“We’ve been meeting secretly under the bleachers.”
“Chantale?”
“No.”
“What else did he ask about?”
She didn’t answer.
“Chantale?”
The ambassador’s daughter looked up, anger crimping her features into a cold, hard version of the little-girl face in the embassy photo.
“My father,” she said in a tremulous voice. “My famous, brainfucking, goddamn father. It’s not about me. It’s
never
about me.”
Chantale reached into an embroidered bag slung diagonally across her chest, removed dark glasses, and slid them on. A distorted version of my face jumped onto each lens, two fun-house Tempes, each wearing the same confused look.
Ryan tossed two looneys on the bar.
“Your mother is worried. We can talk tomorrow.”
Chantale allowed herself to be escorted out of the restaurant, down the escalator, and through the lobby. As we were approaching the glass doors leading to Ste-Catherine, Ryan caught my eye and gestured at the SAQ wineshop. Ollie Nordstern stood near the entrance, ostensibly studying a selection of French Chardonnays.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“A job with the CIA is definitely not in this guy’s future. Let’s see if he follows us.”
Ryan and I hurried Chantale out the door and around the corner. She did one of her eye rolls, but said nothing.
Nordstern stepped onto the sidewalk twenty seconds behind us, looked around, and began hurrying west. At Atwater he reversed direction and doubled back.
I watched him stop at Lambert-Closse, look left toward the mountain, right toward Cabot Square. My eyes moved with his, then went past him across the intersection. It was then I saw the man in the baseball cap. He was walking toward Nordstern, a Luger nine-millimeter angling from his waistband.
What followed were ninety kaleidoscoping seconds that felt like a triple eternity.
“Ryan!” I indicated the gunman.
Ryan drew his gun. I pushed Chantale to her knees, crouched beside her.
“Police!” Ryan bellowed. “Everybody down!
Par terre!”
The gunman drew to within five feet, extended his arm, and leveled his nine-millimeter at Nordstern’s chest.
A woman screamed
“Gun!
Arme à feu!
” The words rolled down Ste-Catherine like a balloon being bandied at a football game.
Another scream.
Two explosions ripped the air. Nordstern flew backward, a pair of red blossoms darkening his shirt.
There were maybe fifteen people on the street. Most dropped to their knees. Others scrambled to get into the Forum. A man grabbed a child, wrapped himself around her like an armadillo. Her muffled crying added to the pandemonium.
Cars pulled to the curb. Others sped up. The intersection emptied.
The shooter stood with legs spread, knees slightly bent, sweeping his Luger in wide arcs in front of him. Left to right. Right to left. He was about fifteen feet from me, but I could hear his breath, see his eyes under the navy-blue brim.
Ryan was crouched behind a taxi parked on Lambert-Closse, gun aimed at the shooter with a two-handed grip. I hadn’t seen him move from my side.
“Arrêtez!
Freeze!”
A dark barrel swung around and sighted on Ryan’s head. The shooter’s finger twitched against the trigger. I held my breath. Ryan hadn’t shot for fear of wounding an innocent bystander. The shooter might have no such compunction.
“Drop your weapon!
Mettez votre arme par terre!
” Ryan shouted.
The shooter’s face registered nothing.
One block over, a car horn sounded. Above me, the traffic signal clicked from green to yellow.
Ryan repeated his command.
Yellow to red.
In the distance, a siren. A second. A third.
The shooter tensed. Taking two steps backward, he bent toward a woman huddled on the sidewalk, never shifting the gun from Ryan’s face. The woman put her head to the pavement and flung both arms over it.
“Don’t kill me. I have a baby.” The woman’s voice was frantic with terror.
The shooter grabbed her by the jacket and dragged her across the cement.
Ryan fired.
The shooter’s body jerked. He dropped the woman and grabbed his right shoulder. Blood mushroomed across his shirt.
Straightening, the shooter raised his Luger and squeezed off four rounds. Bullets pinged the wall above us. Fragments of brick rained down on our heads.
“Oh God. Oh no.” Chantale’s voice was high and quavery.
Ryan fired again.
