Madonna and Corpse (10 page)

JOE MULLINS WAS THREE THOUSAND MILES TO THE west of France, but ten minutes after Giselle scanned the skull in Avignon, Joe was looking at it in Alexandria, Virginia.

Joe was a forensic artist at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a mouthful of a name that he mercifully shortened to the acronym NCMEC, pronounced “nickmeck.” After a traditional fine arts training in painting and drawing, Joe had taken an unusual detour. He’d traded in his paintbrushes and palette knives for a computer and a 3-D digitizing probe; he’d forsaken blank canvases for bare skulls—unknown skulls on which he sculpted faces in virtual clay. By restoring faces to skulls, Joe could help police and citizens identify unknown crime victims.

I’d worked with Joe on a prior case, one involving boys who’d been beaten to death at a reform school in Florida, but the Avignon case was different from the reform-school case in a multitude of ways. For one, we already knew the identity, or at least the supposed identity: Jesus of Nazareth. But was it, really? ForDisc hadn’t been able to shed much light, but perhaps Joe’s facial reconstruction—based on the skull’s shape and the artist’s subtle eye—could tell us whether our man had been a first-century Jew from Palestine.

Joe wasn’t looking at the actual skull, of course. After the CT scan, Giselle and Miranda had uploaded a massive file containing the 3-D image of the skull and sent it to a file-sharing Web site—a cyberspace crossroads, of sorts—called Dropbox. Joe had then gone to Dropbox and downloaded the file, and, as the French would say,
voilà.

The case clearly didn’t involve a missing or exploited child, so Joe couldn’t do the reconstruction on NCMEC time. But he was willing to do it as a moonlight gig, a side job, and when I’d first e-mailed to ask if he’d be able to do it—and do it fast—he’d promised that if we got the scan to him by Friday afternoon, he’d have it waiting for us first thing Monday.

My phone warbled. “Hey, Doc, I’ve got him up on my screen,” Joe said. “What can you tell me about this guy?”

“Not much, Joe.” I didn’t want to muddy the water by telling him what the ossuary inscription claimed. “Adult male; maybe in his fifties or sixties. Could be European but might be Middle Eastern.”

“Geez, Doc, that doesn’t narrow it down much.”

“Hey, I didn’t include African or Asian or Native American,” I said. “Give me at least a little credit.”

“Okay, I give you a little credit. Very, very little.”

“You sound just like Miranda, my assistant.
Way
too uppity.”

He laughed. “This Miranda, she sounds pretty smart. She single, by any chance?”

Sheesh
, I thought. “Take a number,” I said.

Chapter 5

“SHALL WE FIND SOME FISHING POLES,” I JOKED, “and see what we can catch from the end of this fancy pier?”

Miranda, Stefan, and I were standing on the ancient stone bridge that stretched halfway across the Rhône. After we left the hospital’s Radiology Department, Stefan had headed for Lumani, skirting the city wall—the fastest way to cross old Avignon was to detour around it—but as we’d passed under the bridge, I’d admired the four graceful arches. In response, Stefan had whipped the car off the road, parked, and led us up through a tower and onto the bridge, or what was left of it.

“No fishing,” he said in response to my question. “You don’t want to eat anything that comes out of the Rhône.”

I peered down at the emerald water. “Looks pretty clean to me,” I said, leaning over the metal rail for a better view.

“Be careful,” he cautioned. “That railing isn’t strong. See, a piece of it is missing.” He pointed to a nearby gap in the rail, cordoned off by orange plastic safety mesh. “The river is full of industrial chemicals,” he went on. “Terrible toxins and carcinogens. Not just in the water; the sediment in the bottom of the river is full of them, too.”

“Okay, I take your point,” I said. “I won’t fish, I won’t swim, and I won’t eat the mud. It’s still a pretty river, though.” He made a grimace of disagreement.

