by Kathy Reichs
“Man, can I lower my arms?”
“No.”
“How the hell should I know? She don’t check in with me. Like I said, I come by, I get laid, I go about my business.”
“You pay for these little rendezvous?”
“Me? You gotta be kiddin’.” The oily smirk made me crave a very hot shower. “I bring the bitch a bottle, she’s grateful. Ya know what I mean?”
“You also bring her a little toot?”
“I don’t roll with that stuff. Just sauce.”
“You know what, Rocky? I think maybe you’re lying to me. I look at you, I see a guy who enjoys his flake. Maybe a guy who deals. What do you say I toss that funny little car of yours?”
“You can’t do that.”
“What do you think, Corporal Bédard?” Ryan’s eyes remained on Trees. “You think we can do that?”
“We can do that.”
Ryan passed the license to Bédard. “How about you check ole Romeo out, see if he’s got any interesting history.”
Bédard holstered his gun and strode to his cruiser. While he ran Trees’s name through the system, Ryan and I waited in silence. Like many under stress, Trees felt the need to fill it. “Look, I’m telling you what I know. It’s jack shit. Alva and I didn’t spend our time talking.”
“Where does Ms. Rodriguez work?” Ryan asked.
“You’re not listening to me.”
“She have a steady income? A way to pay the rent?”
Trees shrugged—as well as he could with his hands in the air.
“You maybe turn her out, Rocky? Hook her on snow so she’s there when you need a quick jolt? Is that the business you’re talking about? You pimp more women than Rodriguez?”
“No way. I watched out for her. Alva isn’t what you’d call a genius.”
Ryan started firing questions, shifting topics to keep Trees off balance. “You know of her using a name other than Rodriguez?”
Trees shook his head.
“Where did she live before coming here?”
“She’s Mexican, right? Or one of those.”
“Why do you think that?”
“The name. And she had a sort of accent. Not French. I figured it was Mexican. Didn’t matter to me.”
“That’s touching, you being so open-minded and all.”
Trees rolled his eyes skyward. His forearms were now V-ing down, hanging deadweight from his upraised elbows.
“You the baby daddy?”
“What?”
“You help her kill them?”
“Kill what?”
“You crank up some tunes to drown out their crying?”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“Or did she do the babies herself because you gave the word?”
Trees’s eyes bounced from Ryan to me to his car, repeated the circuit. I wondered if he was about to bolt.
“Three, Rocky. Three newborns. Presently on their way to the morgue.”
“You’re freakin’ nuts. Alva wasn’t pregnant. Isn’t pregnant. Where the hell is she?” Trees forgot all about hands-up. Both palms slapped his chest. “What do you want from me?”
“We believe Ms. Rodriguez gave birth early Sunday morning.” Ryan tipped his head toward the three-flat in which we’d spent our day. “We found the baby under the bathroom sink. Two others hidden in the apartment.”
“Jesus freakin’ Christ.” The color drained from Trees’s cheeks, leaving his nose a bright beacon in a field of pitted gray. “I don’t know nothing about Alva being pregnant.”
“How can that be, Rocky? You being her devoted guardian and all.”
“Alva is, you know, heavy. Wears baggy clothes. Looks like a goddamn tent on legs.”
“Don’t worry. DNA will answer all those messy paternity questions. If you’re the daddy, you can buy flowers to lay on their graves.”
“This is fucking horseshit.”
“Where would she go, Rocky?”
“Look, I keep telling you, I don’t know where she come from. I don’t know where she’d go. I just know her to—”
“Yeah. You’re a real romantic. Where did you two meet?”
“At a bar.”
“When?”
“Two, maybe three years ago.”
“Where have you been since Saturday?”
Trees brightened, as though sensing a sliver of hope. “I did a run over to Kamloops. You can ask my brother-in-law.”
“Bet on it.”
“Can I get something out of my car?”
Ryan nodded once. “Don’t pull any cowboy moves.”
