36
THE SOUND OF MY OWN VOICE HIT ME LIKE A BLOW TO THE HEAD. My legs buckled and my breath came in rapid gasps.
Ryan helped me to a chair, brought water, asked no questions. I have no idea how long I sat there, feeling nothing but emptiness. Eventually, my composure crept back, and I began to assess the reality.
He’d phoned me. Why? When?
I watched Gilbert don rubber gloves and slide his hand around the inside of the disposal. He drew something out and dropped it in the sink.
Was he trying to reach me? Or Gabby? What had he intended to say? Had he intended to speak at all, or just check whether I was there?
A photographer moved from room to room, his flash like a firefly in the gloomy flat.
The hang-ups. Was it he?
A tech in rubber gloves and coveralls taped books and sealed them into evidence bags, marking each, then signing across the seal. Another brushed white powder across the red-black varnish of the shelves. A third emptied the refrigerator, removing packages in plain brown wrappers, and placing them in a cooler.
Had she died here, her last visual images the ones I now saw?
Ryan spoke to Charbonneau. Snatches of the conversation floated to me through the suffocating heat. Where’s Claudel? Took off. Roust the superintendent. Find out about basements, storage areas. Get keys. Charbonneau left, returned with a middle-aged woman in housecoat and slippers. They disappeared again, accompanied by the book packer.
Again and again Ryan offered to take me home. There was nothing I could do, he told me gently. I knew that, but I couldn’t leave.
Grammama arrived around four. She was neither hostile nor cooperative. Reluctantly, she provided a description of Tanguay. Male. Quiet. Brown hair, thinning. Medium everything. Could have fit half the men in North America. She had no idea where he was or how long he’d be gone. He’d left before, but never for long. She only noticed because Tanguay asked Mathieu to feed the fish. He was nice to Mathieu and gave him money when he cared for the fish. She knew little else about him, rarely saw him. She thought he worked, thought he had a car. Wasn’t sure. Didn’t care. Didn’t want to get involved.
The recovery team spent all afternoon and late into the night dissecting the apartment. I didn’t. By five I needed out. I accepted Ryan’s offer of a ride and left.
We spoke little in the car. Ryan repeated what he’d said on the phone. I was to stay home. A team would watch my building around the clock. No late night sorties. No solo expeditions.
“Don’t ride me, Ryan,” I said, my voice betraying my emotional brittleness.
The rest of the drive was spent in strained silence. When we reached my building Ryan put the car in park and turned to me. I could feel his eyes on the side of my face.
“Listen, Brennan. I’m not trying to give you a hard time. This scum is going down. You can take that to the bank. I’d just like you to live to see it.”
His concern touched me more than I was willing to admit.
They pulled out all stops. APB’s went out to every cop in Quebec, to the Ontario Provincial Police, the RCMP, and the state forces in New York and Vermont. But Quebec is big, its borders easy to cross. Lots of places to hide or slip out.
In the days that followed I grappled with the possibilities. Tanguay could be lying low, biding his time. He could be dead. He could have taken off. Serial killers do that. Sensing danger, they pack up and relocate. Some are never caught. No. I refused to accept that.
Sunday I never left home. Birdie and I did what the French call coconer. We cocooned. I didn’t get dressed, avoided the radio and television. I couldn’t bear to see Gabby’s photo, or hear the overdone descriptions of the victim and suspect. I made only three calls, first to Katy, then to my aunt in Chicago. Happy Birthday, Auntie! Eighty-four. Well done.
I knew Katy was in Charlotte, just wanted to reassure myself. No answer. Of course. Curse the distance. No. Bless the distance. I didn’t want my daughter anywhere near the place a monster had held her picture. She would never know what I’d found.
The last call was to Gabby’s mother. She was sedated, couldn’t come to the phone. I spoke to Mr. Macaulay. Assuming they released the body, the funeral would be on Thursday.
For a time, I sat sobbing, my body rocking as though to a metronome. The demons that live in my bloodstream screamed for alcohol. Pleasure-pain, such a simple principle. Feed us. Numb us. Make it go away.
But I didn’t. That would have been easy. You’re down love-forty, so lob one in, shake hands at the net, and it’s Miller time. Except this wasn’t tennis. If I gave up in this game, I would lose my career, my friends, my self-respect. Hell, I might as well let St. Jacques/Tanguay do me in.
