Déjà Dead (16 page)

Claudel leaned close and shouted in my ear, “Stay with me!”

I nodded.

He worked his way toward the west side of Berger, where the crowd was a little thinner. I followed on rubbery legs. Then he turned and began to worm his way in the direction of the car. I lunged and grabbed his arm. He stopped and looked a question at me. I shook my head vehemently, and his eyebrows went from a deep V to a Stan Laurel imitation.

“He’s over there!” I screamed, pointing in the opposite direction. “I saw him.”

A man in a Tweedledee costume brushed past me. He was eating a snow cone, and the drops from the melt-off were painting a red trail down his belly. It looked like a blood-spatter pattern.

Claudel’s brows dived in the midline. “You are going to the car,” he said.

“I saw him on Ste. Catherine!” I repeated, thinking perhaps he hadn’t heard. “Outside Les Foufounes Électriques! He was going toward St. Laurent!” Even to me, my voice was sounding a bit hysterical.

It got his attention. He hesitated a second, assessing the damage to my cheek and limbs.

“You’re okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You will go to the car?”

“Yes!” He turned to go. “Wait.” One by one I lifted my trembling legs over a rusted metal cable that looped knee-high around the edge of the lot, crossed to another cement block, and stepped onto it. I scanned the sea of heads, looking for the orange baseball cap. Nothing. Claudel watched impatiently as I surveyed the crowd, shifting his eyes from me to the intersection then back again. He reminded me of a sled dog waiting for the gun.

Finally, I shook my head and raised my hands.

“Go. I’ll keep looking.”

Skirting the open lot, he began elbowing his way in the direction I’d indicated. The mob on Ste. Catherine was bigger than ever, and, in a few minutes, I watched his head disappear into it. The swarm seemed to absorb him, like an army of antibodies seeking out and surrounding a foreign protein. One moment he was an individual, the next a dot in the pattern.

I searched until my vision blurred, but hard as I tried I couldn’t locate Charbonneau or St. Jacques. Beyond St. Urbain, I could see a squad car nibbling its way into the edge of the crowd, its lights flashing red and blue. The revelers ignored its whining insistence on right of way. Once I caught a flash of orange, but it turned out to be a tiger wearing tails and high-top sneakers. Moments later she passed closer, carrying her costume head and drinking a Dr Pepper.

The sun was burning, and my head pounded. I could feel a crust hardening on my abraded cheek. I kept scanning and rescanning, sweeping the crowd. I refused to quit until Charbonneau and Claudel returned. But I knew it was farce. St. Jean and the day had smiled on our quarry, and he had escaped.

An hour later we were gathered around the car. Both detectives had removed their jackets and ties and tossed them in the backseat. Beads of sweat glistened on their faces and flowed into their collars. Their underarms and backs were saturated, and Charbonneau’s face was the color of a raspberry tart. His hair stood on end in front, reminding me of a schnauzer with a bad clip. My T-shirt hung limp, and my spandex workout pants felt as if I’d put them on straight from the washer. Our breathing had slowed to normal, and “fuck” had been said at least a dozen times, with everyone contributing.

“
Merde
,” said Claudel. It was an acceptable alternative.

Charbonneau leaned into the car and extracted a pack of Players from his jacket pocket. He slumped against a fender, lit up, and blew the smoke out the corner of his mouth.

“Bastard can cut a crowd like a cockroach through shit.”

“He knows his way around here,” I said, resisting the urge to explore the damage to my cheek. “That helps him.”

He smoked for a moment.

“Think it was our guy from the cash machine?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t get a look at his face.”

Claudel snorted, then pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and began wiping the perspiration from the back of his neck.

I locked my one good eye on him. “Were you able to ID him?”

Another snort.

I looked at him shaking his head, and my plan of zero commentary evaporated.

“You’re treating me like I’m not quite bright, Monsieur Claudel, and you’re starting to piss me off.”

He gave another in his series of smirks.

“How’s your face feel?” he asked.

“Peachy!” I shot back between clenched teeth. “At my age free dermabrasion is a bonus.”

“Next time you decide to go on a wild-assed crime fighting spree, don’t expect me to scrape you up.”

“Next time do a better job of controlling an arrest scene and I won’t have to.” The blood was pounding in my temples, and my hands were clenched so tightly the nails were digging small crescents into the flesh of my palms.

