Bones to Ashes (27 page)

I didn’t cry when I read that. But it was close.

After much searching, a place was found for Archange away from Tracadie. One hundred and sixteen years after opening, the lazaretto finally closed its doors.

The year was 1965.

I stared at the date, hearing yet another subliminal whisper.

As before, I struggled to bring the message to clarity. My exhausted brain refused to process fresh data.

A weight hit my lap. I jumped.

Birdie
brrrp-ed
and rubbed his head on my chin.

“Where’s Harry, Bird?”

The cat
brrrp-ed
again.

“You’re right.”

Gathering the feline, I crawled into bed.

Harry was sitting on a carved wooden bench outside Obéline’s gazebo, the totem pole casting zoomorphic shadows across her face. She was holding a scrapbook, insisting I look.

The page was black. I could see nothing.

Harry spoke words I couldn’t make out. I went to turn the page, but my arm jerked wildly. I tried over and over, with the same spastic result.

Frustrated, I stared at my hand. I was wearing gloves with the fingers cut off. Nothing protruded from the holes.

I tried to wiggle my missing fingers. My arm jerked again.

The sky darkened and a piercing cry split the air. I looked up at the totem pole. The eagle’s beak opened and the carved bird screeched again.

My lids dragged apart. Birdie was nudging my elbow. The phone was ringing.

Fumbling the handset to my ear, I clicked on.

“—lo.”

Ryan made none of his usual sleeping-princess jokes. “They’ve cracked the code.”

“What?” Still sluggish.

“Cormier’s thumb drive. We’re in. You available to scan faces?”

“Sure, but—”

“Need a ride?”

“I can drive.” I checked the clock: 8:13.

“Time to make yourself useful, princess.” The old Ryan.

“I’ve been up for hours.” I looked at Bird. The cat looked back. Disapproving?

“Right.”

“I was online until three-thirty.”

“Learn much?”

“Yes.”

“Surprised you could stay awake after such rigorous physical activity.”

“Cooking pasta?”

Pause.

“You OK with last night?” Ryan’s voice had gone serious.

“What happened last night?”

“Headquarters. ASAP.”

Dial tone.

Fifty minutes later I entered a conference room on the fourth floor of Wilfrid-Derome. The small space contained one battered government-issue table and six battered government-issue chairs. A wall-mounted chalkboard. Vertical-slat blinds on one dingy window.

The table held a cardboard box, a phone, a rubber snake, a laptop, and a seventeen-inch monitor. Solange Lesieur was connecting the latter two pieces of equipment.

Ryan arrived as Lesieur and I were speculating on the provenance of the serpent. Hippo was two steps behind. Bearing coffee.

Seeing me, Hippo frowned.

“Brennan’s good with faces,” Ryan explained.

“Better than she is with advice?”

Lesieur spoke before I could think of a clever rejoinder. “No coffee for me.”

“I brought extra,” Hippo said.

Lesieur shook her head. “I’m already stoked.”

“What’s Harpo doing here?” Sideswiping the reptile, Hippo placed his tray on the table.

Lesieur and I exchanged glances. The snake’s name was Harpo?

Everyone sat. While Lesieur booted the laptop, the rest of us stirred powdered cream and/or sugar into the opaque brown sludge in our Styrofoam cups. Hippo went with two packets of each.

“All set?”

Nods around.

Lesieur inserted Cormier’s thumb drive. The PC
bong-bonged.

“Cormier was security-conscious but amateur.” Lesieur’s fingers worked the keyboard. “Want to know his system?”

“Talk quick, this stuff is lethal.” Ryan pounded a fist to his chest.

“Next time get your own freakin’ coffee.” Hippo flipped Ryan the bird.

Ryan fist-pounded his chest.

I recognized the jesting for what it was. Morgue humor. Everyone was on edge, jittery about the images we might soon see.

“The best passwords are alphanumeric,” Lesieur began.

“Sheez.” Hippo doing derisive. “It’s the jargon not the coffee that’s gonna take us out.”

“An alphanumeric password is composed of both numbers and letters. The more random the combination, and the more characters included, the safer you are.”

“Don’t rely on your puppy’s name backward,” I said.

Lesieur continued as though no one had spoken.