I would not give in. Not to the bottle, and not to the maniac. I owed it to Gabby. I owed it to myself and to my daughter. So I stayed sober and waited, desperately wishing I had Gabby to talk me through. I checked frequently to be sure the surveillance team was in place.
On Monday Ryan called around eleven-thirty. LaManche had completed the autopsy. Cause of death: ligature strangulation. Though the body was decomposed he’d found a groove buried deep in the flesh of Gabby’s neck. Above and below it the skin was torn in a series of gouges and scratches. The vessels in the throat tissue showed hundreds of tiny hemorrhages.
Ryan’s voice receded. I pictured Gabby desperately clawing to breathe, to live. Stop. Thank God we found her so quickly. I couldn’t have faced the horror of Gabby on my autopsy table. The pain of losing her was unbearable enough.
“. . . hyoid was broken. Also, whatever he used had links or loops or something, left a spiral pattern in the skin. ”
“Was she raped?”
“He couldn’t tell because of the decomposition. Negative for sperm.”
“Time of death?”
“LaManche is giving it a minimum of five days. We know the upper limit is ten.”
“Pretty wide window.”
“Given this heat and the shallow burial, he thinks the body should be in worse shape.”
Oh, God. She may not have died the day she disappeared.
“Have you checked her apartment?”
“No one saw her, but she’d been there.”
“What about Tanguay?”
“Ready for this? The guy’s a teacher. Small school out on the west island.” I heard the rustle of paper. “St. Isidor’s. Been there since 1991. He’s twenty-eight. Single. For next of kin on his application he put ‘none.’ We’re checking it. He’s been living on Séguin since ’91. Landlady thinks he was somewhere in the States before that.”
“Prints?”
“Lots. We ran them, came up empty. Sent them south this morning.”
“Inside the glove?”
“At least two readable and a smudged palm.”
An image of Gabby. The plastic bag. Another glove. I jotted down a single word. Glove.
“He has a degree?”
“Bishops. Bertrand’s out in Lennoxville now. Claudel’s trying to roust someone at St. Isidor’s, not having much luck. The caretaker is about a hundred and no one else is around. They’re closed for the summer.”
“Any names turn up in the apartment?”
“None. No pictures. No address books. No letters. Guy must live in a social vacuum.”
A long silence as we mulled that over, then Ryan said,
“Might explain his unusual hobbies.”
“The animals?”
“That. And the cutlery collection.”
“Cutlery?”
“This squirrel had more blades than an orthopedic surgeon. Surgical tools mostly. Knives. Razors. Scalpels. Kept them stashed under the bed. Along with a box of surgical gloves. Original.”
“A loner with a blade fetish. Great.”
“And the standard porn gallery. Well thumbed.”
“What else?”
“Guy’s got a car.” More rustling. “A 1987 Ford Probe. It’s not in the neighborhood. They’re looking for it. We got the driver’s license photo this morning and sent that out too.”
“And?”
“I’ll let you judge for yourself, but I think Grammama was right. He’s not memorable. Or maybe the Xerox/fax reproduction doesn’t do him justice.”
“Could it be St. Jacques?”
“Could be. Or Jean Chrétien. Or the guy that sells hot dogs on Rue St. Paul. Richard Petty’s out. He’s got a mustache.”
“You’re a laugh riot, Ryan.”
“This guy doesn’t even have a parking ticket. He’s been a real good boy.”
“Right. A real good boy who collects knives and porn and carves up small mammals.”
Pause.
“What were they?”
“We’re not sure yet. They’re asking some guy over at U of M.”
I looked at the word I’d written, swallowed hard.
“Any prints inside the glove we found with Gabby?” It was difficult to say her name.
“No.”
“We knew there wouldn’t be.”
“Yeah.”
I heard squad room noises in the background.
“I want to drop off a copy of this license photo so you’ll have some idea what he looks like in case you meet him up close and personal. I still think it’s better if you stick near home until we pop this asshole.”
“I’m coming in. If ident is done with the gloves I want to take them over to biology. Then Lacroix.”
“I think you sh—”
“Cut the macho crap, Ryan.”
