Styx (19 page)

“Although she's dead,” said Delacroix.

“At least she ends in beauty.”

“I thought morticians were responsible for all that sort of thing.”

“Perhaps. But I take my work more seriously than they do. Especially when I know the victim.”

So at least
some
of the rumors were true, then.

“I'll admit,” said Delacroix, “when I go, I want to go in style.”

“I can see that.”

Delacroix could tell that it was time for him to leave. As he strode across the room he spotted a small table half-hidden behind a narrow door he'd barely noticed. On it was an array of what seemed to be medical specimens and personal effects.

He swung open the door for a better overview of the table. There were a dozen airtight plastic Baggies, some containing bits of skin, tissue samples, strands of hair, nail clippings, while others held a lipstick, a compact, a ring of keys, and similar items.

“What's all this?” he asked.

“Evidence,” Ornelis responded brusquely. “From the decedent, Madeleine Bohy.”

The sapeur delicately lifted one of the Baggies with his thumb and
forefinger. It held a length of what looked like wire. On closer inspection, he saw that it was a thick plastic filament. “And this? The fishing line used to hold the body together, right?”

“Yes, I took it all out. I I don't think her family would want to see her buried like that.”

Delacroix nodded. He laid the Baggie back in its place and asked, “Who says she's going to be buried? Maybe they'll have her cremated.”

“What difference does it make? Either way, it's better without the—”

“Better?” Delacroix spat out the word. “A corpse is a corpse.”

“Not to me.”

“No, clearly not. I assume you had official permission to cut the line out of her? To make your . . . improvements?”

“Improvements?”

“You have a better word for it? You sewed her back together, I noticed, with surgical thread. That's an improvement on the Stuffer's work, isn't it?”

Delacroix's imagination unspooled a film of Tobias Ornelis here in his workshop, leisurely restitching the sculpture he'd had to hurry through out on the beach. He could see the pathologist patiently sewing, talking pleasantly to the dead girl while he worked.

“I don't think I like your tone,” said Ornelis.

“I don't think I much like
you
,” said Delacroix.

“As I said, Inspector, I spend most of my time with the dead. I'm not very good with the living. I apologize for my manners.”

The doctor had clearly had enough of this particular representative of the living and wanted to be left alone so he could eat his late breakfast. Or early lunch. Delacroix was about to offer the pathologist his hand when he saw it.

The scar. An ugly cut, perpendicular to the wrist on the side of the hand. Delacroix had known a young woman who'd succeeded in
slitting her own wrists. In fact, it was because of her that he'd become a sapeur.

His whole life, Delacroix had been a Sunday's child, “bonny and blithe, and good and gay.” Everyone around him in Ostend assumed he'd grown up in Brazzaville and emigrated to Belgium as a young adult, and he thought that origin story added to his allure so he did nothing to disabuse them of the notion. But the truth was that he'd been born to a Belgian mother and a Congolese father, and had been raised in one of Brussels' better neighborhoods. He'd coasted through middle school and high school, and was planning to study law and become an attorney.

He was in his first year, wrestling with contracts and judicial remedies when his half-sister Celine, seven years his senior and a classic Jill of all trades, master of none, finally lucked into an internship in Prague. Though this was pre-Facebook, they'd stayed in close contact by e-mail and phone until the day her calls stopped coming.

At first, he assumed Celine had fallen for some hulking Eastern European, but then he got a call from the host family that provided her with room and board. She'd been terribly homesick, they explained in English they barely spoke and he understood with only marginally less difficulty. Ultimately, the depression had driven her to slit her wrists in a public bathroom at school. No one found her until hours had passed and it was far too late to save her.

Joachim thought the call had to be some kind of sick joke. But no one was laughing, and, when the confirmation came, he took a leave of absence from school and a train from Brussels to Frankfurt to Nuremberg to Prague to investigate the matter on his own.

He questioned her friends, her colleagues, and her host family, determined to uncover whatever it was that had driven her to suicide. There had to have been more to it than loneliness. If that was
all it was, then why hadn't she simply gotten on a plane and returned home?

He learned that Celine had steeped herself not only in the beauty of the Golden City but also in the darker side of its history, a history stained by occult practices and tragic melancholy. Had she gone mad? He didn't know. He'd finally given up and returned to Brussels, unable to solve the mystery of her death.

He knew from their father and their Congolese friends of the rise of La Sape back in Brazzaville, and to honor his sister's memory he attended her funeral dressed for the first time as a sapeur. With his sister dead now, he wanted somehow to keep her spirit alive, so he dressed up every day, as if he dressed for two. It was months later that the host family in Prague came across a stack of letters she'd written but never sent on the top shelf of the closet in what had been her room. Several of the letters were addressed to him. They were heartbreaking cries for help, permeated with shame and grief and misery as she became convinced that a daughter of racially mixed parentage would always be an outcast.

It was after reading those letters that Joachim Delacroix dropped out of law school and applied to the police academy.

The scar on Tobias Ornelis's wrist was a faint reminder of his lost half-sister Celine.

They shook hands, and, before letting go, Delacroix turned the doctor's arm a bit for a better look.

“Occupational hazard,” Ornelis said, noticing Delacroix's attention. “The problem's not the knives and scalpels. It's the thread.”

“I wouldn't have thought surgical thread was all that dangerous.”