Trees reached into the backseat of the Kia, yanked some papers from under an empty KFC bag, and gave them to Ryan. “That top one’s a flyer for my brother-in-law’s company. The green one’s my work order. Check the date. I was in Kamloops.”
Ryan read from the flyer. “‘Got it here? Want it there? We move fast.’ Pure poetry.”
Trees missed the sarcasm. “Yeah. Phil’s good with writing and shit.”
“Phil looks like a skunk.”
“Hey, he can’t help it. He was born that way.”
Ryan skimmed the work order, then handed both papers to me. Curious about his comment, I glanced at the flyer.
A happy driver I assumed to be Phil sat smiling and waving behind the wheel of a truck. His hair was black and combed straight back from his face. A white crescent streaked from his forehead toward the crown of his head.
Bédard rejoined us. Shook his head.
Ryan spread his feet and stared at Trees as though weighing options. Then, “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’ll go with Corporal Bédard. You’ll write down contact information for yourself and your brother-in-law and anyone else who can vouch for your sorry ass. You can write, can’t you, Rocky?”
“You’re the funny guy.”
“Downright hilarious when I’m searching a glove compartment.”
“OK. OK.” Two placating palms came up.
“You will record everything you remember about Alva Rodriguez. Right down to the last time she flushed the toilet. You got it?”
Trees nodded.
Ryan raised his brows at me.
“Does Alva have a dog or cat?” I asked.
“A dog.”
“What kind?”
“Just a dog.” The oaf looked confused by the question.
“Big? Small? Long-eared? Brown? White?”
“A little gray yappy thing. Shits all over the place.”
“What’s the dog’s name?”
“Fuck if I know.”
“If Alva left, would she take the dog with her?”
“Fuck if I know.”
Ryan shot me a quizzical look but said nothing. Then to Trees, “Go, Rocky. And dig real deep.”
While Trees followed Bédard to his unit, Ryan walked me to my car.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“The guy couldn’t find his own ass with GPS. Brain’s probably fried.”
“You think he’s using?”
Ryan pulled his “you’ve got to be kidding” face.
“I thought he sounded genuinely shocked at the mention of the babies.”
“Maybe,” Ryan said. “But I’m going to be on that prick like fleas on a hound.”
“Anything new on Roberts?”
“Demers doubts he got any useful prints. Those he lifted will take time to process. If Roberts isn’t in the system, that’s a dead end anyway. The landlord paid the utilities. There’s no phone. No computer. No paper trail of any kind. If Mama’s in the wind, it could take a while to find her.”
“And the baby can’t help us.”
Turned out I was dead wrong.
THE NEXT MORNING I SPENT TWENTY MINUTES SNAKING UP and down the narrow streets of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, a working-class neighborhood a bump east of centre-ville. I passed iron staircase–fronted two-flats, convenience stores, a school, a small park. But no curbside usable at eight A.M. on a Tuesday in Jun
e.
Don’t get me started. One needs a degree in civil engineering to understand when and where it is legal to park in Montreal, and the luck of a lotto winner to find footage that qualifies.
On my fifth pass down Parthenais, a Mini Cooper pulled out half a block up. I shot forward and, with much shifting and swearing, wedged my Mazda into the vacated space.
The clock on the dash said 8:39. Great. Morning meeting would begin in about six minutes.
After gathering my laptop and purse from the backseat, I got out and assessed my handiwork. Six inches in front, eight behind. Not bad.
Pleased with my achievement, I headed toward the thirteen-story glass-and-steel structure recently renamed Édifice Wilfrid-Derome in honor of Quebec’s famous pioneer criminalist. Famous by Quebec standards. In forensic circles.
Hurrying along the sidewalk, I could see the T-shaped black hulk looming over the quartier. Somehow, the brooding structure looked wrong against the cheery blue sky.
Old-timers still refer to Wilfrid-Derome as the QPP or SQ building. Quebec Provincial Police for Anglophones, Sûreté du Québec for Francophones. Makes sense. For decades the provincial force has laid claim to most of the square footage.
