Authors: Kathy Reichs
“That’s him. I saw him when he came to ID the deceased.”
The card read: Parker T. Bailey, Ph.D., Professeur de Biologie, Université du Québec à Montréal, and gave e-mail, telephone, and fax numbers, along with an address.
“What was the story?” I asked.
“The gentleman keeps monkeys at the university for his research. One day he came in and found one less subject.”
“Stolen?”
“Stolen? Liberated? Escaped? Who knows? The primate was AWOL.” The expression sounded odd in French.
“So he read about the dead monkey in the paper and called here?”
“
C’est ça
.”
“What happened to it?”
“The monkey?”
I nodded.
“We released it to . . .” He gestured at the card.
“Dr. Bailey,” I supplied.
“
Oui
. There were no next of kin. At least, not in Quebec.” Not a twitch.
“I see.”
I looked at the card again. This is nothing, my left brain said, while at the same time I heard myself asking, “May I keep this?”
“Of course.”
“One other thing.” I laid the trap for myself. “Why do you call it the case of the terminal monkey?”
“Well, it was,” he answered, surprised.
“Was what?”
“The monkey. It was terminal.”
“Yes. I see.”
“Also, that’s
where
it was.”
“Where?”
“The terminal. The bus terminal.”
Some things do translate. Unfortunately.
For the rest of the afternoon I pulled details from the four principal files and entered them into the spreadsheet I’d created. Color of hair. Eyes. Skin. Height. Religion. Names. Dates. Places. Signs of the Zodiac. Anything and everything. Doggedly, I plugged it in, planning to search for links later. Or perhaps I thought the patterns would form by themselves, the interconnecting bits of information drawn to each other like neuropeptides to receptor sites. Or maybe I just needed a rote task to occupy my mind, a mental jigsaw puzzle to give the illusion of progress.
At four-fifteen I tried Ryan again. Though he wasn’t at his desk, the operator thought she’d seen him, and reluctantly began a search. While I waited, my eye fell on the monkey file. Bored, I dumped out the photos. There were two sets, one of Polaroids, the other of five-by-seven color prints. The operator came back on to tell me Ryan was not in any of the offices she’d rung. Yes, sigh, she’d try the coffee room.
I thumbed through the Polaroids. Obviously taken when the remains arrived in the morgue. Shots of a purple and black nylon gym bag, zipped and unzipped, the latter showing a bundle in its interior. The next few showed the bundle on an autopsy table, before and after it was unrolled.
The remaining half dozen featured the body parts. The scale on the ID card confirmed that the subject was, indeed, tiny, smaller than a full-term fetus or newborn. Putrefaction was advancing nicely. The flesh had begun to blacken and was smeared with something that looked like rancid tapioca. I thought I could identify the head, the torso, and the limbs. Other than that, I couldn’t tell squat. The pictures had been taken from too far away, and the detail was lousy. I rotated a few, looking for a better angle, but it was impossible to make out much.
The operator came back with resolve in her voice. Ryan was not there. I’d have to try tomorrow. Denying her the opportunity to launch the argument she’d prepared, I left another message, and hung up.
The five-by-seven close-ups had been taken following cleaning. The detail that had escaped the Polaroids was fully captured in the prints. The tiny corpse had been skinned and disjointed. The photographer, probably Denis, had arranged the pieces in anatomical order, then carefully photographed each in turn.
As I worked my way through the stack, I couldn’t help noting that the butchered parts looked vaguely like rabbit about to become stew. Except for one thing. The fifth print showed a small arm ending in four perfect fingers and a thumb curled onto a delicate palm.
The last two prints focused on the head. Without the outer covering of skin and hair it looked primordial, like an embryo detached from the umbilicus, naked and vulnerable. The skull was the size of a tangerine. Though the face was flat and the features anthropoid, it didn’t take Jane Goodall to know that this was no human primate. The mouth contained full dentition, molars and all. I counted. Three premolars in each quadrant. The terminal monkey had come from South America.
It’s just another animal case, I told myself, returning the pictures to their envelope. We’d get them occasionally, because someone thought the remains to be human. Bear paws skinned and left behind by hunters, pigs and goats slaughtered for meat, the unwanted portions discarded by a roadside, dogs and cats abused and thrown in the river. The callousness of the human animal always astounded me. I never got used to it.
