Black Notice

35

When I got Dr. Stvan on the phone, she remembered me without hesitation, which reinforced what Talley had told me. She was expecting my call and wanted to see me.

"I teach at the university tomorrow afternoon," she told me in English that sounded as if it had not been practiced in a while. "But you can come by in the morning. I get in at eight."

"Will eight-fifteen give you enough time to get settled?"

"Of course. Is there something I can help you with while you're in Paris?" she asked in a tone that made me suspect others could hear.

"I'm interested in how your medical examiner system works in France." I followed her cue.

"Not very well some of the time," she replied. "We're near the Gare de Lyon, off the Quai de la Rapйe. If you drive yourself, you can park in back where the bodies are received. Otherwise, come in to the front."

Talley looked up from telephone messages he was sifting through.

"Thanks," he said when I hung up.

"Where do you suppose Marino has wandered off to?" I asked.

I was getting anxious. I didn't trust Marino on his own. No doubt he was offending someone.

"There are but so many places he can go," Talley replied.

We found him downstairs in the lobby, sitting glumly by a potted palm. It seemed he had wandered through too many doors and had locked himself out of every floor. So he had taken the elevator down and hadn't bothered to ask for assistance from security.

I hadn't seen him this petulant in a while, and he was so surly on our way back to Paris that I finally moved to another seat and turned my back to him. I closed my eyes and dozed. I wandered to the dining car and bought a Pepsi without asking him if he wanted one. I bought my own pack of cigarettes and offered him nothing.

When we walked into the lobby of our hotel, I finally broke down.

"How about I buy you a drink?" I said.

"I gotta go to my room."

"What's wrong with you?"

"Maybe I should ask you that," he retorted.

"Marino, I don't have any idea what you're talking about. Let's relax in the bar for a minute and figure out what to do next about this mess we've gotten ourselves into."

"Only thing I'm doing next is going to my room. And it ain't me who's gotten us into a mess."

I let him step inside the elevator alone and watched his stubborn face disappear behind closing brass doors. I climbed the long, curved flights of carpeted stairs and was reminded how bad smoking was for my health. I unlocked my door and was not prepared for what I saw. Cold fear seized me as I walked over to the fax machine and stared at what the. chief medical examiner of Philadelphia, Dr. Harston, had sent. I sat down on the bed, paralyzed.

The lights of the city were bright, the sign for the Grand Marnier distillery was huge and high, and the Cafй de la Paix was busy below. I collected the paper off the fax machine, my hands shaking, my nerves jumping as if I had some awful disease. I got three Scotches from the minibar and poured all of them at once. I didn't bother to get ice. I didn't care if I felt like hell the next day because I knew I was going to anyway. There was a cover sheet from Dr. Harston.

Kay I was wondering when you'd ask. Knew you would when you were ready. Let me know if you have further questions. I'm here for you.

Vance.

Time numbly passed, as if I were catatonic, as I read the medical examiner's report of initial investigation, the description of Benton's body, what was left of it, in situ, in the gutted building where he died: Phrases floated past my eyes like ashes on the air. Charred body with bum fractures of the wrists and hands absent and skull shows laminar peeling burn fractures and charred down to muscle over the chest and abdomen.

The entrance of the gunshot wound to his head had left a half-inch hole in the skull that showed internal beveling of the bony fracture. It had entered behind the right ear causing radial fractures and impacting and terminating in the right petrous region.

He had a slight diastema between the maxillary centrals. I had always loved that subtle space between his front teeth. It made his smile more endearing because he was so precise in every other way, his teeth otherwise perfect because his perfect, proper New England family had made sure he wore braces. … Suntan pattern of swimming trunks. lie had left for Hilton Head without me because I was called to a scene. If only I'd said no and gone with him. If only I'd refused to work the first in what would prove to be a series of horrendous crimes that would eventually claim him as the final victim.

None of what I was looking at was manufactured. It couldn't be. Only Benton and I knew about the two-inch linear scar on his left knee. He had cut himself on glass in Black Mountain, North Carolina, where we had first made love. That scar had always seemed a stigma of adulterous love. How odd it was spared because soggy insulation from the roof had fallen on it.

That scar had always seemed a reminder of a sin. And now it seemed to turn his death into a punishment that culminated in my envisioning everything the reports described because I had seen it all before, and those images knocked me to the floor, where I sat crying and mumbling his name.

