Authors: Kathy Reichs
I slid the soap over my breasts, circling each again and again, willing the sweet-smelling lather to cleanse me of the night’s events. I raised my face to the spray that was pounding my head and coursing over my body. The water would grow cold soon. I’d been showering for twenty minutes, trying to drive out the cold and silence the voices in my head.
The heat and the steam and the scent of jasmine should have relaxed me, loosened the tension in my muscles and carried away the soreness. They hadn’t. The whole time I was listening for a sound outside my rectangle of steam. I was waiting for the phone to ring. Fearful I’d miss Ryan’s call, I had brought the handset into the bathroom.
I’d called the station immediately on reaching home, even before stripping off my wet clothes. The dispatcher had been skeptical, reluctant to disturb a detective in the middle of the night. She’d been adamant in her refusal to give me Ryan’s home number, and I’d left his card at work. Standing in my living room, shivering, my head still pounding and my stomach regrouping for another attack, I’d been in no mood for discussion. My words, as well as my tone, persuaded her. I would apologize tomorrow.
That had been half an hour ago. I felt the back of my head. The lump was still there. Under my wet hair it felt like a hard-boiled egg, and was tender to the touch. Before getting into the shower I’d gone through the instructions I’d been given following previous thumps on the head. I checked my pupils, rotated my head hard right and hard left, and pricked my hands and feet to test for feeling. All parts seemed to be in their proper places and in working order. If I’d suffered a concussion, it was a mild one.
I turned off the water and stepped from the shower. The phone lay where I’d left it, mute and disinterested.
Damn. Where is he?
I dried myself, slipped into my ratty old terry cloth robe, and wrapped a towel around my hair. I checked the answering machine to be sure I hadn’t missed a call. No red light. Damn. Retrieving the handset, I clicked it on to see if it was working. Dial tone. Of course it was working. I was just agitated.
I lay down on the couch and placed the phone on the coffee table. Surely he’d call soon. No point going to bed. I closed my eyes, planning to rest a few minutes before making something to eat. But the cold and the stress and the fatigue and the jolt to my brain melded into a tidal wave of exhaustion that rose up and crashed over me, plunging me into a deep but troubled sleep. I didn’t drift off, I passed out.
I was outside a fence, watching someone dig with an enormous shovel. Each time the blade came out of the ground it seethed with rats. When I looked down, there were rats everywhere. I had to keep kicking at them to keep them off my feet. The figure wielding the shovel was shadowy, but when it turned I could see it was Pete. He pointed at me and said something, but I couldn’t make out the words. He started to shout and beckon to me, his mouth a round, black circle that grew larger and larger, engulfing his face and turning it into a hideous clown mask.
Rats ran across my feet. One was dragging Isabelle Gagnon’s head. Its teeth were clamped onto her hair as it yanked the head across the lawn.
I tried to run, but my legs didn’t move. I’d sunk into the earth, and was standing in a grave. Dirt was trickling in around me. Charbonneau and Claudel were peering down at me. I tried to speak, but words wouldn’t come. I wanted them to pull me out. I held my hands out to them, but they ignored me.
Then they were joined by another figure, a man in long robes and an odd hat. He looked down and asked me if I’d been confirmed. I couldn’t answer. He told me I was on church property, and had to leave. He said only those who worked for the church could enter its gates. His cassock flapped in the wind, and I worried that his hat would fall into the grave. He tried to restrain his vestments with one hand, and dial a flip phone with the other. It started to ring, but he ignored it. It rang and rang.
So did the phone on my coffee table, which I eventually distinguished from the phone in my dream. Awakening through layers of resistance, I reached for the handset.
“Um. Hm,” I said, groggily.
“Brennan?”
Anglophone. Gruff. Familiar. I fought to clear my head.
“Yes?” I looked at my wrist. No watch.
“Ryan. This better be good.”
“What time is it?” I had no idea if I’d been asleep five minutes or five hours. This was getting old.
“Four-fifteen.”
“Just a sec.”
I set the phone down and stumbled to the bathroom. I threw cold water on my face, sang one chorus of “The Drunken Sailor” as I jogged in place. Rewrapping my turban, I returned to Ryan. I didn’t want to increase his annoyance by making him wait, but, even more, I didn’t want to sound groggy, or to ramble. Better to take a minute to slap myself into shape.
