some it was a way to deal with the obscenity of violence, a protective barrier against the daily reality of human slaughter. Morgue humor. Mask the horror in male bravado. For others it went deeper. I suspected Claudel was among the others.
I watched him for several seconds. Down the hall a phone rang. Though I truly disliked the man, I forced myself to admit that his opinion of me mattered. I wanted his approval. I wanted him to like me. I wanted all of them to accept me, to admit me to the club.
An image of Dr. Lentz flashed into my mind, a hologram psychologist, lecturing from the past.
?Tempe,? she would say, ?you are the child of an alcoholic father. You are searching for the attention he denied you. You want Daddy?s approval, so you try to please everybody.?
She made me see it, but she couldn?t correct it. I had to do that on my own. Occasionally I overcompensated, and many found me a genuine pain in the ass. This had not been the case with Claudel. I realized I?d been avoiding a confrontation.
I took a deep breath and began, choosing my words carefully.
?Monsieur Claudel, have you considered the possibility that this murder is connected to others that have taken place during the past two years??
His features froze, the lips drawn in so tightly against his teeth as to be almost invisible. A cloud of red began at his collar and spread slowly up his neck and face. His voice was icy.
?Such as?? He held himself absolutely still.
?Such as Chantale Trottier,? I continued. ?She was killed in October of ?93. Dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled.? I looked directly at him. ?What was left of her was found wrapped in plastic trash bags.?
He raised both hands to the level of his mouth, clasped them together, fingers intertwined, and tapped them against his lips. His perfectly chosen gold cuff links, in his perfectly fitted designer shirt, clinked faintly. He looked straight at me.
?Ms. Brennan,? he said, emphasizing the English label. ?Perhaps you should stick to your area of expertise. I think we would recognize any links which might exist between crimes under our jurisdiction. These murders share nothing in common.?
Ignoring the demotion, I forged on. ?They were both women. They were both murdered within the past year. Both bodies showed signs of mutilation or attempt-?
His carefully constructed dam of control ruptured, and his anger rushed at me in a torrent.
?
His lips pursed to form the despised word, but he stopped himself just in time. With a visible effort, he regained his composure.
?Do you always have to overreact??
?Think about it,? I spat at him. I was trembling in rage as I got up to close the door.
4
IT SHOULD HAVE FELT GOOD JUST TO SIT IN THE STEAM ROOM AND sweat. Like broccoli. That had been my intention. Three miles on the StairMaster, a round on the Nautilus, then vegetate. Like the rest of the day, the gym was not living up to my expectations. The workout had dissipated some of my anger, but I was still agitated. I knew Claudel was an asshole. It was one of the names I?d stomped on his chest with each pump of the StairMaster. Asshole. Dickhead. Moron. Two syllables worked best. I?d figured that out, but little else. It distracted me for a while, but now that my mind was idle I couldn?t drive the murders out. Isabelle Gagnon. Chantale Trottier. I kept rolling them around, like peas on a dinner plate.
I shifted my towel, and allowed my brain to reprocess the events of the day. When Claudel left, I?d checked with Denis to see when Gagnon?s skeleton would be ready. I wanted to go over every inch of it for signs of trauma. Fractures. Gashes. Anything. Something about the way the body had been carved up bothered me. I wanted a close look at those cut marks. There was a problem with the boiling unit. The bones wouldn?t be ready until tomorrow.
Next I?d gone to the central files and pulled the jacket for Trottier. I spent the rest of the afternoon poring over police accounts, autopsy findings, toxicology reports, photos. Something lingered in my memory cells, nagging at me, insisting the cases were linked. Some forgotten detail hovered just beyond recall, coupling the victims in a way I didn?t understand. Some stored memory that I couldn?t access told me it wasn?t just the mutilation and bagging. I wanted to find the connection.
I readjusted my towel and wiped sweat from my face. The skin on my fingertips had gathered into little puckers. Everywhere else I was slick as a perch. I was definitely a short-timer. I couldn?t take the heat for more than twenty minutes, no matter what the alleged benefits. Five more.
Chantale Trottier had been killed less than a year ago, in the fall of my first year full time at the lab. She was sixteen. I?d spread the autopsy photos on my desk this afternoon, but I didn?t need them. I remembered her vividly, remembered in crisp detail the day she?d arrived at the morgue.
October 22, the afternoon of the oyster party. It was a Friday and most of the staff had quit early to drink beer and shuck their way through the crates of Malpeques that are an autumn tradition.
Through the crowd in the conference room I noticed LaManche talking on the phone. He held a hand over his free ear as a barricade against the party noise. I watched him. When he hung up he did a visual sweep of the room. Spotting me, he signaled with one hand, indicating that I should meet him in the hall. When he located Bergeron and got his attention, he repeated the message. In the elevator, five minutes later, he explained. A young girl had just come in. The body was badly beaten and dismembered. A visual ID would be impossible. He wanted Bergeron to look at the teeth. He wanted me to look at the cuts on the bones.
The mood in the autopsy room was in sharp contrast to the gaiety upstairs. Two SQ detectives stood at a distance while a uniformed officer from the identity section took photos. The technician positioned the remains in silence. The detectives said nothing. There were no jokes or wisecracks. The usual banter was completely stilled. The only sound was the click of the shutter as it recorded the atrocity that lay on the autopsy table.
What was left of her had been arranged to form a body. The six bloody pieces had been placed in correct anatomical order, but the angles were slightly off, turning her into a life-size version of those plastic dolls designed to be twisted into distorted positions. The overall effect was macabre.
Her head had been cut off high on the neck, and the truncated muscles looked bright poppy red. The pallid skin rolled back gently at the severed edges, as if recoiling from contact with the fresh, raw meat. Her eyes were half open, and a delicate trail of dried blood meandered from her right nostril. Her hair was wet and lay plastered against her head. It had been long and blond.
Her trunk was bisected at the waist. The upper torso lay with her arms bent at the elbows, the hands drawn in and resting on her stomach. Coffin position, except her fingers were not intertwined.
Her right hand was partially detached, and the ends of the creamy white tendons jutted out like snapped electrical cords. Her attacker had been more successful with the left. The technician had placed it beside her head, where it lay alone, the fingers drawn in like the legs of a shriveled spider.
Her chest had been opened lengthwise, from throat to belly, and the pendulous breasts drooped downward toward each side of the rib cage, their weight drawing apart the two halves of divided flesh. The lower section of torso extended from her waist to her knees. Her lower legs rested side by side, positioned below their normal points of attachment. Unfettered by union at the knee joint, they lay with the feet rotated far to the sides, the toes pointed outward.
With a stab of pain, I?d noticed that her toenails were painted a soft pink. The intimacy of that simple act had caused me such an ache that I wanted to cover her, to scream at all of them to leave her alone. Instead, I?d stood and watched, waiting for my turn to trespass.
I could still close my eyes and see the jagged edges of the lacerations on her scalp, evidence of repeated blows with a blunt object. I could recall in minute detail the bruises on her neck. I could visualize the petechial hemorrhages in her eyes, tiny spots left by the bursting of small blood vessels. Caused by tremendous pressure on the jugular vessels, they are the classic sign of strangulation.
My gut had recoiled as I?d wondered what else had happened to her, this woman-child so carefully composed
