“
“I can hear you, miss.” The man had switched to English. “Yes. This is Sylvain Rayner. I’m returning your call.”
Clearly, the good doctor had excellent ears. Or a dandy of a hearing aid. He’d even caught my Anglophone accent.
“Sorry, sir. Occasionally this phone distorts sound levels,” I lied.
“How may I help you?”
“As I said in my message, my name is Temperance Brennan. I’m the forensic anthropologist with the coroner in Montreal. I have some questions concerning a former patient.”
I expected the usual rebuff based on confidentiality. That’s not what I got.
“You’ve found Christelle Villejoin,” Rayner said.
“Perhaps.” Careful. “Remains have come into the morgue. I’ve determined the bones are those of an elderly white female, but I’ve found nothing sufficiently unique to permit positive identification. The medical file I have is quite limited.”
“I’m not surprised. The Villejoin sisters were blessed with remarkable genes. I saw both of them from the mid-seventies until my retirement in ’ninety-eight. They rarely had an ailment. Oh, a bellyache now and then. Common cold. Maybe a rash. Anne-Isabelle and Christelle may have been the two healthiest patients I treated in my entire forty-six years of practice. Never smoked, never drank. Took only drugstore vitamins, an aspirin now and then. No magic potions or lifestyle secrets. Just whoppin’ good DNA.”
“The coroner provided no dental records.”
“The girls weren’t so lucky there. Brushed and flossed like the devil, but still lost their teeth. Didn’t matter how much I scolded. Both hated dentists. Got it from their mama, I think.”
“I see.” Discouraged, I slumped back in my chair.
“Fact is, they distrusted medicine in general. As far as I know, they gave up on doctors altogether when I retired. I referred their files to the young fellow who took over my practice, but he once told me he never laid eyes on either. Funny, them working all their lives at the hospital.”
Is it? I thought. Maybe they’d seen too much.
“I remember the attack,” Rayner said. “Poor Anne-Isabelle. I suppose the same demented animal also killed Christelle that day?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t discuss an open investigation.”
Rayner wasn’t fooled.
“It’s a harsh world we live in.”
I couldn’t disagree with that.
“Dr. Rayner, can you think of anything that might help me determine if this skeleton is Christelle’s? Perhaps something you noticed while examining her? Something she told you? Something you spotted in older records that no longer exist?”
Down the hall I heard a door open, close. Footsteps. The pause continued so long I thought we’d been disconnected.
“Sir?”
“Actually, there was something.”
Sitting upright, I said, “Tell me about it.”
“Christelle had a ninety-degree flexion contracture in the proximal interphalangeal joint of her right little finger. When I asked about it she said her pinky had been crooked since birth.”
“What about the other joints in that finger?” I grabbed pen and paper.
“They were fine. At first. Whenever I saw Christelle I checked her hand. Over the years compensatory deformity developed in the metacarpo-phalangeal and distal interphalangeal joints.”
“Camptodactyly?” I guessed.
“I think so.”
“Congenital?”
“Yes.”
“Bilateral or just on the right?”
“Just the one hand was affected.”
“Did you take X-rays?”
“I offered repeatedly. Christelle always refused. Said the thing never caused her any pain. The finger wasn’t a complaint, and there was never any treatment, so I didn’t chart it. Didn’t seem important.”
Suddenly, I was in a froth to get back to the bones.
“Thank you so much, doctor. You’ve been very helpful.”
“Call if you need anything further.”
Though an affected finger may look painfully distorted, camptodactyly is usually asymptomatic. And, like Christelle, many with the condition seek no medical attention.
Not particularly useful from an antemortem records perspective.
But two things
Camptodactyly occurs in less than one percent of the population.
Camptodactyly leaves its mark on the joints.
After disconnecting, I shot upstairs, grabbed a Diet Coke, then practically danced back down to Salle 4.
Scooping the unsorted phalanges, I began to triage.
Row: Proximal. Middle. Distal.
Digit: Thumb. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Side: Left. Right.
Done.
I stared in disbelief.
17
IMPOSSIBLE.
Joe and I had recovered all fifty-six.
I checked every inch of the autopsy table. The entire skeleton. The gurney. The body bag. The floor. The counter. The sink. The plastic sheet I’d used to cover the remains.
I had no distal phalange from the right third finger and none of the three from the right fifth finger.
I checked again.
Nope.
Phalanges are small, often lost from corpses left out in the elements. Had the missing bones been carried from the grave by rodents? Wood rats are known to collect body parts in their nests. Had they been washed away by percolating ground water?
Or had I screwed up?
The skeleton had darkened to the same deep brown as the soil. Had I failed to spot the phalanges in the pit? Missed them in the screen? I’d dug an extra six inches below the skeleton. Had
