by Kathy Reichs
“Our job is easy now.”
Ryan and I looked at Ollie.
“No way she’s not coming back for these jewels.”
No one smiled at Ollie’s joke.
“What about the front compartment?” Ryan suggested.
I checked. It was empty.
We were standing there, mute with disappointment, when the bathroom door opened. We all turned.
Devereaux’s hair was combed and sprayed into a blond updo, and her face was a Gauguin palette of color. Green and lavender lids. Rose cheeks. Red lips. Had her situation not been so sad, I might have found it comical. Like Toddlers & Tiaras.
Ignoring us, Devereaux crossed the room, dropped to her knees, and yanked a suitcase from under the bed. With angry movements, she began tossing in clothing from the shelves and floor. No folding or layering. A wrinkle-free look was not a priority.
Lowering my voice, I told Ollie and Ryan what I’d seen behind the suitcase in the closet.
“The panel is removable?” Ryan asked.
“I think so.”
“May provide access to the bathroom pipes,” Ryan said.
“You’re thinking another dead baby?” Ollie’s expression was grim.
My gaze slid to Devereaux. She was emptying a dresser drawer, oblivious to our conversation.
I nodded.
Wordlessly, we returned to the closet. Ollie and I watched as Ryan dragged the suitcase from behind the clothes.
The panel was approximately twelve inches square, attached to the wall by nails at the corners.
My eyes did a three-sixty. Landed on a pair of orange stiletto pumps. I grabbed and handed one to Ryan.
Hooking the tip of the heel onto the edge of the panel, Ryan pulled with the body of the shoe. The nails slid free with little resistance.
It was Saint-Hyacinthe all over again. I held my breath as Ryan inserted his fingers, levered downward, and pulled the panel free. The opening gaped black and foreboding.
Ollie produced a penlight. Ryan thumbed it on and aimed the beam into the darkness. As expected, the tiny white oval landed on pipes. They were dark and wrapped with frayed insulation.
I watched the oval probe. It crawled up a vent stack. Over a flange. Left across a horizontal.
Banging down the hall told me Devereaux was checking the kitchen drawers and cabinets.
Banging in my ears told me my pulse had gone apeshit.
The oval doubled back, continued to the right, then started probing downward.
Seconds passed. Eons.
And there it was. Jammed in the hollow of a U-shaped trap.
I felt sick to my stomach.
The towel was blue with a small appliqué on one side. It was tightly rolled, with the thick end pointing our way.
“Call the ME?” Ryan asked.
Ollie shook his head. “Let’s be sure. Don’t want to bring a doc out here for nothing.”
A voice in my head was rejecting the brutal reality of the visual input. No, God, no!
Ryan set the penlight on the floor and took a series of shots with his iPhone. Checked the results. “Got it.”
As I kicked aside clothing to clear floor space, Ryan reached in and removed the bundle. Both men looked at me. I dropped to my knees and took a steadying breath.
The fabric was degraded and easily torn. The layers were tightly adhered, sealed by fluids that had long ago dried and congealed. My fingers trembled as I tried to gain entry without doing damage.
The world went deadly quiet, all sound obscured by emotions inside me.
Finally the terry cloth yielded. I rolled the bundle sideways.
The bones were small and brown and curled around a fragmented skull.
“Jesus Christ!”
I looked up.
Ollie’s face was the color of oatmeal. I realized he hadn’t seen the other dead infants.
Moving as gently as possible, I rewound the towel.
“That’s four that we know of.” Ryan was using the light to make one last round in the opening.
“This murdering bitch left a trail of dead babies from Quebec to Alberta! And we can’t find her sorry ass?” Fired by loathing, Ollie’s words came out way too loud.
Ryan got to his feet. “We’ll find her.”
I rose and placed a calming hand on Ollie’s arm.
“Call the ME,” I said.