A few paces farther out on the span, Miranda hummed a few bars of music, then began twirling, singing in French, “
Sur le pont d’Avignon, l’on y danse, l’on y danse
”; a moment later Stefan chimed in, trailing a line behind, turning the song into a round. Miranda and I had never sung together at all, I realized with a pang, much less sung rounds. Halfway through the verse, Miranda lost her place in the lyrics, falling into sync with Stefan for the last two lines.

“Crap,” she laughed. “I mean
merde
. I can’t sing rounds worth a damn. I lack the courage of my melodic convictions.”

“What’s the song?” I asked. “How do you know it?”

“It’s about dancing on this bridge, the
pont
of Avignon. My mom used to sing it to me as a lullaby.” She smiled at the memory.

“It has lots of silly verses,” Stefan added. “You dance, I dance, we all dance. The girls dance, the boys dance. The dolls dance, the soldiers dance. Frogs. Gorillas.”

“Frogs and gorillas? My mom never mentioned those,” Miranda said. “She just sang the first verse over and over. No wonder it put me to sleep—it was
so boring
! Matter of fact, I could use a nap right now.” She faked a yawn.

Halfway along the bridge was a small stone building, ancient and showing its age badly. The front of the building partially blocked the bridge; the back, though, jutted above the river, supported by an extension of one of the bridge pilings. “Nice fishing shack,” I observed.

“The chapel of Saint Bénézet,” said Stefan.

“Saint who?”

“Bénézet,” said Miranda. “The kid that built the bridge.”

“
This
bridge?” She nodded. “It was built by a kid?”

“Yep. Maybe a teenager. Hard to be sure. ‘A young shepherd boy’ is how most of the stories put it. I read up on it after Stefan brought me here.” Suddenly I was less excited about the bridge, now that I knew I was retracing an outing they’d made together. But Miranda went on. “The kid’s minding his flock, minding his business, and suddenly he has a vision, or an angel swoops down, or some such. God tells him to build a bridge over the Rhône, right here. So Bénézet goes and relays this message to the bishop of Avignon. The bishop says, ‘Yeah, sure, kid—’ ”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “Really? The bishop says, ‘Yeah, sure, kid’?”

She cut her eyes at me. “What, you’re thinking the bishop says, ‘Forsooth, callow youth, thou pullest my leg’?”

“Okay, smarty, I guess ‘Yeah, sure, kid’ is more like it.”

“Anyhow,” she resumed. “So then the bishop says—and I’m paraphrasing, mind you—‘Okay, junior, if you want me to believe that God sent you, you gotta prove it. See that huge stone over there? Thirty men can’t lift that stone. If you can, I’ll believe you; if you can’t, go back to the farm and quit wasting my time.’ So the kid—”

“Young Bénézet?”

“Our boy Benny. Benny goes over and hoists it with his pinky—”

“With his
pinky
?”

She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “So maybe he uses
both
pinkies. The point, Dr. Hairsplitter, is that Benny hoists the giant rock, plunks it in the river, and
voilà
, the bridge building has commenced. Seven years later, while the bridge is still going up, Benny goes down—dies, at age twenty-five, plus or minus.”

“Of overwork?”

She shrugged. “Overwork. Underfeeding. A surfeit of saintliness. Who knows? The historical record is vague on cause of death.”

“But that’s why the bridge only goes halfway across the river.”

“Not at all. When Bénézet dies, it’s far enough along that other, lesser mortals can finish it. But maybe their workmanship wasn’t as miraculous as his, because after four or five centuries, most of the arches collapsed during floods and wars.
Anyhow.
Bénézet’s body was entombed in this sweet little chapel they built on the bridge to commemorate him.”

“Is it still here?”

“
Duh.
If you keep walking another twenty feet, you’ll smack into it.”

“Not the chapel, smart-ass, the body. Is it still here in the chapel?”

“
Non
,” said Stefan, who had kept quiet for what was—for him—a remarkably long time. “During the French Revolution it was moved to a convent outside the city to protect it.”

