Текст книги "Bones Never Lie"

Автор книги: Kathy Reichs

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CHAPTER 15

I CHECKED WITH Larabee. He had no problem with my being away for a few days.

Before leaving the office, I booked two seats on the 8:25 nonstop to Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau. Then I phoned to arrange for cat care.

My neighbor was unavailable but suggested her granddaughter, Mary Louise Marcus, who lived just blocks from Sharon Hall. I called. Mary Louise was available, at a whopping ten bucks a day. She promised to come by at seven to meet me and Birdie.

On my way across uptown, I stopped at Bojangles’, Slidell’s favorite, and bought enough food for a family of six.

It was after two when I arrived at the LEC. Slidell was at the computer, lips pressed to his teeth, head wagging slowly from side to side. Tinker was sticking pins into a map of North Carolina spread on a corkboard that hadn’t been there before. Today he looked like someone sponsored by Wiseguys R Us. Black jacket, black shirt, shiny lavender tie.

Ryan was speaking on his mobile. I heard the name Manon, guessed he was trying to locate the Violette family. His quiet French rode on air brittle with suppressed hostility.

I tossed my jacket on a chair and waited. After concluding his call, Ryan briefed me.

Slidell had made zero progress with his license plate search. The guy in IT had recovered only snatches of data from Leal’s computer, none of it useful. Barrow was having no luck locating Nance’s laptop. The age-progressed image of Pomerleau wouldn’t be ready for days, maybe a week. Ditto DNA sequencing from the hair found in Leal’s trachea. The tox screen was going nowhere.

I placed my bags on the table. “How did Slidell react to the amelogenin shocker?”

“His commentary was unconstructive.”

“Lunch,” I announced.

Slidell’s eyes rolled up to peer at me over the screen. I could almost see the smell of deep-fried grease hit his olfactory lobes.

As I began spreading paper plates, plastic utensils, and cardboard cartons of chicken and sides, Slidell heaved to his feet. Behind me, I heard Tinker cross the room, keys jangling in a pocket or on a belt loop.

“We need to think about highways.” Tinker spooned mashed potatoes onto his plate, added gravy, slaw, and a biscuit. “Nance was dumped at Latta Plantation, not far off I-485.” To Slidell, “You gonna paw every piece?”

Slidell continued digging through the chicken, maybe even slowed, eventually emerged with two legs and two thighs.

Tinker stepped up and helped himself to a breast. Took a bite before continuing with his train of thought. “Gower was left just off a state highway, Vermont 14, I think Rodas said.”

“Pure genius.” Spoken through masticated drumstick. “We’ve determined that vics are transported by car. We can forget tossing all those choppers and yachts.”

I ignored Slidell’s sarcasm. “Koseluk was abducted in Kannapolis, Estrada in Salisbury. Both lie along the I-85 corridor.”

Tinker looked at me with his flat little eyes. Swallowed. “I’m having a hard time putting those two in the show.”

“Leal was found under I-485,” I added.

“Amelogenin says she’s not in there, either.”

“Not necessarily.”

Tinker did something that combined a shrug with a “Give it to me” finger curl.

“Pomerleau could have an accomplice. Or—”

Slidell cut me off, voice dripping with scorn as he addressed Tinker. “Low number of vics make it easier to tie the bow? Buff up the image?”

“Or perhaps you’re projecting, Detective. Talking about yourself,” shot back Tinker.

I feared the smart-ass tone would goad Slidell to smash Tinker’s plate up into his face, Stooges-style. I glanced at Skinny. His lower lids were crimped and twitching, sparkling grease coating his upper lip and chin.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Now Slidell was the recipient of Tinker’s flat-eyed stare. For a moment their gazes locked. Skinny turned away first. “That’s it. I ain’t working with this troll.” Wrapping his poultry in a napkin, Slidell strode from the room.

Tinker finished eating, wiped his hands digit by digit, and returned to his map.

I raised my brows at Ryan. He raised his at me.

I pointed at the chicken.

Ryan shook his head.

Realizing I’d never answered Slidell’s question about a cellphone for Nance, I asked Ryan if he’d come across any mention of one in the file. He had not.

While clearing the lunch debris, I told Ryan about our flight reservations. He hesitated a moment, then thanked me. Asked how much time we had. I suggested we leave the LEC by six. He nodded, grabbed his phone, and started punching digits.

Ryan hadn’t been back to Montreal since Lily’s death. I wondered what storm was swirling inside him. Didn’t ask.