I did not hear the knocking of the door until it turned to pounding.

"Who is it?" I called out in a husky, ruined voice.

"What's wrong with you?" Marino said loudly through the door.

I weakly got up and almost lost my balance as I let him in.

"I been knocking for five minutes…" he started to say. "Jesus-fucking-Christ. What the hell's the matter?"

I turned my'back to him and walked over to the window.

"Doc, what is it? What is it?" He sounded frightened. "Did something happen?"

He came over and put his hands on my shoulders, and it was the first time he'd ever done that in all the years I'd known him.

"Tell me. What are all these body diagrams and shit on the bed. Is Lucy okay?"

"Leave me alone," I said.

"Not until you tell me what's wrong!"

"Go away."

He removed his hands and I felt coolness where they had been. I felt our space. He walked across the room. I heard him pick up the faxes. He was silent.

Then he said, "What the shit are you doing? Trying to make yourself crazy? Why the hell do you want to be looking at something like this?" His voice rose as his pain and panic did. "Why? You've lost your mind!"

I wheeled around and lunged for him. I grabbed the faxes. I shook them in his face. Copies of body diagrams, and toxicology and submitted evidence reports, the death certificate, toe tag, dental charts, what had been in his stomach, all of it drifting and scattering over the rug like dead leaves.

"Because you just had to say it," I yelled at him. "You just had to open your big, rude mouth and say he wasn't dead! So now we know, right? Read it your goddamn self, Marino."

I sat down on the bed and wiped my eyes and nose with my hands.

"Just read it and don't ever talk to me about it again," I said. "Don't you ever say anything like'that again. Don't you say he's alive. Don't you ever do that to me again."

The phone rang. He snatched it up.

"What" he blurted out. "Oh, yeah?" he added after a pause. "Well, they're right. We are making a fucking disturbance, and you send fucking security up, I'll just send 'em right back down 'cause I'm a goddamn-fucking cop and I'm in a goddamn-fucking-shitty mood right now!"

He slammed down the receiver. He sat down on the bed next to me. Tears filled his eyes, too.

"Now what do we do, Doc? Now what the hell do we do, huh?"

"He wanted us to have dinner together so we would fight and hate and cry like this," I muttered, tears slipping down my face. "He knew we would turn on each other and blame each other because there was no other way for us to let it out and go on."

"Yeah, I guess he profiled us;" Marino said. "I guess he did. Like he somehow knew it would happen, and how we'd act."

"He knew me," I muttered. "Oh, God, did he know me. He knew I would handle it worse than anybody. I'don't cry. I don't want to cry! I learned not to when my father was dying, because to cry was to feel, and it was too much to feel. It was as if I could make myself get dry inside like a dry pod that rattles, my feelings tiny, hard… rattling. I'm devastated, Marino. I don't think I can get over it. Maybe it would be a good thing if I got fired, too. Or quit."

"That ain't gonna happen," he said.

When I didn't reply, he got up and lit a cigarette. He paced.

"You want some dinner or something?"

"I just need to sleep," I said.

"Maybe getting out'of this room would be a good thing."

"No, Marino."

I knocked myself out with Benadryl and felt thickheaded and bleary when I forced myself out of bed the next morning. I looked in the bathroom mirror and saw exhausted, puffy eyes. I splashed cold water on my face and dressed and got a cab at seven-thirty, this time without any help from Interpol.

The Institut Mйdico-Lйgal, a three-story building of red brick and pitted limestone, was in the east section of the city. The Voie Expressway cut it off from the Seine, which this morning was the color of honey. The taxi driver dropped me off in front, where I walked through a small, lovely park with primroses, pansies, daisies and wild flowers, and old plantain trees. A young couple necking on a bench and an old man walking his dog seemed oblivious to the distinct stench of death seeping through the Institut's barred windows and black iron front door.

Ruth Stvan was well known for the unusual system she ran. Visitors were received by hostesses, so when the bereft came through the door, they were immediately intercepted by someone kind who helped them find their way, and one of these hostesses reached out to me. She led me along a tile corridor where investigators waited in blue chairs, and I understood enough of what they were saying to gather that someone had jumped out of a window the night before.

I followed my silent guide past a small chapel with stained glass where a couple was crying over a young boy inside an open white casket. Handling the dead here was different from what we did. In America, there simply wasn't time or funding for hostesses, chapels and handholding in a society in which shootings came in every day and no one lobbied for the dead.

