Reichs, Kathy - Fatal Voyage

I unloaded. My friend listened. Twenty minutes later I took a breath, not weeping but close.

“So the Arthur property and unidentified foot issue are separate from the crash complaint issue?”

“Sort of. I don't think the foot came from anyone on the flight. I have to prove that.”

“You think it's this Mitchell character who's been missing since February?”

“Yes.”

“And the NTSB still doesn't know what took that plane out?”

“No.”

“And all you know about this property is that some guy named Livingstone gave it as a wedding gift to some guy named Arthur who sold it to some guy named Dashwood.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But the deed is in the name of an investment group, not Dashwood.”

“H&F. In Delaware.”

“And some of the officers' names match up to the names of people who died right before local seniors went missing.”

“You're good.”

“I took notes.”

“Sounds ridiculous.”

“Yes. And you have no idea why Davenport is on a tear for you?”

“No.”

Silence hummed across two countries.

“We heard about some lord in England named Dashwood. A friend of Benjamin Franklin's, I think.”

“That should crack this wide open. How was London?”

“Great. But too much the ABC tour.”

“ABC tour?”

“‘Another bloody cathedral.’ Ted likes history. He even dragged me through a bunch of caves. When will you be back in Charlotte?”

“Thursday.”

“Where are we going for Thanksgiving?”

Anne and I met when we were young and pregnant, I with Katy, she with her son, Brad. That first summer we'd all packed up and taken the babies to the ocean for a week. We'd been going to one beach or another every summer and Thanksgiving ever since.

“The kids like Myrtle. I like Holden.”

“I want to try Pawleys Island. Let's have lunch. We'll discuss it and I'll tell you all about my trip. Tempe, things will get back to normal. You'll see.”

I fell asleep listening to sleet, thinking of sand and palmetto, and wondering if I had any chance at all of having a normal life again.

The Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale is the central medico-legal and crime laboratory for the province of Quebec. It is located on the top two floors of the Édifice Wilfrid-Derome, known to locals as the Sûreté du Québec, or SQ building.

By nine-thirty Monday morning I was in the anthropology-odontology lab, having already attended the morning staff meeting, and collected my Demande d'Expertise en Anthropologie request form from the pathologist assigned to each case. After determining that the copilot long-bone shaft actually came from the lower leg of a mule deer, I wrote a brief report and turned to Claudel's lady.

I arranged the bones in anatomical order on my worktable, did a skeletal inventory, then checked indicators of age, sex, race, and height for consistency with the presumed ID. This could be important, since the victim had been toothless, and dental records did not exist.

I broke at one-thirty and ate my bagel with cream cheese, banana, and Chips Ahoy! cookies while watching boats sailing under cars driving over the Jacques Cartier Bridge far below my office window. By two I was back with the bones, and by four-thirty I had finished my analysis.

The victim could have shattered her jaw, orbit, and cheekbone and smashed the depressed fractures into her forehead by falling. From a hot air balloon or high-rise building.

I called Claudel and left a verbal opinion of homicide, locked up, and went home.

I spent another night by myself, cooking and eating a chicken breast, watching a rerun of Northern Exposure, reading a few chapters of a novel by James Lee Burke. It was as though Ryan had dropped from the planet. I was asleep by eleven.

The next day was spent documenting the battered lady: photographing my findings with regard to biological profile and photographing, diagramming, describing, and explaining the injury patterns on her skull and face. By late afternoon I'd compiled a report and left it in the secretarial office. I was removing my lab coat when Ryan appeared at my office door.

“Need a lift to the funeral?”

“Rough couple of days?” I asked, taking my purse from the bottom desk drawer.

“There's not a lot of sunshine in the squad.”

“No,” I said, meeting his gaze.

“I'm completely jammed up with this Petricelli thing.”

“Yes.” My eyes never left his.

“Turns out Metraux isn't quite so sure about eyeballing Pepper.”

“Because of Bertrand?”

He shrugged.

“These bastards will dime their own mothers for an afternoon out.”

“Risky.”

“As tap water in Tijuana. Do you want the ride?”

“If it's not too much trouble.”

“I'll pick you up at eight-fifteen.”

* * *

Since Sergent-détective Jean Bertrand had died while on duty, he was given full state honors. La Direction des Communications of the Sûreté du Québec had informed every police force in North America, using the CPIC system in Canada and the NCIC system in the United States. An honor guard flanked the casket at the funeral parlor. The body was escorted from there to the church, from the church to the cemetery.

While I had expected a large turnout, I was astounded by the mass of people who showed up. In addition to Bertrand's family and friends, his fellow SQ officers, members of the CUM, and many from the medico-legal lab, it looked like every police department in Canada, and many in the United States, had sent representatives. French and English media sent reporters and TV crews.

By noon, the bits of Bertrand that passed for his corpse lay in the ground at the Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery, and Ryan and I were winding our way down the mountain toward Centre-ville.

“When do you fly out?” he asked, splitting off Côte-des-Neiges onto rue St-Mathieu.

“Eleven-fifty tomorrow morning.”

“I'll pick you up at ten-thirty.”

“If you're aspiring to a position as my chauffeur, the pay is lousy.”

The joke plunged to its death before I'd finished saying it.

“I'm on the same flight.”

“Why?”

“Last night the Charlotte PD busted an Atlanta lowlife named Pecan Billie Holmes.”

He dug a pack of du Maurier's from his pocket, tapped one out on the steering wheel, and placed it between his lips. After lighting up with one hand, he inhaled, then blew smoke through both nostrils. I lowered my window.

“Seems the Pecan had a lot to say about a certain telephone tip to the FBI.”

THE NEXT FEW DAYS FELT LIKE A PLUNGE ON THE MIND ERASER AT Six Flags. After weeks of the slow climb, suddenly everything broke. But there was nothing amusing about the ride.

It was late afternoon when Ryan and I touched down in Charlotte. In our absence, fall had caught on, and a strong breeze flapped our jackets as we walked to the parking garage.

We drove directly downtown to the FBI office at Second and Tryon. McMahon had just returned from interviewing Pecan Billie Holmes at the jail.

“Holmes was coked to the eyeballs when they hauled his butt to the bag last night, yelling and screaming, offering to roll over on everything back to a Little League game his team threw in the fourth grade.”

“Who is this guy?” Ryan.

“A thirty-eight-year-old three-time loser. Hangs on the fringes of the Atlanta biker scene.”

“Hells Angels?”

McMahon nodded.

“He's not a full patcher, doesn't have the brains of a banana Popsicle. The club tolerates him as long as he's useful.”