After positioning one of the empty boards between Nance and Koseluk, I pulled the ME107-10 file from my purse and began posting information. Biological profile. Estimated time of death. Date of discovery. Location. Scene photos of the skeleton and associated articles.

Tinker abandoned his pushpins to eyeball my display. Which was meager. “Seriously?”

“Clothing was still in place on some of the bone clusters. Missing articles were probably dragged off by scavengers.”

Tinker nodded, noncommittal.

“A lot fits the pattern.”

“Where was this kid?”

I showed Tinker on his map. He stuck in a yellow pin, indulging me.

It took a moment to decipher his coding system. Green marked the intersection where Nance was last seen alive, red the place her body was found. Stoplight colors for a murder solidly connected to another by DNA.

Blue indicated LSA sites for girls “not in the show,” yellow the places Estrada and Leal were found.

The rainbow pins flowed north along I-85, circled Charlotte on the I-485 beltway, and dropped south toward the South Carolina border. One red and two blue pins marked inner-city locations.

One yellow pin sat off to the southeast by itself.

Tinker read my thoughts. “Estrada’s body wasn’t anywhere near I-85.”

“It wasn’t far from NC-52.” I studied the configuration, willing a pattern to make itself known. “Estrada was at a campground near the Pee Dee National Wildlife Refuge. Nance was at Latta Plantation.” I was juggling aloud, twisting and turning pieces to make them connect. “ME107-10, my Jane Doe, was at the Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden. Gower was at a quarry.”

“Break out the champagne. We got us a nature lover.”

Smiling coolly at Tinker’s smarmy cynicism, I resumed posting ME107-10.

We worked the next couple of hours without saying much. After finishing my Jane Doe board, I began with the other girl about whom we knew almost nothing.

Ryan was right. Little effort had gone into finding Colleen Donovan. And paperwork wasn’t Pat Tasat’s strong suit.

I went through the interview summaries. The aunt, Laura Lonergan, a tweaker and sometime prostitute. The director of a homeless shelter. A dozen street kids. A hooker named Sarah Merikoski, aka Crystal Rose, who’d filed the MP report.

At some point I heard Slidell slouch in and settle at the computer. I continued reading.

It seemed a cliché. But clichés become what they are due to constant validation. A case either broke quickly and was solved in the first frantic days when witness memories were vivid, evidence was fresh, and theories abounded, or it lingered, dried up, inevitably grew cold. The longer the drought, the deeper the freeze.

Such was not the case with Colleen Donovan. Twenty-four hours. Forty-eight. A year and a half. It wouldn’t have mattered. Right out of the gate, there was nothing to indicate what had happened to her or why. Or when.

If anything had happened to her. No proof of a crime existed. No blood spatter on a hotel room wall. No treasured belonging left behind in a shelter. No wallet or purse recovered from a trash can. No whispered fears about a john or pimp.

One thread ran through every witness statement. Life on the street is harsh and unpredictable. Kids come, kids go. Everyone but Merikoski, an old-style streetwalker and Donovan’s self-appointed tutor on the workings of the sex trade, felt Colleen had taken off on her own. Even Merikoski had misgivings.

A lack of evidence meant no narrative. No narrative meant no suspect.

No big bang break.

As I worked through the chronology, I was vaguely aware of Slidell leaving his keyboard. Of raised voices by the corkboard.

A few calls had come in from the public, not many. A kid named Jon Sapuppo reported seeing Donovan on a bus on Wilkinson Boulevard two weeks after Merikoski walked into the LEC to file her report. A clerk claimed he’d sold Donovan cigarettes at a gas station on Freedom Drive.

It registered in my brain that the scrum by the corkboard was gaining in volume. Still I ignored it.

The calls tapered off, stopped by the end of February. In August the aunt called to ask where the case stood. That was it.

“… questioning my integrity?”

“I’m questioning your effort.”

Slidell and Tinker were at it again.

“You stick to the cold ones,” Slidell snapped. “Leave Leal to me.”

“Once burned, twice shy, eh, Skinny?”

“What the hell does that mean?”

I turned in my chair. Slidell was glaring at Tinker, arms down, hands balled into fists.

“Don’t push too hard? Play it careful?”

“I’m pushing full-out. There ain’t much to push.”

“You background the guy who spotted that car?”

“He’s got cataracts and a prostate the size of a squash.”

“How’s that computer search going?”

“It’s going.” Slidell’s tone sounded dangerous.

“You get Donovan’s juvie file?”

“Yeah. She lifted a watch at Kmart. Got caught in a sweep with an ounce of weed in her purse. Oh, and her big one. She fell while shit-faced and had to have her head stitched.”

