The remains were going to be returned to her grandmother for a private burial in Lafayette in the morning.
We were going to restore her one more time.
She had been used by too many people.
Delacroix had used her death to frame me. Camille had used her face to terrify me. The department had used her body to crack a network of cold-case fraud. And I, for seven years, had been too afraid of my own past to admit out loud that I knew her at all.
This time I did not let any of my staff in.
Marigny stood across from me, on the other side of the table.
He did not touch her.
I worked slowly.
I was not, this time, restoring her so that she would look complete.
I was restoring her so that every wound she had carried would still be visible.
The old scar on her left cheek, the one she had had at nineteen — I left it. The forced re-positioning at the angle of the jaw, the place where Delacroix had reshaped her bone to mimic my own, I touched only enough to make her recognizable to her grandmother.
The last suture went in around four-twenty in the morning.
Marigny said, "Ready?"
I nodded.
He laid his palm over Lila Toussaint's hand.
He kept his eyes closed for a long time. Longer than I had ever seen him keep them closed. Long enough that I started to worry he had gone back into one of the rooms in his head he could not always come out of.
Then he said: "She says — it hurts."
I lowered my eyes.
He waited.
He said: "She says — Camille, don't believe him."
A long beat passed. His voice came out scraped.
"She says — Delphine, I'm sorry."
The curved needle slipped out of my hand and tapped against the tray.
The sound was very small.
It still felt as if somebody had hit me, low under the sternum, with the flat of a hand.
Seven years ago, Lila Toussaint had come to my porch in a white sundress and told me she could clear my father's debt.
I had thought she was Delacroix's instrument.
I had hated her every day for seven years.
What she had been trying to save was, maybe, not only Camille.
It was, maybe, also me.
Marigny took his hand off hers.
He looked at me.
"She says — don't lie for the dead anymore."
I nodded.
"All right."
The loading bay was getting light outside.
For the first time in I could not remember how long, the morning in the prep room of Aucoin & Sons did not feel cold.
The day Étienne Delacroix's trial opened, I was in the first row of the gallery in the federal courthouse at Tulane and Broad.
Camille took the stand as a cooperating witness.
She wore a loose white button-down that hid most of the scar on her neck. Her hair had been brushed straight back.
Delacroix smiled at her from the defendant's table with the same gentle smile he had used on me at sixteen.
"Camille. Think about this. Without me, you are nothing."
Camille looked at him. Her voice came out unsteady, but it did not retreat.
"I am Camille Aucoin."
Her eyes moved to me.
"And I am Delphine Aucoin's sister."
The smile went off Delacroix's face.
The prosecution put the digital recorder into evidence. Then the thirty-seven notebooks. Then the updated autopsy on Lila Toussaint. Then the chain-of-custody report on every one of the twenty-seven cases I had ever worked, annotated with which had been compromised, which had held.
When defense called me, the lawyer was a senior federal trial guy out of D.C. with a soft baritone.
"Ms. Aucoin. Is it correct that you have personally performed restorative work on multiple bodies during the period in question, and that those restorations directly affected the investigative conclusions reached by Detective Marigny."
"Yes."
He smiled the smile they have for that answer.
"So in fact, Ms. Aucoin, you are also a co-conspirator."
A noise went through the gallery.
In the row behind me Marigny stood up.
The judge tapped her gavel.
I did not look at either of them.
I looked at Delacroix.
"I admit," I said into the microphone, "that I trusted my training without questioning it. I admit that I trusted my teacher without questioning him. I admit that I trusted what I was told the dead had said without questioning the chain by which I was told."
I paused.
"From this day forward, every body that comes through my prep room will be documented from intake to release on video, with a duplicate copy of the original chart and an independent third-party review."
I let it sit.
"I won't let anybody borrow my hands to lie for the dead again."
Delacroix, for a long second, did not move.
Then he laughed.
"Delphine. You think you've won."
The bailiff put a hand on his shoulder.
He looked at me without losing the smile.
"The dead don't lie, Delphine. Only the living do. And that detective sitting behind you — he's living the most like a dead man of all of us."
Marigny's face did not change.
I knew, though, that Delacroix had not yet finished with him.
After the courtroom session let out, Marigny went off the radar for two days.
On the third afternoon he came up the side stair to the prep room without using the bell.
He stopped in the doorway. He looked like someone who had been pulled out of the river and not quite dried off.
I set my tools down.
"You went looking at your mother's file."
He didn't deny it.
"Delacroix did her restoration. Twenty years ago. He worked her case as a department consultant."
I held his eyes.
"So her last memory might have been shaped before you ever put your hand on her."
He nodded once.
It was the kind of nod that costs.
He leaned against the door frame.
"I have built every certainty I have on one sentence I thought I heard her say."
I waited.
"She said don't be afraid."