BY ONE-THIRTY RYAN AND I WERE SUITED UP AND STANDING beside a stainless-steel table with Dr. Dirwe Okeke, one of the Alberta ME’s newest hires. Okeke had done his prelims—photos, X-rays, measurements, descriptive observations. I’d done a little dry-brush cleaning and arranged the baby’s bones in anatomical position.
Rather than a pathologist, Okeke looked like he played defensive tackle for Edmonton High, and parents of opposing teams wouldn’t have demanded a birth certificate. He stood six-two, weighed 250. Had I seen him on the street, I’d have put his age at maybe eighteen.
When I’d phoned the ME office, a receptionist had listened to my story, then rolled my call to Okeke. He hadn’t interrupted as I’d introduced myself and explained the dead babies in Quebec and the one at Susan Forex’s house.
As expected, Okeke elected to visit the scene personally. He arrived in an Escalade with a front seat specially outfitted to accommodate whales. Two techs followed in a van.
When she saw Okeke, Devereaux’s attitude did a rapid 180 to meek. I couldn’t blame her. The good doc looked like he was of another species, huge and dark to her small and pale. Without moving or speaking, Okeke seemed to fill her wee bedroom to overflowing.
Okeke had asked few questions, viewed the tiny bones in silence. Then he’d interviewed Devereaux, who swore she knew zip. She hadn’t met Ruben, had never had reason to pry the panel from the wall.
Forex also knew nothing. Or so she claimed. Her shocked expression suggested she was probably being straight.
Ollie had waited for Devereaux to stuff her closet sparklies into the second suitcase, then he drove her to a women’s shelter. I suspected the gesture came partly out of compassion but mostly out of a desire to avoid an up-close-and-personal with the bones of a newborn.
Ryan, Okeke, and I had watched the techs enlarge the opening with a handheld power saw, then search inside the wall. Other than a nest of startled roaches, their efforts produced zilch.
Leaving the techs to photograph and process the scene, Okeke transported the remains in the Escalade. Ryan and I rode with him to the ME office on 116th Street. On the way, we learned that Okeke was from Kenya and that he studied medicine in the UK. That was it. The guy wasn’t a talker.
And here we were.
As with the Saint-Hyacinthe attic baby, nothing was left of this infant but a skeleton and fragments of desiccated tissue. Lacking flesh to hold it together, the skull had fallen apart. The individual cranial bones lay spread like an illustration in an anatomy text.
“Please clarify.” Okeke’s voice was deep, with a Masai Mara lilt reshaped by years of British schooling.
“The baby was at least seven gestational months at the time of its death.”
“Not full-term?”
“It may have been. If so, it was in a very low percentile for size. But the fetus was definitely viable.”
As I explained my measurements and observations, Okeke jotted notes. The clipboard looked like a child’s toy in his enormous hands. “Gender?”
“I can’t determine that from the bones.”
When Okeke nodded, the scalp above his neck rippled, then smoothed.
“Trauma?”
“None,” I said. “No fractures or indications of physical abuse.”
More jotting. “Cause of death?”
“The bones and X-rays show no evidence of malnutrition, disease, or deformation.” I thought of the wadded tissue in the throat of the window-seat baby. “No intrusions or foreign objects.”
“What of ancestry?”
“The cheeks may have been quite wide, but it’s hard to tell wi
th nonarticulated bones. And I may have seen slight shoveling on an upper central incisor.”
“Suggesting what was once called Mongoloid racial background.”
“Yes.” I told him about Simone’s DNA finding for the bathroom-vanity baby.
“So this child may be of aboriginal heritage?”
“Assuming it is a sibling or half sibling of the baby that was tested.”
“Is there any question the infants are of the same mother?”
I looked at Ryan. So did Okeke.
“We have no proof,” Ryan said. “Yet. But we believe Annaliese Ruben gave birth to all four babies.”
“Why would a mother kill her own children?”
Oh, yeah. Okeke was new at the game.
“It happens.”
Okeke’s dark eyes darkened. “Where is this woman now?”
“We’re looking for her,” Ryan said.
Okeke was about to ask another question when a phone shrilled loudly. “Excuse me.”