I couldn’t resist a joke, though I feared it would trigger another round of pedantry. “Even corpses got guillotined during the Revolution?”

“The revolutionaries considered religion an institution of tyranny,” he began, and my fears were confirmed. “All over France, they destroyed churches, religious statues, other symbols of oppression.”

God save us from oppressors
, I prayed.
And from pedants.

“
But
,” Miranda interrupted, snatching back the reins of the narrative, “here’s some trivia you’ll find interesting. He was an Incorruptible.”

“Excuse me?”

“Bénézet. He was an Incorruptible.” She stopped and nodded at the stone chapel, whose stout wooden door faced the bridge. “Bénézet’s body, lying here for centuries, did not decompose. Leading one of the popes, in the sixteen hundreds, to proclaim Bénézet one of the Incorruptibles.”

“The Incorruptibles.” I sounded it out slowly, savoring the syllables and the meaning. “Sounds like a band of crime-fighting comic-book superheroes waging war on bribery and embezzlement. ‘Holy hedge fund, Miranda—someone on Wall Street is making insider trades! This looks like a job for the Incorruptibles!’ ”

She groaned, as I’d figured she would, and as I’d hoped she would. But she was right: I
was
intrigued to learn that Saint Bénézet was an Incorruptible—someone whose corpse did not decay. Catholics considered incorruptibility a sign of sainthood, but I looked at it through the lens of science. A few years back, I’d examined the body of a young woman—a pregnant young woman—who’d been killed and hidden in a cave for thirty years. The cave’s cool, damp conditions turned her soft tissue into a substance called adipocere—sometimes called “grave wax”—and the transformation was so complete, she might almost have come from a wax museum rather than a crime scene. In the morgue, I’d paused to admire her lovely features, and then I’d sprayed her body with hot water, watching with wonder as her prettiness and her half-formed baby melted away, dissolving like some sweet sad dream in the heat of a summer’s day.

I thought of her—that lovely murdered young woman who had spent three decades as an Incorruptible—as I stood on the ancient bridge beside an antique chapel where a shepherd-turned-engineer had lain in state for centuries.

According to Stefan, the move to the convent for safekeeping had not agreed with Bénézet. Some years after the French Revolution, the nuns to whom he’d been entrusted opened the saint’s coffin, the better to revere his perfectly preserved remains. Imagine their disappointment to discover that the miracle—like the man himself—had expired, and his mortal coil had shuffled off silently, unheralded by angelic fanfare or human notice.

HUMAN NOTICE: WE SEEMED TO BE ATTRACTING IT. AS I leaned recklessly on the tubular steel rail of the Bénézet bridge once more, watching a long, slender canal boat slip beneath the outermost arch, Miranda laid her hand on my arm. “Don’t look now,” she murmured, “but someone’s stalking us.”

“Where?” Trying to look casual and touristy, I raised my eyes, pointing to the fortress on the river’s far shore, as if calling Miranda’s attention to it.

She looked in that direction, smiling and saying, just loudly enough for Stefan and me to hear, “Downstream about a hundred yards. Edge of the parking lot. There’s a red-and-blue sign. Guy in a floppy hat standing behind it, propping binoculars on top. Don’t look yet.”

I swiveled slowly, with only a passing glance at the spot she’d indicated, and gazed upward at the cathedral and the papal palace, which loomed above us on the rock. “You’re right,” I said. “That’s the biggest pair of binoculars I’ve ever seen. And they’re pointing right at us.”

“
Merde
,” Stefan muttered a moment later. “Now he has a camera. A big telephoto lens.” He raised his arm, hitched up the cuff of his sleeve, and made a show of checking his watch. “
Allons-y.
Let’s go. Turn your backs and cross to the other railing, so he can’t see us. Then let’s get the hell out of here.”

Hugging the far side of the bridge, we hurried back along the span. This time there was no singing or dancing. As we exited the tower and scurried to the car, I asked, “Did either of you get a good look?”