“Okay. Knock this shit off,” said Charbonneau, flipping his cigarette in a wide arc. “Let’s toss the apartment.”

He turned to the patrolmen, who had been standing by quietly.

“Call in recovery.”

“You got it,” said the taller, moving toward the squad car.

Silently, the rest of us followed Charbonneau to the red-brick building and reentered the corridor. The other patrolman waited outside.

In our absence someone had closed the outer door, but the one leading to number 6 still stood wide. We entered the room and spread out as before, like characters in a stage play following directions for blocking.

I moved toward the back. The hot plate was cold now, and the SpaghettiOs had not improved with age. A fly danced on the edge of the pan, reminding me of other, grislier leftovers that may have been abandoned by the occupant. Nothing else had changed.

I walked over to the door in the far right corner of the room. Small chunks of plaster littered the floor, the result of a doorknob slammed against the wall with great force. The door was half open, revealing a wooden staircase descending to a lower floor. It dropped one step to a small landing, made a ninety-degree turn to the right, and disappeared into darkness. The landing was lined with tin cans where it met the back wall. Rusted hooks jutted from the wood at eye level. I could see a light switch on the wall to the left. The plate was missing, and the exposed wires looped around themselves like worms in a bait carton.

Charbonneau joined me and eased the door back with his pen. I indicated the switch, and he used the pen to flip it. A bulb went on somewhere below, casting the bottom steps into shadowy relief. We listened to the gloom. Silence. Claudel came up behind us.

Charbonneau stepped onto the landing, paused, and descended slowly. I followed, feeling each riser protest softly under my feet. My battered legs trembled as though I’d just run a marathon, but I resisted the temptation to touch the walls. The passage was narrow, and all I could see were Charbonneau’s shoulders ahead of me.

At the bottom, the air was dank and smelled of mildew. Already my cheek felt like molten lava, and the coolness was a welcome relief. I looked around. It was a standard basement, roughly half the size of the building. The back wall was constructed of unfinished cinder blocks, and must have been added later to subdivide a larger area. A metal washtub stood ahead and to the right, with a long wooden workbench snugged up against it. Pink paint was peeling from the bench. Below it lay a collection of cleaning brushes, their bristles yellowed and covered in cobwebs. A black garden hose was coiled neatly on the wall.

A behemoth furnace filled the space to the right, its round metal ducts branching and rising like the limbs of an oak. A midden of trash circled its base. In the dim light I could identify broken picture frames, bicycle wheels, bent and twisted lawn chairs, empty paint cans, and a commode. The castoffs looked like offerings to a Druid god.

A bare bulb hung in the middle of the room, throwing about one watt of light. That was it. The rest of the cellar was empty.

“Sonofabitch must’ve been waiting at the top,” said Charbonneau, gazing up the stairs, hands on his hips.

“Madame Fatass might have told us the guy had this little hidey-hole,” said Claudel, teasing at the trash pile with the tip of his shoe. “Regular Salman Rushdie down here.”

I was impressed by the literary reference, but having returned to my original plan of neutral observation, said nothing. My legs were beginning to ache, and something was very wrong in my neck.

“Fucker could’ve scrambled us from behind that door.”

Charbonneau and I didn’t reply. We’d had the same thought.

Dropping his hands, Charbonneau crossed to the stairs and started up. I followed, beginning to feel a bit like Tonto. When I emerged into the room, the heat rolled over me. I crossed to the makeshift table and started examining the collage on the wall above.

The central piece was a large map of the Montreal area. Cutouts from magazines and newspapers surrounded it. Those on the right were standard issue pornography shots, the progeny of
Playboy
and
Hustler
. Young women stared from them, their bodies in distorted positions, their clothes absent or in disarray. Some pouted, some invited, and some feigned looks of orgasmic bliss. None was very convincing. The collagist was eclectic in his taste. He exhibited no preference as to body type, race, or hair color. I noted that the edges of each picture were carefully trimmed. Each was set equidistant from its neighbors and stapled in place.

