Monday Mourning

The exit wound was at Menard’s left temple. Most of that side of his head was gone, spattered on the brass lamp, the dangling crystals, and the floral wallpaper of the hideous room. Mingled with Menard’s cranial wreckage was a macabre gumbo of blood and brain matter.

I felt a tremor under my tongue.

Ryan dragged the Windsor chair as far as from the body as possible, led me to it, and pressed gently on my shoulders. I sat and lowered my head.

I heard the uniformed cops storm in.

I heard Ryan’s voice, shouted orders.

I heard Charbonneau. The word “ambulance.” The name Pomerleau.

I heard doors kicked open as Ryan and the others moved through the house.

To escape the present, I tried to focus on all I would have to do in the future. Reassess the MP lists. Resubmit skeletal descriptors with open age estimates. Obtain DNA samples from Angie Robinson’s family.

It was no good. I couldn’t think. My attention kept drifting back across the room. My eyes roved the hands, the splayed legs, the gun.

The face.

Menard’s freckles stood out like dark little kidneys against the pallid skin. Though his eyes were open, the expression was blank. No pain. No surprise. No fear. Just the empty stare of death.

My own mind was a combat zone. Relief that Menard would hurt no one else. Anger that he’d escaped so easily. Pity for a life so grotesquely twisted. Anxiety for Anique Pomerleau.

Concern that we still did not have the answers.

This wasn’t Menard. Who was this guy? Where was Menard?

Fingers caressed my hair.

I looked up.

“You OK?”

I nodded, touched by the tenderness in Ryan’s expression. “Have you found Pomerleau?”

“House is empty.” Ryan’s voice was heavy as a coffin lid. “There are things here you might want to see.”

I followed him through a hallway, into a back room, and down a narrow stairway to a poorly lit cellar. The walls were brick and windowless, the floor cement. The air was damp and smelled of mold, dust, and dry rot.

Around me I could see the usual assortment of basement junk. A metal washtub. Garden implements. Stacks of cardboard boxes. An old sewing machine.

I heard voices, then a muffled expletive ahead and to my right.

Passing through an open door, Ryan led me into a second room. Though similar in construction to the outer basement, this one was smaller and brightly lit. Its walls and ceiling were covered with polyurethane panels.

Claudel and Charbonneau were standing by a counter that might once have served as a workbench. Both wore latex surgical gloves.

Hearing us enter, Charbonneau turned. His face looked like something in the claret family.

Ryan left to do another sweep of the basement.

“The little troll had himself a really special place down here.” Charbonneau swept a hand around the room. “Soundproofing and all.”

My eyes followed the arc of Charbonneau’s motion.

In one corner two sets of handcuffs dangled from a pair of rings imbedded in the ceiling. A crude table hugged the adjacent wall. I crossed to it, a cold numbness in my gut.

The table was sturdily built, of plywood and two-by-fours. Eye-hooks had been screwed into each corner, then a leather cuff attached to each hook. Four chains lay coiled beside the cuffs.

“This table isn’t old,” I said.

“Table?” Charbonneau’s voice trembled with anger. “It’s a goddamn rack!”

I walked to the workbench. Claudel looked at me, then shifted left, his face a shrink-wrapped mask of control.

The numbness made the rounds of my innards.

A bullwhip. A cat-o’-nine-tails. A riding crop. A hide-covered paddle. A noose with an enormous knot at midloop.

“All the tricks needed to show your slave who’s boss.” A vein throbbed in Charbonneau’s temple. I saw fury in his eyes.

“Calm-toi, Michel.” Claudel’s voice was a flat line.

“And this asshole was real creative.”

Charbonneau jabbed at a horse bit, a curling iron, a crudely made gag with a ball in the center.

“Check out his reading material.”

Charbonneau’s rage made him hyperactive. He snatched up a magazine, tossed it down. “Porn. Bondage. S and M.” He grabbed a videotape. The Story of O.

As the video hit the workbench, Ryan charged in, his jaw muscles tightened all the way to his sternum.

“I’ve found something.”

We moved as one, out the door, through the outer basement, around an ancient furnace, and into a chamber much like the one we’d just left.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves wrapped three sides of this room. A single bare bulb hung from its ceiling.

Ryan strode to the far wall. We followed. Behind the shelving I could see polyurethane similar to that lining the other room. The edge of one panel had been pried free.

“This wall isn’t brick. It’s plywood.”

Ryan ran his fingertips vertically along the newly exposed plywood, just beyond the shelving.

“There’s a discontinuity.”

Claudel removed one glove, mimicked Ryan’s move, then nodded.

Ryan pointed to the door through which we’d entered.

“Check out the lights.”

We all turned. One switch plate looked shiny and new, the other dingy and cracked.

“The older one works the overhead.”