Styx (18 page)

Or was there another possibility? Could he be some type of dark messiah,
chosen
to walk this dusty road alone? Perhaps his lot was to wander through the darkness as Jesus had wandered through the desert.

No one, not even a zombie, should have to go through life—or death—alone. But once again Raphael Styx seemed to be an exception to the rule.

When he got to the house, he pulled out Marc Gerard's half-hunter and snapped it shut.

He didn't need to look around to know that, by doing so, he had returned himself to his own place in time.

With its bright fluorescent lighting and blank walls, the forensic lab's pathology department was just as cold and sterile at nine
AM
as it was at midnight. As behooves a true sapeur, Joachim Delacroix had decked himself out to shame the sun in a three-piece suit, striped tie, and silk pocket square in shades of brown, green, and blue.

He was accompanied by a patrolman, Martens or Maertens, who outranked him in age only and was as colorless as—well, a nonsapeur.

“Window shopping?” asked Dr. Tobias Ornelis, chief pathologist, a man with a spartan frame that suggested a refugee from behind the Iron Curtain.

“Not exactly,” said Delacroix. “I recently replaced Chief Inspector Styx on the Stuffer case, and I never got to see Madeleine Bohy's body, so I—”

“Sad story, Styx,” said Ornelis.

“I don't know whether I'm glad you haven't got him on a slab here or sad we still haven't found him.”

“What do you expect to learn from Bohy's corpse? Everything's in the autopsy report. Blood results, descriptions of the wounds, internal bleeding, the sand, everything up to and including the needle and fishing line he used to sew her back together.”

“No idea,” Delacroix admitted. “I don't know what to look for, and it's probably a waste of time, but—”

“But what?”

“Well, maybe Styx missed something.”

“I don't suppose taking another look could hurt,” said Ornelis.

“I think we owe it to the chief inspector.”

“Still no sign of him?”

“Not a trace,” Delacroix lied.

He'd taken a night to sleep on it—as John Crevits had directed—but hadn't actually gotten a wink of sleep. He was too wound up to close his eyes, too eager to get a look at Tobias Ornelis. Delacroix wasn't there because of anything Styx might have missed but because of something the zombie cop claimed to have
seen
: the Stuffer dressed in rain gear and a James Ensor mask.

Ornelis was also obsessed with James Ensor and his masks. He had reproductions all over the place. But then again, this was Ostend, the birthplace of the master painter, so perhaps it wasn't all that unusual for Ornelis to be a fan. Still, two things made the pathologist special. One, he apparently knew the last victim, had a secret crush on her, according to several people Delacroix had questioned. Even dead and lying in his morgue, she seemed to have an unnatural hold on him. Two, people were starting to gossip about Tobias Ornelis and his bizarre relationship with the dead girl.

Ornelis led him into the morgue, its far wall lined with a bank of
refrigerated lockers. He unlocked one of the compartments, slid out a long metal drawer, and unzipped the white plastic body bag that lay on it. Madeleine Bohy's head and limbs were all there, not quite touching the torso but ranged around it in their proper positions. Delacroix stood there looking Death in the eye, and for the first time he had absolutely no doubt who it was he'd encountered the previous evening.

Raphael Styx.

He knew it the moment he saw the pigmentation of the dead woman's skin, smelled the grave-reek that rose from her body, felt the changes that being in a room with her wrought in the very atmosphere. They were kinfolk, Bohy and Styx, two of a kind. With one difference: unlike the woman on the slab, Styx was still walking around.

“Crevits gave you a copy of the autopsy report, I assume?”

“Yes,” said Delacroix, staring at the severed head.

“She was strangled, unlike the first two victims, both of whom were stabbed to death. Hey, can you tell me what we're supposed to do with the sand? We've got it bagged in a storage closet, but it can't sit there forever.”

“Why not?” asked Delacroix. “It's just sand.”

“What are we supposed to do with it? Make sand castles?”

“It'll make its way back to the beach eventually,” said Delacroix.

Ornelis cocked his head toward Martens or Maertens, who was waiting for them out in the corridor as instructed, on the other side of the viewing window. “How's the new partner working out?”

Delacroix shrugged. “I don't really know him yet.”

“He's not as . . . colorful as you.”

Delacroix understood that his approach to life must seem completely foreign to Ornelis, a man who spent eight hours a day puttering around among the dead.

“You can zip her back up,” Delacroix said, after a perfunctory examination.

“You sure?”

The rookie nodded, and tried to act as if he'd found what he'd been looking for. As Ornelis carefully reclosed the body bag, the young cop wandered apparently aimlessly around the impersonal examination room.

There was a battered metal desk in a corner of the room, and on it was an equally impersonal MacBook Pro. The lid was up, and a screen saver showed a colorful photo of the Ostend shrimpers' annual parade: dozens of men in yellow oilskins and sou'westers on horseback, dragging enormous nets behind them along the beach.

Delacroix had seen the picture on Ornelis's desk a few times. He'd never paid any attention to it before—to each his own obsession—but it certainly caught his eye now. Only once had he noticed Ornelis at a crime scene—and then only from a distance.

“The shrimpers' parade,” he said casually. “When is that again?”

He examined his memory more closely, zoomed in mentally on Ornelis's figure in the distance—and, yes, there he stood, protected from the rain by his yellow oilskin jacket and hat. There'd been no reason to notice it at the time—yellow raingear was practically an Ostender's uniform—but now he combined the memory of that crime scene with the more recent memory of Raphael Styx's voice:

I saw him, the Stuffer . . . a yellow oilskin slicker and a sou'wester hat . . . a James Ensor mask.

