crawling across its back. It
“It distracts me from thinking about how small this office is.” I slipped past him, around the desk, and into my chair.
“A distracted mind can be dangerous.”
“My bruised shins bring me back to reality.” I swiveled sideways and propped my legs on the ledge below the window, ankles crossed. “It’s an old woman, Ryan. Shot in the head.”
“How old?”
“I’d say she was at least seventy. Maybe even seventy-five. Her pubic symphyses have a lot of miles on them, but folks are variable up in that range. She has advanced arthritis and she’s osteoporotic.”
He dipped his chin and raised his brows. “French or English, Brennan. Not doctor talk.” His eyes were the shade of blue on the Windows 95 screen.
“Os-te-o-po-ro-sis.” I spoke each syllable slowly. “I can tell from the X-rays that her cortical bone is thin. I can’t see any fractures, but I only had parts of the long bones. The hip is a common site for breaks in older women because a lot of weight is transferred there. Hers were O.K.”
“Caucasian?”
I nodded.
“Anything else.”
“She probably had several kids.” The laser blues were fixed on my face. “She has a trench the size of the Orinoco on the back of each pubic bone.”
“Great.”
“Another thing. I think she was already in the basement when the fire started.”
“How’s that?”
“There was absolutely no floor debris below the body. And I found a few tiny scraps of fabric embedded between her and the clay. She must have been lying directly on the floor.”
He thought for a moment.
“So you’re telling me someone shot Granny, dragged her down to the basement, and left her to fry.”
“No. I’m saying Granny took a bullet in the head. I don’t have a clue who fired it. Maybe she did. That’s your job, Ryan.”
“Did you find a gun near her?”
“No.”
Just then Bertrand appeared in the doorway. While Ryan looked neat and pressed, his partner’s creases were sharp enough to cut precious gems. He wore a mauve shirt keyed to the tones of his floral tie, a lavender and gray tweed jacket, and wool trousers a precise half note down from shade four in the tweed.
“What have you got?” Ryan asked his partner.
“Nothing we didn’t already know. It’s like these people were beamed down from space. No one really knows who the hell was living in there. We’re still trying to track down the guy in Europe that owns the house. The neighbors across the road saw the old lady from time to time, but she never spoke to them. They say the couple with the kids had only been there a few months. They rarely saw them, never learned their names. A woman up the road thought they were part of some sort of fundamentalist group.”
“Brennan says our Doe is a Jane. As in Baby Jane. A septuagenarian.”
Bertrand looked at him.
“In her seventies.”
“An old lady?”
“With a bullet in her brain.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Someone shot her and torched the place?”
“Or Granny pulled the trigger after having lit the barbecue. But, then, where’s the weapon?”
When they’d gone I checked my consult requests. A jar of ashes had arrived in Quebec City, the cremains of an elderly man who died in Jamaica. The family was accusing the crematory of fraud, and had brought the ashes to the coroner’s office. He wanted to know what I thought.
A skull was found in a ravine outside the Cote des Neiges Cemetery. It was dry and bleached, and had probably come from an old grave. The coroner needed confirmation.
Pelletier wanted me to look at the baby for evidence of starvation. That would require microscopy. Thin sections of bone would have to be ground down, stained, and placed on slides so I could examine the cells under magnification. While high turnover of bone is typical of infants, I’d look for signs of unusual porosity and abnormal remodeling in the microanatomy.
Samples had been sent to the histology lab. I’d also study the X-rays and the skeleton, but that was still soaking to remove the putrefied flesh. A baby’s bones are too fragile to risk boiling.
So. Nothing urgent. I could open Elisabeth Nicolet’s coffin.
After a refrigerated sandwich and a yogurt in the cafeteria, I rode down to the morgue, asked to have the
