Kathy Reichs - Deadly Descisions

Someone had collected shards of bone and brain pudding and sealed them in a Ziploc bag. The plastic sack lay in the man's lap, as though he'd been put in charge of watching over his own brain. A large flap of skin clung to the edge of the chair, smooth and shiny as the belly of a perch.

The deceased sat opposite a small TV on which a coat hanger had been rigged to replace the broken antenna. One twisted end projected toward his head, like the finger of an eyewitness pointing to its find. No one had bothered to turn the set off and I could hear Montel talking with women whose mothers had stolen their lovers. I wondered what the discussants would think of their grisly viewer.

A member of the Ident section dusted the bedroom for latent prints, while another did the same in the kitchen. A third worked a camcorder, slowly sweeping each room, then zooming in for closeups of the jumbles of junk. Before I'd gotten there, she'd shot dozens of stills of the victim and his gloomy surroundings.

LaManche had been and gone. Since the body wasn't badly burned and decomposition was only moderate I wasn't really needed, but that hadn't been clear in the early stages. Initial reports described a body and a fire, so I'd been called and transport arrangements had been made. By the time the scene was assessed, I was in transit from Raleigh and the simplest thing was to follow through with the original plan. Quickwater had picked me up at the airport and brought me here.

Les Appartements du Soleil were located southwest of Centreville, on a small street running east from rue Charlevoix. The neighborhood, known as Pointe-St-Charles, was on the island of Montreal, so the murder fell to the CUM.

Michel Charbonneau stood across the room, his face the color of Pepto-Bismol, his hair projecting in clammy spikes. He was jacketless, his collar soaked with sweat, his tie hanging below the open top button of his shirt. Even loosened it was much too short. I watched him pull a hankie from his pocket and wipe it across his forehead.

Charbonneau once told me that as a teen he'd worked in the Texas oil fields. Though he loved the cowboy life, the heat won out and he'd returned to his home in Chicoutimi, eventually drifting to Montreal, where he joined the city police force.

At that moment Quickwater emerged from the kitchen. The victim was known to have gang connections, so Carcajou would also be involved.

The constable joined Charbonneau and the two stood watching a team examine bloodstains in a corner behind the victim. Ronald Gilbert held a gray-and-white L-shaped ruler against the wall while a younger man shot videos and prints. They repeated the shots with a plumb line, then Gilbert switched to sliding calipers and took a series of measurements. He entered the data into a laptop computer, then went back to the ABFO ruler and plumb line. More video footage. More photos. More measurements. Blood was everywhere, speckling the ceiling and walls and mottling oblects stacked against the baseboards. The two looked like they'd be at their task a long time.

I took a deep breath and approached the detectives.

"Bonjour. Comment ça Va?"

"Eh, Doc. How's tricks?" Charbonneau's English was an odd blend of quebecois and Texas slang, most of the latter out-of-date.

"B onjour, Monsieur Quickwater."

Quickwater rotated slightly, looking annoyed at having to acknowledge my presence, then returned his attention to the bloodspatter team. They were filming an acoustic guitar propped upright on a rusted birdcage. Behind the cage I could see an athletic cap jammed against the wall, the letters "-cock-" visible in the center of a wine-colored blotch. I thought of the posters and wondered what lewd macho message we'd been spared by the gore.

"Where's Claudel?" I asked Charbonneau.

"Checking out a suspect, but he'll be here soon. These guys are really something, aren't they?" Charbonneau's voice filled with disgust. "Got the moral qualities of dung beetles."

"This is definitely gang-related?"

"Yeah. The guy that's not looking too good over there is Yves Desjardins, street name 'Cherokee.' He was a Predator"

"Where do they fit in?"

"The Predators are another Hells Angels puppet club."

"Like the Vipers."

"You got it."

"So this was a Rock Machine hit?"

"Probably. Though I understand Cherokee hadn't been active in years. He had a bad liven No. Colon cancer That was it. Not surprising given the shit these guys usually have on board."

"What had he done to anger the opposition?"

"Cherokee ran some kind of spare-parts business." When Charbonneau made a sweeping gesture I could see a dark crescent under his armpit. "But apparently sprockets and carburetors weren't profitable enough. We found about two kilos of coke hidden in the big brave's underwear drawer. No doubt a safe spot since the guy looks like he never changed his shorts. Anyway, that's probably what inspired the surprise visit. But who knows? Maybe it was retaliation for the Marcotte hit."

"Spider"

Charbonneau nodded.

"Were there signs of forced entry?"

"There's a broken window in the bedroom, but that's not how they got in."

"It's not?"

"Most of the fragments are in the alley. Looks like the window was popped from inside."

"By whom?"

He gave a palms-up gesture.

"So how did the killer get in?"

"He must have let them in."

"Why would he do that?"

"Cherokee was wily as a pit bull and just a little less friendly But he'd outlived the stats and was probably starting to feet immortal."

"Except for the cancer

"Right. Let me show you something."

Charbonneau crossed to the body and I followed. Close up the smell was stronger, a nauseating blend of charred wool, gasoline, excrement, and putrefying flesh. He pulled out his hankie and held it across his nose.

"Check out the tattoos." Muffled.

Cherokee's right hand was in his lap, his left flung at an odd angle across the arm of the chair, fingers hanging toward the carpet. Despite a thick layer of soot, a cluster of skulls was clearly visible on his right wrist. There were fifteen in all, arranged in a pyramid like the mysterious offerings found in European caves. But these trophies showed a distinction our Neanderthal ancestors had failed to make. Thirteen of the skulls had black eyes, two had red.

"They're like notches on a gun." Charbonneau took the cloth from his mouth lust long enough to speak. "Black means he killed a male, red a female."

"Pretty stupid to advertise."

"Yeah, but our boy here was old school. Today they're listening more to their lawyers."

From the amount of bloating and skin slippage I guessed the victim had been dead a couple of days.

"How was he found?"

"The usual. A neighbor complained about a foul odor Amazing anyone would notice in this shithole."

I looked at the body again. Other than the bad teeth and mustache it was impossible to tell what the man had looked like. What was left of his head rested against the back of the chair, a dark blossom staining the upholstery around it. I could see shotgun pellets in the flesh that had been his face.

"Like the special effects?"

Charbonneau pointed at the small braided carpet below the victim's feet. It was badly charred, as was the underside of the chair Cherokee himself was smoke-blackened, and his dangling left hand, jean cuffs, and boots were singed. But beyond that there was little damage due to burning.

A fire had been set in front of the chair, and the lingering smell of gasoline suggested the use of an accelerant. Flames had probably engulfed the body, but then, lacking fuel, petered out. By then the killers were long gone.

Charbonneau lifted the hankie again.

"Typical biker shit. Blast the target then torch the body Only this team must have failed Arson 101."