?How old is she?? I was appalled.
?Says she?s eighteen. She?s probably fifteen.?
I leaned back and rested my hands on the steering wheel. As she pointed them out, one by one, I couldn?t help thinking of gibbons. Just like the small apes, the women spaced themselves at equal intervals, dividing the field into a mosaic of precise territories. Each worked her patch, excluding others of her gender, and trying to beguile a mate. The seductive poses, the taunts and jeers, were a courtship ritual,
I realized Gabby had stopped talking. She?d finished her roll call. I turned to look at her. She was facing in my direction, but her eyes went past me, locked on something outside my window. Perhaps outside my world.
?Let?s go.?
She said it so quietly I could hardly hear her. ?Wha-??
?Go!?
Her ferocity stunned me. A volley flew to my lips, but the look in her eyes convinced me to say nothing.
Again we rode in silence. Gabby seemed to be deep in thought, as though mentally she?d relocated to a different planet. But as I pulled up to her apartment she blindsided me with another question.
?Are they raped??
My mind rewound and played the tape of our conversation. No good. I?d missed another bridge.
?Who?? I asked.
?These women.?
The hookers? The murder victims?
?Which women??
For several seconds she didn?t answer.
?I?m so sick of this shit!?
She was out of the car and up the stairs before I could react. Then her vehemence slapped me in the face.
5
FOR THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS I HEARD NOTHING FROM GABBY. I was also not on Claudel?s dialing list. He?d cut me out of the loop. I learned about Isabelle Gagnon?s life through Pierre LaManche.
She?d lived with her brother and his lover in St. #201;douard, a working-class neighborhood northeast of Centre-ville. She worked in a lover?s boutique, a small shop off St. Denis specializing in unisex clothes and paraphernalia. Une Tranche de Vie. A Slice of Life. The brother, who was a baker, had thought of the name. The irony of it was depressing.
Isabelle disappeared on Friday, April 1. According to the brother, she was a regular at some of the bars on St. Denis, and had been out late the night before. He thought he?d heard her come in around 2 A.M., but didn?t check. The two men left for work early the next morning. A neighbor saw her at 1 P.M. Isabelle was expected at the boutique at 4 P.M. She never showed up. Her remains were discovered nine weeks later at Le Grand S #233;minaire. She was twenty-three.
LaManche came into my office late one afternoon to see if I?d finished my analysis.
?There are multiple fractures of the skull,? I said. ?It took quite a bit of reconstructing.?
?
I took the skull from its cork ring.
?She was hit at least three times. This is the first.?
I pointed to a small, saucerlike crater. A series of concentric circles expanded outward from its epicenter, like rings on a shooting target.
?The first blow wasn?t hard enough to shatter her skull. It just caused a depression fracture of the outer table. Then he hit her here.?
I indicated the center of a starburst pattern of fracture lines. Looping through the stellate system was a series of curvilinear fractures. The rays and the circles interlaced to form a spiderweb of damage.
?This blow was much harder, and caused a massive comminuted fracture. Her skull shattered.?
It had taken long hours to reassemble the pieces. Traces of glue were visible along the fragment edges.
He listened, absorbed, his eyes driving back and forth from the skull to my face so intently they seemed to burrow a channel through the air.
?Then he hit her here.?
I traced a runner from another starburst system toward an arm of the one I?d just shown him. The second linear break came up to the first and stopped, like a country road at a T-intersection.
?This blow came later. New fractures will be arrested by preexisting ones. New lines won?t cross old ones, so this one had to have come last.?
?
?The blows were probably delivered from the back and slightly to the right.?
?
He did this to me often. The absence of feedback was no indication of a lack of interest. Or understanding. Pierre LaManche missed nothing. I doubt he ever needed second explanations. The monosyllabic response was his way of forcing you to organize your thoughts. A sort of dry-run jury presentation. I forged on.
?When a skull is hit it acts like a balloon. For a fraction of a second the bone pushes in at the point of impact, and bulges out on the opposite side. So the damage isn?t restricted to the place the head was struck.?
I looked to see if he was with me. He was.
?Because of the architecture of the skull, the forces caused by a sudden impact travel along certain pathways. The bone fails, or breaks, somewhat predictably.?
I pointed to the forehead.
?For example, an impact here can result in damage to the orbits or face.?
I indicated the back of the skull.
?A blow here often causes side-to-side fractures of the base of the skull.?
He nodded.
?In this case, there are two comminuted fractures and one depressed fracture of the posterior right parietal. There are several linear fractures that start on the opposite side of the skull and travel toward the damage in the right parietal. This suggests she was struck from the back and to her right.?
?Three times,? he said.
?Three times,? I confirmed.
?Did it kill her?? He knew what my answer would be.
?Could have. I can?t say.?
?Any other signs of cause??
?No bullets, no stab marks, no other fractures. I?ve got some odd gashes on the vertebrae, but I?m not really sure what they mean.?
?Due to the dismemberment??
I shook my head. ?I don?t think so. They?re not in the right place.?
I replaced the skull in its ring.
?The dismemberment was very clean. He didn?t just chop the limbs off. He severed them neatly at the joints. Remember the Gagne case? Or Valencia??
He thought a minute. In a rare display of movement he tipped his head to the right, then to the left, like a dog cuing in on the crinkle of cellophane.
?Gagne came in, oh, maybe two years ago,? I prompted. ?He was wrapped in layers of blankets, trussed up with packaging tape. His legs had been sawed off and packaged individually.?
At the time it had reminded me of the ancient Egyptians. Before mummification they removed the internal organs and preserved them. The viscera were then bundled separately and placed with the body. Gagne?s killers had done the same with his legs.
