and went to work. She planned to gather some things from her apartment. She’d agreed to stay off the Main for a while, and meant to spend time writing. For that she needed her laptop and files.
When I got to my office it was past nine. Ryan had already phoned. The scrawled message read: “Got a name. AR.” He was out when I returned his call, so I went to the histo lab to check on my garden memento.
It was drying on the counter, cleaned and marked, the absence of soft tissue having made boiling unnecessary. It looked like a thousand other skulls, with its empty orbits and neatly penned LML number. I stared at it, recalling the terror it had triggered three nights earlier.
“Location. Location. Location,” I said to the empty lab.
“Pardon?”
I hadn’t heard Denis come in.
“Something a realtor once told me.”
“Oui?”
“It isn’t what something is, so much as where it is that often shapes our reaction.”
He looked blank.
“Never mind. You took soil samples before you washed this?”
“Oui.” He held up two small plastic vials.
“Let’s get them over to trace.”
He nodded.
“Have X rays been done?”
“Oui. I just gave the bitewings and apicals to Dr. Bergeron.
”
“He’s here on a Monday?”
“He’s going on holiday for two weeks so he came to finish some reports.”
“Happy day.” I put the skull in a plastic tub. “Ryan thinks he’s got a name.”
“Ah, oui?” His eyebrows shot up.
“He must have been up with the birds today. The message was taken by the night service.”
“For the St. Lambert skeleton or for your chum there?”
He indicated the skull. Apparently the story had already made the rounds.
“Maybe both. I’ll let you know.”
I headed for my office, stopping by Bergeron’s on the way. He’d spoken with Ryan. The detective had found a missing person match promising enough to request a mandat du coroner for the antemortem records, and was on his way.
“Know anything about her?”
“Rien.” Nothing.
“I’ll finish with the skull before lunch. If you need it, just come by.”
• • •
I spent the next two hours assessing the sex, race, and age of the skull. I observed features of the face and braincase, took measurements, and ran discriminant functions on my computer. We agreed. The skull was that of a white female. Like the St. Lambert skeleton.
Age was frustrating. All I had to go on was closure of the cranial sutures, a notoriously untrustworthy system for evaluating age. The computer couldn’t help. I estimated she’d been in her late twenties to mid-thirties when she died. Maybe forty. Again, consistent with the bones from St. Lambert.
I looked for other indicators of congruity. Overall size. Robusticity of muscle attachments. Degree of arthritic change. Condition of the bone. State of preservation. Everything matched. I was convinced this was the head missing from the Monastère St. Bernard skeleton, but I needed more. Then I turned the skull over and examined the base.
Coursing across the occipital bone, close to the point where the skull sits on the vertebral column, I could see a series of slashes. They were V-shaped in cross-section and ran from high to low, following the contour of the bone. Under the Luxolamp they looked similar to the marks I’d observed on the long bones. I wanted to be sure.
I took the skull back to the histo lab, set it next to the operating scope, and got out the headless skeleton. I withdrew the sixth cervical vertebra, placed it under the scope, and reexamined the cuts I’d described the week before. Then I switched to the skull, focusing on the gashes scoring its back and base. The marks were identical, the contours and cross-sectional dimensions matching perfectly.
“Grace Damas.”
I switched off the fiber-optic light and turned toward the voice.
“Qui?”
“Grace Damas,” repeated Bergeron. “Age thirty-two. According to Ryan, she went missing in February of ’92.”
I calculated. Two years and four months. “That fits. Anything else?”
“I really didn’t ask. Ryan said he’d stop in after lunch. He’s tracking something else down.”
“Does he know the ID’s positive?”
“Not yet. I just finished.” He looked at the bones. “Anything?”
“They’re a match. I want to see what the trace evidence folks have to say about the soil samples. Maybe we can get a pollen profile. But I’m convinced. Even the cut marks are the same. I wish I had the upper neck vertebrae, but it’s not critical.”
Grace Damas. All through lunch the name echoed in my head. Grace Damas. Number five. Or was it? How many more would we find? Each of the names was burned into my mind, like a brand on a heifer’s rump. Morisette-Champoux. Trottier. Gagnon. Adkins. Now another. Damas.
At one-thirty Ryan came to my office. Bergeron had already given him the positive on the skull. I told him it was good for the skeleton as well.
“What do you know about her?” I asked.
“She was thirty-two. Three kids.”
“Christ.”
“Good mother. Faithful wife. Active in the church.” He glanced at his notes. “St. Demetrius, over on Hutchison. Near Avenue du Parc and Fairmont. Sent the kids off to school one day. Never seen again.”
“Husband?”
“Looks clean.”
“Boyfriend?”
He shrugged. “It’s a very traditional Greek family. If you don’t talk about it, those things can’t be true. She was a good girl. Lived for her husband. They’ve got a friggin’ shrine set up for her in the living room.” Another shrug. “Maybe she was a saint. Maybe she wasn’t. We’re not going to find out from Mama or Hubby. It’s like talking to barnacles. You mention hanky-panky, they pull in and slam shut.”
