finger moving slowly from entry to entry.
?Got your note,? I said.
She raised the finger, typed a few more strokes, then laid a ruler across the file. Pivoting and thrusting in one motion, she rolled to her desk.
?I pulled up what you asked for. Sort of.?
She dug through one stack of paper, shifted to another, then returned to the first, searching more slowly. Finally she withdrew a small stack of papers stapled at the corner, scanned a few pages, then extended the collection to me.
?Nothing before ?88.?
I leafed through the pages, dismayed. How could there be so many?
?First I tried calling up cases with ?dismemberment? as my key word. That?s the first list. The long one. I got all the people who threw themselves in front of trains, or fell into machinery and had limbs ripped off. I didn?t think you wanted that.?
Indeed. It seemed to be a list of every case in which an arm, leg, or finger had been traumatically severed at or even near the time of death.
?Then I tried adding ?intentional,? to limit the selections to cases in which the dismemberment was done on purpose.?
I looked at her.
?I got nothing.?
?None??
?That doesn?t mean there weren?t any.?
?How come??
?I didn?t enter this data. Over the past two years we?ve had special funding to hire part-time workers to get historical data on-line as quickly as possible.? She gave an exasperated sigh and shook her head. ?The ministry dragged its heels for years getting computerized, now they want everything up to date overnight. Anyway, the data entry people have standard codes for the basics: date of birth, date of death, cause of death, and so on. But for something that?s odd, something that occurs only rarely, they?re pretty much on their own. They make up a code.?
?Like a dismemberment.?
?Right. Someone might call it an amputation, someone else might use the term disjointing, usually they just use the same word the pathologist put in the report. Or they might just enter it as cutting or sawing.?
I looked back at the lists, thoroughly discouraged.
?I tried all of those, and a few others. No go.?
So much for this idea.
??Mutilation? brought up the other really long list.? She waited while I turned to the second page. ?That was even worse than ?dismemberment.?
?Then I tried ?dismemberment? in combination with ?postmortem? as a limiter, to select out the cases in which the?-she turned her palms upward and made a scratching motion with her fingers, as if trying to tease the word from the air-?the event took place after death.?
I looked up, hopeful.
?All I got was the guy with his dick chopped off.?
?Computer took you literally.?
?Huh??
?Never mind.? Another joke that didn?t travel.
?Then I tried ?mutilation? in combination with the ?postmortem? limiter, and . . .? She reached across the desk and displayed the last printout. ?Bango! Is that what you say??
?Bingo.?
?Bingo! I think this may be what you want. You can ignore some of it, like those drug things where they used acid.? She pointed to several lines she?d penciled out. ?Those are probably not what you want.?
I nodded absently, totally absorbed by page three. It listed twelve cases. She?d drawn lines through three of them.
?But I think maybe some of the others might be of interest to you.?
I was hardly hearing her. My eyes had been drifting through the list, but were now riveted on the sixth name down. A tingle of uneasiness passed through me. I wanted to get back to my office.
?Lucie, this is great,? I said. ?This is better than I?d hoped for.?
?Anything you can use??
?Yes. Yes, I think so,? I said, trying to sound casual.
?Do you want me to call these cases up??
?No. Thanks. Let me look this over, then I think I?d rather pull the complete files.? Let me be wrong on this one, I prayed to myself.
?
She took off her glasses and began polishing a lens on the hem of her sweater. Without them she looked incomplete, wrong somehow, like John Denver after he switched to contacts.
?I?d like to know what happens,? she said, the pink rectangles back flanking the bridge of her nose.
?Of course. I?ll tell you if anything breaks.?
As I walked away I heard the wheels of her chair gliding across the tile.
In my office, I laid the printout on my desk and looked at the list. One name stared at me. Francine Morisette-Champoux. Francine Morisette-Champoux. I?d forgotten all about her. Stay cool, I told myself. Don?t jump to conclusions.
I forced myself to go over the other entries. Gagne and Valencia were in there, a pair of drug dealers with a lousy business sense. So was Chantale Trottier. I recognized the name of a Honduran exchange student whose husband had put a shotgun to her face and pulled the trigger. He had driven her from Ohio to Quebec, cut off her hands, and dumped her nearly headless body in a provincial park. As a parting gesture, he?d carved his initials on her breasts. I didn?t recognize the other four cases. They were before 1990, before my time. I went to the central files and pulled them, along with the jacket on Morisette-Champoux.
I stacked the files according to their LML numbers, thus achieving chronological order. I?d go about this systematically. Violating that resolution as soon as I made it, I went right to the Morisette-Champoux folder. Its contents made my anxiety rocket.
22
FRANCINE MORISETTE-CHAMPOUX WAS BEATEN AND SHOT TO DEATH in January 1993. A neighbor had seen her walking her small spaniel around ten one morning. Less than two hours later her husband discovered her body in the kitchen of their home. The dog was in the living room. Its head was never found.
I remembered the case, though I wasn?t involved in the investigation. I?d commuted to the lab that winter, flying north for one week of every six. Pete and I were at each other constantly, so I?d agreed to spend the whole summer of ?93 in Quebec, optimistic the three-month separation might rejuvenate the marriage. Right. The brutality of the attack on Morisette-Champoux had shocked me then and did still. The crime scene photos brought it all back.
She was lying half under a small wooden table, her arms and legs spread wide, white cotton panties stretched taught between her knees. A sea of blood surrounded her, giving way at its perimeter to the geometric pattern of the linoleum. Dark smears covered the walls and counter fronts. From off camera, the legs of an upturned chair seemed to point at her. You are here.
Her body looked ghostly white against the crimson background. A pencil-thin line looped across her abdomen, a happy-face smile just above her pubis. She was slit from this scar upward to her breastbone, and her innards protruded from the opening. The handle of a kitchen knife was barely visible at the apex of the triangle formed by her legs. Five feet from her, between a work island and the sink, lay her right hand. She?d been forty-seven years