So why did this case hold my attention? Another look at the five-by-sevens. Okay. The monkey had been cut up. Big deal. So are a lot of animal carcasses that we see. Some asshole probably got his jollies tormenting and killing it. Maybe it was a student, pissed off at his grade.
With the fifth photo I stopped, my eyes cemented to the image. Once again, my stomach muscles knotted. I stared at the photo, then reached for the phone.
T
HERE’S NOTHING EMPTIER THAN A CLASSROOM BUILDING AFTER
hours. It’s how I imagine the aftermath of a neutron bomb. Lights burn. Water fountains spew forth on command. Bells ring on schedule. Computer terminals glow eerily. The people are absent. No one quenching a thirst, scurrying to class, or clicking on keyboards. The silence of the catacombs.
I sat on a folding chair outside Parker Bailey’s office at the Université du Québec à Montréal—UQAM. Since leaving the lab, I’d worked out at the gym, bought groceries at the Provigo, and fed myself a meal of vermicelli and clam sauce. Not bad for a quick and dirty. Even Birdie was impressed. Now I was impatient.
To say the biology department was quiet would be like saying a quark is small. Up and down the corridor every door was closed. I’d perused the bulletin boards, read the graduate school brochures, the field school announcements, the offers to do word processing or tutoring, the notices announcing guest speakers. Twice.
I looked at my watch for the millionth time—9:12
P.M
. Damn. He should be here by now. His class ended at nine. At least, that’s what the secretary had told me. I got up and paced. Those who wait must pace—9:14. Damn.
At 9:30 I gave up. As I slung my purse over my shoulder, I heard a door open somewhere out of sight. In a moment a man with an enormous stack of lab books hurried around the corner. He kept adjusting his arms to keep the books from falling. His cardigan looked as if it had left Ireland before the potato famine. I guessed his age at around forty.
He stopped when he saw me, but his face registered nothing. I started to introduce myself when a notebook slipped from the stack. We both lunged for it. Not a good move by him. The better part of the pile followed, scattering across the floor like confetti on New Year’s Eve. We gathered and restacked for several minutes, then he unlocked his office and dumped the books on his desk.
“Sorry,” he said in heavily accented French. “I—”
“No problem,” I responded in English. “I must have startled you.”
“Yes. No. I should have made two trips. This happens a lot.” His English was not American.
“Lab books?”
“Yeah. I just taught a class in ethological methodology.”
He was brushed with all the shades of an Outer Banks sunset. Pale pink skin, raspberry cheeks, and hair the color of a vanilla wafer. His mustache and eyelashes were amber. He looked like a man who’d burn, not tan.
“Sounds intriguing.”
“Wish more of them thought so. Can I—”
“I’m Tempe Brennan,” I said, reaching into my bag and offering him a card. “Your secretary said I could catch you now.”
As he read the card, I explained my visit.
“Yeah, I remember. I hated losing that monkey. It really cheesed me off at the time.” Suddenly, “Would you like to sit?”
Without waiting for a reply, he began shoveling objects from a green vinyl chair and heaping them onto the office floor. I stole a peek around. His tiny quarters made mine look like Yankee Stadium.
Every inch of wall space that wasn’t covered with shelves was blanketed with pictures of animals. Sticklebacks. Guinea fowl. Marmosets. Warthogs. Even an aardvark. No level of the Linnaean hierarchy had been neglected. It reminded me of the office of an impressario, with celebrity associations displayed like trophies. Only these photos weren’t signed.
We both sat, he behind his desk, feet propped on an open drawer, I in the recently cleared visitor’s chair.
“Yeah. It really cheesed me off,” he repeated, then switched the topic suddenly. “You’re an anthropologist?”
“Um. Hm.”
“Do much with primates?”
“No. Used to, but not anymore. I’m on the anthropology faculty at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Occasionally I teach a course on primate biology or behavior, but I’m really not involved in that work anymore. I’m too busy with forensic research and consulting.”
“Right.” He waved the card. “What did you do with primates?”
I wondered who was interviewing who. Whom. “I was interested in osteoporosis, especially the interplay between social behavior and the disease process. We worked with animal models, rhesus mostly, manipulating the social groups, creating stress situations, then monitoring the bone loss.”