“Okay, I’m back. Sorry.”
“Was someone singing?”
“Hm. I went out to St. Lambert tonight,” I began. I wanted to tell him enough, but didn’t want to go into the details at 4:15
A.M
. “I found the spot where St. Jacques put the X. It’s some sort of abandoned church property.”
“You called to tell me this at four in the morning?”
“I found a body. It’s badly decomposed, probably already skeletal from the smell. We need to get out there right away before someone stumbles on it, or the neighborhood dogs organize a church supper.”
I took a breath and waited.
“Are you fucking crazy?”
I wasn’t sure if he was referring to what I’d found, or to my going out alone. Since he was probably right about the latter, I went for the former.
“I know a body when I find one.”
There was a long silence, then, “Buried or surface?”
“Buried, but very shallow. The portion I saw was exposed, and the rain was making it worse.”
“You sure this isn’t another pissant cemetery eroding out?”
“The body’s in a plastic bag.” Like Gagnon. And Trottier. It didn’t need saying.
“Shit.” I could hear a match being struck, then the long expulsion of breath that meant a cigarette had been lit.
“Think we should go now?”
“No fucking way.” I could hear him pull on the cigarette. “And what is this ‘we’? You have something of a reputation as a freelancer, Brennan, which doesn’t particularly impress me. Your go-to-hell attitude may work with Claudel, but it’s not going to slice with me. The next time you feel an urge to go waltzing around a crime scene, you might just politely inquire as to whether someone in the homicide squad has an opening on his dance card. We do still fit that sort of thing into our busy schedules.”
I hadn’t expected gratitude, but I was unprepared for the vehemence of his response. I was starting to get angry, and it was causing the hammering in my head to escalate. I waited, but he didn’t go on.
“I appreciate your calling back so soon.”
“Hm.”
“Where are you?” With my brain fully functional, I would never have asked. I regretted it immediately.
After a pause, “With a friend.”
Good move, Brennan. No wonder he was annoyed.
“I think someone was out there tonight.”
“What?”
“While I was looking at the burial, I thought I heard something, then I took a shot to the head that knocked me out. All hell was breaking loose with the storm, so I can’t be sure.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
Another pause. I could almost hear him turning things over in his head.
“I’ll send a squad to secure the site until morning. Then I’ll get recovery out there. Think we’ll need the dogs?”
“I only saw the one bag, but there must be more. Also, it looked like there’d been other digging going on in the area. It’s probably a good idea.”
I waited for a response. There was none.
“What time will you pick me up?” I asked.
“I won’t be picking you up,
Doctor
Brennan. This is real life homicide, as in the jurisdiction of the homicide squad, not
Murder She Wrote
.”
Now I was furious. My temples were pounding and I could feel a small cloud of heat directly between them, deep in my brain.
“‘More holes than the TransCanada,’” I spat at him. “‘Get me something else.’ Those are your words, Ryan. Well, I got it. And I can take you right to it. Besides, this involves skeletal remains. Bones. That’s
my
jurisdiction, unless I’m mistaken.”
The line was silent for so long I thought he might have hung up. I waited.
“I’ll come by at eight.”
“I’ll be ready.”
“Brennan?”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe you should invest in a helmet.”
The line went dead.
R
YAN WAS TRUE TO HIS WORD, AND BY EIGHT FORTY-FIVE WE WERE
sliding in behind the recovery van. It sat not ten feet from where I’d parked the night before. But it was a different world from the one I’d visited hours earlier. The sun was shining and the street throbbed with activity. Cars and police cruisers lined both curbs, and at least twenty people, in plainclothes and uniform, stood talking in clumps.
I could see DEJ, SQ, and cops from St. Lambert scattered here and there, each wearing a different uniform and distinctive insignia. The assemblage reminded me of the mixed flocks birds will sometimes form, spontaneous jamborees of twittering and chirping, each bird declaring its species by the color of its plumage and the stripes on its wings.
A woman with a large shoulder bag and a young man draped with cameras smoked and leaned against the hood of a white Chevy. Yet another species: the press. Further up the block, on the grassy strip adjacent to the fence, a German shepherd panted and sniffed around a man in a dark blue jumpsuit. The dog kept bolting off on short forays, nose to the ground, then darting back to its handler, tail wagging and face upturned. It seemed anxious to go, confused by the delay.