The woman shrieked as the shooter fell across her. I heard a skull crack pavement, the Luger skitter then drop from the curb, the woman scrabble up the sidewalk.
The woman sobbed. The child cried. Otherwise, silence. No one spoke. No one moved.
The sirens grew louder, built into a screaming chorus. Cruisers converged from every direction, tires screeching, lights flashing, radios crackling.
Ryan rose, gun pointed at the sky. I watched him reach for his badge.
Beside me, I heard Chantale draw a series of unsteady breaths. I looked over. Her chin quivered and both cheeks glistened. I reached out and stroked her hair.
“It’s over.” My voice didn’t sound like my own. “You’re fine.”
Chantale looked up. Only two tattoo tears remained on her face.
“Am I?”
I put my arm around her. She collapsed into me and wept silently.
AS ON THE MORNING AFTER THE ATTACK IN SOLOLÁ, I AWOKE
I rubbed my hands up and down on my face, then closed my eyes and pulled the blanket over my head. Would there be no end to the killing?
In my mind’s eye I saw Chantale, cheeks streaked with tears, body rigid with terror. A shiver ran through me as I thought of how close she and I had come to being injured or killed. How could I ever have told her mother?
I imagined how devastated Katy would be should someone deliver news of my death. Thank God that would not be necessary.
I remembered Nordstern in Guatemala City, and in the bar at Jillian’s minutes before his death. I felt a wave of remorse. I had disliked the man, had not been kind to him. But I’d never imagined him dead.
Dead.
Jesus! What had Nordstern discovered? What was so big that it had gotten him blasted on a Montreal street?
My thoughts circled back to Chantale. What impact would these events have on her? There were so many directions a troubled adolescent could take. Repentance? Flight? Escape through drugs?
Though tough on the outside, I suspected Chantale had an interior as fragile as a butterfly wing. Vowing I would stand by her, appreciated or not, I flung back the covers and headed for the shower.
The summer that had dropped in so unexpectedly had bolted during the night. I exited my garage to a steady drizzle and temperatures in the forties.
C’est la vie québécoise.
The morning staff meeting was mercifully short and produced no anthropology cases. I spent the next hour cutting segments of eraser to proper lengths and gluing them to Susanne’s replica of the Paraíso skull. Except for some shine and subtle layering, her model looked exactly like the real thing.
By 10 A.M. I was seated at a monitor in
Imagerie,
the section responsible for photography and computer imaging. Lucien, our graphics guru, was positioning the Paraíso model before a video camera when Ryan entered.
“What’s sticking out all over that skull?”
“Tissue depth markers.”
“Of course.”
“Each marker shows how much flesh there was at a specific point on the face or skull,’’ Lucien piped up. “Dr. Brennan cut them using standards for a Mongoloid female. Right?”
I nodded.
“We’ve done gobs of facial reproductions like this.” He adjusted a light. “Though this is the first with a plastic skull.”
Gobs?
“Let me guess. The camera captures the image, sends it to the PC, and you connect the dots.”
Ryan had a way of making complex things sound kindergarten simple.
“There’s a bit more to it than that. But, yes, once I’ve drawn facial contours using the markers, I’ll choose features from the program’s database, find the best fit, and paste them in.”
“This the technique you used for one of the Inner Life Empowerment bodies?”
Ryan referred to a case he and I had worked several years back. A number of McGill students were recruited into a fringe sect led by a sociopath with delusions of immortality. When a skeleton turned up in a shallow grave near the group’s South Carolina commune, Lucien and I did a sketch to establish that the remains were those of a missing coed.
“Yes. What’s up with Chantale?”
“The judge agreed to give her another chance at home detention.”
Last evening, while Ryan stayed to explain the shooting, I’d taken Chantale home. This morning he’d done a follow-up to be sure she was still there.
“Think Mommy will keep a closer watch?” I asked.
“I suspect Manuel Noriega enjoys more freedom than Chantale can hope for in the near future.”
“She was pretty subdued last night,” I said.
“The fuck-off-and-leave-me-alone demeanor has definitely lightened.”
“How are you doing?” I asked, noticing the tension in his face.