“Cormier used an old trick. Pick a song or poem. Take the first letter of each word of the opening line. Bracket that string of letters with numbers, using the date of the password’s creation, day at the front, month at the back.”

The Windows screen opened and Lesieur entered a few more keystrokes.

“Generates a pretty good encryption chain, but a lot of us geeks are wise to the trick.”

“A double-digit, multiletter, double-digit pattern,” I guessed.

“Exactly.”

Ryan was right. The coffee was undrinkable. Sleep-deprived as I was, I gave up trying.

“Working on the assumption that the password was created this year, I checked music charts, created letter sequences from the opening lines of the top fifteen songs for each of the fifty-two weeks, then ran combinations of all month-day number pairs with all-letter strings. Hit with the program’s four hundred and seventy-fourth alphanumeric chain.”

“Only four seventy-four?” Hippo’s distaste for technology was evident in his sarcasm.

“I had to try both French and English.”

“Lemme guess. Cormier was hot for Walter Ostanek.”

Three blank looks.

“The polka king?”

The looks held.

“The Canadian Frank Yankovic?”

“You’re into polka?” Ryan.

“Ostanek’s good.” Defensive.

No one disputed that.

“You should know him. He’s your homeboy. Duparquet, Québec.”

“Cormier used Richard Séguin,” Lesieur said.

Hippo shrugged. “Séguin’s good, too.”

“The week of October twenty-ninth, Séguin’s “Lettres ouvertes” charted at number thirteen in Montreal. He used the opening line of a song from that album.”

“I’m impressed,” I said. I was.

“A fourteen-character alphanumeric code will keep the average hacker out.” Lesieur hit
Enter
. “But I’m not your average hacker.”

The screen changed to black. On the upper right was a graphic showing old-fashioned spool film, below it a playlist offering a dozen untitled selections. Digits indicated the duration of each. Most ran between five and ten minutes.

“The thumb drive contains video files, some brief, some with running times of up to an hour. I’ve opened nothing, figuring you’d want the first look. I also figured you’d want to start with the shorter clips.”

“Go.” Ryan’s tone was devoid of humor now.

“This is virgin territory, people.” Lesieur double-clicked the first listing.

The quality was poor, the duration six minutes.

The scene showed things I never imagined possible.

T
HE VIDEO HAD BEEN SHOT WITH A SINGLE HANDHELD CAMERA. There was no sound.

The setting is a room done in roach-motel cheap. The side table is wood-grain plastic. The double bed is plaid-quilted. A shadow hairlines from a nail on the wall above the headboard.

Normally my mind would have played with that. What had been removed? Terrible mass-market art? A print of beer-drinking dogs playing cards? Something fingering the motel’s name or location?

No speculation this time. All my senses were focused on the horror center stage.

A girl lies on the bed. She is pale and has cornsilk hair. Bows double-loop from the ends of her pigtails.

My breath stopped in my throat.

The girl is naked. She can be no more than eight years old.

Rising onto her elbows, the girl turns her face toward something off camera. Her eyes sweep past the lens. The pupils are caverns, the gaze unfocused.

The girl lifts her chin, tracking someone’s approach. A shadow crawls onto her body.

The girl shakes her head no and lowers her lids. A hand comes into frame and presses her chest. The girl drops back and closes her eyes. The shadow moves down her torso.

Opposing reflexes shot through my nerves.

Turn away!

Stay! Help the little girl!

I kept my eyes glued to the monitor.

A man moves into frame. His naked back is to the camera. His hair is black, bound at the nape of his neck. Ugly red zits speckle his buttocks. Around them, the skin is the color of pus.

My fingers sought each other, clenched hard. I felt dizzy, anticipating the nightmare that was about to play out.

The man takes the child’s wrists and raises her frail little arms. Her nipples are dots on the curvy shadows defining her rib cage.

I looked down. My nails had carved crescents into the backs of my hands. Drawing two steadying breaths, I refocused on the monitor.

The girl has been turned. She lies prone, helpless and mute. The man has climbed onto the bed. He is on his knees. He moves to straddle her.

Shooting to my feet, I bolted from the room. No conscious thought. Limbic impulse straight to motor neurons.

Footsteps echoed mine. I didn’t glance back.