I knew the cadence of that sentence already because I had heard him repeat it three times in three years over a glass at a bar on Esplanade.
"And now."
"In the original medical examiner's notes, she had fabric fibers in the oropharynx. She couldn't have spoken. She couldn't have made an audible word."
I didn't say anything.
He laughed once, ugly. "I have run my entire adult life off a sentence that didn't exist."
I said, "So we look at it again."
He looked up at me.
"What if when we look, she didn't say anything."
"Silence is also evidence."
His eyes filled. He did not let anything fall.
After a long time he reached into the inside pocket of his coat and brought out a photograph, three by five, edges soft from being carried.
A young woman, late twenties, holding a small boy. Her smile was the kind that arrives in waves. The boy was looking sideways at the camera with the slight stiffness of a child who does not yet know how to be loved on.
"Her name was Tessa," Marigny said. "Tessa Marigny."
I took the photograph.
"It's a beautiful name."
"Her case. I'd like you to work it."
I looked at him.
"Auguste. Are you sure."
He nodded.
"This time we don't listen for ghosts. We look at the wounds."
I slid the photograph into the top drawer of my desk, on the right.
"All right."
There was no body to restore. Tessa Marigny had been cremated the year Auguste was nine.
What we had was a 1998 autopsy file, the original scene photographs, an evidence inventory that had been culled at least twice, and a sixteen-minute analog cassette of the responding officer's interview with the next-door neighbor.
It was not embalming.
It was more like trying to take a stretch of time someone had ground under a boot heel and lay the pieces back out on a table.
We worked for a month.
The morning the results came in, Marigny sat in the chair in my prep room and didn't say anything for ten minutes.
Tessa Marigny had not been killed in a botched burglary.
She had been killed to suppress documentation she had been quietly compiling on the early non-IRB human research Delacroix had been running through a back wing of the Institute. Her best friend had been a junior pathologist in the parish. The two of them, between them, had been on the edge of having enough.
The friend had given Tessa Marigny up.
Which meant, among the other implications, that Auguste Marigny had been on Delacroix's radar from the time he was a boy.
His "gift" had not been a gift.
It had been a wound deliberately placed in him, in the same year his mother was killed, by a teacher who knew exactly what he would do with it later.
Marigny stared at the cover sheet of the report. The knuckles on his right hand had gone white.
I thought, for a second, he was going to come apart at the seams in my chair.
He didn't.
He stood up. He slid the report into his shoulder bag. He turned to the door.
"Where," I said.
"Superseding indictment."
He stopped at the door.
He raised his hand.
He knocked three times on the frame.
"Ms. Aucoin."
I looked at him.
"Thank you," he said.
I let one corner of my mouth go up. "Detective. I charge."
"How much."
"Twenty-seven plates of red beans and rice at Mandina's. Late shift."
He laughed once. It was a small laugh. It came out of him the way light comes up through standing water — not much of it, but enough to count.
Six months later, the federal jury came back on Delacroix with a death verdict.
Camille was committed to long-term locked treatment. The state psychiatric review board declined to schedule a release hearing for at least eighteen months.
I drove out to her facility on the first Friday of every month.
For the first few months she wouldn't come down to the visiting room. After that she started coming, and she would sit on the far side of the wire-laminated glass and ask me the same question first thing.
"Where's Lila buried."
I told her each time. "Lafayette. Holy Rosary, the west fence. Her grandmother put her under the camellias."
She would nod.
"When I get out, I want to apologize to her."
I said, "Whether she hears it is on her. Whether you say it is on you."
She looked at me, and one corner of her mouth came up.
"Big sister. You talk so ugly."
"I do."
"You talk less ugly than Teacher."
I didn't answer that one.
When I came out of the visiting wing, Marigny was leaning against the side of his unmarked car in the parking lot with two paper cups of chicory coffee.
He handed me one.
"New file."
I took the manila and flipped it.
Male, forty-two. Found at the foot of a balcony on Decatur, blunt-force facial trauma consistent with a fall, possibly assisted. Family was leaning on the parish for a fast viewing.
I turned to the last page.
The crime-scene photo at the bottom right was a close shot of the decedent's open right palm.
Across the palm, in blood the deceased had wiped on with his own index finger, was a single letter.
A.
I closed the folder.
Marigny said, "It isn't necessarily aimed at you."
I lifted an eyebrow.
"That came out about as confident as you wanted it to, Detective."
He thought about it. "Fair."
I opened the passenger door.
He came around to the driver's side.
"Where to."
"Aucoin and Sons."
I sat down. I set the coffee in the cup holder.
"What are we going there to do."
I looked out the windshield at the late afternoon light coming sideways through the live oaks at the edge of the parking lot.
"To listen to a dead man tell the truth."
This time, I would not be the one to cover his wounds for him.