A breath drawn deeply, expelled.
“Are you holding out on me?”
“Brennan, what we know, you know.”
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
In less than half an hour I arrived at the lab. Ident had finished and sent the gloves to the biology section.
I looked at my watch—twelve-forty. I called the ident section at CUM headquarters to ask if I could see the photos taken at the St. Jacques apartment on Rue Berger. Lunchtime. The desk clerk would leave a message.
At one o’clock I walked over to the biology section. A woman with flyaway hair and a plump, Christmas angel face was shaking a glass vial. Two latex gloves lay on the counter behind her.
“Bonjour, Françoise.”
“Ah. I thought I might see you today.” The cherub eyes took on a worried expression. “I’m sorry. I don’t quite know what to say to you.”
“Merci. It’s okay.” I nodded at the gloves. “What have you got?”
“This one is clean. No blood.” She gestured at Gabby’s glove. “I’m just starting on the one from the kitchen. Would you like to watch?”
“Thank you.”
“I’ve taken scrapings from these brown spots and rehydrated the sample in saline.”
She examined the liquid and placed the vial in a test tube tray. Then she withdrew a glass pipette with a long, hollow projection, held it over a flame to seal it, and twisted off the tip.
“I’ll test for human blood first.”
Removing a tiny bottle from the refrigerator, she broke the seal and inserted the thin, tubular point of a fresh pipette. Like a mosquito sucking blood, the antiserum moved up the tiny pipeline. She sealed the other end with her thumb.
She then inserted the long beak of the pipette into the fire-sealed pipette, released her thumb, and allowed the antiserum to dribble out. She spoke as she worked.
“The blood knows its own proteins, or antigens. If it recognizes foreigners, antigens that don’t belong, it tries to destroy them with antibodies. Some antibodies blow up foreign antigens, others clump them together. That clumping is called an agglutination reaction.
“Antiserum is created in an animal, usually a rabbit or a chicken, by injecting it with the blood of another species. The animal’s blood recognizes the invaders and produces antibodies to protect itself. Injecting an animal with human blood produces human antiserum. Injecting it with goat blood produces goat antiserum. Horse blood produces horse antiserum.
“Human antiserum creates an agglutination reaction when mixed with human blood. Watch. If this is human blood a visible precipitate will form in the test tube, right where the sample solution and the antiserum meet. We’ll compare to the saline as a control.”
She tossed the pipette into a biological waste container and picked up the vial with the Tanguay sample solution. Using another pipette, she sucked the sample up the tube, released it into the antiserum, and set the pipette into a holder.
“How long will it take?” I asked.
“That depends on the strength of the antiserum. Anywhere from three to fifteen minutes. This is pretty good. Shouldn’t be more than five or six minutes.”
We checked it after five, Françoise holding the pipettes under the Luxolamp, a black card behind for background. We checked again after ten. Fifteen. Nothing. No white band appeared between the antiserum and the sample solution. The mixture stayed as clear as the control saline.
“So. It’s not human. Let’s see if it’s animal.”
She went back to the refrigerator and withdrew a tray of small bottles.
“Can you tell the exact species?” I asked.
“No. Usually just family. Bovid. Cervid. Canid.”
I looked at the tray. Written next to each bottle was an animal name. Goat. Rat. Horse. I pictured the paws in Tanguay’s kitchen.
“Let’s try dogs.”
Nothing.
“What about something like a squirrel or a gopher?”
She thought a minute then reached for a bottle. “Maybe rat.”
In less than four minutes a tiny parfait had formed in the tube, yellow above, clear below, a layer of foggy white between.
“Voilà,” said Françoise. “It’s animal blood. Something small, a mammal, like a rodent or a ground hog or something. That’s about all I’ll be able to determine. I don’t know if that helps you.”
“Yes,” I said. “That helps. May I use your phone?”
“Bien sûr.”
I dialed an extension down the hall.
“Lacroix.”
I identified myself and explained what I wanted.
“Sure. Give me twenty minutes, I’m just finishing up a run.”
I signed for the gloves, returned to my office, and spent the next half hour proofing and signing reports. Then I walked back to the corridor occupied by biology, and entered a door marked Incendie et Explosifs. Fire and Explosives.