In Montreal, an internal investigation is mandated following every police shooting. To maintain impartiality, the CUM homicide section looks into shootings by SQ officers, and the SQ investigates incidents involving the CUM. As I was leaving with Chantale, I saw Ryan hand his gun to a CUM cop.
Ryan shrugged. “Two DOAs. One was mine.”
“It was a good shoot, Ryan. They know that.”
“I turned Ste-Catherine into the O.K. Corral.”
“The guy killed Nordstern and was about to take a hostage.”
“Have you been called?”
“Not yet.”
“Something to look forward to.”
“I’ll tell them exactly what went down. Have you got an ID on the shooter?”
“Carlos Vicente. Held a Guatemalan passport.”
“The moron carried his passport to a hit?”
Ryan shook his head. “A key from the Days Inn on Guy. We tossed the room, found the passport in a carry-on bag.”
“Doesn’t sound like a pro.”
“We also found two thousand U.S. dollars and an airline ticket to Phoenix.”
“Anything else?”
“Dirty shorts.”
I gave him the look.
“I phoned Galiano. Nothing popped up when he ran Vicente’s name, but he’s going to dig deeper.”
“What about Nordstern?”
“Doesn’t look good for the Pulitzer.”
More of the look.
“I’m heading to the Hotel St. Malo now. Since Nordstern was your boy, I thought you might like to tag along.”
“I need to finish this facial.”
“I can do it, Dr. Brennan.” Lucien sounded like a second-stringer on a high school football team.
I must have looked skeptical.
“Let me give it a shot.” Please, Coach. Send me in.
Why not? If Lucien’s sketch didn’t look right, I could always do my own.
“O.K. Do a full frontal. Don’t force the features. Make sure they fit the bony architecture.”
“Allons-y,”
said Ryan.
“Allons-y.”
Let’s go.
The St. Malo was a tiny hotel on du Fort, approximately six blocks east of the Pepsi Forum.
The proprietor was a tall, skeletal man with a wandering left eye, and skin the color of day-old tea. Though less than enthused about our visit, Ryan’s badge spurred him to do the right thing.
Nordstern’s room was the size of a cell, with much the same ambience. Clean, functional, no frills. I took inventory in three seconds.
Iron bed. Battered wardrobe. Battered dresser. Battered nightstand. Gideons’ Bible. Not a personal item in sight. Nothing in the drawers or wardrobe.
The bathroom looked a little more lived-in. Toothbrush. Crest. Disposable razor. Gillette Cool Wave for sensitive skin. Dippity-Do Sport Gel. Hotel soap.
“No shampoo,” I noted when Ryan drew the shower curtain back with his pen.
“Who needs shampoo when you’ve got Dippity-Do?” We returned to the bedroom.
“Guy traveled light,” said Ryan, dragging a hockey bag from under the bed.
“Crafty, though. Knew how to blend with the natives.”
“It’s an athletic bag.”
“It’s a hockey bag.”
“The NHL has twenty-four franchises south of the border.”
“Hockey hasn’t adulterated the American sense of fashion.”
“Your people wear cheese on their heads.”
“Are you going to open the bag?”
I watched Ryan remove several shirts and a pair of khaki pants.
“A boxer man.”
He used thumb and forefinger to extract the shorts, then reached back in and withdrew a passport.
“American.”
“Let’s see.”
Ryan flipped it open, then handed it to me.
Nordstern was not having a good hair day when the photo was taken. Nor did he look like he’d had much sleep. His skin was pale and the flesh under his eyes looked dark and puffy.
Again, I felt a wave of remorse. While I hadn’t liked Nordstern, I would never have wished him such an end. I looked at his possessions, evidence of a life interrupted. I wondered if Nordstern had a wife or girlfriend. Kids. Who would notify them of his death?
“Must have applied for the passport prior to the Dippity-Do epiphany,” Ryan said.
“This was issued last year.” I read further. “Nordstern was born in Chicago on July seventeenth, 1966. Jesus, I thought he was in his twenties.”
“It’s the gel. Shaves years.”
“Get over the hair gel.”
Ryan wasn’t really making light of Nordstern’s death. He was using cop humor to break the tension. I was doing it myself. But his flippancy was starting to annoy me.