Two steps brought Okeke to a desk beside a sink at the back of the autopsy room. For me, the trip would have required five.
Okeke stripped off a glove, punched a button, and lifted the receiver. “Yes, Lorna.” Pause. “I choose not to speak with anyone at this time.”
Lorna said something. I assumed she was the receptionist who triaged my call.
“Who is this man?” There was another, longer pause. “Where did Mr. White obtain this information?”
As he took in Lorna’s response, Okeke’s eyes rolled to me. “Put him through.”
Lorna did.
“Dr. Okeke.”
White’s voice had greater power than Lorna’s. The buzzy whine carried past Okeke’s ear.
“I can’t release that information, sir.”
The next whine ended on a high note, suggesting another question.
“I’m sorry, that’s confidential.”
Anxious to proceed with the analysis, I crossed to the counter to untangle the towel that had wrapped the baby. It was like the movie Groundhog Day, autopsy room four all over again. Same cautious twisting and pulling. Same fear of causing damage.
Oblivious to Okeke’s end of the conversation, I focused on inserting my fingers, lifting, inserting deeper, lifting more. Millimeter by millimeter, the gunk yielded and the kinks came free.
I vaguely registered that, in the background, Okeke’s answers were growing increasingly clipped. I kept teasing and tugging.
Eventually, the towel lay flat with only one corner stuck. I pulled gently. With a Velcro-like frip, the fibers disengaged. I laid back the flap.
Yep. Groundhog Day. But this time my find wasn’t a bag of sand and small green pebbles.
Pasted to the underside of the corner was a scrap of paper. I tried freeing an edge with the tip of one gloved finger. No go. The thing had become one with the terry cloth.
I adjusted the Luxo lamp and leaned close. There was lettering, uppercase, black, on a blue background. Above the lettering was what might have been a white border.
I rotated the towel to try to make sense of the message. LA MONFWI.
I was running possible meanings, adding letters on both ends, when Okeke’s comment brought my head up sharply.
“I was told you were calling with information about Annaliese Ruben.”
Ryan looked my way. His brows rose slightly. So did mine.
Okeke waited out a whine. “May I ask why you are interested, sir?”
The whine launched into a long explanation. Okeke did not let it finish. “Are you a reporter, Mr. White?”
Again the whine droned on. This time Okeke cut it off by slamming the receiver into its cradle.
Okeke attempted to make a note on his clipboard, shook his pen, then winged it onto the desk. It bounced to the floor. He made no move to retrieve it.
“That was a journalist?” I guessed.
“A Mr. White. If that is his real name.”
“Who does he work for?”
“It does not matter.” Okeke flapped his clipboard toward the sad little bones. “How did he learn of this baby? Of the others?”
“He knew about the Quebec cases?” I couldn’t keep the shock from my voice.
“He did.” Okeke’s angry eyes drilled me with a look. It was an intimidating sight.
“He got nothing from me. Or Ryan.” Curt. The implied accusation piqued me.
“Neither Dr. Brennan nor I speak to the press about ongoing investigations.”
Okeke turned the angry eyes on Ryan. “Yet this man knew.”
“Information about this baby had to come from Devereaux or Forex.” Ryan spoke in a low and very even voice. “Or from one of your technicians, though that does not explain the Quebec angle.”
Ollie knew all of it, I thought. Didn’t say it.
“Why would a member of my staff do such a thing?”
Ryan rotated a thumb against his fingertips. “Someone rings White, claims to have insider information about a woman leaving a trail of dead babies across Canada. Says the scoop goes to the highest bidder. Thinking the story might have legs, White agrees to pay.”
Okeke shook his head in disgust. “Such thirst for the lurid and heinous. Like your famous Butterbox Babies. A book, even a movie. Why?”
Okeke referred to the case of the Ideal Maternity Home, a Nova Scotia facility for unwed pregnant mothers operated from 1928 until 1945 by William Peach Young, an unordained minister and chiropractor representing himself to be a Seventh-day Adventist, and his wife, Mercedes, a midwife. After years of delivering babies and placing them up for adoption, accumulated allegations of profiteering and of high infant mortality rates brought the home under scrutiny.