Behind him, the pathologist said, “I'm not sure what the date is this year. Tell you the truth, I haven't watched it in years.”

“You still use that photo as your screen saver, though. When was it taken?”

“Oh, Lord, I don't remember. It's not me, though.”

Delacroix turned around. Ornelis had slid the drawer back into
its refrigerated compartment and was tapping the lock code into the door.

“The picture, I mean. I didn't take it, and I'm not in it.”

“I see,” said Delacroix. “Where'd you get it, then?”

“Some website. Probably the city's.”

Delacroix turned back to the laptop, studying the yellow rain jackets like the little patch of yellow wall in Vermeer's
View of Delft
that had so affected Marcel Proust. The so-called Stendhal syndrome, the experience of being overwhelmed by beauty.

Delacroix wondered if there was a version of the word for horror. Here in the morgue, he was prepared to believe there was.

“When was the last time you took part in the parade?” he asked. Ornelis seemed not to hear him, and he began to repeat the question: “When was the last time you—?”

“The last time I was in the parade?”

So he
had
heard him. There was something weird about Ornelis, Delacroix thought. He'd heard enough gossip over the past year to know that he wasn't the only one who thought so.

“You haven't met Dr. Death yet, eh, Delacroix?” one of his colleagues had joked, while a bunch of them were catching a beer after their shift, his second week in Ostend. “Never fear: you will. We all do. He's a nutcase. But, I mean, what would it do to
you
, sitting there, day in, day out, nobody around but the dead? Who
else
has he got to talk to?”

Delacroix thought he must have misunderstood. “You mean—?”

“Oh, yes,” said another gleefully.

“He
talks
to them?” He assumed the story was an exaggeration, some sort of hazing new members of the city's police force were put through. But the whole group chimed in with its agreement.

“I heard him myself,” a third man said. “I was about to open the door, and I heard him in there talking to someone. I figured he had somebody in there with him, but, when I went in, he was all alone.”

“Creepy,” Delacroix had said.

And then there was the aura the man gave off.

Or, better, the
lack
of one.

Like every pathologist, Tobias Ornelis was more or less required to wear a white lab coat during working hours, but he usually ignored that custom, roaming around in old jeans and a raggedy sweater. He wasn't merely as somber as the Man with the Scythe. He had no personality at all—at least none he allowed anyone around him to see.

“Can I ask you something?” said Delacroix, still focused on the laptop. Ornelis didn't respond. Maybe he was only used to talking when no one else was around. No one
alive
, at any rate. “You still have your jacket and sou'wester?”

“What?”

“That fisherman's gear.”

“I'm not a fisherman.”

“No, but you used to be in the parade.”

Delacroix smiled affably, but the other man was carved out of ice, as cold and stiff as the corpses he worked with.

“Why do you ask?”

“Just curious.”

“I don't know. If I still do, I haven't worn them in a while.”

A silence fell upon them and lasted long enough to begin to become uncomfortable. Finally, Ornelis added, “I don't go out much.”

“It's been pretty busy around here lately, eh?”

“Unfortunately.”

“But you have to go out sometimes? I mean, you don't sleep here, do you? And there's been so much rain lately. People tell me they've never seen anything like it. Supposed to be the worst spring since they started keeping records.” He let a moment go by, then continued: “You could
use
one of those yellow rain jackets. I hope you didn't throw yours away.”

They stood there eyeing each other. Tobias Ornelis, with his hands clasped behind his back, and Joachim Delacroix, placidly watching the doctor, a man who fit the description Styx had provided. Tall, thin, hollow eyes.

“Anything else, Inspector?” Ornelis asked.

“I don't know,” Delacroix said. “I'm thinking.”

“It's just, I was about to take a break when you came in. I eat my breakfast late, and I like to keep to my schedule.”

A slave to routine
, Delacroix had heard it said.
A strange, strange man. He lives alone, never married, never had a girlfriend or even been out on a date, far as we know. Had a crush on the last victim. Carries the smell of death around with him. No wonder he's single. Can you imagine going out to dinner with the guy? How could you possibly eat?

“I don't want to keep you,” said Delacroix.

But he couldn't pull himself away. He'd seen Madeleine Bohy's body, and he knew there were other bodies in the other sliding metal compartments. There were cabinets and drawers filled with scalpels, knives, and surgical saws. In the hands of a serial killer, these would be dangerous weapons. Here, though, they were simply tools of the pathologist's trade.

“I don't like to leave strangers in here on their own,” said Ornelis.

Apparently Delacroix counted as a stranger.

“It's all right, I'll walk out with you.”

“It's just, people usually aren't comfortable in here without me.”

Delacroix let the statement hang in the air.

“Why wouldn't I be comfortable?”

“Well, because they—because they're all dead, obviously.”

“Doesn't bother me,” said Delacroix. “I deal with death every day of the week.”

“Then we're two of a kind,” Ornelis said, smiling weakly.

“How do you mean?”

“We know the dead can't hurt us. Most people are afraid of them, but we really ought to pity them. If you ask me, we need to do a better job of getting them ready for their journey. You take a living woman, for example. She spends an hour, maybe two, in front of her mirror in the morning, making herself up, smearing gel in her hair, covering up her wrinkles. Once she's dead, though, that all comes to a stop. Except for me. I'm the one who takes over the job. It's like maintaining an old car. It'll never drive again, the motor's shot, maybe even gone altogether like the heart out of a body, but I can still polish her chassis and keep her looking good.”