Deja Dead Page 0,37

facing each other across stacks of file folders and overflowing in-baskets.

A tall, lanky man with hollow cheeks and hair the color of hand-rubbed pewter sat with his chair tipped back, feet propped high and ankles crossed. His name was Andrew Ryan. He spoke in the hard, flat French of an anglophone, stabbing the air with a ballpoint pen. His jacket hung from the chair back, its empty arms swinging in rhythm to the pen thrusts. The tableau reminded me of firemen at a firehouse, relaxed but ready at a moment’s notice.

Ryan’s partner watched him from across the desk, head tilted to one side, like a canary inspecting a face outside its cage. He was short and muscular, though his body was beginning to take on the bulges of middle age. He had the unlined tan of a bronzing salon, and his thick black hair was styled and perfectly combed. He looked like a would-be actor in a promo shot. I suspected even his mustache was professionally coifed. A wooden plaque on his desk said Jean Bertrand.

The third man perched on the edge of Bertrand’s desk, listening to the banter and inspecting the tassles on his Italian loafers. When I saw him my spirits dropped like an elevator.

“. . . like a goat shitting cinders.”

They laughed simultaneously, with the throaty sound men seem to share when enjoying a joke at the expense of women. Claudel looked at his watch.

You’re being paranoid, Brennan, I told myself. Get a grip. I cleared my throat and began weaving my way through the labyrinth of desks. The trio fell silent and turned in my direction. Recognizing me, the SQ detectives smiled and rose. Claudel did not. Making no attempt to mask his disapproval, he flexed and lowered his feet, and resumed his tassle inspection, abandoning it only to consult his watch.

“Dr. Brennan. How are you?” Ryan asked, switching to English and extending his hand in my direction. “You been home lately?”

“Not for several months.” His grip was firm.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you, do you pack an AK-47 when you go out down there?”

“No, we keep those mostly for home use. Mounted.”

I was used to their quips about American violence.

“They got indoor toilets down there yet?” asked Bertrand. His topic of choice was the South.

“In some of the bigger hotels,” I responded.

Of the three men, only Ryan looked embarrassed.

Andrew Ryan was an unlikely candidate for an SQ homicide detective. Born in Nova Scotia, he was the only son of Irish parents. Both were physicians who trained in London, arriving in Canada with En-glish as their sole language. They expected their son to follow into the professional ranks, and, having chafed under the confines of their own unilingualism, vowed to ensure his fluency in French.

It was during his junior year at St. Francis Xavier that things began to go bad. Enticed by the thrill of life on the edge, Ryan got into trouble with booze and pills. Eventually, he was spending little time on campus, preferring the dark, stale beer-smelling haunts of dopers and drunks. He became known to the local police, his benders frequently concluding on the floor of a cell, his finales played facedown in vomit. He ended up one night in St. Martha’s Hospital, a cokehead’s blade having pierced his neck, nearly severing his carotid artery.

As with a born-again Christian, his conversion was swift and total. Still drawn to life in the underbelly, Ryan merely changed sides. He finished his undergraduate studies in criminology, applied for and got a job with the SQ, eventually rising to the rank of detective lieutenant.

His time on the streets served him well. Though usually polite and soft-spoken, Ryan had the reputation of a brawler who could take the lowlifes on their own terms and match them trick for trick. I’d never worked with him. All this had come to me through the squad room grapevine. I’d never heard a negative comment about Andrew Ryan.

“What are you doing here today?” he asked. He swept his long arm toward the window. “You should be out enjoying the party.”

I could see a thin scar winding out of his collar and up the side of his neck. It looked smooth and shiny, like a latex snake.

“Lousy social life, I guess. And I don’t know what else to do when the stores are closed.”

I said it brushing bangs back from my forehead. I remembered my gym gear, and felt a bit intimidated by their impeccable tailoring. The three of them looked like