The investigation revealed that the Youngs had purposely killed “unmarketable” babies by feeding them only molasses and water. A deformity, serious illness, or “dark” coloration meant no placement potential, no revenue, and therefore, death through starvation.
Dead babies were buried on the property in small wooden grocery boxes typically used for dairy products: thus the term “Butterbox Babies.” Others were tossed into the sea or burned in the Ideal Maternity’s furnace. Estimates suggested between four and six hundred infant deaths at the home.
“I want to know who did this.” Anger thumped a vein in Okeke’s right temple.
“As do we,” I said.
“You will inform the RCMP sergeant who was present at the scene?”
“Mmm.”
A dripping faucet made soft thups in the stainless-steel sink. Finally, Okeke circled the desk to snatch up his pen.
“I found something in the towel,” I said.
Both men followed me to the counter, leaned in, and studied the truncated message.
“The beginning of the first word and the end of last word are missing,” I said.
“Not necessarily.”
I was about to query Ryan’s meaning when my iPhone offered another performance of the Irish National Anthem.
Ollie.
I pulled off a glove and clicked on. Ryan and Okeke continued staring at the scrap.
“Where are you?” Ollie asked me.
“Still with Okeke.”
“Bones tell you anything?”
“Ruben found motherhood inconvenient. What’s up?”
“After depositing Devereaux at WIN House, a delight I hope never to repeat, I dropped in at headquarters to see if anything had popped. Had a message from a Constable Flunky.”
“Seriously?”
“You want to hear this?”
“I’m putting you on speaker. Ryan’s with me.” I hit the button and, stupidly, fixed my eyes on the phone.
“—big guy to miss anything. Anyway, I broadcast Ruben’s pic, asked our officers to show it around on the street. Flunky actually did.”
Reception was lousy, and Ollie kept growing loud then fading. I looked up to see if Ryan was paying attention. He was punching buttons on his own iPhone.
“An agent at the Greyh
ound station remembered a woman who looked like Ruben tried to buy a ride to Hay River.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“Where’s Hay River?”
“The south shore of Great Slave Lake.”
“In the Northwest Territories.”
“Gold star for geography.”
“Was the agent sure it was Ruben?”
“No. But get this. At first he refused to sell her a ticket because of the pooch.”
“The woman had a dog?” I felt my heart skip a beat.
“Yeah. Greyhound has a no-pet policy. The only exception is a service animal.”
“So she didn’t get on?”
“The guy finally took pity and let her ride.”
I thought a minute. It made sense. The NWT has a large Dene population. I was about to say that when Ryan surprised me.
“I know where Ruben’s gone.”
OKEKE AND I BOTH EYED RYAN SKEPTICALLY.
“She’s trying to get to Yellowknife.”
“What’s he saying?”
Ignoring Ollie, I gestured with my free hand for Ryan to explain.
“The last string of letters forms a complete word.”
I reconsidered the scrap.
“Monfwi is an electoral district for the Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories.”
“And you know this because?” Without looking up.
“Two years ago I busted a kid from Monfwi for dealing crack out of the Guy-Concordia metro station in Montreal. Turned out the little twerp had juice. Twenty minutes after I let him phone Daddy, I got a call from his MLA.” Ryan used the abbreviation for Member of Legislative Assembly.
“What’s he saying?”
Ignoring the sputtering coming from my mobile, Ryan read from the screen of his iPhone. “‘The Monfwi district consists of Behchoko, Gamèti, Wekwèeti, and Whatì.’”
“Dene communities.”
“The Tlicho people, to be exact. There are five main Dene groups. The Chipewyan, living east of Great Slave Lake; the Yellowknives to the north; the Slavey along the Mackenzie River to the southwest; the Tlicho between Great Slave and Great Bear lakes; and the Sahtu living in the central part of the NWT.”