“The atmosphere has gone rancid. It’s Briel.” Santangelo practically spit the name. “She’s poison.”
Like Ryan, I used silence, allowing her to go on. She did. Big-time.
“The woman is ambitious to the point of ruthlessness. She’s everywhere, has a finger in every pie. She’s in the autopsy room at all hours of the night. Teaches a university course. Has a research grant. Plans to present papers at about a zillion scientific conferences. She’s a callous, unfeeling, coldhearted climber.”
“Don’t hold back.”
“It isn’t funny, Tempe. Briel is determined to be a superstar and she doesn’t care who she destroys on her march to glory. Did you know she fired her graduate student today? Had the girl in tears.”
“Duclos?”
Santangelo nodded.
“Why?”
“Probably because the kid has warm blood in her veins.”
“Why doesn’t someone rein Briel in?”
“She has the other pathologists cowed and the chief coroner eating out of her hand.”
Santangelo toyed with her soup using the little china spoon. Set it down. Picked up her chopsticks. Dropped them. Pushed her bowl toward the center of the table.
“You said you watched Briel’s interview Wednesday night?”
“Yes.”
“You heard her plug this Body Find outfit? Corps decouvert? It’s her husband’s company.”
“You’re kidding.” I couldn’t keep the shock from my voice.
“I heard her talking about it with Joe Bonnet. She and her husband are going to be the next Mulder and Scully.” Santangelo’s voice was coated with disdain.
“Who’s she married to?”
“Sebastien Raines. An archaeologist.”
That surprised me. I thought I knew all the archaeologists in Montreal, at least by name.
“Is Raines on faculty with one of the universities?”
Santangelo shook her head. “He does cultural resource management.”
Typically, CRM archaeologists work for governments and for businesses that must, by law, save archaeological resources threatened by development. Some do the archaeological portions of environmental impact studies. Some direct salvage digs.
Although many private sector archaeologists are very good surveyors and excavators, academics view them as a whole as second-rate. Why? They work on short contracts and rarely publish. Many are employed by companies that prefer nothing be found that would delay their projects. Rightly or wrongly, those at universities see opportunity for corruption in CRM work.
“Where did Raines train?”
“No clue.”
“How does he figure into Briel’s Mulder-and-Scully scenario?”
“Briel and Raines are starting this company, Body Find. Corps decouvert. When everything is in place they plan to hawk it as one-stop shopping for law enforcement. Archaeology, anthropology, pathology, psychology, entomology, botany, geophysics, cadaver dogs, remote sensing. They’ll find your body, ID it, determine PMI, cause of death. You’ll only need a lab for complex testing like mass spectrometry or DNA sequencing. They’ll even provide expertise in underground mine safety, mapping, ingress-egress methods. You name it, Body Find will be there for you! Better, quicker, cheaper!”
“Such companies already exist,” I said. “NecroSearch International, for example. They do fantastic work. Although NecroSearch limits itself largely to victim location.”
“There’s one other big difference. NecroSearch is a nonprofit. Every team member is a volunteer. Body Find’s objective will be to make bucks.”
“Privatized forensics?”
Santangelo nodded. “And Briel is doing everything she can right now to raise her profile. When it’s time to launch the business, she wants to trade on her status as the
“Including anthropology,” I said, seeing the implication.
“Yeah. Imagine that.”
I stared at Santangelo. She stared back. Around us, china clinked and conversation hummed.
The waiter approached. Feeling tension, he left the check and quietly slipped away.
“Nail her, Tempe.” Santangelo’s tone was soft, but her words were edged with emotion.
“Why me?”
“Why not? You’ve never been afraid to take a good bite of charlatan.”
Back home, the dragging fatigue again threatened to flatten me. Nevertheless, I did a Google search on Sebastien Raines. It turned up zilch.
Next I called Jean Tye, a colleague at the Universite de Montreal. Tye knew little beyond the fact that Briel’s husband had applied for a position at the U of M in 2007. Since Raines had done zero research, published nothing, and completed only a master’s degree, he’d not been considered a serious candidate. He’d heard that Raines had also submitted an application to the Universite du Quebec a Montreal. UQAM had also declined to hire him.
Tye was aware that Raines was involved in contract archaeology. He remembered that Raines had done some fieldwork in France, and that his MA had been granted by an institution with which Tye was unfamiliar. His specialty was urban archaeology, digging up garbage dumps, abandoned cemeteries, and building ruins.
And one other thing. Sebastien Raines was active in a number of radical fringe separatist groups. According to Tye, Raines’s desire for an independent French-speaking North American nation was so extremist that the guy offended most members of the Bloc Quebecois.
Ryan called shortly after eight. He planned to meet Claudel and Otto Keiser at the Edouard-Montpetit apartment at ten the next morning.
Saturday. What the hell. I agreed to ride along.
By nine I was back in bed. New sheets. New nightie. Same old cat.
I was unconscious in minutes.
In sleep, I sifted. Organized. Played with patterns.
I saw Rose Jurmain’s skeleton, gnawed and scattered in piney woods. As I watched, it rose, bones ghostly in the moonlight. Tendrils grew around its perimeter, rippling like seaweed under water. Written on each tendril was a name and identifier.
Edward Allen, the father. Perry Schechter, the attorney. Janice Spitz, the lover. Andre and Bertrand Dubreuil, the discoverers. Red O’Keefe-Bud Keith, the auberge kitchen worker. Chris Corcoran, the Chicago pathologist. ML, the Chicago anthropologist.
No. That’s wrong. ML analyzed Laszlo Tot’s bones.
The ML tendril went dark and drifted to the ground.
The scene morphed to Christelle Villejoin, buried in bra and panties in a shallow grave. Slowly, the old woman sat up. The undies looked zombie white against her earth-stained bones.