“Non.”

“’Fraid not,” Miranda said. “White guy with tan hat and black binoculars. That narrows it down to about, what, a zillion people?”

I recalled Stefan’s nervousness as we’d driven from Marseilles to Avignon, and again when we’d heard noises near the treasure chamber. I’d been inclined to dismiss it as excessive paranoia—that, or Stefan’s exaggerated sense of importance—but now I was re-evaluating. “Have you seen someone watching you before now?”

“
Oui
,” he said. “Nothing as obvious as binoculars and a camera, but yes, I think so.”

“When did it start?”

He shrugged. “A few days ago.”

“Maybe the day before you got here,” Miranda added. “Remember, Stefan? You got that phone call when we were having lunch, but then the caller hung up without saying anything?”

“Ah,
oui
. And then you thought someone was following us back to the Palais
. . .”

“But when we turned around, he ducked down an alley and disappeared,” she finished. “So now I’m questioning everything, everybody. The guy behind me at the café this morning—did he smile because he thought I was cute, or was he just pretending to flirt so he could study me? The woman in the hotel lobby—was she really reading that newspaper? Hell, now that I’m feeling paranoid, even
you
seem kinda sinister, Dr. B, you know?”

I knew, and I made a mental note to make a phone call to Tennessee as soon as I was alone.

“STONE HERE.”

“Rocky, it’s Bill Brockton.” I backed into a doorway in a narrow street that was just around the corner from Miranda’s hotel. She’d gone to her room to catch up on her e-mail for an hour, and Stefan had headed off to an electronics store to buy a motion detector and alarm for the treasure chamber. I was on my own until seven, when I’d arranged to fetch Miranda for dinner.

“Doc? I thought you were in France,” said Stone. “Did you just make that up so you could get the extra helicopter ride?”

“No, I
am
in France. Rocky, I need to know if there’s a chance—any chance at all—that one of your drug smugglers might have followed me here?”

The line was silent for a moment. “Are you serious, Doc?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” I said. “I realize it’s unlikely, but I need to know. Somebody’s watching us—me, Miranda, and this French archaeologist we’re working with.”

“Are you sure? What happened? Exactly?”

“We just caught someone watching us through binoculars from about a hundred yards away. Then he traded the binoculars for a camera with a really long lens.”

“You’re sure he wasn’t just sightseeing? Taking in the scenery?”

“Come on, Rocky. Howitzer-sized binoculars, followed by a foot-long telephoto? What would
you
think if you saw that kind of optical artillery aimed at you?”

“I’d probably think, ‘Oh shit,’ ” he acknowledged.

“So. Any chance your bad guys have tailed me to France?”

“I doubt it,” he said . . . but his tone was hedging. He sighed. “The truth is, I can’t completely rule it out. We’ve got a bad leak somewhere, Doc. I don’t know where, but we’ve just had another operation compromised. So yeah, it’s possible they know we called you in. If they do, they know you’d be important at a trial. I’m sorry, Doc. I was gonna call you soon—you’re on my list, but I’m up to my ass in alligators, and I’ve got half a dozen undercover operatives I’m trying to pull in before it’s too late.”

“I understand,” I said. “I’ll let you get back to it. Good luck, Rocky.”

“Thanks, Doc. I’ll call you as soon as I know anything. Meanwhile, watch your back.”

Suddenly, just as the call ended, I felt myself falling, toppling straight back. Reflexively I yelled; an answering shriek sounded in my ear as I thudded into someone and we landed in a tangle of arms and legs. A moment later, I was helping an irate Frenchwoman to her feet—a woman whose door I’d been leaning against at the moment she opened it. Mortified by my clumsiness—and by my inability to say anything but “
pardon, pardon
” by way of apology—I slunk down the street and around the nearest corner.

But it’s not paranoia
, I finally consoled myself,
if they really are out to get you.