That stilled Tinker a moment. “This Pomerleau. She works your turf, what, five years, and you can’t roust her?”

“I’m following every lead, you worthless piece of—”

“Are you?”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I’m just wondering. It took a while to put that other thing behind you. Maybe you decide to play it safe on this one. You don’t screw up, everyone forgets. Pretty soon you’re a rock star again.”

“You’re a fucking moron.”

“Or is your beef something else?” Tinker’s mouth curled in an oily little grin. “Something more personal.”

Slidell gave Tinker a long, hard stare, his face so red it was almost purple.

“You had to know Verlene would eventually trade up.” Tinker jumped his eyebrows, Groucho-style.

“Bloody hell!”

I shot to my feet. “Do I have to turn a hose on you two?”

Slidell looked at me. Shook his head in disgust to say I didn’t get it. “I’m filing a complaint on this asshole.” He pivoted and stomped from the room.

I checked my watch. Ryan had reviewed all the other files. Was now focused on Montreal.

I crossed to the boards. Slowly worked my way down the row. I was looking at Shelly Leal’s school portrait when something said pssst in my head.

What?

I’d seen no pattern in Tinker’s pins. No geo-profile to suggest a terrain-motivated course of action.

Mama thought the LSA dates were significant. Was my unconscious telling me there was something more there?

Leal had gone missing ten days earlier, on Friday, November 21. I got my iPhone and pulled up a calendar for 2009. Felt a jolt of excitement. Nance had also disappeared on a Friday.

I checked 2007. The jolt fizzled. Gower’s LSA date was a Thursday. But so was Koseluk’s. Estrada had vanished on a Sunday.

I jotted the dates, returned to the table, and studied the list.

The pssst called out louder.

On a whim, I did some math.

For a moment I sat very still, staring at the numbers I’d generated. Feeling a lump at the base of my throat.

“Ryan.”

He looked up.

“Gower disappeared on October 18, 2007. Nance on April 17, 2009.”

He nodded, clearly puzzled by the chill in my voice.

“There’s an eighteen-month interval between the two abductions.”

Ryan nodded again.

“A little over two and a half years go by between Nance and Koseluk.”

Ryan ran the numbers in his head. “Twenty-nine months.”

“But if you slot in ME107-10, my Jane Doe skeleton, the intervals are cut to roughly fifteen months.” Ryan started to speak. I cut him off. “Koseluk vanished on September 8, 2011. Estrada on December 2, 2012.”

He saw where I was going. “Fifteen months in between.”

“Merikoski reported Donovan missing on February 1, 2014.”

“According to her statement, she hadn’t seen the kid in weeks.”

“Leal vanishes nine months later.”

“Remember Mama’s theory?”

“Each recent LSA links to the LSA of a vic in Montreal.”

We’d accepted the idea of the linked dates. But Mama had grasped the full significance of the pattern. Because Ryan and I hadn’t done the math that day, we hadn’t seen it. Or perhaps we’d gotten channeled on the difference in ages between the earlier and the more recent victims.

As one, we now had the same terrible thought.

“The intervals are decreasing,” I said. “The next child could be taken this February sixth. That’s roughly two months off.”

PART II

CHAPTER 16

WE LEFT THE law enforcement center twenty minutes late. Fortunately, the girl who was going to catsit for me arrived at the annex precisely at seven. She was a gangly kid wearing the kind of cloche hat once favored by flappers. Birdie took to her right off. Ryan and I left them playing fetch with a red plaid mouse in the study.

I transit a lot of airports. Except for baggage retrieval, which takes longer than the average fall harvest, Charlotte Douglas is perhaps my favorite. Rocking chairs. Grand piano. Sushi bar. That night, forget it. We had barely enough time to grab takeout and dash to the gate.

The wheels left the tarmac right on the dot. Ryan and I had twelve hundred miles of East Coast to eat lukewarm barbecue and fries and plan our attack.

We knew we’d be on our own. The Service de police de la Ville de Montréal detectives who’d worked the case, Luc Claudel and Michel Charbonneau, were both unavailable. Claudel was in France, Charbonneau was on leave following knee surgery. Perhaps just as well. Given the jurisdictional rivalries between the provincial and city cops, we doubted much help would come from the latter on a ten-year-old file.

Angela Robinson was fourteen when she disappeared in Corning, California, in 1985. Hers had been one of the three skeletons unearthed in the pizza parlor basement in 2004. Stalled at every turn, Slidell had agreed to phone the Tehama County Sheriff’s Department to try to churn the waters out there. With little optimism. Almost thirty years had passed since Robinson’s abduction.