But the cops aren’t alone in the édifice. The Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale, Quebec’s combined medico-legal and crime lab, occupies the top two floors. The Bureau du coroner is on eleven. The morgue and autopsy suites are in the basement. Hail, the gang’s all here. Makes my job easier in many ways, harder in some. Ryan’s office is just eight floors below mine.
I swiped my security pass in the lobby, in the elevator, at the entrance to the twelfth floor, and at the glass doors separating the medico-legal wing from the rest of the T. At eight-forty-five the corridor was relatively quiet.
As I passed windows opening onto microbiology, histology, and pathology labs, I could see white-coated men and women working at microtomes, desks, and sinks. Several waved or mouthed greetings through the glass. I returned their bonjour and hustled to my office, not in the mood to chat. I hate being late.
I’d barely dumped my laptop and stowed my purse when my desk phone rang. LaManche was eager to begin the meeting.
When I entered the conference room, only the chief and one other pathologist, Jean Pelletier, were seated at the table. Both did that half-standing thing older men do when women enter a room.
LaManche asked about events following his departure from the apartment in Saint-Hyacinthe. As I briefed him, Pelletier listened in silence. He is a small, compact man with thin gray hair and bags under his eyes the size of catfish. Though subordinate to LaManche, Pelletier had been at the lab a full decade when the chief hired on.
“I will begin the baby’s autopsy as soon as we adjourn,” LaManche said to me in his perfect Sorbonne French. “If the other infants have been reduced to bone, as you suspect, those cases will be assigned to you.”
I nodded. I already knew they would be.
Hearing Pelletier sigh, I looked in his direction.
“So sad.” Pelletier drummed the tabletop with his fingers, the first two permanently yellowed from half a century of smoking Gauloises cigarettes. “So very, very sad.”
At that moment Marcel Morin and Emily Santangelo joined us. More pathologists. Bonjour and Comment ça va all around. After distributing copies of the day’s lineup, LaManche began discussing and assigning cases.
A thirty-nine-year-old woman had been found dead, tangled up in a plastic dry-cleaning bag in Longueuil. Alcohol intoxication was suspected.
A man’s body had washed ashore under the Pont des Îles on Île Sainte-Hélène.
A forty-three-year-old woman had been bludgeoned by her husband following an argument over the TV remote. The couple’s fourteen-year-old daughter had called the Dorval police.
An eighty-four-year-old farmer had been found dead of a gunshot wound in a home he shared with his eighty-two-year-old brother in Saint-Augustin.
“Where’s the brother?” Santangelo asked.
“Call me crazy, but I expect the SQ is pondering that very question.” Pelletier’s dentures clacked as he spoke.
The Saint-Hyacinthe infants had been assigned LSJML numbers 49276, 49277, and 49278.
“Detective Ryan is attempting to locate the mother?” LaManche said it more as statement than question.
“Yes,” I said. “But there’s little to go on, so it could take time.”
“Monsieur Ryan is a man of many talents.” Though Pelletier’s expression was deadpan, I wasn’t fooled. The old codger knew that Ryan and I had been an item, and loved to tease. I didn’t take his bait.
Santangelo got the floater and the plastic-bag vic. The bludgeoning went to Pelletier, the gunshot death to Morin. As each case was dispensed, LaManche marked his master sheet with the appropriate initials. Pe. Sa. Mo.
La went onto dossier LSJML-49276, the newborn from the bathroom sink. Br went onto LSJML-49277 and LSJML-49278, the babies from the window seat and the attic.
When we dispersed, I returned to my office, pulled two case forms from my plastic shelving, and snapped them onto clipboards inside folders. Each of us uses a different color. Pink is Marc Bergeron, the odontologist. Green is Jean Pelletier. LaManche uses red. A bright yellow jacket means anthropology.
As I was digging for a pen, I noticed the flashing red light on my phone.
And felt the tiniest of flutters. Ryan?
Jesus, Brennan. It’s over.
I dropped into my chair, picked up the receiver, and entered my mailbox and code numbers.
A journalist from Le Courrier de Saint-Hyacinthe.
A journalist from Allô Police.