In the lobby, I stood by a window, arms wrapping my chest. Needing reality to ground me. Skyline. Sunlight. Concrete. Traffic.

A hand touched my shoulder.

“You OK?” Ryan spoke softly.

I answered without turning to face him. “These bastards. These evil fucking perverted bastards.”

Ryan didn’t reply.

“For what? For their own depraved gratification? To so injure an innocent child to get their jollies? Or is it really for the gratification of the viewing audience? Are there so many sickos out there that there’s a market for videos of such injurious depravity?”

“We’ll get them.”

“These degenerates pollute the world. They don’t deserve to suck air from the planet.”

“We’ll get them.” Ryan’s tone reflected the loathing I was feeling.

A tear broke from my lid. I backhanded it from my cheek.

“Get who, Ryan? The scum who make this garbage? The pedophiles who pay to watch, collect, and swap it? The parents who pimp their children to pocket a few bucks? The predators who cruise Internet chat rooms hoping to make a contact?”

I whirled to face him.

“How many kids will we see on that drive? Alone. Frightened. Powerless. How many childhoods were destroyed?”

“Yes. These guys are moral mutants. But my job is Phoebe Quincy, Kelly Sicard, Claudine Cloquet, and three girls found dead on my patch.”

“It’s Bastarache.” Through clamped teeth. “I can feel it in my gut.”

“Being a flesh peddler doesn’t make him a kiddie porn dealer.”

“This is Cormier’s dirty little collection. Cormier had photos of Évangéline. Évangéline worked for Bastarache.”

“Thirty years ago.”

“Cormier—”

Ryan placed a finger on my lips.

“Bastarache may turn out to be dirty. Cormier may turn out to be a link. Or he may turn out to be just another twisted perv. Either way, everything on that drive goes to NCECC.”

Ryan referred to Canada’s National Child Exploitation Coordination Center.

“Right.” Wanting to lash out. “What will they do?”

“They investigate this type of thing full-time. NCECC maintains a database of images of exploited children and has sophisticated programs for digital enhancement. They’re developing ways to ID the pricks who download this trash from the Net.”

“Annually, there are more investigations into auto theft than into child exploitation.” Scornful.

“You know that’s unfair. There are a whole lot more auto thefts to investigate. The guys at NCECC bust their butts to rescue these kids.” Ryan flicked a hand at the conference room.

I said nothing, knowing he was right.

“My focus is here.” Ryan’s fingers curled. “Quincy. Sicard. Cloquet. The DOA’s.” His fist pumped the air for emphasis. “I won’t quit until I close the file on every last one of them.”

“Watching is pure agony.” My words were almost inaudible. “I can’t do a goddamn thing to help her.”

“It’s gut-wrenching. I know. I can hardly bear to stay with it. But I keep telling myself one thing. Spot something. A street name. A sign on a delivery truck. A logo on a bath towel. Spot something and you’re one step closer to finding one kid. And wherever that one kid is, there will be others. Perhaps some of mine.”

Ryan’s eyes burned with an intensity I’d never seen before.

“OK,” I said, drying my cheeks with my palms. “OK.” I started back toward the conference room. “Let’s spot one.”

And that’s exactly what happened.

The next three hours were some of the worst of my life.

Before leaving, Lesieur explained that Cormier had stored his collection in a series of digital folders. Some were titled. “Teen Dancers.” “Kinders.” “Aux privés d’amour.” “Japonaise.” Others were numbered or coded with letters. Every file bore the same date, probably the day of transfer to the thumb drive.

Hippo, Ryan, and I slogged our way through, folder by folder, video by video.

Not every clip was as horrific as the opener. Some showed overly made-up kids in sex-kitten lingerie. Others featured girls or adolescents awkwardly vamping, or mimicking strippers or pole dancers. A large number portrayed torture and full penetration.

Artistic skill and technical quality varied. Some videos looked old. Others appeared to have been shot recently. Some showed aptitude. Some were amateur.

The collection was formed around one common element. Every video featured one or more young females. A ghastly few involved toddlers.

Periodically, we took breaks. Drank coffee. Battled back revulsion. Refocused on the goal.

Each time, I checked my phone messages. No calls from Harry.

By noon nerves were frayed and the mood was tense.