Dr. Stvan was working on a case in the Salle d'Autopsie, designated as such by a sign over automatically opening doors. When l walked in, I was overwhelmed by anxiety again. I shouldn't have come here. I didn't know what I would say. Ruth Stvan was placing a lung in a hanging scale, her green gown splashed with blood, glasses speckled with it. I knew her case was the man who had jumped. His face was smashed, feet split open, shin tones driven up into his thighs.

"Give me one minute, please," Dr. Stvan said to me.

There were two other cases going on, those doctors wearing white. On chalkboards were names and case numbers. A Stryker saw was opening a skull while water ran loudly in sinks. Dr. Stvan was quick and energetic, fair and big-boned and older than me. I remembered that when we were in Geneva she had kept to herself.

Dr. Stvan covered her unfinished case with a sheet and pulled off her gloves. She began untying her gown in back as she walked over to me with sure, strong steps.

"How are you?" she asked.

"I'm not sure," I said.

If she thought this an odd answer, she didn't show it.

"Follow me, please, and we'll talk as I clean up. Then get a coffee."

She took me into a small dressing room and dropped her gown in a clothes bin. Both of us washed our hands with disinfectant soap, and she scrubbed her face, too, and dried it with a rough, blue towel.

"Dr. Stvan," I said, "obviously I'm not here for a friendly chat or to dabble into what your M.E. system is like over here. We both know that."

"Of course," she replied, meeting my eyes. "I'm not friendly enough for a social visit." She smiled a little. "Yes, we met in Geneva, Dr. Scarpetta, but we didn't socialize. It's a shame, really. There were so few women back then:'

She talked as we walked along the corridor.

"When you called, I knew what it was about because I'm the one who asked you here," she added.

"It makes me a little nervous to hear you say that," I replied. "As if I'm not nervous enough."

"We're after the same things in life. If you were me, I'd be visiting you, do you see? I would be saying, we can't let this continue. We can't let other women die this way. Now in America, in Richmond. He's a monster, this Loup-Garou: "

We stepped inside her office, where there were no windows, and stacks of files and journals and memos spilled from every surface. She picked up the phone and dialed an extension, and asked someone to bring us coffee.

"Please, make yourself comfortable, if that's possible. I'd move things out of the way but I've no place to put them."

I pulled a chair close to her desk.

"I felt very out of place when we were in Geneva," she said, her mind apparently jumping back to that memory as she shut the door. "And part of the reason is the system here in France. Forensic pathologists are completely isolated here and that's not changed and perhaps never will in my lifetime. We're allowed to talk to no one, which isn't always so bad because I like to work alone."

She lit a cigarette.

"I inventory the injuries and police tell the whole story, if they choose. If a case is sensitive, I talk to the magistrate myself and maybe I get what I need, maybe I don't. Sometimes when I raise the question, no lab is appointed for the tests, do you understand?"

"Then, in a sense," I said, "your only job is to find the cause of death."

She nodded. "For each case I receive a mission from the magistrate to determine the cause of death, and that's all."

"You don't really investigate."

"Not the way you do. Not the way I want to," she replied, blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth. "You see, the problem with French justice is the magistrate is independent. I can report to no one but the magistrate who appointed me, and only the minister of justice can take a case away and give it to another magistrate. So if there's a problem, I don't have the power to do anything about it. The magistrate does what he wants to my report. If I say it's a homicide and he doesn't agree, so be it. It's not my problem. This is law."

"He can change your report?" The idea was outrageous to me.

"Of course. I'm alone against everyone. And I suspect you are, too. “

I didn't want to think about how alone I was.

"I'm keenly. aware if anyone knew we were talking, it could be very bad, especially for you" I started to say.

She held up her hand for me to be quiet. The door opened and the same young woman who had escorted me came in with a tray of coffee, cream and sugar. Dr. Stvan thanked her and said something else in French I didn't get. The woman nodded and quietly left, shutting the door behind her:

"I told her to hold all calls," Dr. Stvan informed me. "I need to let you know right away that the magistrate who appointed me is someone I very much respect. But there are pressures above him, if you understand what I mean.

Pressures even above the minister of justice. I don't know where all of it comes from, but there was no lab work done in these cases, which is why you were sent."

