?Ah,
?Gagne?s legs were sawed off below the knees. Same with Valencia. His arms and legs were cut several inches above or below the joints.?
Valencia had gotten greedy on a drug deal. He came to us in a hockey bag.
?In both those cases the limbs were hacked off at the most convenient place. In this case the guy neatly disconnected the joints. Look.?
I showed him a diagram. I?d used a standard autopsy drawing to indicate the points at which the body had been cut. One line ran through the throat. Others bisected the shoulder, hip, and knee joints.
?He cut the head off at the level of the sixth cervical vertebrae. He removed the arms at the shoulder joints, and the legs at the hip sockets. The lower legs were separated at the knee joints.?
I picked up the left scapula.
?See how the cuts surround the glenoid fossa??
He studied the marks, sets of parallel grooves circling the joint surface.
?Same thing with the leg.? I switched the scapula for the pelvis. ?Look at the acetabulum. He went right into the socket.?
LaManche inspected the deep cup that accommodates the head of the femur. Numerous gashes scarred its walls. Silently, I took the pelvis and handed him the femur. Its neck was ringed by pairs of parallel cuts.
He looked at the bone a long time, then returned it to the table.
?The only place he deviated was with the hands. There he just sliced right through the bone.?
I showed him a radius.
?Odd.?
?Yes.?
?Which is more typical? This or the others??
?The others. Usually you want to cut a body up so it?s easier to dispose of, so you do it the fastest way possible. Grab a saw and hack away. This guy took more time.?
?Hmm. What does it mean??
I?d given the question quite a bit of thought.
?I don?t know.?
Neither of us spoke for a few moments.
?The family wants the body for burial. I?m going to hold off as long as I can, but be sure you?ve got good pictures and everything you will need if we go to trial on this one.?
?I plan to take sections from two or three of the cut marks. I?ll look at them under the microscope to see if I can pinpoint the tool type.?
I chose my next words carefully, and watched him closely for a reaction.
?If I get any good features I?d like to try comparing these cuts to some I have on another case.?
The corners of his mouth twitched almost imperceptibly. I couldn?t tell if it was amusement or annoyance. Or perhaps I?d imagined it.
After a pause he said, ?Yes. Monsieur Claudel has mentioned this.? He looked directly at me. ?Tell me why you think these cases are connected.?
I outlined the similarities I saw between the Trottier and Gagnon cases. Bludgeoning. Cutting of the body after death. The use of the plastic bags. Dumping in a secluded area.
?Are these both CUM cases??
?Gagnon is. Trottier is SQ. She was found in the St. Jerome.?
As in many cities, questions of jurisdiction can be tricky in Montreal. The city lies on an island in the middle of the St. Lawrence. The Communaut #233; Urbaine de Montr #233;al police handle murders occurring on the island itself. Off the island, they fall to local police departments, or to La S #251;ret #233; du Qu #233;bec. Coordination is not always good.
After a pause he said, ?Monsieur Claudel can be?-he hesitated-?difficult. Follow through on your comparison. Let me know if you need anything.?
Later that week I?d photographed the cut marks with a photomicroscope, using varying angles, magnifications, and intensities of light. I hoped to bring out details of their internal structure. I?d also removed small segments of bone from several joint surfaces. I planned to view them with the scanning electron microscope. Instead I was up to my neck in bones for the next two weeks.
A partially clothed skeleton was discovered by kids hiking in a provincial park. A badly decomposed body washed up on the shore of Lac St. Louis. While cleaning the basement of their newly purchased home, a couple found a trunk full of human skulls covered with wax, blood and feathers. Each find came to me.
The remains from Lac St. Louis were presumed to be those of a gentleman who died in a boating mishap the previous fall when a competitor took exception to his freelancing as a cigarette smuggler. I was putting his skull back together when the call came.
I?d been expecting it, though not this soon. As I listened my heart raced and the blood below my breastbone felt fizzy, like carbonated soda shaken in a bottle. I felt hot all over.
?She?s been dead less than six hours,? LaManche was saying. ?I think you?d better take a look.?
6
MARGARET ADKINS WAS TWENTY-FOUR. SHE HAD LIVED WITH HER common-law husband and their six- year-old son in a neighborhood nestled in the shadow of the Olympic Stadium. She was to have met her sister at ten-thirty that morning for shopping and lunch. She didn?t make it. Nor did she take later phone calls after speaking with her husband at ten. She couldn?t. She?d been murdered sometime between his call and noon, when her sister discovered her body. That was four hours ago. That?s all we knew.
Claudel was still at the scene. His partner, Michel Charbonneau, sat on one of the plastic chairs lining the far wall of the large autopsy suite. LaManche had returned from the murder scene less than an hour ago, the body preceding him by minutes. The autopsy was underway when I arrived. I knew immediately that we?d all work overtime that night.
She lay facedown, her arms straight against her sides, hands palm up with the fingers curving inward. The paper bags placed on them at the scene had already been removed. Her fingernails had been inspected and scrapings taken. She was nude, and her skin looked waxy against the polished stainless steel. Small circles dotted her back, pressure points left by drainage holes in the table?s surface. Here and there a solitary hair clung to her skin, estranged forever from the curly tangle on her head.
The back of her head was distorted, the shape slightly off, like a lopsided figure in a child?s drawing. Blood oozed from her hair and mingled with the water used to clean her, gathering below the body in a translucent, red pool. Her sweat suit, bra, panties, shoes, and socks had been spread across the adjacent autopsy table. They were saturated with blood, and the sticky, metallic smell hung heavy on the air. A Ziploc bag next to the sweats held an elasticized belt and sanitary pad.
Daniel was taking Polaroids. The white-bordered squares lay on the desk next to Charbonneau, their emerging images in varying degrees of clarity. Charbonneau was inspecting them, one by one, then carefully returning each to its original place. He chewed on his lower lip as he studied them.
A uniformed officer from identity was shooting with a Nikon and flash. As he circled the table, Lisa, newest of the autopsy technicians, positioned an old-fashioned screen behind the body. The painted metal frame, with its shirred white fabric, belonged to an era when such paraphernalia were used in hospital rooms to barricade patients during intimate procedures. The irony was jarring. I wondered whose privacy they were trying to protect here. Margaret Adkins was past caring.
After several shots the photographer stood down from his stool and looked questioningly at LaManche. The pathologist stepped closer to the body and pointed to a scrape on the back of the left shoulder.
?Did you get this??
Lisa held a rectangular card to the left of the abrasion. On it were written the LML number, the morgue