A man in a lab coat stood in front of an enormous piece of machinery. A label identified it as an X-ray diffractometer. He didn’t speak and I didn’t say anything until he had removed a slide with a small white smear and placed it on a tray. Then he gave me eyes as soft as a Disney fawn, lids drooping, lashes curling back like petals on a daisy.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Lacroix. Comment ça va?”
“Bien. Bien. You have them?”
I held up two plastic bags.
“Let’s get started.”
He led me into a small room with an apparatus the size of a photocopier, two monitors, and a printer. A periodic chart of the elements hung on the wall above.
Lacroix laid the evidence bags on a counter and pulled on surgical gloves. Gingerly, he withdrew each suspect glove, inspected it, then laid it on its plastic bag. The gloves stretched across his hands looked identical to those on the counter.
“First we look for gross characteristics, details of manufacturing. Weight. Density. Color. How the rims are finished.” He turned each glove over and over, examining as he spoke. “These two look quite similar. Same rim technique. See?”
I looked. The wrist of each glove ended in a border that rolled outward onto itself.
“They’re not all like that?”
“No. Some roll in, some roll out. These are both outies. So. Now we see what’s in them.”
He carried Gabby’s glove to the machine, raised the cover, and placed it on a tray inside.
“With very small samples I use those little holders.” He pointed to a tray of small plastic tubes. “I stretch a square of polypropylene window film across the holder, then use press-on tabs to make a sticky spot to hold the fragment. That’s not necessary with this. We’ll just put the whole glove in.”
Lacroix flipped a switch and the apparatus whirred to life. A box positioned on a pole in one corner lit up, the word X RAY white against a red background. A panel of buttons glowed, indicating the machine’s condition. Red: X rays. White: Power. Orange: Shutter open.
For a few moments Lacroix adjusted dials, then he closed the cover and moved to a chair in front of the monitors.
“S’il vous plaît.” He indicated the other chair.
A desert landscape appeared on the first monitor, a granular backdrop of synclines and anticlines, with shadows and boulders scattered here and there. Superimposed on that scene was a series of concentric circles, the two smallest and most central shaped like footballs. Two hashed lines intersected at right angles, forming a cross directly over the bull’s-eye circles.
Lacroix adjusted the image by manipulating a joy stick. Boulders shifted in and out of the circles.
“That’s the glove we’re looking at, magnified eighty times. I’m just picking a target location. Each run samples an area of about three hundred microns, approximately the area inside the dotted circle. So you want to direct your X rays onto the best part of your sample.”
He shifted the crosshairs a few more moments, then settled on a boulderless patch.
“There. That should be good.”
He flipped a switch and the machine hummed.
“Now we’re creating a vacuum. That’ll take a couple of minutes. Then the scan. That’s very quick.”
“And this will determine what’s in the glove.”
“Oui. It’s a form of X-ray analysis. X-ray microfluorescence can determine what elements are present in a sample.”
The humming stopped and a pattern began to form on the right-hand monitor. A series of tiny red mounds sprouted across the bottom of the screen, then grew against a bright blue background, a thin yellow stripe up the middle of each. In the lower left-hand corner was an image of a keyboard, each key marked with the abbreviation for an element.
Lacroix typed in commands, and letters appeared on the screen. Some mounds remained small, others grew into tall peaks, like the giant termite castles I’d seen in Australia.
“C’est ça.” That’s it. Lacroix pointed at a column on the far right. It rose from the bottom to the top of the screen, where its top was truncated. A smaller peak to its right climbed to a quarter of its height. Both were marked Zn.
“Zinc. That’s standard. It’s found in all these gloves.”
He indicated a pair of peaks to the far left, one low, the other rising three quarters of the distance up the screen. “That low one is magnesium. Mg. The tall one marked Si is silicon.” Farther to the right a double peak bore the letter S.
“Sulfur.”
A Ca peak spired halfway up the screen.
“Quite a bit of calcium.”
Beyond the calcium a gap, then a series of low mounds, foothills to the zinc pinnacle. Fe.
“A little iron.”
He leaned back and summarized. “Pretty common cocktail. Lots of zinc, with silicon and calcium, the other major components. I’ll print these, then let’s test another spot.”
We ran ten tests. All showed the same combination of elements.