The other skeletons belonged to Manon Violette and Marie-Joëlle Bastien. The former was fifteen, the latter sixteen, when they vanished in 1994.

Ryan’s phone queries concerning Bastien had turned up zilch. She was from Bouctouche, New Brunswick, and in the two decades since her disappearance, her nuclear family had dispersed, leaving only a few cousins in the area. No one recalled anything about Marie-Joëlle except that she’d been murdered. And that her remains were buried in the cimetière Saint-Jean-Baptiste.

Ryan had fared better with Violette. Manon’s parents still lived at the same address on boulevard Édouard-Montpetit in Montreal. Though reluctant, they’d agreed to see us the next day.

In the morning, after reexamining our respective files, we would interview Mère and Père Violette. Then we’d work on locating Tawny McGee, the sole survivor of the Pomerleau-Catts reign of terror. We held little optimism that the visits would yield fruit. But what the hell. Nothing else was working.

Another aviation miracle. The flight landed early. The bookend punctuality made me mildly uneasy.

Exiting the airport, I was hit by a wind corkscrewing straight off the tundra. I admit it—I gasped. No matter how often it happens, I’m never prepared for that first frigid slap.

Ryan and I shared a taxi from Dorval. At his insistence, I was dropped first. I suppose it made sense. My condo is in Centreville. His is across the St. Lawrence in a concrete LEGO curiosity called Habitat 67.

Ryan offered to collect me in the morning. Happy to avoid the Métro, and frostbite, I accepted.

Digging for keys, I was aware of the taxi lingering at the curb, exhaust billowing like a small white cumulus in the red glow of the taillights. I was touched. Though I knew we had no future together, it meant something that he still cared about my safety.

My condo was cold and dark. Before removing my inadequate autumn-in-Dixie jacket, I thumbed the lever on the thermostat left. Way left. The hum of the furnace sounded loud in the stillness.

After a slapdash facial and dental effort, I threw on sweats and dropped into bed.

I dreamed about snow.

I awoke to bright sunlight leaking around the edges of the shade. Knew the day would be colder than crap.

The cupboard was bare, not even coffee. Rather than hike to the corner dépanneur, I skipped breakfast.

Ryan phoned at 7:55 as he was making the turn onto my street. I dug out my Kanuk jacket, mittens, and a scarf. Pulled on boots and set forth.

I was right. The air was so crisp, it felt like tiny crystals sliding in and out of my nose. The sun was a tight white ball hanging low in an immaculate blue sky.

I scurried to Ryan’s Jeep and climbed in.

Ryan never tired of teasing about my inadequacy in dealing with polar climes. Today he said nothing. His skin looked gray, and a dark half-moon sculpted each lower lid.

Congealed blood marked a spot on Ryan’s chin that he’d nicked while shaving. I wondered if he’d slept. If so, I guessed he’d dreamed about the Lily-shaped void now forever in his life.

I also wondered if he’d called ahead to his squad, or if he’d opted to appear unannounced. Either way, I suspected he was dreading the upcoming encounter.

You’ve got it. I asked about neither.

Traffic was surprisingly light across Centreville and through the Ville-Marie Tunnel. By eight-fifteen we were parked at the Édifice Wilfrid-Derome, a T-shaped high-rise in a working-class neighborhood just east of the city center.

Here’s how the place works.

For almost twenty years I have served as forensic anthropologist for the Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médicine legale, the central crime and medico-legal lab for the province of Quebec. Charlotte, North Carolina? Montreal? Right. The commute is a bitch. A story for another time.

The LSJML occupies the top two floors of Wilfrid-Derome, twelve and thirteen. The Bureau du coroner has ten and eleven. The morgue and autopsy suites are in the basement.

Ryan is a lieutenant-détective with the provincial police, the Sûreté du Québec. The SQ has the rest of the building.

After entering the front doors, we swiped our security cards and passed through thunk-thunk metal gates. Ryan took an elevator to the Services des Enquêtes sur les crimes contre la personne, located on the second floor. I waited for the restricted LSJML/Coroner elevator.

I ascended with a dozen others mumbling “Bonjour” and “Comment ça va?” At that hour, “Good morning” and “How’s it going?” are equally perfunctory no matter the language.

A woman from ballistics asked if I’d just come from the Carolinas. I said I had. She queried the weather. When I answered, my fellow passengers groaned.