"Sent? I thought it was you who asked for me."

"How do you take your coffee?" Dr. Stvan asked.

"Who told you I was sent?"

"Certainly, you've been sent in to relieve me of my secrets, and I'll give them up to you gladly. Do you take sugar and cream?"

"Black."

"When the woman was murdered in Richmond, I was told you'd be sent here if I'd talk to you."

"So you didn't request that I come?"

"I would never have asked such a thing, because I would never imagine such a request would be granted."

I thought of the private jet, the Concorde and all the rest of it.

"Could you spare a cigarette?" I said.

"I'm so sorry I didn't ask. I didn't know you smoke."

"I don't. This is just a detour. One that's lasted about a year. Do you know who sent me, Dr. Stvan?"

"Someone with enough influence to get you here almost instantly. Beyond that, I don't know."

I thought of Senator Lord.

"I'm worn down by what Loup-Garou brings to me. Eight women now," she said, staring off, a glazed, pained look in her eyes.

"What can I do, Dr. Stvan?"

"There's no evidence they were raped vaginally," she said. "Or sodomized. I took swabs of the bite marks, very strange bite marks with missing molars, occlusion and tiny teeth widely spaced. I collected hairs and all the rest of it. But let's go back to the first case, when everything got strange.

"As you might expect, the magistrate instructed me to submit all evidence to the lab. Weeks went by, months went by, no results ever came back. From then on, I learned. With subsequent cases believed to be LoupGarou, I didn't ask to submit anything."

She was silent for a moment, her thoughts elsewhere.

Then she said, "He's a strange one, this Loup-Garou. Biting the palms, the soles of the feet. It must mean something to him. I've never seen anything like it. And now you must contend with him as I have."

She paused, as if what she had to say next was very hard.

"Please be very careful, Dr. Scarpetta. He will came after you as he did me. You see, I'm the one who survived."

I was too stunned to speak.

"My husband is a chef at Le Dome. He is almost never home at tight, but as God would have it, he was sick in bed when this creature came to my door several weeks ago. It was raining. He said his car had just been in an accident and needed to call the police. Of course, my first thought was to help. I wanted to make certain he wasn't injured. I was very concerned.

"That was my vulnerability," she went on. "I think physicians have a savior complex, you know? We can take care of problems, no matter what they are, and that's the impulse he counted on, in retrospect, where I was concerned. There was nothing suspicious about him in the least, and he knew I would let him in, and I would have. But Paul lard voices and wanted to know who was there. The man ran off. I never got a good look at him. My house light was out, you see, because he'd unscrewed it, I found out later."

"Did you call the police?"

"Only a detective I trust." “Why?”

"One has to be careful."

"How did you know it was the killer?"

She sipped her coffee. By now, it was cold, and she added a little to both of ours to warm them up:

"I could feel it. I remember smelling a wet animal smell, but I think now I must have imagined it. I could feel the evil, the lust in his eyes. And he wouldn't show himself. I never saw his face, just the glint of his eyes as light spilled out the open door."

"Wet animal smell?" I asked.

"Different from a body odor. A dirty odor, like a dog that needs to be bathed. That's what I remember. But all of it happened so fast, and I can't be sure. Then the next day I received a note from him. Here. Let me show you."

She got up and unlocked a drawer of a metal filing cabinet, where files were squeezed so tightly together she had difficulty pulling one out. It was not labeled, and inside was a torn piece of blood-speckled brown paper protected by a transparent plastic evidence bag.

"Pas la police. iVa va, ga va. Pas de problйme, tout va bien. Le Loup-Garou," she read. "It means No police. It's all right. It's okay. Everything's fine. The werewolf."

I stared at the familiar block letters. They were mechanical and almost childish.

"The paper looks like a piece of a torn bag from the market," she said. "I can't prove it's from him, but who elsewould it be from? I don't know whose blood it is, becauseagain, I can do no tests, and only my husband knows I got this.” "Why you?" I asked. "Why would he come after you?"

"I can only suppose it's because he saw me at the crime scenes. So I know he watches. When he kills, he's out there in the dark somewhere, watching what people like us do. He's very intelligent, cunning. I have no doubt he knows exactly what happens when his bodies come to me."

I tilted the note in lamplight, looking for hidden strokes that might have been pressed into the paper by the force of someone writing on whatever had been on top of it. I saw none.

