All Cry Chaos (6 page)

    It was the first time Poincaré had met with the medical examiner away from the crime scene. Annette Günter was a matronly woman his age, built for endurance on a stocky, double-chinned and squarish frame that suggested Winston Churchill with curls. Had he not known her profession and met her at the counter of a cheese shop, or at a party, he would never have guessed she spent the better part of each day elbow deep in viscera. She was naturally too pleasant to have turned world-weary, a malady common to coroners. Günter impressed him as a sort of diligently pleasant neighbor who organizes blood drives and knits booties at birth announcements. By day she just happened to keep the company of corpses. "There can be no doubt about identification," she concluded. "Look at these." She held before him two images, a pairing of dark, vertical columns interrupted by bands of bright, horizontal strips.

    Even to Poincaré's untrained eye, the match was perfect.

    "The state crime lab in Massachusetts ran an analysis of dried urine from the rim of the commode in Fenster's apartment and an unwashed coffee cup from his office. Hair from a comb, with some follicles intact, rounded out the sample. Those three specimens had a single DNA signature, and as a unit they're identical to the analysis we ran off a sample of the victim's thigh bone. And then we have the fingerprints from Fenster's office and apartment in Boston, which match the prints we developed at the crime scene. He's your man," she said, pointing to a cardboard box in the corner of her office. The box was large enough to hold a soccer ball and was lined with heavy plastic sheeting folded over its top edges and covered firmly with a lid.

    It took Poincaré a moment to register her meaning. "You cremated him?"

    "He was three-quarters there anyway. We're shipping the remains tomorrow. And I'm going home because I promised my husband a pot roast. If I don't get started within the hour . . ." She checked her watch, then reached into a desk drawer for a tin of peppermints.

    "By whose authority?"

    His question edged toward accusation, a mistake. Günter carefully placed two mints on the tip of her tongue and then slid the tin across her desk, where they sat untouched. "A woman named Madeleine Rainier."

    Poincaré adjusted his tie, the depths of his miscalculation clear. "She's a possible suspect," he said.

    Günter was not impressed. "You know, I once had a case in which three different parties made a claim on a suicide. One insisted on cremation. One demanded embalming. The other said, 'Let the bastard rot.' Which is to say it's a waste of my precious time standing between a corpse and people fighting over it. No one told me not to proceed as usual. This isn't a cemetery, you know. When I complete my work, I move the bodies out like that." She snapped her fingers. "But I see you're upset, so . . ." She grabbed a file from a stack on her desk and flipped through papers and photographs until she found a page and paused over it. She slid the entire file across the desk. "Fairly straightforward, I'd say. It's not as if we did anything illegal, Henri."

    In fact, the memo before him could not have been clearer. According to Fenster's attorney in Boston, a fully executed will dated thirteen months earlier stipulated that Madeleine Rainier would serve as executor of Fenster's estate. If the memo was authentic, which Poincaré saw no reason to doubt, Rainier would have been within her rights to run Fenster's remains up a flagpole in Dam Square.

    "They were engaged to be married when he agreed to this," he said.

    "Lovely. What's that to me?"

    "When did she order the cremation?"

    "Last night, sitting where you are now. My assistant reached the provost's office at Harvard, which was able to locate the attorney, who contacted Miss Rainier. She arrived rather quickly, I must say."

    "She was already in Amsterdam."

    Günter retrieved her tin of peppermints. "Well, then. There's a coincidence."

    He closed the file and returned it, aware that Günter was now watching him with the same detached interest she showed her cadavers. His bile rose at how thoroughly he had misread Rainier. Three days earlier, the woman was barely capable of breathing unassisted. And now a move to destroy evidence? "Annette," he said, "you didn't find it odd that a thirty-year-old man with no dependents, in perfectly good health, would write a will?"

    "Apparently I lack your talent for doubting every possible fact." She straightened her desk blotter and squared a felt-lined box that held an elaborate fountain pen. Günter's office suite suddenly oppressed him with its smell of disinfectant and gurneys awaiting fresh customers.

    "Would you mind?" he said, pointing to the tin. "You wouldn't happen to know who the beneficiary was?"