Five of us exited on the twelfth floor. After crossing a marble-floored lobby, I swiped a different security card, then swiped it again to pass into the medico-legal wing. The board showed only two pathologists present, Jean Morin and Pierre LaManche, the chief. The others were testifying, teaching, or absent on personal leave.

Continuing along the corridor, I passed pathology and histology labs on my left, pathologists’ offices on my right. Through observation windows and open doors, I could see secretaries booting up computers, techs flipping dials, scientists and analysts donning lab coats. All the world slamming down coffee.

The anthropology/odontology lab was last in the row. There I used an old-fashioned key to enter.

My previous visit had been almost a month earlier. My desk was mounded with letters, flyers, and ads. A packet of prints from a Division d’identité judiciaire photographer. A copy of Voir Dire, the LSJML gossip sheet. One demande d’expertise en anthropologie form.

After removing my copious outerwear, I skimmed the anthropology consult request. Bones had been found in a farmer’s field near Saint-Chrysostome. If the remains were human, LaManche wanted a full bio-profile, estimated PMI, and trauma analysis.

Inwardly groaning, I walked to the side counter and opened a brown paper bag stamped with SQ identifiers. The contents included a partial tibia, a phalange, and one rib. Nothing human in the lot. That was why LaManche hadn’t phoned me in Charlotte. He knew. But perfectionist that he was, the old man had held the bones for my evaluation.

After getting coffee, I returned to the lab and dug three dossiers from a gray metal filing cabinet around the corner from my desk. LSJML-38426, LSJML-38427, LSJML-38428. The numbering system was different, but the covers were the same neon yellow as at the MCME.

I began by studying the pictures. And circled straight to that cellar with its rats and refuse and reek of decay.

Manon Violette’s bones were jumbled in a crate stamped with the words Dr. Energy’s Power Tonic. Marie-Joëlle Bastien’s skeleton lay naked in a shallow grave. Angela Robinson’s was wrapped in a moldy leather shroud.

The images. My findings. Reports of the SQ and city cops. Lab results. The final positive IDs. The names of those responsible. Pomerleau. Catts, aka Menard.

At one point I lingered on a crime scene pic of the house on de Sébastopol. I thought of the original owners, Menard’s grandparents, the Corneaus. Wondered if the crash in which they’d died had ever been investigated.

The file felt like a phone call from a decade ago.

Two hours later, I sat back in my chair, frustrated and discouraged. I’d found nothing I didn’t already know. Except that Angela Robinson had broken her wrist in a fall from a swing at age eight. I’d forgotten that.

The wall clock said 10:40.

I wrote a brief report on the Saint-Chrysostome deceased. Odocoileus virginianus. White-tailed deer. Then I went to tell LaManche. He was not in his office. I left a note.

As agreed, I met Ryan in the lobby at eleven.

André and Marguerite Violette lived in Côte-des-Neiges, a neighborhood known for sprawling cemeteries and the Université de Montréal, not for architectural caprice. Like the Westmount of the well-heeled English, and the Outremont of their French counterparts, the quartier is up-mountain from Centreville, a mix of student, middle class, and blue collar, with enough rough spots to make it interesting.

Twenty minutes after leaving Wilfrid-Derome, Ryan pulled to the curb on a stretch of boulevard Édouard-Montpetit within spitting distance of the university campus. We both took a moment to look around.

Duplexes and low-rise apartments lined the street, red brick, plain, and functional. No turrets, no mansard roofs, no curlicue iron stairs. None of the whimsy that gives Montreal its charm.

The Violette building fit with the theme. The address was posted on a two-story brick box stuck to another two-story brick box, each accessed by a set of shotgun steps.

“Remind me,” I said. “What did André do?”

“He was a pipe fitter. Still is.”

“And Marguerite?”

“She irons his shorts.”

“As I recall, he was difficult.”

“The guy was a cocky little prick.”

“Charming turn of phrase.”

“What I have can’t be taught.”

Ryan and I got out and climbed to the door, footsteps clanging on the stiff metal risers.

When Ryan rang the bell, I heard a muffled double bong, then a voice barked once, like a Doberman firing a warning. Seconds later, locks rattled and the door opened inward.

André Violette looked smaller than I remembered, shorter and thinner. His hair was dyed now, dull and unrelentingly black. The pompadour styling was unchanged from 2004. So was the brash kiss-my-ass attitude.

“Perhaps you remember us. I’m Detective Ryan. This is Dr.—”

“I know who you are.”

“Thank you for seeing us.”