“Right, then. The other glove.”
We repeated the procedure with the glove from Tanguay’s kitchen.
The peaks for zinc and sulfur were similar, but this glove contained more calcium, and had no iron, silicon, or magnesium. A small spike indicated the presence of potassium. It was the same on every run.
“What does this mean?” I asked, already certain of the answer.
“Each manufacturer uses a slightly different recipe for the latex. There will even be variation among gloves from the same company, but it will be within limits.
“So these gloves are not a pair?”
“They weren’t even made by the same company.”
He got up to remove the glove. My mind was stumbling over our finding.
“Would X-ray diffraction give more information?”
“What we’ve done, X-ray microfluorescence, tells what elements are present in an object. X-ray diffraction can describe the actual mixture of the elements. The chemical structure. For example, with microfluorescence we can know that something contains sodium and chloride. With diffraction we can tell that it is made up of sodium-chloride crystals.
“To oversimplify, in the X-ray diffractometer a sample is rotated and hit with X rays. The X rays bounce off the crystals, and their pattern of diffraction indicates the structure of those crystals.
“So one limitation with diffraction is that it can only be done on materials with a crystalline structure. That’s about eighty percent of everything that comes in. Unfortunately, latex is not crystalline in structure. Diffraction probably wouldn’t add much anyway. These gloves are definitely made by different manufacturers.”
“What if they’re just from different boxes? Surely individual batches of latex must vary.”
He was silent for a moment. Then:
“Wait. Let me show you something.”
He disappeared into the main lab and I could hear him talking to the technician. He reappeared with a stack of printouts, each composed of seven or eight sheets showing the familiar spire and steeple patterning. He unfolded each series and we looked at the variations in pattern.
“Each of these shows a sequence of tests done on gloves from a single manufacturer, but sampled from different boxes. There is variation, but the differences are never as great as those in the gloves we just analyzed.”
I examined several series. The size of the peaks varied, but the components showed consistency.
“Now. Look at this.”
He unfurled another series of printouts. Again, there were some differences, but overall the mix was the same.
Then I caught my breath. The configuration looked familiar. I looked at the symbols. Zn. Fe. Ca. S. Si. Mg. High zinc, silicon, and calcium content. Traces of the other elements. I laid the printout from Gabby’s glove above the series. The pattern was almost identical.
“Monsieur Lacroix, are these gloves from the same manufacturer?”
“Yes, yes. That’s my point. From the same box, probably. I just remembered this.”
“What case is this?” My heart rate had picked up tempo.
“It came in just a few weeks ago.” He flipped to the first sheet in the series. Numéro d’événement: 327468. “I can pull it up on the computer.”
“Please.”
Data filled the screen in seconds. I scanned it.
Numéro d’événement: 327468. Numéro de LML: 29427. Requesting Agency: CUM. Investigators: L. Claudel and M. Charbonneau. Recovery location: 1422 Rue Berger. Recovery date: 24/06/94.
An old rubber glove. Maybe the guy worried about his nails. Claudel! I thought he’d meant a glove for household cleaning! St. Jacques had a surgical glove! It matched the one in Gabby’s grave!
I thanked Monsieur Lacroix, gathered the printouts, and left. I returned the gloves to property, my mind tearing through what I’d just learned. The glove from Tanguay’s kitchen did not match the one buried with Gabby’s body. Tanguay’s prints were on it. The outside stains were animal blood. The glove found with Gabby was clean. No blood. No prints. St. Jacques had a surgical glove. It matched the one in Gabby’s grave. Was Bertrand right? Were Tanguay and St. Jacques the same person?
A pink slip waited on my desk. CUM Ident had called. The photos of the Rue Berger flat had been archived on a CD-ROM disk. I could view it there or check it out. I called to request the latter, told them I’d be there shortly.
I fought my way to CUM headquarters, cursing the rush-hour traffic and the tourists that clogged the Old Port area. Leaving the car double-parked, I bolted the steps and went directly to the desk sergeant on the third floor. Amazingly, he had the disk. I signed it out, dashed back to the car, and stuffed it in my briefcase.
All the way home I kept looking over my shoulder, watching for Tanguay. Watching for St. Jacques. I couldn’t stop myself.