“Do any work in the wild?”
“Just island colonies.”
“Oh?” The amber eyebrows arched with interest.
“Cayo Santiago in Puerto Rico. For several years I taught a field school on Morgan Island, off the coast of South Carolina.”
“Rhesus monkeys?”
“Yes. Dr. Bailey, I wonder if you can tell me anything about the monkey that disappeared from your facility?”
He ignored my not so smooth segue. “How’d you get from monkey bones to corpses?”
“Skeletal biology. It’s the crux of both.”
“Yeah. True.”
“The monkey?”
“The monkey. Can’t tell you much.” He rubbed one Nike against the other, then leaned over and flicked at something. “I came in one morning and the cage was empty. We thought maybe someone had left the latch unhooked and that Alsa, that was her name, maybe she let herself out. They’ll do that, you know. She was smart as a pistol and had phenomenal manual dexterity. She had the most amazing little hands. Anyway, we searched the building, alerted campus security, jumped through all the hoops. But we never found her. Then I saw the article in the paper. The rest is history.”
“What were you doing with her?”
“Actually, Alsa wasn’t my project. A graduate student was working with her. I’m interested in animal communication systems, particularly, but not exclusively, those relying on pheromones and other olfactory signals.”
The change in cadence, along with the shift to jargon, clued me that he’d given this synopsis before. He’d launched into his “my research is” spiel, the scientist’s oral abstract for public consumption. “The spiel” is based on the KISS principle: Keep It Simple Stupid. It is trotted out for cocktail parties, fund-raisers, first meetings, and other social occasions. We all have one. I was hearing his.
“What was the project?” Enough about you.
He gave a wry smile and shook his head. “Language. Language acquisition in a New World primate. That’s where she got her name. L’Apprentissage de la Langue du Singe Americain. ALSA. Marie-Lise was going to be Quebec’s answer to Penny Patterson, and Alsa would be the KoKo of South American monkeys.” He flourished a pen above his head, gave a derisive snort, then let his arm drop heavily. It made a soft thud against the desk. I studied his face. He looked either tired or discouraged, I couldn’t tell which.
“Marie-Lise?”
“My student.”
“Was it working?”
“Who knows? She didn’t really have enough time. The monkey disappeared five months into the project.” More wry. “Followed shortly thereafter by Marie-Lise.”
“She left school?”
He nodded.
“Do you know why?”
He paused a long time before answering. “Marie-Lise was a good student. Sure, she had to start over on her thesis, but I have no doubt she could have completed her master’s. She loved what she was doing. Yeah, she was devastated when Alsa was killed, but I don’t think that was it.”
“What do you think it was?”
He drew small triangles on one of the lab books. I let him take his time.
“She had this boyfriend. He’d hassle her all the time about being in school. Badgered her to quit. She only talked to me about it once or twice, but I think it really got to her. I met him at a couple of department parties. I thought the guy was spooky.”
“How so?”
“Just . . . I don’t know, antisocial. Cynical. Antagonistic. Rude. Like he had never absorbed the basic . . . skills. He always reminded me of a Harlow monkey. You know? Like he was raised in isolation and never learned to deal with other beings. No matter what you said to him, he’d roll his eyes and smirk. God, I hated that.”
“Did you ever suspect him? That maybe he killed Alsa to sabotage Marie-Lise’s work, to get her to quit school?”
His silence told me that he had. Then, “He was supposedly in Toronto at the time.”
“Could he verify that?”
“Marie-Lise believed him. We didn’t pursue it. She was too upset. What was the point? Alsa was dead.”
I wasn’t sure how to ask the next question. “Did you ever read Marie-Lise’s project notes?”
He stopped doodling and looked at me sharply. “What do you mean?”
“Is there any chance of something she wanted to cover up? Some reason to want to dump the project?”
“No. Absolutely not.” His voice held conviction. His eyes did not.
“Does she keep in touch?”
“No.”
“Is that common?”
“Some do, some don’t.” The triangles were spreading.
I changed tack. “Who else had access to the . . . is it a lab?”
“Just a small one. We keep very few animal subjects here on campus. We just don’t have the space. Every species has to be kept in a separate room, you know.”