I told him about the cut marks.
“Same as Trottier. And Gagnon.”
“Hm.”
“Hands were cut off. Like Gagnon, and one each for Morisette-Champoux and Trottier.”
“Hm.”
When he’d gone I turned on the computer and pulled up my spreadsheet. I erased “Inconnu” from the name column and typed in Grace Damas, then entered the scanty information Ryan had given me. In a separate file I summarized what I knew about each of the women, arranging them by date of death.
Grace Damas had disappeared in February of 1992. She was thirty-two, married, the mother of three. She lived in the near northeast part of the city, in an area known as Parc Extension. Her body had been dismembered and buried in a shallow grave at the St. Bernard Monastery in St. Lambert, where it was found in June of 1994. Her head showed up in my garden several days later. Cause of death was unknown.
Francine Morisette-Champoux was beaten and shot in January of 1993. She was forty-seven. Her body was found less than two hours later, just south of Centre-ville, in the condo she shared with her husband. Her killer had slit her belly, cut off her right hand, and forced a knife into her vagina.
Chantale Trottier disappeared in October of 1993. She was sixteen. She lived with her mother off the island, in the lake community of Ste. Anne-de-Bellevue. She’d been beaten, strangled, and dismembered, her right hand partially severed, her left one completely detached. Her body was found two days later in St. Jerome.
Isabelle Gagnon disappeared in April of 1994. She’d lived with her brother in St. Édouard. In June of this year her dismembered body was found on the grounds of Le Grand Séminaire in Centre-ville. Though cause of death could not be determined, marks on her bones indicated she’d been dismembered, her belly slit. Her hands had been removed, and her killer had inserted a plunger in her vagina. She was twenty-three.
Margaret Adkins was killed on June 23, just over a week ago. She was twenty-four, had one son, and lived with her common-law husband. She’d been beaten to death. Her belly was slit and one breast had been sliced off and forced into her mouth. A metal statue had been rammed up her vagina.
Claudel was right. There was no pattern in MO. They were all beaten, but Morisette-Champoux was also shot. Trottier was strangled. Adkins was bludgeoned. Hell, we didn’t even have a cause for Damas and Gagnon.
I went over and over what had been done to each of them. There was variation, but there was also a theme. Sadistic cruelty and mutilation. It had to be one person. One monster. Damas, Gagnon, and Trottier were dismembered and dumped in plastic bags. Their bellies had been slit. Gagnon and Trottier had had their hands severed. Morisette-Champoux was slashed and had a hand cut off, but she wasn’t dismembered. Adkins, Gagnon, and Morisette-Champoux had suffered genital penetration with a foreign object. The others hadn’t. Adkins’s breast was mutilated. No one else was disfigured in that way. Or were they? There hadn’t been enough of Damas and Gagnon to say.
I stared at the screen. It has to be here, I told myself. Why can’t I see it? What’s the link? Why these women? Their ages are up and down the charts. It’s not that. They’re all white. Big deal, this is Canada. Francophone. Anglophone. Allophone. Married. Single. Common law. Choose another category. Let’s try geography.
I got out a map and plotted where each of the bodies had been found. It made even less se
nse than when I’d done it with Ryan. Now there were five points in the scatter. I tried plotting their homes. The pins looked like paint flung at a canvas by an abstract artist. There was no pattern.
What did you expect, Brennan, an arrow pointing to a flat on Sherbrooke? Forget place. Try time.
I looked at the dates. Damas was the first. In early 1992. I calculated in my head. Eleven months between Damas and Morisette-Champoux. Nine months later, Trottier. Six months to Gagnon. Two months between Gagnon and Adkins.
The intervals were decreasing. Either the killer was growing bolder, or his blood lust was growing stronger. My heart pounded hard against my ribs as I considered the implication. Over a week had passed since Margaret Adkins died.
I FELT TRAPPED INSIDE MY SKIN. ANXIOUS AND FRUSTRATED. THE visions in my head annoyed me, but I couldn’t turn them off. I watched a candy wrapper dance on the wind outside my window, tossed by puffs of shifting air.
That piece of paper is you, Brennan, I chided myself. Can’t control your own fate, much less anyone else’s. There’s nothing on St. Jacques. No word on who put the skull in your yard. Gabby’s nut case is still out there. Claudel is probably lodging a complaint against you. Your daughter is about to drop out of school. And five dead women are living in your head, and likely to be joined by a sixth or seventh at the rate your investigation is going.
I looked at my watch—2:15 P.M. I couldn’t stand my office another minute. I had to do something.
But what?
I glanced at Ryan’s incident report. An idea began to form.
They’ll be furious, I told myself.
Yes.
I checked the report. The address was there. I pulled up my spreadsheet on the computer screen. They were all there, along with the phone numbers.
You would do better to go to the gym and work off your frustration there.
Yes.
Solo sleuthing won’t help the situation with Claudel.
No.
You may lose Ryan’s support.
True.
Tough.