“Pfff. You give me a choice, me?”

Joual is a form of Quebecois French. Some speak it due to lack of education, others as a statement of francophone pride. André’s accent was thicker than I recalled. His moi came out a nasal “moe”; his toi was “toe.” I doubted his choice of lexicon was based on politics.

“We’re very sorry—”

André cut me off. “For my loss. I heard that speech ten years ago.”

“We’re still working to find the woman who hurt your daughter.”

No reply.

“May we come in?” Ryan’s tone said the request was clearly a formality.

André stepped back. We followed him down a short hall to a living room overfilled with bulky sofas, chairs, and carved mahogany pieces. A tasseled lamp occupied every table. A doily protected every seat back. Shelves on either side of a painted brick fireplace held bric-abrac, religious statues, and framed photos.

André dropped into a chair and lifted an ankle onto a knee. The upraised foot looked unnaturally large inside its salt-stained boot.

As Ryan and I settled on opposite ends of the couch, a woman materialized in a doorway to our left. Her hair, once brown, was fast going gray. She was doing nothing to hide it. I liked her for that.

André’s eyes cut to his wife. “Is it all right—?” she started.

André flicked an impatient hand. The woman scuttled to a chair, hands clutched to her chest.

I’d never met Marguerite Violette. Back in ’04, André had been my sole point of contact. It was André who’d delivered antemortem records. André to whom I’d reported the ID.

I recalled his odd reaction. He hadn’t cried, hadn’t questioned, hadn’t lashed out. He’d pulled a Mr. Goodbar from his pocket, eaten half the chocolate, risen, and walked from my office.

Seeing the Violettes together, I understood the dynamic.

“Would anyone like—?” Marguerite began.

“This ain’t a social visit.” To Ryan, “So, what? You finally caught this freak?”

“I’m sorry I can’t report that. Yet. But there are new leads.”

André shook his head. Marguerite slumped visibly.

“We have reason to believe that the woman involved in your daughter’s abduction—”

“My daughter’s murder.” André’s foot began winging on his knee.

“Yes, sir. We believe your daughter’s abductor is now in the U.S.”

“Anique Pomerleau.” Marguerite’s whisper was barely audible.

Ryan nodded. “Recently discovered evidence places Pomerleau in Vermont in ’07, and in North Carolina this year.”

“What evidence?” André asked.

“DNA.”

Marguerite’s eyes went wide. The irises were blue and flecked with caramel-colored points. “Has she hurt another child?”

“I’m sorry,” Ryan said softly. “I can’t discuss details of the investigation.”

“So arrest the bitch,” André snapped. “It’s good she’s in America. They can put her down.”

“We are using every resource at our disposal to find her.”

“That’s it? Ten years and you tell us our kid’s killer maybe left her spit in one place or another? Whoop-de-fucking-do.” The last was delivered in English. “You guys are worthless. Next you’ll say it’s bonhomme Sept-Heures done it.”

“You’ve had a lot of time to think,” I said gently. “Perhaps one of you has remembered a detail that hadn’t occurred to you back when Manon went missing. Or hadn’t seemed important. Any bit of information could prove useful.”

“Remember? Yeah, I remember. Every day.” His face hardened, and venom infiltrated his voice. “I remember how my baby kicked off the covers and slept sideways on her bed. How she loved rainbow sherbet. How I patched up her knee when she fell off her bike. How her hair smelled like oranges after she washed it. How she got on the fucking Métro and never came home.”

André’s jaw clamped suddenly. His cheeks were aflame with ragged patches of red.

Ryan caught my eye. I got the message and didn’t reply.

But neither Violette seemed compelled to fill the awkward silence that followed the outburst. André remained mute. Marguerite’s breathing went faster and shallower as a thousand emotions clearly vied for control of her face.

I studied André’s eyes, his body language. Saw a man hiding pain behind macho bluster.

A full minute passed. Ryan spoke first. “Those are precisely the types of recollections that might prove useful.”

“I got a recollection. I recall my knitting club meets today.” André’s foot was again dancing on his knee. “We’re done.”

“Mr. Violette—”

“I got a right to remain silent, yeah?”

“You are not a suspect, sir.”

“I’m gonna do that anyway.”

“Thank you for your time.” Ryan rose. I followed. “And again, we are so sorry for your loss.”

André remained seated, his thoughts obviously fixed on things other than needles and yarn.

Marguerite led us down the hall. At the door, she placed a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t judge my husband harshly. He’s a good man.”

The sadness in the caramel-blue eyes seemed bottomless.