Deja Dead Part 26

"Ah, Mon Dieu Mon Dieu, can I remember that far back? I can barely remember my own address sometimes." He leaned forward, cupped his mouth, and looked conspiratorial. "I write it on matchbooks, just in case."

We both laughed. "Dr. Pelletier, I think you remember just about everything you want to remember."

He shrugged and wagged his head, all innocence.

"Anyway, I brought the file." I held it up, then opened it. "Police report says the remains were found in a gym bag behind the Voyageur bus station. Wino opened it, thinking maybe he could find the owner."

"Right," said Pelletier. "Honest rubbies are so common they should form their own fraternal organization."

"Anyway, he didn't like the aroma. Said"-I skimmed the incident report to find the exact phrase-"'the smell of Satan rose up out of the bag and surrounded my soul.' Unquote."

"A poet. I like that," said Pelletier. "Wonder what he'd say about my shorts."

I ignored that and read on. "He took the bag to a janitor, who called the police. They found a collection of body parts wrapped up in some sort of tablecloth."

"Ah, oui oui. I remember that one," he said, pointing a yellowed finger at me. "Grisly. Horrible." He had that look.

"Dr. Pelletier?"

"The case of the terminal monkey."

"Then I read your report correctly?"

He raised his eyebrows questioningly.

"It really was a monkey?"

He nodded gravely. "Capucin."

"Why did it come here?"

"Dead."

"Yes." Everyone's a comedian. "But why a coroner case?"

The look on my face must have prompted a straight answer. "Whatever was in there was small, and someone had skinned it and cut it up. h.e.l.l, it could have been anything. Cops thought it might be a fetus or a neonate, so they sent it to us."

"Was there anything odd about the case?" I wasn't sure what I was looking for.

"Nah. Just another sliced-up monkey." The corners of his mouth twitched slightly.

"Right." Dumb question. "Anything strike you about the way the monkey was cut up?"

"Not really. These monkey dismemberments are all the same."

This was going nowhere.

"Did you ever find out whose monkey it was?"

"Actually, we did. A blurb appeared in the paper, and some guy called from the university."

"UQAM?"

"Yeah, I think so. A biologist or zoologist or something. Anglophone. Ah. Wait."

He went to a desk drawer, pushed the contents around, then withdrew a stack of business cards bound with a rubber band. Rolling the band off, he flicked through the cards and handed one to me.

"That's him. I saw him when he came to ID the deceased."

The card read: Parker T. Bailey, Ph.D., Professeur de Biologie, Universite du Quebec a Montreal, and gave e-mail, telephone, and fax numbers, along with an address.

"What was the story?" I asked.

"The gentleman keeps monkeys at the university for his research. One day he came in and found one less subject."

"Stolen?"

"Stolen? Liberated? Escaped? Who knows? The primate was AWOL." The expression sounded odd in French.

"So he read about the dead monkey in the paper and called here?"

"C'est ca."

"What happened to it?"

"The monkey?"

I nodded.

"We released it to . . ." He gestured at the card.

"Dr. Bailey," I supplied.

"Oui. There were no next of kin. At least, not in Quebec." Not a twitch.

"I see."

I looked at the card again. This is nothing, my left brain said, while at the same time I heard myself asking, "May I keep this?"

"Of course."

"One other thing." I laid the trap for myself. "Why do you call it the case of the terminal monkey?"

"Well, it was," he answered, surprised.

"Was what?"

"The monkey. It was terminal."

"Yes. I see."

"Also, that's where where it was." it was."

"Where?"

"The terminal. The bus terminal."

Some things do translate. Unfortunately.

For the rest of the afternoon I pulled details from the four princ.i.p.al files and entered them into the spreadsheet I'd created. Color of hair. Eyes. Skin. Height. Religion. Names. Dates. Places. Signs of the Zodiac. Anything and everything. Doggedly, I plugged it in, planning to search for links later. Or perhaps I thought the patterns would form by themselves, the interconnecting bits of information drawn to each other like neuropeptides to receptor sites. Or maybe I just needed a rote task to occupy my mind, a mental jigsaw puzzle to give the illusion of progress.

At four-fifteen I tried Ryan again. Though he wasn't at his desk, the operator thought she'd seen him, and reluctantly began a search. While I waited, my eye fell on the monkey file. Bored, I dumped out the photos. There were two sets, one of Polaroids, the other of five-by-seven color prints. The operator came back on to tell me Ryan was not in any of the offices she'd rung. Yes, sigh, she'd try the coffee room.

I thumbed through the Polaroids. Obviously taken when the remains arrived in the morgue. Shots of a purple and black nylon gym bag, zipped and unzipped, the latter showing a bundle in its interior. The next few showed the bundle on an autopsy table, before and after it was unrolled.

The remaining half dozen featured the body parts. The scale on the ID card confirmed that the subject was, indeed, tiny, smaller than a full-term fetus or newborn. Putrefaction was advancing nicely. The flesh had begun to blacken and was smeared with something that looked like rancid tapioca. I thought I could identify the head, the torso, and the limbs. Other than that, I couldn't tell squat. The pictures had been taken from too far away, and the detail was lousy. I rotated a few, looking for a better angle, but it was impossible to make out much.

The operator came back with resolve in her voice. Ryan was not there. I'd have to try tomorrow. Denying her the opportunity to launch the argument she'd prepared, I left another message, and hung up.

The five-by-seven close-ups had been taken following cleaning. The detail that had escaped the Polaroids was fully captured in the prints. The tiny corpse had been skinned and disjointed. The photographer, probably Denis, had arranged the pieces in anatomical order, then carefully photographed each in turn.

