I looked around for my coat, then remembered I hadn't worn one.
It was spring outside, sport jacket weather, although it would be going down into the forties in the evening.
I started for the door and he said, 'Hold it a minute, will you, Mr.
Scudder?'
I looked at him.
'I was out of line,' he said. 'I apologize.'
'You don't have to apologize.'
'Yes I do. I flew off the handle. This is nothing. Earlier today I broke a phone, I got a busy signal and I flew into a rage and smashed the receiver against the wall until the housing splintered.' He shook his head. 'I never get like that. I've been under a strain.'
'There's a lot of that going around.'
'Yeah, I suppose there is. The other day some guys kidnapped my wife, cut her up in little pieces wrapped in plastic and sent her back to me in the trunk of a car. Maybe that's the same strain everybody else is under. I wouldn't know.'
Pete said, 'Easy, babe—'
'No, I'm all right,' Kenan said. 'Matt, sit down a minute. Let me just run the whole thing down for you, top to bottom, and then you decide if you want to walk or not. Forget what I said before. I'm not worried, who you're gonna tell or not tell. I just don't want to say it out loud 'cause it makes it all real, but it's real already, isn't it?'
HE took me through it, giving me the story essentially as I recounted it earlier. There were some details I supplied that came out later in my own investigation, but the Khoury brothers had already unearthed a certain amount of data on their own. Friday they found the Toyota Camry where she'd parked it onAtlantic Avenue , and that had led them to The Arabian Gourmet, while the bags of groceries in the trunk had let them know about her stop at D'Agostino's.
When he was done telling it I declined the offer of another cup of coffee and accepted a glass of club soda. I said, 'I have some questions.'
'Go ahead.'
'What did you do with the body?'
The brothers exchanged glances, and Pete gestured for Kenan to go ahead. He took a breath and said,
'I have this cousin, he's a veterinarian, has an animal hospital on—
well, it doesn't matter where it is, it's in the old neighborhood. I called him and told him I needed private access to his place of business.'
'When was this?'
'This was Friday afternoon that I called him and Friday night that I got the key from him and we went over there. He has a unit, I guess you would call it an oven, that he uses for cremating people's pets that he puts to sleep. We took the, uh, we took the—'
'Easy, babe.'
He shook his head, impatient. 'I'm all right, I just don't know how to say it. What do you call it? We took the pieces of, of Francine, and we cremated her.'
'You unwrapped all of the, uh—'
'No, what for? The tape and plastic burned along with everything else.'
'But you're sure it was her.'
'Yeah. Yeah, we unwrapped enough to, uh, to be sure.'
'I have to ask all this.'
'I understand.'
'The point is there's no corpse left, is that correct?'
He nodded. 'Just ashes. Ashes and bone chips, is what it amounts to. You think cremation and you think you'll wind up with nothing but powdery ash, like what comes out of a furnace, but that's not how it works. There's an auxiliary unit he's got for pulverizing the bone segments so it's less obvious what you've got.' He raised his eyes to meet mine. 'When I was in high school I worked afternoons at Lou's place. I wasn't going to mention his name. Fuck it, what difference does it make? My father wanted me to become a doctor, he thought this would be good training. I don't know if it was or not, but I was familiar with the place, the equipment.'
'Does your cousin know why you wanted to use his place?'
'People know what they want to know. He couldn't have figured I wanted to slip in there at night and give myself a rabies shot. We were there all night. The unit he has is pet size, we had to do several loads and let the unit cool down in between. Jesus, it's killing me to talk about it.'
'I'm sorry.'
'It's not your fault. Did Lou know I used the cooker? I figure he had to know. He has to have a pretty good idea what kind of business I'm in. He probably figures I killed a competitor and wanted to get rid of the evidence. People see all this shit on television and they think that's how the world works.'
'And he didn't object?'
'He's family. He knew it was urgent and he knew it wasn't something we should talk about. And I gave him