A grouping of newspaper articles occupied the space to the left of the map. Although a few were in English, the majority were drawn from the French press. I noticed that those in English were always accompanied by pictures. I leaned close and read a few sentences about a groundbreaking at a church in Drummondville. I moved to a French article on a kidnapping in Senneville. My eyes shifted to an ad for Videodrome, claiming to be the largest distributor of pornographic films in Canada. There was a piece from
Allo Police
on a nude dance bar. It showed “Babette” dressed in leather cross garters and draped with chains. There was another on a break-in in St.-Paul-du-Nord in which the burglar had constructed a dummy of his victim’s nightclothes, stabbed it repeatedly, then left it on her bed. Then I spotted something that again turned my blood to ice.

In his collection St. Jacques had carefully clipped and stapled three articles side by side. Each described a serial killer. Unlike the others, these appeared to be photocopies. The first described Léopold Dion, “The Monster of Pont-Rouge.” In the spring of 1963 police had discovered him at home with the bodies of four young men. They had all been strangled.

The second recounted the exploits of Wayne Clifford Boden, who strangled and raped women in Montreal and Calgary beginning in 1969. When arrested in 1971, his final count was four. In the margin someone had written “Bill
l’étrangleur
.”

The third article covered the career of William Dean Christenson, alias Bill
l’éventreur
, Montreal’s own Ripper. He’d killed, decapitated, and dismembered two women in the early 1980s.

“Look at this,” I said to no one in particular. Though the room was stifling, I felt cold all over.

Charbonneau came up behind me. “Oh, baby, baby,” he intoned flatly, as his eyes swept over the arrangement to the right of the map. “Love in wide angle.”

“Here,” I said, pointing at the articles. “Look at these.”

Claudel joined us and the two men scanned them wordlessly. They smelled of sweat and laundered cotton and aftershave. Outside I could hear a woman calling to Sophie, and wondered briefly if she beckoned a pet or a child.

“Holy fuck,” breathed Charbonneau, as he grasped the theme of the stories.

“Doesn’t mean he’s Charlie Manson,” scoffed Claudel.

“No. He’s probably working on his senior thesis.”

For the first time I thought I detected a note of annoyance in Charbonneau’s voice.

“The guy could have delusions of grandeur,” Claudel went on. “Maybe he watched the Menendez brothers and thought they were keen. Maybe he thinks he’s Dudley DoRight and wants to fight evil. Maybe he’s practicing his French and finds this more interesting than Tin Tin. How the fuck do I know? But it doesn’t make him Jack the Ripper.” He glanced toward the door. “Where the hell is recovery?”

Sonofabitch, I thought, but held my tongue.

Charbonneau and I turned our attention to the desktop. A stack of newspapers leaned against the wall. Charbonneau used his pen to rifle through them, lifting the edges then allowing the sections to drop back into place. The stack contained only want ads, most from
La Presse
and the
Gazette
.

“Maybe the toad was looking for a job,” said Claudel sardonically. “Thought he’d use Boden as a reference.”

“What was that underneath?” I’d seen a flash of yellow as the bottom section was lifted briefly.

Charbonneau nudged the pen under the last section in the pile and levered it upward, tipping the stack toward the wall. A yellow tablet lay under it. I wondered briefly if pen manipulation was required training for detectives. He allowed the newspapers to drop back to the desktop, slid the pen to the back of the stack, and pushed at the tablet, sliding it forward and into view.

It was a lined yellow pad, the type favored by attorneys. We could see that the top page was partially filled with writing. Bracing the stack with the back of his hand, Charbonneau teased the tablet out and slid it into full view.

The impact of the serial killer stories was nothing compared to the jolt I felt on seeing what was scrawled there. The fear that I’d kept down deep in its lair lunged out and grabbed me in its teeth.

Isabelle Gagnon. Margaret Adkins
. Their names leapt out at me. They were part of a list of seven that ran along the bound edge of the tablet. Beside each, running sideways across the page, was a series of columns separated by vertical lines. It looked like a crude spreadsheet containing personal data on each of the individuals listed. It did not look unlike my own spreadsheet, except I didn’t recognize the other five names.

The first column listed addresses, the second phone numbers. The next held brief notations on the residence. Apt. w/ outsd. entr., condo, 1st flr.; house w/ yd. The next column contained sets of letters behind some names, for others it was blank. I looked at the Adkins entry. Hu. So. The combinations looked familiar. I closed my eyes and ran a key word search. Kinship charts.