    "Why would I? Look. The man's parents were dead. He had no relations. Do you think he wanted some paralegal at a law office in Boston choosing his casket? Under the circumstances, thirty is a reasonable age to write a will. I wrote mine at twenty-two."

    "You're a coroner, for God's sake."

    Over her shoulder, a cut-through to the autopsy room gave Poincaré a clear view of an assistant lifting the organ set from a recent arrival. He slopped the whole mess into a steel pan. A
nd this is what
makes a life? P
oincaré thought. He needed air.

    "You want me to apologize," Günter said. "For the cremation."

    "It's done. Forget it."

    "Well, I won't. The attorney's instructions were clear, as were Rainier's. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a pot roast to make." She retrieved her coat and turned to him with a consoling smile. "Cheer up, friend. You would have lost the remains to burial in a few days, anyway. Did I tell you she asked to see the body? I've been at this nearly forty years, and I've yet to see anything so affecting. These were gruesome remains, even by my standards, and I advised Miss Rainier against looking. When I pulled the drape, she smiled so sadly, then ran a hand over the bones as if she were bathing a child. I welled up at that, I'm not ashamed to say. She put her forehead to what remained of Dr. Fenster's and whispered something. She loved that man, what was left of him. How does one forget this?"

POINCARÉ STEPPED into the street, a cell phone pressed to his ear. "Gisele, for pity's sake tell me you have the lab results." Not only had the residue screenings not been conducted the night of the bombing; Amsterdam's police lab, busy analyzing its own long list of physical evidence from other cases, could not be cajoled, bribed, or threatened into faster service. Poincaré had waited thirty-six hours, until he could wait no longer, and dispatched De Vries to The Hague, to a different lab. Without a positive test, he could not detain Rainier. In fact, understaffed and preoccupied with the WTO meeting, he could not even monitor her movements properly. He had approached the Dutch police for surveillance help, but they ignored him. The detective who had so happily washed his hands of the affair, the one who promised full cooperation, waited twelve hours to return his call and said:
Why would we undertake the expense?

    Poincaré resorted to the one option left him, calling Rainier at her hotel at regular intervals on the pretext of posing follow-up questions. If he could hear her voice at least, if he knew she hadn't fled Amsterdam, he could detain her at a moment's notice. They had last spoken that morning, and he was beginning to relax his guard. Still, he needed those results and, at last, Gisele had them: "Positive for ammonium perchlorate," she reported. "Inside her suitcase and on the front of a pair of jeans and a blouse. I called the moment I heard, thirty minutes ago—and then every five minutes. I'm on the train from Den Hague right now. Shall we meet at the hotel?"

    He hailed a cab. "No—get an arrest warrant, and we'll hold her until you come." Poincaré made a second call and, twenty minutes later, arrived at the Ravensplein just as Ludovici and Laurent stepped clear of a car. They converged on the lobby to find the same clerk, her hair now jade green, working the reception desk. This time as Poincaré jerked open the door, the young woman stepped around the desk.

    "I called," she said, pleading her case. "I did. Both numbers you left me. The lady checked out ninety minutes ago. I called. I couldn't get through. I'm not in trouble, am I?"

    "Did she take a cab? Did someone pick her up?"

    "Just walked away, I think."

    "She paid in cash, I suppose."

    "It was a large bill. How did you know?"

    Two levels below street grade, the medical examiner's suite turned out to be a graveyard for cellular signals. Poincaré had told no one of his appointment, assuming he could be reached by mobile phone and resolved, after the botched interview with Rainier, to work alone. Interpol had not yet assigned him the Fenster case, and so he had made no "errors" as such; still, he knew he had blundered monumentally. Outside the Ravensplein he faced Ludovici to take his medicine full-on, Laurent present as witness.

    "Excellent work, Henri. She lied in the interview, she destroyed evidence—cremated it, then fled the scene of a crime. But at least you went by the book. Well done!"