“The gang’s all here,” said Ryan, putting the car in park and releasing his seat belt.
He hadn’t apologized for his rudeness on the phone, and I hadn’t expected it. No one is at his best at 4
A.M
. He’d been cordial throughout the ride, almost jocular, pointing out places where incidents had occurred, recounting anecdotes of blunder and humiliation. War stories. Here, in this three-flat, a woman assaulted her husband with a frying pan, then turned it on us. There, in that Poulet Kentucky Frites, we found a nude man stuck in the ventilator shaft. Cop talk. I wondered if their cognitive maps were based on sites of police happenings chronicled in incident reports, rather than on the names of rivers and streets and the numbers on buildings that the rest of us use.
Ryan spied Bertrand and headed toward him. He was part of a clump composed of an SQ officer, Pierre LaManche, and a thin, blond man in dark aviator glasses. I followed him across the street, scanning the crowd for Claudel or Charbonneau. Though this was officially an SQ party, I thought they might be here. Everyone else seemed to be. I saw neither.
As we drew close I could tell the man in the sunglasses was agitated. His hands never rested, but continuously worried a wispy fringe of mustache that crawled across his upper lip. His fingers kept teasing out a few sparse hairs, then stroking them back into place. I noticed that his skin was peculiarly gray and unblemished, having neither color nor texture. He wore a leather bomber jacket and black boots. He could have been twenty-five or sixty-five.
I could feel LaManche’s eyes on me as we joined the group. He nodded, but said nothing. I began to have doubts. I’d choreographed this circus, brought all these people here. What if they found nothing? What if someone had removed the bag? What if it did turn out to be just another “pissant cemetery” burial? Last night was dark, I was hyped. How much had I imagined? I could feel a growing tightness in my stomach.
Bertrand greeted us. As usual, he looked like a short, stocky version of a men’s fashion model. He’d chosen earth colors for the exhumation, ecologically correct tans and browns, no doubt made without chemical dyes.
Ryan and I acknowledged those we knew, then turned to the man in the shades. Bertrand introduced us.
“Andy. Doc. This is Father Poirier. He’s here representing the diocese.”
“
Arch
diocese.”
“Pardon me. Archdiocese. Since this is church property.” Bertrand jerked his thumb toward the fence behind him.
“Tempe Brennan,” I volunteered, offering my hand.
Father Poirier fixed his aviators on me and accepted it, wrapping my palm in a weak, spiritless grip. If people were graded on handshakes, he’d get a D-minus. His fingers felt cold and limp, like carrots kept too long in a cooler bin. When he released my hand, I resisted the urge to wipe it on my jeans.
He repeated the ritual with Ryan, whose face revealed nothing. Ryan’s early morning joviality had flown, replaced by stark seriousness. He’d gone into cop mode. Poirier looked as if he wanted to speak, but, seeing Ryan’s face, reconsidered and crimped his lips into a tight line. Somehow, with nothing said, he recognized that authority had shifted, that Ryan was now in charge.
“Has anyone been in there yet?” asked Ryan.
“No one. Cambronne got here about 5
A.M
.,” said Bertrand, indicating the uniformed officer to his right. “No one’s gone in or out. Father tells us that only two people have access to the grounds, himself and a caretaker. The guy’s in his eighties, been working here since Mamie Eisenhower made bangs popular.” In French it came out Eesenhure, and sounded comical.
“The gate could not have been open,” said Poirier, turning his aviators back on me. “I check it every time I am here.”
“And when is that?” asked Ryan.
The shades released me and fastened on Ryan. They rested there a full three seconds before he responded.
“At least once a week. The Church feels a responsibility for all its properties. We do not simp—”
“What is this place?”
Again, the pause. “Le Monastère St. Bernard. Closed since 1983. The Church felt the numbers did not warrant its continued operation.”
I found it strange that he spoke of the Church as an animate being, an entity with feelings and will. His French was also odd, subtly different from the flat, twangy form I’d grown used to. He wasn’t Québecois, but I couldn’t place the accent. It wasn’t the precise but throaty sound of France, what North Americans call Parisian. I suspected he was Belgian or Swiss.