Traffic was clogged, so I cut down to the Ville-Marie tunnel. Full morning, but dark, heavy clouds trapped the city in murky gloom. The streets were covered with a wet sheen that reflected the brake lights of the morning rush hour.
My wipers beat a monotonous refrain, slapping water from two fan-shaped patches on the windshield. I leaned forward, bobbing my head like a palsied tortoise, searching for clear glass between the streaks. Time for new wipers, I told myself, knowing I wouldn?t get them. It took a good half hour to reach the lab.
I wanted to get right to the files, to dig out minutiae and enter them into the spreadsheet, but there were two requisitions on my desk. A baby boy had been found in a municipal park, his tiny body wedged in the rocks of a creek bed. According to LaManche?s note, the tissue was desiccated and the internal organs unrecognizable, but otherwise the corpse was well preserved. He wanted an opinion on the infant?s age. That wouldn?t take long.
I looked at the police report attached to the other form. ?
I called Denis and requested radiographs of the infant, then went downstairs to look at the bones. Lisa brought a cardboard box from the morgue and placed it on the table.
?
?
She handed me gloves, and I withdrew three clods of hard clay from the box. Bones protruded from each clump. I chipped at the soil, but it was hard as cement.
?Let?s get photos and radiographs, then put these in a screen and get them soaking. Use dividers to keep the chunks separate. I?ll be back down after the meeting.?
The four other pathologists at the LML meet with LaManche each morning to review cases and receive autopsy assignments. On the days I?m present, I attend. When I got upstairs LaManche, Natalie Ayers, Jean Pelletier, and Marc Bergeron were already seated around the small conference table in LaManche?s office. From the activity board in the corridor, I knew that Marcel Morin was in court, and Emily Santangelo had taken a personal day.
Everyone shifted to make room, and a chair was shuffled into the circle.
?Marc, what brings you in on a Thursday?? I asked.
?Holiday tomorrow.?
I?d completely forgotten. Canada Day.
?Going to the parade?? asked Pelletier, poker-faced. His French wore the trappings of the Quebec back country, making it difficult for me to unravel his words. For months I hadn?t understood him at all, and had missed his wry comments. Now, after four years, I caught most of what he said. I had no trouble following his drift this morning.
?I think I?ll skip this one.?
?You could just get your face painted at one of those booths. It might be easier.?
Chuckles all around.
?Or maybe a tattoo. Less painful.?
?Very funny.?
Feigned innocence, eyebrows raised, shoulders hoisted, palms up. What? Settling back, he clamped the last two inches of an unfiltered cigarette between yellowed fingers, and inhaled deeply. Someone once told me that Pelletier had never traveled outside Quebec Province. He was sixty-four years old.
?There are only three autopsies,? LaManche began, distributing the list of that day?s cases.
?Pre-holiday lull,? said Pelletier, reaching for his printout. His dentures clicked softly when he spoke. ?Things?ll get busier.?
?Yes.? LaManche picked up his red marker. ?At least the weather is cooler. Perhaps that will help.?
He went over the day?s melancholy roster, supplying additional information on each case. A suicide by carbon monoxide. An old man found dead in his bed. A baby tossed into a park.
?The suicide looks pretty straightforward.? LaManche scanned the police report. ?White male . . . Age twenty-seven . . . Found behind the wheel in his own garage . . . fuel tank empty, key in the ignition, turned to the ?on? position.?
He laid several Polaroids on the table. They showed a dark blue Ford centered in a one-car garage. A length of flexible tubing, the type used to vent clothes dryers, ran from the exhaust pipe into the car?s right rear window. LaManche read on.
?History of depression . . .
She nodded and reached for the paperwork. He marked ?Ay? in red on the master list, and picked up the next set of forms.
?Number 26742 is a white male . . . Age seventy-eight . . . Controlled diabetic.? His eyes skipped through the summary report, pulling out the pertinent information. ?Hadn?t been seen for several days . . . Sister found him . . . No signs of trauma.? He read to himself for a few seconds. ?Curious thing is there was a delay between the time she found him and the time she called for help. Apparently the lady did some housecleaning in between.? He looked up. ?Dr. Pelletier??
Pelletier shrugged and extended his hand. LaManche placed a red ?Pe? on his list, then passed him the forms. They were accompanied by a plastic bag full of prescription and over-the-counter drugs. Pelletier took the materials, making a wisecrack which I missed.
My attention was turned to the stack of Polaroids accompanying the baby case. Taken from several angles, they showed a shallow creek with a small footbridge arching across it. A little body lay among the rocks, its tiny muscles shriveled, its skin yellowed like old parchment. A fringe of fine hair floated round its head, another rimmed its pale blue eyelids. The child?s fingers were splayed wide, as if grasping for help, for something to cling to. He was nude, and lay half in and half out of a dark green plastic bag. He looked like a miniature pharaoh, exposed and discarded. I was beginning to dislike plastic bags intensely.
I returned the photos to the table and listened to LaManche. He?d finished his summary, and was marking ? La? on the master sheet. He would do the autopsy, I would narrow the age range by assessing skeletal development. Bergeron would have a go at the teeth. Nods all around. There being no further discussion, the meeting broke up.
I got coffee and returned to my office. A large brown envelope lay on the desk. I opened it and slipped the first of the baby?s X rays onto the light box. Withdrawing a form from the drawer in my worktable, I started my survey. Only two carpals were present in each hand. No caps at the ends of the finger bones. I looked at the lower arms. No cap on either radius. I finished with the upper body, listing on my inventory sheet those bony elements that were present, and noting which had not yet formed. Then I did the same for the lower body, shifting from film to film to be sure of my observations. The coffee grew cold.
An infant is born with its skeleton incomplete. Some bones, such as the carpals in the hand, are absent at birth, appearing months, or even years later. Other bones lack knobs and ridges that will eventually give them their adult form. The missing parts emerge in predictable succession, allowing for fairly accurate age estimates for very young children. This baby had lived only seven months.
I summarized my conclusions on yet another form, placed all the paperwork in a yellow file folder, and dropped it on the stack for the secretarial pool. It would come back with the report typed in my preferred format, with all supporting materials and diagrams duplicated and assembled. They would also polish my French. I made a verbal report to LaManche. Then I moved on to my clumps.
The clay hadn?t dissolved, but had softened enough to allow me to pry out the contents. After fifteen minutes of scraping and teasing, the matrix yielded eight vertebrae, seven long bone fragments, and three chunks of pelvis. All showed evidence of butchering. I spent thirty minutes washing and sorting the mess, then cleaned up and jotted a few notes. On my way upstairs, I asked Lisa to photograph the partial skeletons of the three victims: two white-tailed deer and one medium sized dog. I filled out another report form and dropped this folder on top of the earlier one. Odd, but not a forensic problem.
Lucie had left a note on my desk. I found her in her office, back to the door, eyes shifting between a terminal screen and an open dossier. She typed with one hand and held her place in the dossier with the other, her index