    Guilty as charged. The one course left him was a protocol so automatic, so pointless, that he despaired of ever catching Rainier. He alerted rail-station and airport security on the chance she would be foolish enough to leave the country in plain view of the authorities. De Vries posted an alert to the Dutch border crossings. He also had Interpol issue a Red Notice—an international arrest warrant, which would permit local authorities to arrest her on sight in 188 member nations. But Rainier would remain in Holland for weeks, he figured—perhaps make a holiday of it in the Dutch countryside, then slip away unnoticed.

    Later that afternoon he reached Fenster's attorney in Boston, a friendly man who had no interest in sharing information. "I suggest you get a subpoena and then we can talk," said the man. "She's not exactly my client. But I still may invoke attorney-client privilege since I know her only through Dr. Fenster." So Poincaré arranged for the subpoena, aware that any information he pried loose would be dated: for Rainier had already discarded the phone numbers and addresses the attorney had used to locate her. With her usual efficiency, De Vries learned that Rainier had recently shuttered her antiques business, sold her condominium, canceled her credit cards, and closed her savings and checking accounts after wiring all funds to a bank in the Bahamas—an account she subsequently closed within days. With each inquiry De Vries asked if Rainier had left a forwarding address. The answer surprised no one.

    Both a priest and a legal scholar would have praised Poincaré for not arresting the woman on Thursday: the priest for his willingness to risk compassion and give Rainier every benefit of the doubt; the jurist for his guarding the outcome of a later trial by respecting due process. Better to let one criminal go free than to abuse the law and jeopardize the rights of many. A fine theory, though now Poincaré would live with the consequences. He would find her eventually; but the world in which he would search seemed, at present, very large.

Rainier's escape stuck in his throat like a bone he could neither swallow nor cough up. By temperament, Poincaré trained a careful, brutal eye on his failures because failure woke him up to himself. When his son was old enough to understand how papa earned a living, the child asked: "Do you know Sherlock Holmes?" Poincaré could only smile and say
yes
—the great detective was a close, personal friend. But the penetrating, unpleasant truth was that, unlike Conan Doyle's savant, Poincaré—more successful than most—could nonetheless point to real, live failures in his case files, and these failures offended him mightily, personally.

    He stretched, tipping back in a chair he had glued twice to keep from collapsing. The Dutch security services had done Interpol the supposed favor of engaging a short-term lease for the grand ballroom of an eighteenth-century palace near Dam Square. Without a hint of irony, Poincaré's hosts called the disintegrating cavern prime office space in the heart of Old Amsterdam.
Old
, at least, was accurate: every plastered surface was cracked and flaking. What cornice moldings remained suggested a drunk with blasted teeth. The parquet split and creaked underfoot, and the faded curtains elicited from Poincaré an actual groan when he first saw them. For no color moved him like the rich velvet crimson of an opera house, with Claire or Etienne at his side; and no color depressed him more than a beautiful red left to fade. He once knew a man much like this room, a sixthgeneration baron who was cash poor but ego rich, a poseur who waxed the ends of his mustache.

    The door squealed open and Laurent, back from one of their final tasks in Amsterdam, called to Poincaré: "Four more photos . . . The administrator who booked speakers for the conference didn't know where to send these after Fenster
canceled.
" He held a folder aloft. "Her actual word, the harpy. He'd sent them ahead so they could make copies for distribution at his talk. No doubt now—the image we found at the crime scene was part of the presentation."

    Poincaré reached the conference table just as Laurent set his briefcase down and frisked himself for a cigarette. A match flared.

    "Serge, please."

    Laurent had already lost a lobe of one lung to cancer and had since tried quitting, twice. He sucked hard and aimed a blue-white plume over the table. "It's confirmed," he said, pointing to the folder. "We've got a certified enigma in James Fenster. Let's trade assignments, Henri."

    Interpol had just that morning assigned Poincaré the Fenster case. After identifying the body, Dutch authorities contacted the American Embassy, which reserved its right to call in the FBI but asked that Interpol take the lead, with two provisos: that the Americans be kept informed at all stages of the investigation and that special attention be paid to sourcing the ammonium perchlorate. They wanted no more rocket fuel bombings. Fenster, apparently, was an afterthought.