As I worked my way through the stack, I couldn't help noting that the butchered parts looked vaguely like rabbit about to become stew. Except for one thing. The fifth print showed a small arm ending in four perfect fingers and a thumb curled onto a delicate palm.

The last two prints focused on the head. Without the outer covering of skin and hair it looked primordial, like an embryo detached from the umbilicus, naked and vulnerable. The skull was the size of a tangerine. Though the face was flat and the features anthropoid, it didn't take Jane Goodall to know that this was no human primate. The mouth contained full dent.i.tion, molars and all. I counted. Three premolars in each quadrant. The terminal monkey had come from South America.

It's just another animal case, I told myself, returning the pictures to their envelope. We'd get them occasionally, because someone thought the remains to be human. Bear paws skinned and left behind by hunters, pigs and goats slaughtered for meat, the unwanted portions discarded by a roadside, dogs and cats abused and thrown in the river. The callousness of the human animal always astounded me. I never got used to it.

So why did this case hold my attention? Another look at the five-by-sevens. Okay. The monkey had been cut up. Big deal. So are a lot of animal carca.s.ses that we see. Some a.s.shole probably got his jollies tormenting and killing it. Maybe it was a student, p.i.s.sed off at his grade.

With the fifth photo I stopped, my eyes cemented to the image. Once again, my stomach muscles knotted. I stared at the photo, then reached for the phone.

23.

THERE'S NOTHING EMPTIER THAN A CLa.s.sROOM BUILDING AFTER hours. It's how I imagine the aftermath of a neutron bomb. Lights burn. Water fountains spew forth on command. Bells ring on schedule. Computer terminals glow eerily. The people are absent. No one quenching a thirst, scurrying to cla.s.s, or clicking on keyboards. The silence of the catacombs. hours. It's how I imagine the aftermath of a neutron bomb. Lights burn. Water fountains spew forth on command. Bells ring on schedule. Computer terminals glow eerily. The people are absent. No one quenching a thirst, scurrying to cla.s.s, or clicking on keyboards. The silence of the catacombs.

I sat on a folding chair outside Parker Bailey's office at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal-UQAM. Since leaving the lab, I'd worked out at the gym, bought groceries at the Provigo, and fed myself a meal of vermicelli and clam sauce. Not bad for a quick and dirty. Even Birdie was impressed. Now I was impatient.

To say the biology department was quiet would be like saying a quark is small. Up and down the corridor every door was closed. I'd perused the bulletin boards, read the graduate school brochures, the field school announcements, the offers to do word processing or tutoring, the notices announcing guest speakers. Twice.

I looked at my watch for the millionth time-9:12 P.M P.M. d.a.m.n. He should be here by now. His cla.s.s ended at nine. At least, that's what the secretary had told me. I got up and paced. Those who wait must pace-9:14. d.a.m.n.

At 9:30 I gave up. As I slung my purse over my shoulder, I heard a door open somewhere out of sight. In a moment a man with an enormous stack of lab books hurried around the corner. He kept adjusting his arms to keep the books from falling. His cardigan looked as if it had left Ireland before the potato famine. I guessed his age at around forty.

He stopped when he saw me, but his face registered nothing. I started to introduce myself when a notebook slipped from the stack. We both lunged for it. Not a good move by him. The better part of the pile followed, scattering across the floor like confetti on New Year's Eve. We gathered and restacked for several minutes, then he unlocked his office and dumped the books on his desk.

"Sorry," he said in heavily accented French. "I-"

"No problem," I responded in English. "I must have startled you."

"Yes. No. I should have made two trips. This happens a lot." His English was not American.

"Lab books?"

"Yeah. I just taught a cla.s.s in ethological methodology."

He was brushed with all the shades of an Outer Banks sunset. Pale pink skin, raspberry cheeks, and hair the color of a vanilla wafer. His mustache and eyelashes were amber. He looked like a man who'd burn, not tan.

"Sounds intriguing."

"Wish more of them thought so. Can I-"

"I'm Tempe Brennan," I said, reaching into my bag and offering him a card. "Your secretary said I could catch you now."

As he read the card, I explained my visit.

"Yeah, I remember. I hated losing that monkey. It really cheesed me off at the time." Suddenly, "Would you like to sit?"

Without waiting for a reply, he began shoveling objects from a green vinyl chair and heaping them onto the office floor. I stole a peek around. His tiny quarters made mine look like Yankee Stadium.

Every inch of wall s.p.a.ce that wasn't covered with shelves was blanketed with pictures of animals. Sticklebacks. Guinea fowl. Marmosets. Warthogs. Even an aardvark. No level of the Linnaean hierarchy had been neglected. It reminded me of the office of an impressario, with celebrity a.s.sociations displayed like trophies. Only these photos weren't signed.

We both sat, he behind his desk, feet propped on an open drawer, I in the recently cleared visitor's chair.

"Yeah. It really cheesed me off," he repeated, then switched the topic suddenly. "You're an anthropologist?"

"Um. Hm."

"Do much with primates?"

"No. Used to, but not anymore. I'm on the anthropology faculty at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Occasionally I teach a course on primate biology or behavior, but I'm really not involved in that work anymore. I'm too busy with forensic research and consulting."

"Right." He waved the card. "What did you do with primates?"

I wondered who was interviewing who. Whom. "I was interested in osteoporosis, especially the interplay between social behavior and the disease process. We worked with animal models, rhesus mostly, manipulating the social groups, creating stress situations, then monitoring the bone loss."

"Do any work in the wild?"

"Just island colonies."

"Oh?" The amber eyebrows arched with interest.

"Cayo Santiago in Puerto Rico. For several years I taught a field school on Morgan Island, off the coast of South Carolina."