"When I read the note, the corruption became so plain to me, as if there had been any doubt," Dr. Stvan was saying. "Loop-Garou knew it would do no good to submit his note to the police, to the labs. He was telling me, even warning me, not to bother, and it's very odd, but I feel he was also telling me he won't try again."

"I wouldn't be so quick to assume that," I said.

"As if he needs a friend. The lonely beast needs a friend. I suppose in his fantasies he matters to me because I saw him and didn't die. But who can know a mind like that?"

She got up from her desk and unlocked another drawer in another filing cabinet. She lifted out an ordinary shoe box, peeled off tape and removed the lid. Inside were eight small, ventilated paper boxes and just as many small manila envelopes, each labeled with case numbers and dates.

"It's unfortunate no impressions were made of the bite marks," she said. "But to do that I would have to call in a dentist, and I knew that wouldn't be permitted. But I did swab them, and maybe that will help. Maybe it won't"

"He tried to eradicate the bite marks in Kim Luong's murder," I told her. "We can't cast them. Even photographs would do no good."

"I'm not surprised. He knows there's no one to protect him now. He's-how do you say-on your turf? And I'll tell you, it wouldn't be hard to identify him by his dentition. He has very strange pointed teeth, widely spaced. Like some sort of animal."

I began to get a strange sensation.

"I recovered hair from all of the bodies," she was saying. "Catlike hair. I've wondered if he breeds angora cats, something like that."

I leaned forward in my chair.

"Catlike?" I said. "Did you save it?"

She peeled tape off a flap and retrieved a pair of forceps from a.drawer in her desk. She dipped into an envelope, withdrawing several hairs. They were so fine they floated like down as she lowered them to the ink blotter.

"All the same, you see? Nine or ten centimeters long, pale blond. Very fine, baby-fine."

"Dr. Stvan, this isn't cat hair. It's human hair. It was on the clothing of the unidentified man We found in the cargo container. It was on the body of Kim Luong."

Her eyes widened.

"When you submitted evidence in the first case, did you submit some of these hairs?" I asked.

"Yes."

"And you heard nothing back?"

"To my knowledge the labs never analyzed what I sent:' "Oh, I bet they analyzed it, all right," I said. "I bet they know damn well these hairs are human and are too long for baby hair. They know what the bite marks mean and may even have recovered DNA from them."

"Then we should get DNA, too, from the swabs I'm giving you," she said, getting increasingly unsettled.

I didn't care. It no longer mattered.

"Of course, you can't do much with the hairs," she rambled. "Hirsute, no pigmentation. They would simply be consistent with each other, wouldn't they…?"

I wasn't listening. I was thinking of Kaspar Hauser. He spent the first sixteen years of his life in a dungeon because Prince Charles of Baden wanted to make sure Kaspar didn't have any claims to the crown:

"… no DNA without roots, I suppose…" Dr. Stvan went on. '

At age sixteen he was found by a gate, a note pinned to him. He was pale like a cave fish, nonverbal like an animal. A freak. He couldn't even write his name without someone's guiding his hand.

"The mechanical, block letters of a beginner," I thought out loud. "Someone shielded, never exposed to others, never schooled except at home. Maybe even self-taught.".

Dr. Stvan stopped talking.

"Only a family could shield someone from the time he was born. Only a very powerful family could circumvent the legal system, allowing this anomaly to keep on killing without being caught. Without embarrassing them, drawing unwanted attention to them."

Dr. Stvan was silent as every word I said torqued what she believed and aroused a new, more pervasive fear.

"The Chandonne family knows exactly what these hairs, the abnormal teeth, all of it means," I said. "And he knows. Of course he does, and he would have to suspect you know, even if the labs tell you nothing, Dr. Stvan. I think he came to your house because you saw his reflection in what he did to the bodies. You saw his shame, or he thought you did."

"Shame…?"

"I don't think the purpose of that note was to assure you he wouldn't try again," I continued. "I think it was mocking you, telling you he could do what he wanted with sovereign immunity. That he would be back and wouldn't fail next time."

"But it would appear he's not here anymore," Dr. Stvan answered me.

"Obviously, something changed his plans."

"And the shame he thinks I saw? I never got a good look at him."

"What he did to his victims is the only look at him we need. The hair isn't coming from his head," I said. "He's shedding it from his body."