Deja Dead Page 0,135

it?

It kept coming back to that. Why didn’t I just tell Ryan what I knew and ask him to roust this guy?

Because it was personal. But not in the way I’d been telling myself. It wasn’t just a threat in my garden, an attack on my safety or Gabby’s. Something else was causing me to obsess over these cases, something deeper and more troubling. For the next hour, little by little, I admitted it to myself.

The truth was that, lately, I was scaring myself. I saw violent death every day. Some woman killed by some man and thrown into a river, a wood, a dump. Some child’s fractured bones uncovered in a box, a culvert, a plastic bag. Day after day I cleaned them up, examined them, sorted them out. I wrote reports. Testified. And sometimes I felt nothing. Professional detachment. Clinical disinterest. I saw death too often, too close, and I feared I was losing a sense of its meaning. I knew I couldn’t grieve for the human being that each of my cadavers had been. That would empty my emotional reservoir for sure. Some amount of professional detachment was mandatory in order to do the work, but not to the extent of abandoning all feeling.

The deaths of these women had stirred something in me. I ached for their fear, their pain, their helplessness in the face of madness. I felt anger and outrage, and a need to root out the animal responsible for the slaughter. I felt for these victims, and my response to their deaths was like a lifeline to my feelings. To my own humanity and my celebration of life. I felt, and I was grateful for the feeling.

That’s how it was personal. That’s why I wouldn’t stop. That’s why I’d prowl the monastery grounds, and the woods, and the bars and back streets of the Main. I’d persuade Ryan to follow this up. I’d figure out Julie’s client. I’d find Gabby. Maybe this was connected. Maybe not. No matter. One way or another, I’d flush out the sonofabitch responsible for this shedding of female blood, and I’d help shut him down. For good.

33

SPURRING THE INVESTIGATION TURNED OUT TO BE HARDER THAN I thought. Partly because of me.

By five-thirty on Friday afternoon my head and my stomach ached from the endless cups of machine coffee. We’d been discussing the files for hours. No one had turned up much, so we kept rehashing the same things over and over, sifting through the mountains of information, desperately searching for something new. There was little.

Bertrand was working the realtor angle. Morisette-Champoux and Adkins had listed their condos with ReMax. So had Gagnon’s neighbor. Huge firm, three different offices, three separate agents. None of them remembered the victims, or even the properties. Trottier’s father had used Royal Lepage.

Pitre’s former boyfriend was a doper who’d killed a prostitute in Winnipeg. Could be a break. Could be nothing. Claudel was on that.

The questioning of known sex offenders was continuing, coming up empty. Big surprise.

Teams of uniformed officers were canvassing the neighborhoods around the Adkins and Morisette-Champoux condos. Zero.

We had nowhere to turn so we were turning on one another. The mood was gloomy and patience was in short supply, so I bided my time, waiting for the right opening. They listened politely as I told them about the situation with Gabby, about the night in the car. I described the drawing, my conversation with J.S., and my surveillance of Julie.

When I finished, no one spoke. Seven women watched mutely from portable bulletin boards. Claudel’s pen wove complex webs and grids. He’d been silent and withdrawn all afternoon, as if disconnected from the rest of us. My account made him even more sullen. The sound of the large electric clock began to dominate the room.

Buzzzz.

“And you have no idea if this is the same sack of shit we chased from Berger?” Bertrand.

I shook my head.

Buzzzz.

“I say we bust the cocksucker.” Ketterling.

“For what?” Ryan.

Buzzzz.

“We could just be there for him, see how he deals with pressure.” Charbonneau.

“If he is our boy that might spook him. The last thing we want is for him to panic and blow town.” Rousseau.

“No. The last thing we want is for him to shove a plastic Jesus up someone else’s sweet spot.” Bertrand.

“The guy’s probably just a wienie wagger.”

“Or he could be Bundy with an underwear twist.”

Buzzzz.

Round and round it went like that, zigging and zagging from French to English. Eventually, everyone was drawing Claudel lines.

Buzzzz.

Then.

“How unreliable is this