“It isn't,” Ornelis laughed uneasily. “I meant the fishing line the victim was sewed up with. It's all thread to me, but that stuff's so stiff it flies all over the place when you try to stitch with it.”

“You mean when you took it out of her?”

“Right, of course.”

“You said it flies around when you stitch with it.”

“I mean it wasn't the thread I used to sew her up the second time that cut me, but—”

“The second time?” asked Delacroix.

“Yes.”

“You sewed her up twice?”

“No, the killer sewed her the first time with the fishing line, and then I—”

“So how did you cut yourself?”

Ornelis held the door for him, but Delacroix wasn't about to leave now.

“On the—what difference does it make? I don't really remember. Let's just say it was the fishing line, and it happened when I was removing it from her body.”

“Sure,” said Delacroix.

He pressed the button for the elevator, and Tobias Ornelis stood and waited with him. He wanted to question the doctor further about the scar on his wrist, which couldn't possibly have been caused by ordinary surgical thread. Certainly not in the case of a man who used the stuff every day at work.

“I'll let you know if I remember, Inspector.”

The door slid open at the lobby level and Delacroix stepped in, but the pathologist stayed where he was. As the door began to close, the cop put out a hand and stopped it.

“I thought you were going out for breakfast?”

“No, I bring something from home. And I prefer to eat alone, so, if you'll excuse me . . .”

“Of course,” said Delacroix. “I appreciate your time. See you soon.”

“Not
too
soon, I hope.”

It took Delacroix a moment to get the joke.

“Yeah, right. I'm not in any hurry.”

Ornelis returned to his lab and closed the door behind him.

Delacroix stepped back off the elevator and put his ear to the lab door, listening to see if the rumors were true, if the doctor would begin talking to his corpses. But the only sound that came through the door was soft piano music.
Debussy
, Delacroix thought.

“See you
soon
, Ornelis,” Delacroix whispered. He pressed the button to recall the elevator, and, while he waited for it, took out his phone to call John Crevits.

It was pouring yet again in Ostend, and—especially at this time of year—that was bad for business along the coast. Styx was listening to the rain batter his father-in-law's windowpanes when the doorbell rang. He had just finished smearing himself with a tube of Nivea gel moisturizer, not so much to protect his skin as to mask the stench. His H&M suit was already ripe with his new brand of body odor, and he'd had to change into an old one he'd found in one of Marc Gerard's closets. With its wide lapels and sharply pointed collar, it had possibly been in style back in the seventies, and it was at least two sizes too small for him, but it was better than being naked. Though not by much.

He got slowly and painfully to his feet, grabbed his walking stick and dragged himself over to the window. He drew the heavy curtains
aside to see who was at the door, but all that was visible through the rain was a dark cap and coat. Whoever it was stood with his back to the house, watching the street.

“Shit,” said Styx.

Who knew he was hiding here? The house hadn't yet been put up for sale. Was it some city functionary checking the place out? That didn't seem likely at this time of night.

Could it be the Stuffer, here to finish what he'd begun? No, there wasn't a chance in a thousand he could have linked this address to Raphael Styx. Was there? Anyway, though the color of the unexpected visitor's cap and coat were difficult to determine in the dark, they certainly weren't a yellow sou'wester and oilskin. But Styx clutched his walking stick a bit more firmly, just in case.

Styx thought of his plunge into the chilly waters of the North Sea and decided it couldn't hurt to see who it was. At this point, he had nothing left to lose.

When he eased the door open, a familiar voice said, “Styx. Finally.”

Beneath the cap stood Joachim Delacroix, wrapped in an old-fashioned dark-gray three-quarter-length English overcoat. The two men eyed each other for a full half minute, as if neither could believe what he saw.

“I thought I'd never find you.”

“Delacroix? How
did
you find me?”

“I'm a cop, Styx. We have ways. Your wife told me you'd been clearing this place out the last few days before you died. Or were supposed to be, anyway. I didn't get the address out of her, but I've got a realtor friend, and I asked him if he knew of any interesting properties that were likely to come on the market soon.”

“Solid detective work,” said Styx grudgingly. “I couldn't have done better myself.”

“You going to let me in or make me stand out here until I drown?”

“Why should I let you in?”

“Because it was a whole lot of trouble finding you.”

“Why should I care? And how do I know you won't just turn me in again?” He peered out past Delacroix's shoulder, but there was no one lurking in the street.

“You think I'd pull that twice?”

“Why not?”

“Because the fact you're still standing here proves you weren't lying. You're the real deal, aren't you? I mean, you're exactly what you said you are.”

“You can't say the word, can you?” said Styx.

He took a step back to make room for Delacroix to come in. The young cop whipped off his overcoat, which he'd been wearing draped around his shoulders like an aristocrat, and scoped out the foyer, wrinkling his nose at the musty smell.

“Come on,” said Styx, and led him into the interior of the house.

Marc Gerard's living room was divided into two distinct areas, a front parlor used only for Sunday company and a second, less formal sitting room. Styx had closed the metal shutters, and the only illumination came from a single table lamp beside the threadbare old armchair in which Styx's father-in-law had passed his lonely evenings watching war documentaries on the National Geographic channel.

“I can't say the situation's gotten any better,” Styx said. “You can see that for yourself.”

“I can see it and smell it,” said Delacroix.

“I'm falling apart.”

“Why don't you open a window?”

“What's the use?”

“What happened, Styx? I mean, one minute we were standing there talking, and the next minute you're off like a bat out of hell.”