Footsteps sounded hollow in the empty hall. Probably LaManche. Besides me, the chief would be the only one punching in on a Saturday night.
Congratulations, Brennan. You have the same social life as a sexagenarian with seven grandchildren.
Back to the lists.
I still had the persistent feeling I was missing some connection.
What?
The cut marks?
All three skulls bore evidence of sharp instrument trauma. With the girl in the leather shroud, the cuts appeared to have been made postmortem. With the others, the cuts appeared to have been made to fresh bone. With all three, the cuts were limited to the ear region.
Death sequence?
Carbon 14 dating suggested the girl in the leather shroud died in the eighties, the other two in the nineties.
Place of origin?
Strontium isotope analysis suggested the girl in the leather shroud might have been born or lived her early childhood in north-central California, then moved to Vermont or Quebec. The others might have lived their whole lives in Quebec.
Might have.
Maybe I was hanging too much on the strontium. Maybe the California angle was a dead end.
Another swoosh, then the sound of voices.
But Menard attended grad school in Chico. Chico is in north-central California. Menard was a renter where the dead girls were found. The period of his tenancy coincided with the timing of at least two of the deaths. Louise Parent saw him with young girls on two occasions. One running. One unconscious.
Was the California link mere coincidence?
My hindbrain thought sat up, settled back.
What?
Try as I might, I couldn’t lure the thought from its lair.
Back to Menard.
Menard took possession of his grandparents’ home in Montreal in 1988.
But the guy living there now isn’t Menard, though he’s using Menard’s name.
I threw my pen on the blotter.
“So who the hell is he?”
“I don’t know.”
I jumped at the voice.
Looking up, I saw Ryan standing in my doorway.
“But we got a hit on his girlfriend.”
29
“ANIQUE POMERLEAU.”
I curled my fingers in a give-it-to-me gesture.
“Went missing in 1990.”
“Age?”
“Fifteen.”
That fit. The woman at Menard’s house appeared to be in her mid to late twenties.
“From where?”
“Mascouche.”
“What happened?”
“Kid told her parents she was spending the weekend with a friend. Turned out the girls had cooked up a story so Pomerleau could bunk in with her new squeeze. When she didn’t turn up on Sunday, the parents started checking. On Monday they filed the MP report. At that point Anique had been gone for almost sixty hours.”
“She never made it to the boyfriend’s place?”
“She made it all right. The two hit a couple of bars Friday night, got into a fight, Anique stormed out. Lover boy got lucky, spent the weekend with bachelorette number two.”
“Cops believed his story?”
“The bartender and the lucky lady backed him up. Pomerleau was a troubled kid with a history of runaways. The parents insisted she’d been abducted, but the cops figured she’d taken off.”