After deleting the messages, I went to the women’s locker room, changed into surgical scrubs, and proceeded out of the medico-legal section to a side corridor running past the secretarial office to the library. Located there was an elevator requiring special clearance.
When the doors opened, I stepped in and pressed a button that would take me to the morgue. There were only two other options: Bureau du coroner. LSJML.
Downstairs, a left and then a right brought me to a Santorini-blue door marked Entrée interdite. Entrance prohibited. I swiped my card and started down a long narrow hall shooting the length of the building.
On the left I passed an X-ray room and four autopsy suites, three with single tables, one with a pair. On the right, lining the wall, were drying racks for soggy clothing, evidence, and personal effects recovered with bodies, computer stations, and wheeled tubs and carts for transporting specimens to the labs upstairs.
Through small windows in the doors, I could see that Santangelo and Morin were beginning their externals in rooms one and two. With each pathologist was a police photographer and an autopsy technician, or diener.
Gilles Pomier and a tech named Roy Robitaille were arranging instruments in the large autopsy suite. They would be assisting Pelletier and LaManche, respectively.
I continued on to number four, a room specially ventilated for decomps, floaters, mummified corpses, and other aromatics. My kind of cases.
As did every autopsy suite, room four had double doors leading to a morgue bay. The bay was lined with refrigerated compartments designed to hold one gurney each.
Tossing my clipboard on a counter, I pulled a plastic apron from one drawer, gloves and a mask from another, donned them, and pushed through the double doors.
Head count.
Seven white cards. Seven temporary residents.
I located those cards with my initials, LSJML-49277 and LSJML-49278. Both had been affixed to the same door.
Dead babies need so little room, I thought.
Both cards bore the same sad notation. Ossements d’enfant. Baby bones. Inconnu. Unknown.
Flashback. Rocking Kevin in my arms, afraid to squeeze lest I snap the brittle little bones, lest I add more bruises to the milky white flesh.
Standing amid the cold stainless steel, I could still feel
the feathery weight of my brother’s body against my chest, hear the soft cadence of his breathing, recall the perfume of little-boy sweat and baby shampoo.
Shake it off, Brennan. Do your job.
I pulled the handle and the door swung open. Cold air whooshed, bringing with it the odor of refrigerated death.
Two folded body bags lay side by side on the top shelf of one gurney. I toed the brake and yanked the gurney out.
When I backed through the double doors, Lisa was arranging equipment on a side counter. Together we maneuvered the gurney parallel to the stainless-steel table floor-bolted in the middle of the room.
“SIJ is shorthanded today.” Wanting practice, Lisa usually speaks English to me. “One photographer will float between us and Dr. LaManche.”
“That’s fine. We’ll do our own pics.”
Fortysomething, Lisa has been a diener since receiving certification at age nineteen. Clever and knowledgeable, with hands as adept as any surgeon’s, she is, far and away, the best autopsy tech at the LSJML.
Lisa is also the favorite of every cop in Quebec. I suspect that, besides her skill and sunny disposition, her blond hair and large bra size figure in.
“They look so little.” Lisa was staring at the bags, sadness on her face.
“Let’s get a series of pics before we remove them.”
While Lisa filled out a case identifier and checked the Nikon, I entered information onto the first of my case forms.
Name: Inconnu. Date of birth: blank. Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale number: 49277. Morgue number: 589. Police incident number: 43729. Pathologist: Pierre LaManche. Coroner: Jean-Claude Hubert. Investigator: Andrew Ryan. Section des crimes contre la personne, Sûreté du Québec.
As I added the date and began a form for the attic baby, Lisa took pictures of the two black pouches. Then she snapped on gloves, pulled a plastic sheet from a below-counter drawer, spread it across the autopsy table, and looked a question at me.
“Unzip them,” I said.
The rolled towels were as I remembered, one green, one yellow, both dappled brown by the liquids of death. Using two hands, Lisa transferred each to the table. I made notes as she shot more photos.
“We’ll start with the baby from the window seat.” I indicated the yellow bundle.